The Commandant stepped down from his watch tower by the railway tracks.
This watch tower was a house that had been struck but not tumbled by the
bombardment. It was black and gashed, and looked deserted. That was the
merit of it, for every minute of the day and night, some watcher of the
Belgians sat in the window, one flight up, by the two machine guns,
gazing out over the flooded fields, and the thin white strip of road
that led eastward to the enemy trenches. Once, fifteen mouse-colored
uniforms had made a sortie down the road and toward the house, but the
eye at the window had sighted them, and let them draw close till the aim
was very sure. Since then, there had been no one coming down the road.
But a watcher, turn by turn, was always waiting. The Commandant liked
the post, for it was the key to the safety of Pervyse. He felt he was
guarding the three women, when he sat there on the rear supports of a
battered chair, and smoked and peered out into the east.
He came slowly down the road,--old wounds were throbbing in his
members--and, as always, turned into the half-shattered dwelling where
the nurses were making their home and tending their wounded.
"How is the sentry-box to-night?" asked Hilda.
"Draughty," said the Commandant, with a shiver; "it rocks in the wind."
"You must have some rag-time," prescribed Hilda, and seated herself at
the piano.
It was Pervyse's only piano, untouched by shell and shrapnel, and
nightly it sounded the praise of things. The little group drew close
about the American girl, as she led them in a "coon song."
"I say," said Hilda, looking up from the keys, "would any one believe
it?"
"Believe what?" asked Mrs. Bracher.
"The lot of us here, exchanging favorites, with war just outside our
window. I tell you," repeated Hilda, "no one would believe it."
"They don't have to," retorted Mrs. Bracher, sharply. She had grown
weary of telling folks at home how matters stood, and then having them
say, "Fancy now, really?"
The methodical guns had pounded the humanity out of Pervyse, and, with
the living, had gone music and art. There was nowhere in the wasted area
for the tired soldiers to find relief from their monotony. War is a
dreary thing. With one fixed idea in the mind--to wait, to watch for
some careless head over the mounded earth, and then to kill--war is
drearier than slave labor, more nagging than an imperfect marriage, more
dispiriting than unsuccessful sin. The pretty brass utensils of the
dwellings had been pillaged. Canvas, which had once contained bright
faces, was in shreds. The figures of Christ and his friends that had
stood high in the niches of the church, had fallen forward on their
faces. All the little devices of beauty, cherished by the villagers, had
been shattered.
One perfect piano had been left unmarred by all the destruction that had
robbed the place of its instruments of pleasure. With elation and
laughter the soldiers had discovered it, when the early fierceness of
the attack had ebbed. Straightway they carried it to the home of the
women.
When the Commandant first saw it, soon after its arrival in their
living-room, he beamed all over.
"The Broadwood," he said. "How that brings back the memories! When I
was a young man once in Ostend, I was one of eight to play with
Paderewski, that great musician. Yes, together we played through an
afternoon. And the instrument on which I played was a Broadwood. I
cannot now ever see it, without remembering that day in the Kursaal, and
how he led us with that fingering, that vigor. Do you know how he lifts
his hand high over the keys and then drops suddenly upon them?"
"Yes, I have seen it," said Hilda; "like the swoop of an eagle."
"I do not know that bird," returned the Commandant, "but that is it. It
is swift and strong. He comes out of a stricken country, too; that is
why he can play."
"I wonder, feeling that way, that you ever gave up your music," said
Hilda. "Why didn't you go on with it?"
"I had thought of it. But there was always something in me that called,
and I went into the army. For years we have known this thing was
coming. A man could not do otherwise than hold himself ready for that.
And now it is left to you young people to go on--always the new harmony,
that sings in the ears, and never comes into the notes."
The Commandant, Commandant Jost, was perhaps the best of all their
soldier friends. He was straight and sturdy, a pine-tree of a man in his
early fifties. He was famous in Flanders for his picked command of 110,
all of them brave as he was brave, ready to be wiped out because of
their heart of courage. Often the strength of his fighting group was
sapped, till one could count his men on the fingers of the hands. But
always there were fresh fellows ready to go the road with him. He never
ordered them into danger. He merely called for volunteers. When he went
up against absurd odds, and was left for dead, his men returned for him,
and brought him away for another day. His time hadn't come, he said. It
was no use shooting him down, and clipping the bridge from his
nose,--when his day came, he would be done for, but not ahead of that.
This valiant Belgian soldier was a mystic of war.
In the trenches and at the hospitals, Hilda had met a race of prophets,
men who carry about foreknowledge and premonitions. Sturdy bearded
fellows who salute you as men about to die. They are perfectly cheery,
as brave as the unthinking at their side, but they tramp firmly to a
certain end. War lets loose the rich life of subconsciousness which most
mortals keep bottled up in the sleepy secular days of humdrum. Peril and
sudden death uncork those heady vapors, and sharpen the super-senses.
