Anne Marmont, of old the pupil of the nuns, had told her about Andecy:
an ancient place, half-manor, half-farm, in the Marne valley, whence you
could walk over a wind-swept plain to the battlefields of the Hundred
Days.
'The nuns, being exiled, of course can't keep it up any longer, and no
one wants to buy. I remember it as a place of heavenly peace--though in
my day they used to make the oldest and crossest nun in the order
superior at Andecy. However, Madame Francoise de Paule is dead now, and
there aren't any nuns anyhow. Do take it, dear. If you want quiet'--Anne
Marmont swept her arms out as if to embrace illimitable horizons.
'Nothing but a church-spire or a clump of trees to be seen from edge to
edge of the plain. The unstable ocean is nothing to it. And if you want
variety, you can walk over to Champaubert and look at the house where
Napoleon stayed, the night before the battle. Riddled with bullet-holes
it is. There used to be a foolish ancient there who remembered the
Hundred Days. He's dead now, I suppose--but then, so is Madame Francoise
de Paule, thank Heaven, and her cane, too. I hope they buried the cane.
Do take it, darling. It's dirt cheap, and my dear nuns would be so
pleased. They'd probably send the money to the new Nicaragua convent.'
And Miss Stanley had gone to Andecy, had been conquered by the
insuperable peace of the plain, and had set up her little household. No
place that she had ever seen seemed so good to wait in. When Edmund Laye
came back from the Argentine to marry her, she would submit to London;
but already she had hopes of enticing him to Andecy for the honeymoon.
The chill of the slow spring warmed her northern blood; she liked the
reluctance of the season's green, the roaring fire that met her in the
_salon_, the sharp cold click of her boots on the brick-paved corridor.
She was well cared for: a Protestant and a foreigner, who was, none the
less, a mysterious well-wisher of 'ces dames,' she found a shy
allegiance springing up about her steps as she traversed the plain.
There was always a hot _galette_ for her at 'la vieille Andecy,' an
obsequious curtsy at Congy chateau from the housekeeper, who showed with
mumbling pride the bed where Henri Quatre had slept; and a welcoming
smile from St. Eloi, that holy humorist, in the Champaubert chapel. She
sat until twilight, often, on the sinister shore of l'Etang des Loups.
Even the legended 'Croix Jeanne,' leaning against its pine thicket,
seemed glad of her awkward Protestant dip. It was a good place--and all
for the price of a second-rate hotel splotched with Baedekers.
Loneliness, in the sense of removal from the social scene, did not
afflict her. She who shrank almost morbidly from human encounters, had
no fear of the peasants. Slim, shy, timorous, she felt safe here. Her
terrors were all of people and what people could do to her. The plain
ignored her self-distrust. Letters came from Edmund, regularly, if you
granted the delay of driving to Sezanne to fetch them. The months
rounded slowly, punctually, to winter and her marriage. So might a
chatelaine have waited, powerless but trusting.
Then, in full summer-time, the lightning struck, choosing again the
Montmirail plain, after a hundred years' respite. The first rumors were
vague and vivid--all detail and no substance, like news in the Middle
Ages. There was war, and she scarcely knew more. Jacques or Etienne
turned over night into a reservist, and departed; but had it not been
for that, she would hardly have known. The two maid-servants whom she
had brought with her clamored for Paris; she gave them money and had
them driven to Sezanne. After the mobilization they must have got
through, for she never heard again. It did not occur to her to strike
out, herself, for the capital; for her common sense told her she was
better off where she was until Paris had cleared the decks for action.
Besides, Paris frightened her. She hated being jostled in streets; she
resented even a curious stare.
Old Marie and her husband, with their grandchild, came up from their
cottage to the manor to sleep; and with the son and nephew gone, there
was nothing for them to do but potter about rheumatically in her behalf.
For many days, the click of the rosary was never stilled among the
corridors of Andecy.
