L. P. Gratacap

“ The light of sun and moon and stars seems as it always seemed on Earth, but there does not come to me the divine touch of affection, that intimate feeling of oneness and self-surrender that was mine with Randolph on the Earth. A strength unknown to me before, a power of enjoyment, a motion that is ecstacy, thought, feeling, language, all strong, radiant, supreme, but yet loneliness! Memory of the things of Earth hardly remains, except where love prints its firm expression. ”

“ Yet I was still conscious, and then, as if an omnipotent arm thrust from below raised us, I felt the raft pressed upward against the welter and inrush, and then a titanic convulsion, and the raft, and I dangling to the posts, were shot bodily out of the maelstrom, though scarcely lifted above the surface; and, enveloped in the hill of water that accompanied us, the raft swam out again upon the descending stream, in a turbulence of waves that made me dizzy with its confusion. ”

“ A smile gleamed there too, and a voice spoke in my ears. I looked above me. Again that haunting form and face of Sebastien Quintado, and with it—O my God—the entwined wraith of my sister. The dead body was in my arms, the creature was fleeing beyond my hold. I sprang to my feet, and yet clinging to the dead figure of Gabrielle, lying on my breast, I raised an imploring hand, and cried out in the oncoming darkness—fit symbol of my despair:
"Gabrielle, is this your love? You know that Life is now my prison. Return! Return!" ”

“ Lhatto knelt and bowed to the far-away sea, and her voice became silent. So the Woman there in the Earth’s Dawn begat music and poetry and worship; the mists from the ocean spread about her, the swarming voices of the day entered her ears, and perchance far down in her perturbed soul, by some skill of the Great Intention, she saw and heard the hurrying centuries rampant with life, pregnant with passion, furious with ambition, prostrate—as she had been before the sea—prostrate before a Woman’s form, and voice, and soul. ”

“ Here we are, a group of limited intelligent beings circumscribed by a boundless space, and placed upon a speck of matter which is whirled around the sun in an endless captivity, bound by this inexorable law of gravitation, like a stone in a sling. About us in this ethereal ocean floats a host of similarly made orbs, perhaps, in thousands of cases, inhabited by beings throbbing with the same curiosity as our own to reach out beyond their sphere, and learn something of the nature of the animated universe which they may dimly suspect lies about them in the other stars. ”

“ We drove in triumph through the dismantled gateway, pierced by the convulsion of those yellow sticks of doom. Out on the white field, on which perhaps only the wind had left its imprint, which no eye but that all-seeing orb of day had ever scanned, whose silence only the winds, the waves, the storming ice had ever broken, and which now, the first time since Eternity began its reign there, was rudely assailed—we imagined it as an astonished deity—by yelping dogs and four hurrahing mortals! ”

“ But the hilltop of La Ferté was not sought. The drifting crowds, pushing stubbornly on, almost without sound of voice, in a dreadful silence, like creatures driven to their doom, divided there their compact masses, and it remained like some obstacle in a river's rush and freshet, and only around it poured the human tides, animated by some fear perhaps—No, rather directed by the mystical forces of the intelligences that ruled the hour, and ruling the hour ruled also the inclinations of the hearts that, in their blind animal herding, obeyed them. ”

“ At such a crisis can it be possible for men and women, calling themselves English, in whom the memory of English fame and English glory, is still a present pride, can it be possible that at this moment they still consort for amusement, for display, for the fugitive follies of mutual admiration? This aristocracy is the head and forefront of the nation, and it should now be bowed in penitence, in supplication, in the agony of self inquiry, and it stupifies me to find them gay, when the heart of England is breaking with grief. ”

“ When Ogga opened the door of his tent he could look over the steep land ascending to the glacier, and not infrequently he watched the mastodon moving in small herds, or a few individuals in pairs stirring in dark patches among the low trees and bushes at the sides of rivers; could even see their white tusks reflecting the light from the curved ivory, could even hear their low trumpet calls increasing to brisk short snorts, or the wash of the pond waters as their slouching bodies entered some unfrequented pool to drink or bathe. ”

“ When the spirits, thus shaped in light and otherwise almost immaterial and unclothed, emerge from the Hill of the Phosphori, they are taken along wide, white roads to some of the many chorus halls which fill the City of Light, where I am now, and from which I am sending this magnetic message. They remain for hours, even days and weeks in these halls listening in a sort of stupor or trance to beautiful music; for music is the one great recreation of the Martians, and is spontaneous, appearing as a vocal gift in beings who have never enjoyed its exercise on earth. ”