This race of men with their presciences have no quarrel with death. They
have made their peace with it. It is merely that they carry a
foreknowledge of it--they are sure they will know when it is on the
way.
No man of the troops was more smitten with second-sight, than this
friend of the Pervyse women, this courageous Commandant. His eyes were
level to command, but they grew distant and luminous when his mood was
on him. This gift in him called out the like in other men, and his
pockets were heavy with the keepsakes of young soldiers, a photograph of
the beloved, a treasured coin, a good-bye letter, which he was
commissioned to carry to the dear one, when the giver should fall. With
little faith that he himself would execute the commissions, he had
carefully labelled each memento with the name and address of its
destination. For he knew that whatever was found on his body, the body
of the fighting Commandant, the King's friend, would receive speedy
forwarding to its appointed place.
It was an evening of spring, but spring had come with little promise
that way. Ashes of homes and the sour dead lay too thickly over those
fields, for nature to make her great recovery in one season. The task
was too heavy for even her vast renewals. Patience, she seemed to say, I
come again.
The Commandant was sitting at ease enjoying his pipe.
"Mademoiselle Hilda," said he. Hilda was sitting at the piano, but no
tunes were flowing. She was behaving badly that evening and she knew it.
She fumbled with the sheaves of music, and chucked Scotch under the
chin, and doctored the candles. She was manifesting all the younger
elements in her twenty-two years.
"Mademoiselle Hilda," insisted the Commandant. He was sentimental, and
full of old-world courtesies, but he was used to being obeyed. Hilda
became rapt in contemplating a candlestick.
"Mademoiselle Hilda, a little music, if you please," he said with a
finality.
"You play," said Hilda to Scotch, sliding off the soap-box which served
to uphold the artist to her instrument.
"Hilda, you make me tired," chided Scotch. "The Commandant has given you
his orders."
"Oh, all right," said Hilda.
She played pleasantly with feeling and technique. More of her hidden
life came to an utterance with her music than at other times. She led
her notes gently to a close.
"Mademoiselle Hilda," said the Commandant from his seat in the shadows
on the sofa, "parlez-vous français?"
This was his regular procedure. Why did he say it? They never could
guess. He knew that the women, all three, understood French--Mrs.
Bracher and Scotch speaking it fluently, Hilda, as became an American,
haltingly. Did he not carry on most of his converse with them in
French--always, when eloquent or sentimental? But unfailingly he used
his formula, when he was highly pleased. They decided he must once have
known some fair foreigner who could only faintly stammer in his native
tongue, and that the habit of address had then become fixed upon him for
moments of emotion.
He repeated his question.
"Oui," responded the girl. He kissed his fingers lightly to her, and
waved the tribute in her direction, as if it could be wafted across the
room.
"Chère artiste," said he, with a voice of conviction.
"And now the bacarolle," he pleaded.
"There are many bacarolles," she objected.
"I know, I know," he said, "and yet, after all, there is only one
bacarolle."
"All right," she answered, obediently, and played on. The music died
away, and the girl in her fought against the response that she knew was
coming. She began turning over sheets of music on the rack. But the
Commandant was not to be balked.
"Parlez-vous français?" he inquired, "vous, Mademoiselle Hilda."
"Oui, mon Commandant," she answered.
"Chère artiste," he said; "chère artiste."
"Ah, those two voices," he went on with a sigh; "they go with you,
wherever you are. It is music, that night of love and joy. And here we
sit--"
"Yes, yes," interrupted Mrs. Bracher, who did not care to have an
evening of gaiety sag to melancholy; "how about a little César Franck?"
"Yes, surely," agreed the Commandant, cheerily; "our own composer, you
know, though we never gave him his due."
Hilda ran through the opening of the D Minor.
"Now it is your turn," said she.
"My fingers are something stiff, with these cold nights by the window,"
replied the Commandant, "but certainly I will endeavor to play."
He seated himself at the instrument.
"Chère artiste," he murmured to the girl, who was retreating to the
lounge.
The Commandant played well. He needed no notes, for he was stored with
remembered bits. He often played to them of an evening, before he took
his turn on watch. He played quietly along for a little. Out of the dark
at their north window, there came the piping of a night bird. Birds were
the only creatures seemingly untouched by the war. The fields were
crowded thick with the bodies of faithful cavalry and artillery horses.