And still the rumors grew, terror capping terror, until it seemed that
even at Andecy blood might rain down at any moment from the arched
heaven. At first Miss Stanley forced herself to drive the fat donkey
into Sezanne for news--a half-day's trip with only more terror at the
end. The feeble crowds beset the bulletins posted outside the _mairie_,
and scattered, murmuring their own comments on the laconic messages.
Sometimes crones and half-grown children on the edge of the crowd got
her to report to them, as she emerged from the denser group in front of
the mairie wall. She did so as gently as she could, for they were all
involved: fathers, husbands, sweethearts, brothers, sons, were facing
the enemy at some point or other that only the War Office knew. If some
creatures had had nothing to give, it was only because the Prussians
had taken all they had, in '70.
There was no insane terror; the people were strangely calm; yet they and
theirs had been, of all time, the peculiar food of the enemy, and there
was pessimism afloat. The plain was as defenseless as they: its mild
crops as fore-ordained to mutilation by feet and hoofs and wheels as
they to splintering shells.
Miss Stanley, who was so shy of unfamiliar action, felt Sezanne too much
for her. She stopped going, after a week, and resigned herself to not
knowing. She chafed under the censorship, though she knew that Edmund
Laye would tell her that it was well done of the 'Powers that Were' to
stanch the leakage of news as you would stanch blood from an artery. The
General Staff was better off not drained of its vital facts. To be sure,
Miss Stanley never read newspapers. Even less, did she subscribe to
them. But she longed now for a neutral America, where the extras came
hot and hot, where experts of every kind fought out the battles on the
front page, and good journalese stimulated the lax imagination.
Her determination to go no more to Sezanne led her for exercise to other
quarters of the plain. She would walk quickly, tensely, for an hour, her
eyes fixed on a clump of trees or a church-spire far ahead of her at the
end of the unswerving road, until the clump and the spire rose up to
match her height and she came to the first whitewashed cottage.
Champaubert church was never empty, these days, of worshipers who gazed
up at gaudy St. Eloi as if he could help. The crops that waved on the
old Montmirail battlefield were thinly harvested by women and an
impeding fry of children. The steep little streets of Congy were dirtier
than ever, and the ducks and the infants plashed about more
indiscriminately in the common mud-puddles. No more galettes at 'la
vieille Andecy': the old woman was prostrated by the loss of her
reservist grandson.
Finally she gave up the plain too, and withdrew into Andecy itself,
waiting, always waiting, for word of Edmund Laye. There had been a touch
of loyalty to him in her staying on without plan of escape. News of him
would reach her here sooner than elsewhere. If she left, she would be
lost in a maelstrom, and might lose some precious word. Until she heard
from Edmund of his sailing, or of a change of plan, she would stay where
he thought of her as being. When she heard, she would go.
Some atavistic sense in Miss Stanley caused her to look, all through
early August, to the provisioning of the manor--some dim instinct to
hoard food, that might have sprung from the heart of a colonial
ancestress behind a stockade of logs: premonition against death and
savages. She sent old Marie to buy thriftily, making it clear that her
fortress was not for herself alone, but for all who might be in need.
Together, she and Marie and the granddaughter piled provisions in the
empty rooms and the dark cellars; and they lived frugally on milk and
eggs and _soupe aux choux_.
Sometimes she wondered whether the danger was not a mere fixed idea of
the foolish peasants who had all been touched in the wits by '70. True,
the able-bodied men were gone, but the reports these people brought her
made no sense. Their quality verged on folk-lore. Something gigantic was
going on, somewhere, but it had nothing to do with Edmund Laye in the
Argentine, or with her at Andecy. Paris in danger? Perhaps: but how to
take it on their word? Belgium flowing with blood? Just what did it
mean? An aeroplane over Sezanne at dawn? It must often have happened,
_allez_! The air was never free, nowadays. The Germans in France? They
had been seeing Germans behind every bush for forty years. So she talked
with old Marie, scarcely sure whether she or old Marie were the fool.