“ I could not restrain the impetuous cry that broke from my lips. Perhaps, were it rightly interpreted, it was fear, the sudden effort to restore some balance of sanity in the madness of a nightmare, that forced this outburst. I only knew that I almost shouted:
"Gabrielle, Gabrielle! You have gone mad." I sprang to the lamp and relit it. The pale lights of morning were streaking the sky, and the vocal welcome of Nature was breaking out from myriad throats in the wide jubilation of the spring's resurrection. ”

“ On the fourth of July we were under Cape Lisburne, encountering the rush of the wind that seems harbored by that lofty cliff, and which like a physical avalanche pushed us over until the water rippled over the lee rail. Along the shores everywhere there was a broad avenue of open water, stretching from the skirt of shore ice to the heavy packs, sheeted with fogs and murmurously moaning, inimitably flooring that mysterious ocean whose furthest waters beat on the shores of Krocker Land. ”

“ There was an instant’s silence, and then the stranger spoke, still holding Leacraft’s hand, and retaining his undeviating inspection of Leacraft’s face, as if he would force upon himself the recognition of a friend.
“These are just words, sir,” he began: “but how much you misunderstand what is going on here. This apparent revelry is an effort to keep from swooning: it is the forced continuance of a life familiar to us, when that life is to be crushed into nothingness; it is the defiance of habit, the revolt against extinction, the mortal protest against the infamous tyranny of circumstances. ”

“ It was before a creature of this sort, gigantic, grotesque, decadent and foreign, that Ogga stared with all his eyes, thinking to please Lhatto by bringing back to her some trophy from its body. The strange beast continued its prolonged feeding and Ogga watched. The night, darkening the valley with blue shadows, that sensibly thickened, overtaking each other and pressing like a repulsing force the fleeing lights, rising upward on the mountain, soon hid the animal, and with the night came rain and a low wind raising innumerable voices in the great woods. ”

“ We dare not crush out within us the sweet thought of reunion. Upon that earth I lost a wife, who summed up to me everything of value, virtue, and beauty human life can claim. The passionate desire to regain her, the defiant mutiny of my heart against any thought of her annihilation, made me turn to the shining hosts of heaven for reassurance. In them somewhere I believed the vanished soul of my companion had flown. This wonderful world was known to me, and what the wise men of the Earth said of its possible population. ”

“ For the war went on; west and east the perpetual deluge of shells and shrapnel and bullets, the surges of poisonous gases, the savagery of assassination, and the cruelty of the bayonet, were emptying homes, thinning the ranks, and draining the country of its best, its strongest, men. And now came the trench lines; the insinuating deep gutters in the earth, worming themselves this way and that, here in unutterable perplexity of entrance and exit, there more simple, running on with occasional dug-outs and bomb-proof dungeons, cellar-like dismal caverns of darkness, humidity, and sickness. ”

“ Link, the ebbing tide of life returned, slowly indeed at first, so slowly that the friendly faces around me seemed only indefinite, leering masks, before which I shuddered. Warmth reasserted its sway, the warmth of life. I felt fresh, cleanly nourishment, the elixir of whisky slipping down my throat, and then a delicious thrill of comfort, and I became conscious, to find myself eating and drinking and around me the anxious, staring faces of Coogan, Isaac Stanwix, Bell Phillips, and Jack Spent. ”

“ The King was to leave England in June, 1910, and when he left with sumptuous and melancholy observance, with splendor of color and depth and power of music, with uniform and ritual, with prayer and chorus and prophecy, with august and intolerable grandeur, with the art of tradition and the ornaments of invention, he was to pass down to Tilbury and sail away beyond Gravesend to the new realm of his possession on the shores of Australia. ”

“ The open forest, the glades, the timbered uplands, the valley levels, defile and peak, lakes set like sapphires within beryl rims of trees, rushing torrents carrying in their waters the tint of the washed woods, and holding in their mirrowy pools the cold and painted trout, the cliff side from whose prominence the world seemed suddenly displayed, or the climbing pinnacle whence even the blue ocean like a dream swam upon their vision, still tireless in its endless task of renewing and destroying continents, and still, with the witchery of its deathless charm, calling men to its pale lips. ”

