The car was hopelessly dislocated, that was evident; when Berry started
the engine, it clucked like a dying hen for a few revolutions, and
failed. He was minded to waste no more time on it. He stowed the
contents of the tool-box mysteriously about his person, hid the spare
can of petrol in the ditch, and departed to find his bearings, and, if
possible, a warm barn to sleep in. Once he looked back at the car. “You
look lorst, old girl,” said Berry, “but you aint ’arf so lorst and
lonesome as me.”
There are degrees of lostness. Private Berry was lost in the superlative
degree—utterly, hopelessly, intensively. It was one o’clock in the
morning and cold. The moon was up, so round and white, it reminded him
of a peeled onion but persistently in the wrong quarter of the sky. He
sighed. He had with him a tin of those striped delicacies known as
humbugs, and with these he stayed himself while proceeding to cross the
very loneliest landscape he had ever seen in his life.
Nothing moved within the scope of the moon, but Private Berry. He moved
stiffly, chinking a little, and leaving behind him an almost visible
trail of peppermint. As he walked, he considered and rehearsed what sort
of excuses might most reasonably be offered for his late chapter of
accidents. “Waited an hour in the market place for Private Corkery,
Sir,” he said aloud in a high, hurt voice. “Not my fault I was alone,
Sir. . . I dunno, Sir. Maybe ’e got lorst too. . . No, Sir, not when I
see ’im. . . Yes, Sir, workshop job. I tried an hour. . . I should say
twenty mile, or maybe twenty-two, or a bit to that. . . Yes, Sir, _all_
the way. . Yes, Sir, thank you, Sir.” But the silence spun out his voice
so startlingly that he stopped and looked about him. “It’s a cemetery
without no monuments,” said Private Berry.
“Talk about a silence that might be felt! You can jolly well ’ear this
one.”
It was the quietness that troubled him. Into what country had he
wandered, and where were the lines? He had been moving towards a low
ridge that ran about a mile from the road where he had left the motor.
He topped this rise at last, grunting a little, and very wary. And there
beneath him, in the hollow, was the little town.
If Berry had been an imaginative man, he might have thought that the
deathly silence possessing the world had its source and origin in this
hollow. But he had seen many such villages before—unburied corpses
lying where the tides of war had left them; won and lost, lost and won
so often that now they had nothing more to win or lose forever, and so
were briefly, at peace. He found a downward path contentedly enough. If
there was anything left in the place, a roof, an egg, a heap of
straw—he relied on himself to find it. But as he descended farther, he
began to doubt if he should find even as little as the straw. He had
never seen a town so scraped and scoured by destruction. He wondered if
he would not have done better to stay by the car.
His boots rang on the first of the paving. A cracked trough with a
puddle in it, reflected the moon frostily, and a whirl of dead leaves
rustled past him and settled on a door-step that had no house behind it.
“Bare as the back of my ’and,” muttered Berry. “I wonder which side ’eld
it last. Them, I’ll bet.” And for no reason, a name sprang into his
mind—“Von Eichensau.” It was said that no one swept a place so bare as
Von Eichensau; other things were said of him too. A fear took hold on
Berry that he might be straying into the enemy’s lines; he tried to
tiptoe along the cobbles. He tiptoed massively for several minutes down
the long wall of a building that might have been a school, but was so
torn and shattered by shell that only a paved court and a small cupola
over the gate remained to suggest its past. This court was raised from
the street; half a dozen steps led to it. And here Berry stopped with a
jerk. For an old woman was sitting there.
He couldn’t have told you why she startled him; “Seeing her so sudden,”
he would probably have said. But the shock lay in seeing her so orderly,
so secure, so very _usual_; she must have affronted him almost like an
indecency in the midst of that ravaged corpse of a town—she, stout,
fresh and unfrightened, in a blue cloak and a clean apron, and holding
on her knee a big basket covered with a square of shiny waterproof
cloth.
For a moment the old woman gazed at Berry; not with fear; but with a
certain promise of blank resistance. The moon, however, was kind to
Private Berry’s honest “chunky” countenance: accentuated the appeal of a
pair of eyes as innocent as a hungry calf’s; glinted on a battered
badge. He could feel the precise instant when, without smile or sign,
the old woman became friendly. He took heart and a long breath, and
achieved his linguistic triumph—“Gee swee perdoo.”
A torrent of rapid nods and words answered him. The old soul clattered
to her feet, patted his arm, beckoned him to follow her. She whisked off
so quickly that he was left behind, staring in the moonlight; overtaking
her in three strides, and relieving her, with a not disinterested
gallantry, of the basket, he nearly tossed it over his own head; for he
had expected it to be heavy, and he found it light. Peeping under a
corner of the cover, he saw that it was full of little paper
toys—rosettes, streamers, windmills, red, blue and yellow. He wondered
greatly. But his French was not equal to the whole of the situation; he
followed in silence through the moon-whitened sepulchre that had been a
town.