Since the household no longer drove the fat donkey to Sezanne, none of
them knew even what the War Office said--unless what old Seraphine from
the next farm reported that her granddaughter had heard in Champaubert
from a woman whose married daughter had been to Sezanne two days before,
could be called a War Office report. And never, from the first, on the
plain of Andecy, had anyone understood _why_. According to the plain,
all things were to be believed of the German Emperor, who was usually
drunk; but, on the other hand, who could trust an atheist government?
The soil of the Hundred Days had never recovered from Bonapartist
tendencies, Miss Stanley had often noted; and even old Marie would
sometimes mix up '15 and '70. The White Paper--which Miss Stanley had
never heard of--would have been wasted on Champaubert and Montmirail.
Wonder stirred at last even in old Marie's fatalistic mind at the lack
of panic in this shy young foreigner--who could not chaffer, who could
not bully, who could not endure even the mimic urbanity of Sezanne.
Strange that she should be willing to stay quietly pacing up and down
the cobbled courtyard of Andecy for sole exercise! Past mid-August,
Marie put a vague question.
'When I hear from him, I shall go, Marie,' Miss Stanley answered. 'But I
leave everything here to you and Theophile. The British fleet holds the
sea, they say, and I shall be better off in England. I shall surely come
back when the war is over, and perhaps I shall bring my husband with
me.'
Some dim muscular effort deepened the wrinkles in the old woman's face.
It was as if a knife had cut them in the living flesh.
'I hope so--if Theophile and I are here. To be sure, you must go where
it is your duty. We will keep such of the provisions as can be kept--'
'Keep nothing. It is all for you who have been so kind to me--you and
yours. Not a child, not a creature, for a dozen miles about that I would
not wish to share with, as you know. But--listen, Marie.' Miss Stanley
blushed faintly as she bent her head nearer Marie's good ear.
'It _is_ my duty. My first duty, that is, must be to my future husband.
When he returns from America' (she had long ago learned the futility of
distinguishing, for Marie, between 'l'Amerique du nord' and 'l'Amerique
du sud'; and was patient with her belief that New York was a suburb of
Cayenne) 'he will wish me there. He was to have sailed last month. A
letter--a telegram--must have gone astray in the confusion. When I hear,
he will doubtless be in England. And when he reached England, I was to
go to my friends and be married to him. My heart bleeds for France; but
I am not French, and my duty is not here. I am American, you see, dear
Marie, and my _fiance_ is English.'
'Ah!' Marie shook her head. 'My old head is turned with all they tell
me, and the buzzing in my bad ear is like cannon. But I had thought that
the English, for some reason I do not understand, were fighting with us.
They have been telling us for ten years that we do not hate the
English--that we love them. And Theophile thought that an English army
was against the Germans. But perhaps I am wrong. _Monsieur votre fiance_
will not have to fight, then? I congratulate you, mademoiselle.'
'The English are fighting with the French, Marie. But all Englishmen
are not soldiers. Monsieur Laye is not a soldier. He is an engineer.'
'He is perhaps past the age.'
'There is no conscription in England, Marie. No man is a soldier unless
he chooses.'
'No service to make?'
'None.'
'_C'est beau, ca!_ All Frenchmen must fight. So England may go to war,
and still have men to till the fields. But where do their armies come
from?'
'Any man who wishes may go. But none are compelled--except the soldiers
by profession. There will be enough, never fear. England will not desert
France.'
The old woman nodded. 'I am not afraid of that. And you are not afraid
that _monsieur le fiance_ will fight? I do not understand these things.
As Theophile says, what I comprehend I do not hear, and what I hear I do
not comprehend. I go to fetch mademoiselle's soup. They are lucky, all
the same, to get the crops in, in time of war.' She clattered from the
room.
Miss Stanley felt her heart grow heavy, she did not know precisely why.