Dogs and cats had wasted away in the seared area. Cattle had been mowed
down by machine guns. Heavy sows and their tiny yelping litter, were
shot as they trundled about, or, surviving the far-cast invisible death,
were spitted for soldiers' rations. And with men, the church-yard and
the fields, and even the running streams, were choked. Only birds of the
air, of all the living, had remained free of their element, floating
over the battling below them, as blithe as if men had not sown the lower
spaces with slaughter.
And now in this night of spring, one was calling to its mate. The
Commandant heard it, and struck its note on the upper keyboard.
"Every sound in nature has its key," he said; "the cry of the little
bird has it, and the surf at Nieuport."
"And the shells?" asked Hilda.
"Yes, the shells, they have it," he answered gravely; "each one of them,
as it whistles in the air, is giving its note. You have heard it?"
"Yes," answered Hilda.
"Why, this," he said. He held his hands widely apart to indicate the
keyboard--"this is only a little human dipping, like a bucket, into the
ocean waves of sound. It can't give us back one little part of what is.
Only a poor, stray sound out of the many can get itself registered. The
rest drift away, lost birds on the wing. The notes in between, the
splintered notes, they cannot sound on our little instruments."
A silence had fallen on the group. Out of the hushed night that covered
them, a moaning grew, that they knew well. One second, two seconds of
it, and then the thud fell somewhere up the line. As the shell was
wailing in the air, a hidden string, inside the frame, quivered through
its length, and gave out an under-hum. It was as if a far away call had
rung it up. One gun alone, out of all the masked artillery, had found
the key, and, from seven miles away, played the taut string.
"There is one that registers," said the Commandant; "the rest go past
and no echo here."
Firmly he struck the note that had vibrated.
"That gun is calling for me," said he; "the others are lost in the
night. But that gun will find me."
"You talk like a soothsayer," said Mrs. Bracher, with a sudden gesture
of her hand and arm, as if she were brushing away a mist.
"It's all folly," she went on, "I don't believe it. Good heavens, what
is that?" she added, as a footstep crunched in the hall-way. "You've got
me all unstrung, you and your croaking."
An orderly entered and saluted the Commandant.
"They've got the range of the Station, mon Commandant," he reported;
"they have just sent a shell into the tracks. It is dangerous in the
look-out of the house. Do you wish Victor to remain?"
"I will relieve him," said the Commandant, and he left swiftly and
silently, as was his wont.
Hilda returned to the piano, and began softly playing, with the
hush-pedal on. The two women drew close around her. Suddenly she
released the pedal, and lifted her hands from the keys, as if they
burned her. One string was still faintly singing which she had not
touched, the string of the key that the Commandant had struck.
"Mercy, child, what ails you?" exclaimed Mrs. Bracher. "You've all got
the fidgets to-night."
"That string again," said the girl.
She rose from the piano, and went out into the night. They heard her
footsteps on the road.
"Hilda, Hilda," called Scotch, loudly.
"Leave her alone, she is fey," said Mrs. Bracher. "I know her in these
moods. You can't interfere. You must let her go."
"We can at least see where she goes," urged Scotch.
They followed her at a distance. She went swiftly up the road, and
straight to the railway tracks. She entered the house, the dark, wrecked
house, where from the second story window, a perpetual look-out was
kept, like the watch of the Vestal Virgins. They came to the open door,
and heard her ascend to the room of the vigil.
"You must come," they heard her say, "come at once."
"No, no," answered the voice of the Commandant, "I am on duty here. But
you--what brings you here? You cannot stay. Go at once. I order you."
"I shall not go till you go," the girl replied in expressionless tones.
"I tell you to go," repeated the Commandant in angry but suppressed
voice.
"You can shoot me," said the girl, "but I will not go without you.
Come--" her voice turned to pleading--"Come, while there is time."
"My time has come," said the Commandant. "It is here--my end."
"Then for me, too," she said, "but I have come to take you from it."
There was a silence of a few seconds, then the sound of a chair scraping
the floor, heavy boots on the boarding, and the two, Commandant and
girl, descending the stairs. Unastonished, they stepped out and found
the two women waiting.
"We must save the girl," said the Commandant. "Come, run for it, all of
you, run!"
He pushed them forward with his hands, and back down the road they had
come. He ran and they ran till they reached their dwelling, and entered,
and stood at the north window, looking over toward the dim house from
which they had escaped. Out from the still night of darkness, came a low
thunder from beyond the Yser. In the tick of a pulse-beat, the moaning
of a shell throbbed on the air and, with instant vibrancy, the singing
string of the piano at their back answered the flight of the shell. And
in the same breath, they heard a roar at the railroad, and the crash of
timbers. Soft licking flames broke out in the house of the Belgian
watchers. Slowly but powerfully, the flames gathered volume, and swept
up their separate tongues into one bright blaze, till the house was a
bonfire against the heavy sky.