“ The air of this latitude of Mars is so pure, vivid and dustless! My strength and power and vitality seemed boundless. And as in the broad mirror of my bedchamber I viewed my reflection, I leaped with wonder to see the youth I had been, formed anew in lineaments, fairer than Earth's. My son, I have become younger than yourself, age has vanished, and all the restraint of differing years between has vanished with it.
"Alca, Chapman and myself, as is the Martian habit, walked to the quarry mouth, up a winding and hard stone road. This dreary and desolate region seemed to have a charm. ”

“ The summer was reigning, and the verdurous garb of green and colored things was drawn like a veil over the rugged grounds, soothing them into a transient loveliness. We could see the rivulets from the snowbanks coursing everywhere, and could hear from the glacier the gurgle, rush, and tinkle too of hidden rivers, while towards the coast, in the daytime, the sun revealed a shield of wide-spread waters where the floods from the melting ice poured over the shore, and cut long, wide lanes in the rapidly vanishing shore ice. ”

“ Thomsen had forgotten his first resentment at Leacraft’s apparent admiration for his cousin. The two men had become very intimate. Both felt themselves on the edge of new events, which were in part to be shaped by the blind forces of the earth, and in larger part as they affected England, by the sagacity and steadfastness of men. They talked much over these things together. Both were sombre and frightened. The invincible powers of nature, the unconquerable ferocity of nature which is deaf to reason, blind to suffering, made them shrink and quail. ”

“ Beyond that somewhere lay the slumbering Germans. But their puissant foes were slumbering too. The valley stretch was filled, like an overflowing bowl, with the English troops, and in hedges, in human sheaves, in rows, as in wind-swept, rain-beaten fields of high grass, the soldiers tossed their pain-racked bodies. We had become accustomed to the grotesque predicament and entered the camps, where we were tempted by the rudeness or wonder of the spectacle, with a stolid confidence. ”

“ If I could recover Martha, if, in this serene atmosphere of good will and fairness and kindness, in the midst of unknown possibilities of knowledge, in the company of enthusiastic and high-minded men and women, in this arena of scientific wonders, and in the joy and beauty of universal happiness and thrift and peace and well doing and intuition, I could find a human companionship in the woman whose face and nature have summed up for me the whole of life, if I could find her! ”

“ Lagk had hurried up the valley where Ogga had found the sloth, and the pale topped mountains rose, as he advanced, into flinty pinnacles, gray and spectral, in the summer sun. They rose as the valley widened, their bared heads destitute of covering, sending into the broad zenith the half-visible rays of the reflected heat and light. They thrust out wide shoulders, the shadows resting in the cold remoteness of their elevations, revealing cliffs and recesses, ragged gorges and wandering seams of dislocation. ”

“ And yet—the old dream of a greater England arose, as it had arisen a hundred times before, in all these troubling and disconcerting months—an England leaping forward, as an exultant youth, bearing in his hands the trophies of new and brighter conquests, flushed under changed environments, with the inspiration of new ambitions, and new powers of creation, issuing into a greater chapter of human growth than had ever before been conceived or written. ”

“ It responded to the strokes of the tiller, and my dismal forebodings were momentarily forgotten in the amusement it gave me to swing the raft from side to side of the still broad waterway. As the light became dimmer, and a half crepuscular dusk crept into the deepening fissure over whose topmost edges the sky hung like an illuminated ribbon, I felt the grip of a solemn dread, the precurrent rigor of that deadly rigor animae which palsies the heart. ”

“ The phosphorescent configuration with the extended arms grew paler and paler, and as its extreme blurry splendor died away, there sprang forward from within it, the real similitude of Blanchette, a pallid figure of light, and in it the dear face of the girl, tender, divinely, to my eyes, beautiful, with now a compassionate wistfulness of prettiness, O! so faintly expressed, in the dim radiance that seemed yet to stream with undulous waves through the room from the relaxed, motionless body of my sister. ”

“ The lonely woman, emblem and promise, stood a long time on that untenanted shore looking outward, the encroaching tide slowly encircling her feet with wavelets, while each advancing ripple bearing some bubble of foam bound her ankles with a ring of airy beads.
Before the ocean, whether in calm or in storm, youth feels the power of its silence and its immensity. The wind that moved over its passionless face when still, the wind that carries hurricanes over the same ocean when convulsed and dangerous, solicit the recreant passions of youth, aimless, boundless, and unfulfilled. ”

“ As the sun rose higher, the effulgence of the City died away, the light of the same great orb which brings the dawn to you, covered with its rays the white and glorious City, the music seemed again revived, and from the doorways of the houses I could see forms issuing, while far off the Hill of the Phosphori raised its glass domes in the air, where the homogeneous tide of spirit was undergoing differentiation, as we might say, into separate cognizable, discreet beings. ”