If only word would come! Perhaps she was a fool to stay. There must be
trains through to Paris now. Anything to get nearer Edmund, away from
this historic, war-bound plain! She crouched by the window to eat her
_soupe aux choux_ and stale bread. If only some boy would come riding
into the courtyard with a letter for her! She had bribed half the
urchins who loitered by the mairie in Sezanne to rush to her hot-foot
with anything that came.
The lightning that had struck once at Champaubert and Montmirail was to
strike again before she heard from Edmund Laye. Suddenly, with no
warning, the heavens opened with that reiterant flash. Frightened
stragglers over the plain, refugees from the north pushing on from
beyond Sezanne in a blind stumbling dash to the southward; rumors that
sprang up out of the ground so that she had but to stand still to hear
the world move; indescribable distant noises, commotions less seen than
sensed, on the far horizon; a casual smudge of aeroplanes on the great
blue round of heaven; an earth, for no visible reason, tumultuously
vibrating beneath her,--and then, at last, one hot noon, a frightened
boy falling exhausted at her feet. She gave him the piece of gold which
for many days had been waiting for him in her pocket, and bade him rest
where he lay until he was ready for food. Marie and Theophile crouched
beside him, listening to his winded babbling.
Armies, armies, fighting, men riding on horses, guns and wounded--like
'15, like '70, like Hell. People like themselves leaving their cottages
and farms, making, with such portable treasures as they had (food,
relics, poultry, babes in arms), for the shelter of a town. No town
could avail them, for in the towns sat the officers, and the marketplace
offered only a bigger, a more organized destruction. But the hope of
shelter would take them far afield. Anything was better than to see
sabres splintering your walls, and a greasy flame replacing all that had
been ancestral and intimate. Better to die in the open with friends--not
smoked out of your own cellar to fall on a bayonet. They knew the
secular ways of war: the dwellers on the plain were the foredoomed type
of the refugee, the world over. Once in so often men fought, and poor
people were homeless. And now none of the '_vieux de la vieille_' were
there to guard.
These were the visions that assembled in Miss Stanley's brain while
Marie, her lean fists clenched, reported the boy's wild talk. The lumps
of fat hardened on her congealing soup; and still her mind went
painfully, shuttle-wise, back and forth from her telegram--infinitely
delayed, but clearly authentic--to the apocalyptic events surrounding
her. Like most Americans perpetually defended by two oceans, Miss
Stanley had no conception of invasion as a reality. The insult of an
enemy on your own ground was one which she had never steeled herself to
meet. There was no weapon in her little arsenal for a literal foe. Her
knees trembled under her as she rose to look out of the window, after
Marie, spent with eloquence, had left her.
Edmund Laye, by this, was with his regiment--even she might not know
where. No point in trying to break through to London: his telegram,
dated the day of his arrival in England, was already too old. The letter
he promised her would go the way of all the letters he must have
written, that she had never had. And she herself was caught: she had
waited too long on that predestined plain. The noises she heard seemed
rumblings of the earth and cracklings of the inflamed sky. Andecy manor
had not yet seen one soldier, unless you reckoned the pilots of those
soaring monoplanes. But their hours were numbered: soon--any moment,
now--all that hidden rumor would break forth into visible fruit of
fighting men--men with rifles, men with lances, men with mitrailleuses
or howitzers. She was trapped. To try, even with no luggage, to make the
miles to Sezanne, would be not so much to take her life in her hands as
to kick it from her. Caught; and her nervous nostrils feigned for her a
subtle odor of smoke. She turned from the window and went to the quiet
room that had once been the chapel. Out of those windows she could not
look, thank Heaven! The life of the Virgin, in villainous stained glass,
barred her vision.
She was absolutely alone. Old Marie and Theophile were not people: they
were strangers, creatures, animals--what not. She scarcely knew.