A single window warmed the black shadows behind the half burnt church
with a glow so dim it would have been invisible in the moonlight. Here
they stopped and crept through a door veiled in ruin and drunkenly ajar.
The room they first entered was so wrecked that they crawled over piles
of dust and rubbish, under sooty beams that let the blank white night
through. Berry, very much on the alert, saw nothing unharmed, nothing
that had kept its shape and use, but a single shelf upon which set a row
of tiny wooden dolls. Then they went under a curtain of dirty canvas,
into warmth and firelight and a singular peace.
The room beyond the curtain was undamaged, except that the plaster had
fallen from the brick in many places; and it was neat and clean. A cheap
lamp with a bright tin reflector was on the wall, there was a table
covered with a blue checked cloth, a dresser with some old blue
earthenware, a chair or two, an old painted bench, fire in a brazier.
Two men were sitting on the bench as Berry entered, and they flashed to
their feet with a swiftness of movement that was uncanny; for both were
old. The woman began to explain in a shower of nods, patting Berry’s
arm. He caught “Anglais, Anglais,” and patted his own chest, saying
vigorously “That’s me. . .” At the sound of his voice, they relaxed;
one, who was a priest, dropped back upon the bench; the other came
forward, bowing and rubbing his hands; he shook Berry’s hand timidly. He
was a small man who carried his head bent, and continually looked up
under gray apologetic eyebrows. Berry liked him somehow; he returned the
handshake heartily, and even attained to a “Bongser, Mosoo le cury,” for
the priest. The old woman passed into a room beyond, smiling and nodding
back at Berry. And after a pause the priest answered in a voice rough
and rich with the country’s accent, “I speak some English, my friend.”
“And very well too, Sir,” returned Berry, politely at his ease and
unburdening himself of the heavier portions of the tool kit. “I can get
along well enough in the Francy, but it takes time. . . and maybe you
could tell me where I am, Sir, for it’s a matter of three hours since I
knew!”
“This was St. Aubyn.” The priest spoke with long pauses and hesitations,
as if not sure of what he would say. The little man, who had been
standing aside with his meek look of inquiry bent on Berry, now said
something friendly, helped him off with his coat, patted him into a
chair near the brazier, and called gently, “Judic, Judic!” The old woman
came back with something thin but hot in a bowl and a plate of bread.
Berry shook his head at her, he had some rations left, he didn’t want to
deprive them. . . But the curé said in his heavy voice, “You need not
hesitate. There is plenty.” So he ate and drank, watched by three pairs
of eyes that were singularly incurious; it was not so much that they
were uninterested in him as that they were absorbed in something else.
And Berry, trained by war to be never entirely trustful, wondered what
it was. He resolved to know.
St. Aubyn. . . “You may well say. This _was_ St. Aubyn.” He addressed
the company in general, and beamed on Mère Judic as she took away the
empty bowl. “I’ve seen some places. . . None so bad as this, though.
None so downright thorough. Which makes it all the queerer, if you’ll
excuse me, to find this”—he circled a thumb slowly about the dim, quiet
room—“to find anything so ’omelike as this at two-o’clock in the
morning.” To himself he added, “You’ve a fine old face, Mossoo le cury,
but it’s a listenin’ face. I wonder what you three are waitin’ here
for?”
“You know where you are?” asked the priest, calmly. “You have perhaps
heard of this—this town before?”
“I ’ave.” Berry was blunt. “Most of us ’ave. But I’d never ’ave thought
to find a livin’ soul inside of it, though.”
“Ah!” The word was a slow sigh. “And yet there are three—living souls.
Three.”
“What makes you stay?” asked Berry suddenly, and he had not meant to say
it. “If it’d been me—if this’d been my town—”
“Yes?” The old man on the bench smiled faintly.
Berry leaned forward. “Well, look ’ere,” he went on rapidly, almost in a
whisper, “wasn’t this where Von Eichensau turned the guns on a
school—because ’e said a shot had come from a winder?”
Again, faintly, the priest smiled. “Yes, my friend,” he answered, with
the air of politely answering irrelevant questions, “Yes, it was here.
And that was the school, where our old Judic saw you first. You can see
the marks on the walls. There was—how do you say it?—no place of
refuge for the children—the little small children. . . Two of our good
Rogiet’s were there.”
“Oui, oui.” The small meek Rogiet seemed to catch the sense, and nodded
and smiled nervously, like a shy child to whom attention has suddenly
been drawn. “Oui, oui. Deux de mes petites filles.”