“ The deity of Krocker Land favored our approach. He had rebuked, repelled, dissipated the tempest.
The scenic shock was really tremendous. The dramatic intensity of the change, the startling evolution from storm and darkness, blistering winds, soaked with snow and rain, the earth-driven rolling clouds, black and gray, tossed over us and engulfing us in blankets of cold wetness that sent shivering thrills of dread through our bodies, as the waves mounted and pounced on us like beasts of ravin! ”

“ But Lhatto slept. Her prostrate form lay backwards in the boat, the paddle had dropped from her nerveless hand, her seal skin cap had slipped from the clustering hair, dark with moisture, that pressed down upon her narrow and arched brow, the darting eyes were closed, and as the sun again toiled upward in the east, his light, touching many things with beauty, touched none more gently than the sleeping girl, saved from the sea anemone, or the thronging fish or the myriad coral beds, to be the mother of new men. ”

“ And when the eye, freed momentarily from its awful imprisonment in that hideous wrestle of death and life, turned outward to the wide horizons, the image of the desolating ravages of war were multiplied. The confused flames and smoke-clouds of burning villages or deserted shelters rose tardily into the dimmed skies, while, caught nearer at hand perchance, and beyond the invading surges of the Germans, if seen at all through the screen of vapors, the broken angular edges of wall and parapet, tower and steeple, cut the horizon with cruel indentations. ”

“ Here I was, a disembodied soul from Earth, which at that moment I only dimly recalled, undergoing the strange process of re-establishment in flesh and blood, and slowly appropriating those natural appetites which come with flesh and blood, a waif of spiritual being in the great voids of creation, impelled by some implanted power of affinity to this remote, strange, phantasmal and unreal place, overwhelmed in a stupor of confusion, like some awakening patient from the vertigo of a terrifying dream! ”

“ We had many garden parties with Privat Deschat and Capitaine Bleu-Pistache—growing more feeble now, more silent, with often unbidden tears springing to his eyes—and Quintado and Père Grandin and Père Antoine—though he was not so often with us—and the sweet-voiced and sparkling little orphan girl the captain had adopted—Dora Destin, a vivacious creature with delicate ways and a keen appetite for tarts and pastry, and a peculiar shyness that came and went so oddly, that one instant she might be hiding, as if afraid, and the next leaping amongst us like a bird. ”

“ Then, as if it felt the assurance of an improving destiny, woods rose over ranges of increasing altitude, rivers swept in circling glory through narrow and alluvial valleys, and groves of great trees clustered over mountain terraces, defiled in green seas of leafy glory to the lowlands, where the rhythm of verdurous beauty was resumed in more open country, the reincarnated spirit of Nature loosened its power upon a coast line, washed by the restless ocean. ”

“ Only as I still dare to believe, that the flight of years must end his aging days on Earth, and that the eternal destiny of married souls is an eternal union, and that his reincarnation here shall bring us into a new and better, richer, deeper harmony of mind and tastes and thoughts; only as the belief grows stronger with passing time, can I, so surrounded with peace and happiness, in this countryside of quiet work and gentle cares, bear longer this awful isolation, the nights of prayerful hope, the days of still enduring hope. ”

“ The huge forces on both sides were assembled within the ten thousand miles of trenches, that had converted the northeastern edges of our country into a subterranean battlefield. From these trenches, almost so arranged by some supervising destiny, they were to arise, like implacable fiends or bloodless furies, and plunge their regiments, their brigades, their squadrons, their divisions, their armies against each other, in an unutterable tremendousness of slaughter, that might have rent the vault of Heaven, if any feeling, any sympathy, any recognition, any compassion, any power resided there! ”

“ They lead us only into a new zone of imaginative work, and we are bidden to weave fabrics of design which carry on them the pictures of a lost past, when strange creatures, long extinct, were known to men, themselves extinct, when a strange epoch was placing its landmarks over a world, upon which the dawn of Mind had opened, when the Prehistoric somehow extricated from an inheritance of claws and hair and carnivorous ferocity, felt the mystery of the earth, looked with question upon the unrolled skies, and began the long drama of human love and hate. ”

“ To us on earth, the disappearance of those we love and cherish, the sundering of ties which a lifetime of love and companionship has established, the sharp vanishing away into nothingness and silence of the faces and spirits of the great and glorious, the good, the helpful, the true and noble, has made death an awful, hideous, to some a hopeless mystery. ”