'Allies' meant nothing to her at the moment but marching men. Even
Edmund--who would be killed unless they hid in caves and let their
beauty rot in the dark. Fool that she had been not to go to England
while there was time! Fool that she had been to forget that Edmund Laye,
landing in England, would be first of all a Territorial--one of the
thousands of slim reeds on which Kitchener was so heavily leaning. She
had been obsessed with peace: sure that war could not touch her or what
was privately, supremely, hers. She was a creature of peace; a little
doctrinaire who supposed that, in the inverted moral world in which she
walked, right made might. There was a deal of most logical self-pity in
her tears. How did any of it concern her, that she should be cooped in a
country manor to await horrors from unknown people? Why should Edmund
Laye, who had chosen an antipodal career, be dragged back to present
himself as a mark for some Prussian shell? The senselessness of it
angered her. Nations meant little to her; the cosmos nothing. Alone in
the chapel, she treated herself to a vivid personal rage. And still the
strange tumult, that was more than half made of vibrations too slow for
sound-waves, beat upon her nerves like an injury to the internal ear.
By twilight, the physical need of action came to her. She felt, in the
subtler fibres of her mind, that if she stayed longer there half prone
in her worm-eaten arm-chair, groveling mentally in this welter of
concrete alarms, she should sink into a pit whence reason could not
rescue her. She had been so calm in her folly, so lulled by the sense of
her sacred detachment from this bloody business, so sure that
neutrality protected you from fire and steel even in the thickest
_melee_--she could not have been more ridiculous if she had worn a dress
cut out of the Stars and Stripes. Now, some obscure inhibition told her,
she must act. She must move her hands and feet, limber her cramped
muscles, set the blood flowing properly in her veins, make herself
physically normal, or her worthless mind would let her go mad. She must
not think of death or outrage or torture.
She must forget the things she had heard those first days at Sezanne.
She must forget the gossip of Marie and Theophile and Seraphine,
inventing, inventing, with a mediaeval prolixity and a racial gift for
the _macabre_, on chill evenings by the fire. They had no need of news.
They dug up out of the bloody deeps of the past things the like of which
she had never expected to hear. She must forget--shut her staring mouth
and forget. Whatever visited itself on Andecy must not find a gibbering
mistress there. Perhaps, if she pretended that Edmund knew, moment by
moment, what she was doing, she could master her faltering flesh and her
undisciplined mind. She had lost him forever, but she would try to be
some of the things he thought her. Edmund Laye had called her
flower-like. Well: flowers were broken, but they did not go mad. She
must be--decent.
Her brisk pacing of the chapel did not allay her fears, but it brought
back to her a sense of decorum. Her body had never lent itself to an
immodest gesture; what--she caught at the notion--could be more immodest
than visible fear? So gradually, by artificial means, she brought
herself back into some dignity; scolding and shaking herself into a
trooper's demeanor. She could not trust her mind, but perhaps she could
get her instincts into fighting form. Cautiously she tried them--as you
try a crazy foothold to see if it will bear your weight. Her muscles
seemed to respond: suppleness, strength, coordination, were reported
satisfactory. She thought she could promise not to fall a-shivering
again. The noise in her ears faded; the vibrations ceased to rock her
nerves. Miss Stanley flung open the chapel door, and walked firmly,
ignoring echoes, down the brick-paved corridor to the kitchen.
Marie, Theophile, and little Jeanne watched, in a kind of apathy, the
pot on the fire. In the dim corners of the big kitchen, Miss Stanley
thought she saw strange figures. Inspection revealed a few frightened
women and children from farms that had once been dependencies of Andecy.
Here was something to do--more blessed exercise for hands and feet.
'You, Francoise? and the little ones? And you, Mathilde? and the girl?
Good! It is time the children had food and went to bed. We must
economize candles, so we will all eat here. The dining-room, in half an
hour, will be a dormitory. Jeanne shall sleep in my room. Milk and gruel
for the little ones, Marie, and _soupe aux choux_ for the rest of us.
Milk we will use while we have it. Eggs also. We cannot expect to keep
the livestock forever. Bread we have not--until I bake it in my own
fashion. It may come to that. Jeanne, you will eat with us older ones.