“Well, then—” Berry stammered, and fell suddenly silent. The two
Frenchmen had exchanged a brief glance, as two intimates exchange
glances in a crowd of strangers; and it was like the revelation of a
hidden country by flashlight, a momentary rending of a veil in the
temple of human pain. He felt himself a stranger, an alien to the
passions, the thoughts, the memories that gave to the stuffy cheerful
room the atmosphere of a spiritual battlefield. Here in truth was a
language he did not know. He turned with relief to old Judic, who had
appeared, with a candle-end, at his elbow.
“You will rest an hour or two—yes?” asked the priest. But it was not a
question, it was a dismissal. Without a word Berry followed her up a
little laddery staircase into a sort of loft. When she wished him
good-night, he answered absently in English. He wished to be alone, to
think whether it had been fancy or reality that before Judic had taken
him to the stairs, she had turned to the door of the other room; and
that a voice had whispered with a fierce emphasis, “Non, non, pas
là. . .”
Well, as soon as the door of the loft closed behind her, Berry had his
wish; he found himself quite shudderingly alone, resting his arms on the
sill of the one small window, and covering his hands over his ears. He
swore at himself in pure astonishment, for the action had been
involuntary. “You’re looney,” he told himself, “going looney like the
lot downstairs. Sittin’ up all dressed at two in the mornin’ and
listenin’!. . . Wot do they think they’re listenin’ for? You’ve no call
to listen, any’ow.” He pocketed his hands resolutely and turned away
from the window; but deep down in his soul something was crouching and
crying that it didn’t want to know, it didn’t want to hear. . . Private
Barry flung himself down on the straw mattress that lay under the
window, rolled himself up in a couple of things that looked like
tablecloths, pulled his coat over him, and determined to go to sleep.
Once he woke himself, saying, “But wot do they want to _stay_ ’ere for?”
Again, he found himself awake and standing at the window, which he
thrust open. It was very stiff and the hinges creaked; outside, the
world lay still, shorn, desolate in the moonlight; a dead world lighting
the dead. The priest was standing under the window, looking up at it;
when he saw Berry, he lifted his arm in silence and made the sign of
benediction. Berry closed the window. He had a file in his pocket; this
he wedged under the door, so that it could not be opened from the
outside. There was something else in another pocket, a small neat
weapon, of a kind not supplied by government to the private soldier.
This he placed ready to his hand, and lay down again. He intended to
stay awake, but sleep took him irresistibly.
The third time he woke as if forcibly wrenched out of that sleep. The
voice inside him seemed to be shouting “This is it! Now you’ll know, now
you’ll hear!” And he heard—what? A voice in the room below, or the
ghost of one, singing an old French version of “One, two, buckle my
shoe.” But the voice was not French. And presently the song broke off
and ended in a hurry of shouted orders that sent Berry to his feet and
to the door in a single cat-like bound. For voice and words were German.
“Trapped, by Gord!” panted Berry. He crouched at the crack of the door,
the revolver fidgeting in his hand. He was remotely sorry for himself;
it seemed so stupidly unfair to have come through two years of war
unhurt, only to be ‘done in’ at last by three traitorous old peasants in
a deserted town. But he’d do the French a good turn and take
half-a-dozen along with him. . . He waited. He was not a man; he was
himself a weapon tense with death. And through the long-drawn minutes,
nothing happened. All was still.
At last he could bear it no longer. His boots he had taken off. Silently
he worked out the wedge and opened the door. He stole down the stairs
and into the room below. It was dark now, but there was a white patch of
moonlight on the far wall, like a square of paper stuck there. Across it
was creeping the black figure of a man. In an instant, Berry had him
pinned.
There was a certain satisfaction in gripping and holding and feeling the
frightened heart pound under his arm. . . He wondered if the revolver
would go off if he used the butt; and why the man made so little effort
against him. . . He turned the face up in the square of light, and it
was the meek Rogiet, apparently half-dead with fright. Berry gave an
ugly little laugh under his breath. He was suddenly and savagely angry.
“Where are the others, you Judas?” he whispered, forgetting the little
man could not understand. He slid the revolver forward until it rested
almost against Rogiet’s grizzled cheek.
Over his own shoulder an arm passed, and the revolver was strongly
grasped and held. He wrenched it free and sprang back by one instinctive
movement, covering both Rogiet and the priest, who stood quite still
before him. Only Rogiet made a little scared movement to get in front of
the curé. “Well?” gasped Berry hoarsely. “Well?” The priest raised his
hand.
“My son,” he said gently, “you are mistaken. Go again and sleep.”
Berry began to laugh, silently, rocking a little on his feet. “I ’eard,
I tell you, you dam liar,” he whispered, “I ’eard ’im,—singin’ and
shoutin’ orders to his men. Tell ’em to come and take me! Tell ’em. . .”
He wheeled to the door of the other room, for suddenly within it the
voice rose again, shouting commands. With a sob, Berry backed away, but
only as far as the wall, waiting for death when the door should open.
It opened. And there came out Mère Judic.