Come and help me make beds for the children. Luckily, there are cots for
a whole community. In half an hour'--she took out her watch--'the babies
sup and say their prayers. To-morrow, I prepare the chapel and the
pupils' old dormitory for wounded. Wounded there will be, if what we
hear from Sezanne--though they are all fools in Sezanne, from the fat
mayor down--be true. My fiance is at the front. We wait here for our
men, hein?' And she beckoned to Jeanne.
She had made her speech blindly, recklessly planning as she spoke,
thinking that if she could convince her hearers she could perhaps
convince herself. She looked for the effect on them when she had done.
The speech had worked. If it worked for them, it must work for her, too.
It could not be madness, if it had lighted up those sodden faces. And as
she looked from one to another, she saw a flicker of pride, of
patriotism, reflected in their eyes. Reflected from what? From her,
without doubt. There must have been pride in her voice and glance when
she spoke of Edmund Laye. Good! That was the line to take. There should
be a brave show: she would work her muscles to death to keep it going.
Every due emotion should be cultivated in each limb and feature; every
surface inch of skin should play its part. The drum and fife should play
all the more bravely because her heart was hollow. Perhaps, if she got a
fair start, a fine physical impetus toward courage, she could keep it up
to the end.
'Come, Jeanne.' She beckoned the child.
The women stirred, and the children huddled against their skirts crept
out upon the floor.
'Theophile, is the great gate locked?'
The old man shook his head vaguely. He had gone near to losing his few
wits with the rumors from Sezanne which his ears had drunk up so
greedily. His shaken mind was wandering windily about in reminiscences
of '70 and legends of '15.
'It had best be locked at once. The lantern, Jeanne. Come.'
The child looked at her piteously.
'Oh, very well!' Miss Stanley pushed her gently aside. 'I shall not need
it. There is still light enough. Fetch the bowls for the babies, Jeanne.
We must all get to bed, and be up with the dawn.'
Alone, she left the house and crossed the innumerable cobblestones of
the huge courtyard to the outer gate. She knew the way of the heavy
bolts and bars, for she had often escorted Theophile on his rounds
before the official _coucher_ of the household; but her shaking fingers
tapped the rusty iron ineffectually. She loathed her fingers:
insubordinate little beasts! She struck her right hand smartly with her
left, her left with her right, to punish them with real pain. The
fingers steadied; she drove the foolish, antiquated bolts home.
Something white fluttered about her feet in the twilight: the hens had
not been shut up. Miss Stanley was very angry, for a moment, with
Theophile; then angry with herself for her anger. Theophile was
frightened because he _knew_: '70 had been the moment of his prime. She
did not know; she had no right to be frightened. Tales of the Civil War,
she remembered now, had always bored her; she had never listened to
them. Her duty now was to secure the poultry. They must have eggs while
they could, and chicken broth for the children. Mathilde's little girl
was a weakling. So she ran hither and yon, trying to drive the silly
handful toward the little grange where they were kept. With traditional
idiocy, they resisted; and the last stragglers she lifted and imprisoned
ruthlessly in her skirt. She hated the creatures; to touch them made her
flesh crawl; but at last she got them all in, squawking, and fastened
the door upon them. How like the stupid things, to make extra trouble
because there was a war! Her anger against them was quite serious, and
sank into proper insignificance only when her task was done.
A stone wall, continuing the house wall all the way round, bounded the
courtyard; but through the grille she could see rocket-like sputters of
flame far off on the horizon, and here and there a patch of light in the
sky which meant fires burning steadily beneath. The pounding vibrations
had ceased. There was trouble, a mighty trouble, upon them all; and with
the dawn, perhaps, all the things those chattering fools by the fire had
spent their phrases on.