It was too late to stop the shot; not too late to jerk up the barrel in
the very act. The bullet ripped into the ceiling, and old Judic’s face
stared at him horrified in a cloud of dust. The place was full of dust,
and furious talking and confusion; out of which the priest came, and
stood in front of Berry, and laid a kind hand on his shoulder.
“You are mistaken. But you have not the blame. That is ours. We should
have told you. . . But we thought he would be quiet.”
Berry simply waited.
“That is our prisoner you hear in there.”
“Your prisoner. . . ?”
“Yes. Do you understand? It is how you say it?—our prisoner. When they
left the town—the last time—one, he remained.”
“Why?”
“He would not go,” said the priest gravely.
After some time, Berry passed his hand over his eyes. “O yes!” he agreed
wearily, “I understand—just about as much as I understand what’d keep
an ’Un ’ere on his own, and what’d keep you three, who are none of you
as young as you was, ’ere to look after ’im; and what brought me into it
at all. . . And you take it in turns to guard ’im, you and Mister Rogiet
and the little old lady?”
He rubbed his eyes again with his knuckles.
“We do not guard him.”
“Not guard ’im . . . ?”
It seemed to Berry there was a certain chill, a certain stillness
abroad. That the priest’s voice came from a distance when he said “There
is no need. All the treasures of the whole earth, they would not call
him from that poor room. . .” And he led Berry to the door, and opened
it.
It was a very small room, with a slanted roof and a truckle-bed, and it
was full of shadow. From the shadow sprang one clear and unforgettable
face, with loosened mouth and eyes fastened on the doorway at about the
level of Berry’s belt. And Berry knew that face; knew the arched nose,
the singular long jaw, the hair black and close as sealskin; knew them,
as did thousands of other men, from whispered stories in billets, from
half-uttered tales under the stars, when voices broke into curses
forgiven of God. . .
“My son, I said to you—is it not?—that there were but three living
souls in St. Aubyn. And it is true. This is a dead one. Soon it’s body
will die also, and then we shall go.”
When had the door been shut and that face hidden? Berry did not know. He
was sitting at the table with his elbows on the blue checked cloth and
his hands over his eyes.
“Why does ’e stay? . . .”
A silence. Then—“He will not pass the children in the doorway. He sees
them there always, all about him—the little young children—so very
small and young. When they went, and we came back, to see if there were
any of the others, we found him in hiding in the crypt, you understand.
He could not get away from those little children—our little
children. . .”
“’E’s mad, of course.”
“Of course. Perhaps we are all a little mad.”
“And you stayed—Gord, you stayed!—with that mad devil!”
The priest cried in a terrible voice. “Do you think it was not good for
us to stay? We of St. Aubyn—we three who are here and live—do you not
think that we have need to believe in God? Do you not think we have need
to keep under our eyes the beginning—the so very little beginning—of
the judgment of God? Without the faith in that justice, we could not
live, we could not save our souls. We were lost. . . lost. . . But
‘panem de coelo praestitisti eis, alleluia. Et tecum principium in die
virtutis tuae, in splendoribus sanctorum. . .’”
“And—and the ole lady—the little toys in the basket?”
The priest’s voice changed. Berry knew that he was weeping. “Eh, what
shall I say? I am an old man. I have no children of my flesh. . . _He_
is mad, and Judic is very mad too, and very old. . . She says they are
there, the children. She says that she sees their faces between the
light and the dark. Small happy faces under a whiteness like the veils
of the First Communion. Eh, we are very old and we have seen too
much. . . So she makes the little toys still, singing as she twists the
paper. And she takes her basket to the steps of the school, and sits
there as she did use to—and—sells them. What do I say? I know not what
she does, or what is given her. . . Only that she returns, and sometimes
her basket is. . . empty. . .”
“And the madman in there?”
“Is Kurt Von Eichensau. Yes.” Presently he added, “If you do not object,
I will open the door. If the door is shut, it causes him to make an
outcry. We do not want a noise. You need not fear, he will not come out.
He will not cross that threshold where stand the little children he
killed.”
When dawn, colourless and cold as the moonlight it replaced, drew a
faint line along the rim of the ruined land, Berry slowly climbed the
path that led him back to his world. Once he stopped and raised a hand
to the curé, standing—though Berry could not see him—in the soot-black
shadow of the church; where the one window still glowed dimly, like a
watching eye whose light was soon to be quenched. Again he stopped, and
looked at something that lay in his hand; it was a little paper windmill
which Judic had given him out of her basket for a keepsake. But he
stopped a third time by a little bush which grew on the slope, where a
few green spires promised crocuses. He stuck the windmill-stick in the
earth; the gaudy little toy began to twirl merrily in the wind.
“I won’t take it away,” said Berry jerkily to himself, “the kids—might
miss it.”
The ridge rose behind him and hid St. Aubyn. Striding very quickly, he
went on to meet the dawn.