Strangest of all to her was the sudden thought that Edmund, separated
from her now by the innumerable leagues of destiny, might be, as the
crow flies, not so far away. A few fatal miles might be replacing, even
now, the friendly, familiar ocean whose division of the lovers had been
a mere coquetry of Time. On that thought she must not dwell;
besides--irony returned to her at last--did she not gather from those
idiots within that all soldiers one ever saw were Germans? One's own
armies were routed somewhere; but one encountered, one's self, only the
victors, ever. Then the jealous captain to whom she had given the
command reminded her that such reflections meant mutiny.
Slim, straight, hollowed out with fear, but walking delicately ahead,
she went back to the house and superintended the babies' supper. Then
the grown-ups ate--standing about the table as at the Passover, faces
half-averted toward the door--and she marshaled them all to their
appointed sleeping-places. Marie and Theophile abdicated their dominion
with an uncouth relief. If mademoiselle, so shy, so small, could be so
sure of what they ought to do--doubtless hers was a great brain in a
frail form. After prayers, in which Miss Stanley herself joined,
borrowing a _chapelet_, they went off to snore peacefully in the
guardianship of that great brain so opportunely discovered.
'You have not an American flag?' old Marie asked, as she shuffled off.
Theophile, past any coherent reflections, was mumbling over the dying
fire.
'No, nothing of the sort. I am sorry. I should use it if I had.'
'You could not make one?'
'Impossible, to-night. To-morrow I will see.'
Marie apologetically offered a last suggestion to the great brain. 'A
white flag? It would do no harm to have it ready. Francoise swears they
are in Sezanne to-night.'
'I will see. _Allez vous coucher._'
And Miss Stanley turned on her heel and sought the little room where
Jeanne was already restlessly dreaming.
Save the babies, Andecy found no deep sleep that night. The old people
napped and woke and napped again, according to their habit. The mothers
rose and walked beside their children's cots, then fell limply back and
dozed. Miss Stanley slept from sheer exhaustion until an hour before
dawn. Then she rose and dressed herself, and, when dressed, sent Jeanne
to wake her grandparents. Whatever the day might bring, it should not
find them either asleep or fasting. They would eat, if it was to be
their last meal.
Alone in her room, by candle-light, Miss Stanley made a white flag out
of a linen skirt. She sewed hastily but firmly, that it might be no
flimsier than she could help. By the first streaks of daylight, she
groped for and found, in a lumber-room, a long stick to fasten it
to--probably, it flashed across her, Madam Francoise de Paule's cane,
never buried, as Anne Marmont had hoped. When the flag was finished, she
loathed it: loathed its symbolism, loathed its uselessness. No: whatever
happened, she would have nothing to do with that. What could be more
humiliating than to hold up a white flag in vain? Another idea came to
her; and while breakfast was preparing and the children were being
dressed, she carried it swiftly into execution. Slashing a great cross
out of a scarlet cape, she sewed it firmly to the white ground. _That_
she might hang to the dove-cot, after breakfasting.
She carried it martially with her into the great kitchen, and placed it
in a corner. The sun itself was hardly up, but the children brought the
flag out into the firelight and old Marie was jubilant. The wonderful
idea! The great brain of mademoiselle! She fussed almost happily over
the simmering skillet of milk. But the great brain was pondering apart
in the lessening shadows. Better the American flag, if she could manage
it. She would beg an old blue smock of Theophile's, for she had nothing
herself. Those wretched stars! It would take her a long morning; and she
felt convinced that this day's sun would not rise peacefully to the
zenith. This thing she had made was a lie. Incalculable harm could be
done by assuming a badge you had no right to--incalculable harm to those
who had the right. She was mortally afraid; but she would not do
anything in pure panic. That would make it worse for every one in the
end.
An American flag: it must be made. How many states were there? She had
no notion, but she fancied they were as the sands of the sea. It would
take a woman all day to cut out those stars and sew them to a blue field
hacked out of Theophile's smock. And what a makeshift banner, in the
end! Even if the enemy politely waited for her to finish it, would they
not detect it at once? Was not that the kind of thing every German knew
better than she--how many little silly stars there were, safe and far
away, sending senators to Washington? A sullen tide of mirth was let
loose in her far below the surface. Here she was, quivering with terror,
with a lot of foolish livestock on her hands--livestock that she could
not give up to slaughter as if they had been the sheep that they really
were.
Miss Stanley caught up one of the children to her lap and fed it great
spoonfuls of warm milk--choking it hopelessly. Luckily the mother was
too apathetic to reproach her. She could not even feed a child without
wetting it all over! Disgusted, she put the child down again. It
whimpered, and the mother, roused, moved over to it. Miss Stanley looked
at her cup. Chocolate--no coffee, for the coffee was gone. Coffee might
have cleared her brain, but this mess would do nothing for her. Still,
she drank it. And gradually, as their hunger was appeased, they crept
about her. Even those who did not move their chairs turned and faced
her. She could not meet so many eyes. She had nothing to do with
them--these tellers of old wives' tales, who expected her to deliver
them from the horrors their own lips had fabricated. Why did they stare
at her as if she might have an idol's power over events? Whispering,
almost inaudibly, their strung and beaded prayers, yet blasphemously
looking to her!
The shadows still lessened in the great kitchen. The sun lay in level
streaks on the centre of the stone floor, and even the twilight in the
corners was big with noon. The women sat in a helpless huddle, not
knowing how to go about the abnormal tasks of the abnormal day. The
far-off thunders of the plain began again: vibrations as of earthquake
first, then explicit sounds, unmistakable and portentous. To-day, you
could distinguish among those clamors. Miss Stanley, with the first
sounds, expected to have a tiny mob to quell; but their apathy did not
leave them. Even the children turned that steady, hypnotized stare on
her. And then Jeanne--how could she not have missed Jeanne from the
assembly?--ran down the corridor with a sharp clatter.
'They are there! Soldiers--on horseback--at the gate!'
And indeed now, in the sudden tragic hush, Miss Stanley could hear the
faint metallic thrill and tinkle of iron bars, at a distance, struck
sharply. Old Theophile roused himself as if by unconscious antediluvian
habit, but Marie plucked him back and ran for the flag with the scarlet
cloth cross. This she thrust into the American girl's hand. No one else
moved, except that Mathilde flung her heavy skirt over her little girl's
head.
For one moment, Miss Stanley stood irresolute. She had never dreamed of
such a tyranny of irrelevant fact. She must, for life or death,--for
honor, at all events,--respond to a situation for which nothing, since
her birth, had prepared her. Peace had been to her as air and
sunlight--the natural condition of life. This was like being flung into
a vacuum; it was death to her whole organism. Yet, somehow, she was
still alive.
Irony took her by the throat; and then the thought of Edmund
Laye--linked, himself, with events like these, riding or marching
beneath just such skies, on just such a planet, under just such a law.
Never had there been, really, immunity like that which she had fancied
to be the very condition of human existence. It was all human, with a
wild inclusiveness that took her breath. And, whatever happened,
paralysis like that which even now crept slowly up her limbs, was of the
devil. Against that last ignominy she braced herself.
Her muscles responded miraculously to her call for help, and she felt
her feet moving across the floor. If feet could move, hands could. She
rolled up the little banner and threw it in the very centre of the fire.
It occurred to her as a last insult that she did not know enough German
even to proclaim her nationality; but she did not falter again. Some
residuum of human courage out of the past kept her body loyal--some
archaic fashion of the flesh that dominated the newness of the mind.
Past generations squared her shoulders for her, and gave her lips a
phrase to practice.
As she passed down the corridor, she flung each door wide open. She
paused, a mere fraction of an instant, in the big front door of the
house; but from there she could see only a confusion of helmets, and
horses nosing at the grille. Almost immediately she passed through the
door and walked, hatless, her arms hanging stiffly at her sides, across
the innumerable cobblestones, to the gate.