Beverley Baxter

“ In the scorching heat of a summer afternoon, Petite Simunde was washing some linen outside her cottage home. The silence, like the heat, was oppressive, and seemed more so by contrast with the noise of the troops who had been there a week before. An apple falling from a tree to the ground; the restless pounding of a horse's hoof in its stall; the distant hum of an aeroplane; the rumble of guns, faint but ominous—these and the sighs of the little woman at her task, were the only sounds that broke the stillness of the air. ”

“ When the snow is very thick on the ground, and the wind howls mournfully over the lake, Jacque Noir talks of France and the weary years of war. He will point with pride to his artificial foot, and then to his decoration, and slowly tell how two men went out into the dark after a machine-gun post.
And when the guests are gone and the fire is low, when the wind is moaning quietly, while the snow falls thick—thick—thick—they speak to each other of the officer who will never come back; of the one whose hair was brown, almost like red; whose blue eyes were stern, and yet so kind. ”

“ PETITE SIMUNDE
I
Three hundred miles north of Toronto, the Cobalt mining country surrenders its daily toll of silver to the world. In that region there is mostly rock. Where woods exist, the trees are gaunt and defiant, as though resentful of the approach of man; in winter they stand like white-shrouded ghosts, and the wind howls dismally through them until in the little settlements across Lake Timiskaming men draw closer to the fire, and women croon comfort to frightened children, yet half-believe, themselves, the Indian legend that another soul is on its way to the Great Unknown. ”

“ Across its turbulent expanse, youth was forfeiting its life for the blindness of the past. The hungry fire of war was being fed with human hearts.... But such is the nature of fire that what lives through it is imperishable.
A year ago Montague had gone with his battalion—without even a good-bye. She had never heard of him, but the ordeal of the flames had left him stripped of his artificiality as a tree stricken by a sudden frost is robbed in a moment of its foliage. ”

“ I disapprove of the crudeness of our Canadian civilization. I disapprove of England's lack of the artistic. I disapprove of German militarism, Scotch bagpipes, Swiss cheese, Chinese laundries, and American politics. Why should I fight for one when I disapprove of them all? As for my fellow-man, I shun the ordinary man of the streets because he does not think, read, or bathe often enough. I am not hostile to him; I merely ignore him. I am not a coward at all, my dear Vera; I am merely an artist among artisans. ”

“ Craighouse slowly walked over to his hut to superintend the packing of his own things. In his heart was a great exaltation and a mad love for the men who looked to him for leadership. In the seclusion of his hut he did what he had not done for years. He knelt for a moment by the side of his kit and prayed that he might quit himself like a man.
There are moments in war when men's very souls are touched by a nobility, by a compassion, by a reverence that rises above all creeds. ”

“ He was the type one sees so often—able to touch, but never grasp, the cup of success.
"Klotz," said Norman, "is superb. He has the touch of the artist about him. His tone is not always good, and sometimes he scratches; but when he is at his best he does big things. So many people can perform at music—just as so many write at words—but Klotz plays with color. His art has all the charm of a day in April. He will caress a phrase according to his mood, like a mother crooning to her child. ”

“ But they were young, and in the heart of youth there is always Spring; and the witchery of a moonlight night was calling to it. The minor strains trembled into silence, and the melody of hearts that are young took its place. She had deep-blue eyes that were never meant for tears, and he had a nature that responded to the beauty of life as an Æolian harp to the moods of the wind.
As men and maids have done for generations, they talked of themselves. (A dangerous topic when the moon is making fairy-rings upon the grass.) ”

“ If it seems in these stories that there is a recurrent note on the necessity of artistic expression for the Old Country, the reason for it is that we came from the Dominions to a land we all knew, because English literature had made England our Mother-Country in the real sense of the word. It is the hope of many of us that the artists of Britain—whether they be writers, painters, or composers—will yet realize that the Empire looks to them, as well as to the knights of the air, to bridge the seas, and by their art make us feel as great a kinship in peace as we did in war. ”

“ One is unaware of its presence until it throws off concealment and points its yellow fingers at the throat of its victims. What dramatist would have read tragedy into the absurd tableau presented by a slouchy French-Canadian soldier and a youthful staff-officer? Yet, as inexorable as Fate, it was approaching Jacque Des Rosiers, and only a few yards away, hiding its skeleton's grin behind the mundane countenance of Sergeant Smith, returning to the battalion after a day's work in the orderly room. ”

“ He rose in a determined manner and adjusted his helmet.
"Adieu, my Camel!" He took a last survey of the machine. "The kitchen is calling to my appetite; a storm is brewing in the heavens; a pair of dark eyes is urging all the romance within me; so—mill-stream or no mill-stream—mon oncle, I come."
He squared his shoulders and, with the rather absurd long stride and the odd raising of the knee, made for the cottage door, from underneath which a faint glow of light was timidly emerging. ”

“ It was late in March, 1918, that two American officers sat by the side of a road in France and watched a stream of refugees go by in an endless pageant of misery. Old men crawled along on bleeding, ill-shod feet; women were carrying grotesque bundles and leading absurd ponies that drew household goods on rickety carts; and there were girls, half-women, who bore infants in their arms, and who looked neither to right nor left, but followed on in mute fatigue and tearless agony.
Craighouse, who wore the badges of a captain, swore softly to himself. ”

“ He was an officer who had deserted his pretty little wife for another woman—or so rumor had it; and her mother had died, a flower stricken by a frost. The daughter had been taken by a relative, the owner of a lonely mill, and for six years had lived in solitude, her horizon of life limited to the adjacent village, her knowledge of women gained from the memory of a sad, yearning face, paler than the pillow on which it rested, and an occasional visit to the curé's sister. Of men she knew only her uncle and the few villagers that had not gone to fight for La Belle France. ”

“ Scott going to his death in the Antarctic snow was a great artist. The sailor standing to one side when the last boat is filled, and those six Tommies at Grieswald in Germany, holding their ground against a row of bayonets and taking a sentence of two years' imprisonment rather than aid the Hun in making munitions—are they not artists? Where we fail as a race is in our authors, composers, painters, who divorce themselves from the real spirit of England and wonder that the products of their brains quicken no pulse and stir no imagination. ”

“ Yes—in all Sloane Square, on that damp and foggy Christmas Eve in the year 1913, I doubt if a more morose, self-satisfied, cynical human being plunged into the mists than I. I was unhappy, and reveled in my very unhappiness. If it had been in my power, I would have sent a cloud of gloom into every home and over every hearth in London. There was something splendid, something classical, in my melancholy; it was like Hamlet's, but greater than Hamlet's, for he knew the reason of his mood, while mine was born of an intangible superiority to my day! ”

“ She came out on the lawn at night with him, and, by the music of her voice and the charm of her beauty, inflicted an hour's exquisite pain. I am like a man," he said, with an abrupt descent from the impersonal, "who knows that on the morrow he will be stricken with blindness, and is looking for the last time on a sunset." Whereupon Captain Craighouse sighed like the classic furnace, and Lady Dorothy Oaklands smiled again, though her eyes were glistening with a mysterious dew. ”

“ Dennis Montague of Toronto emerged from his bath, glowing and talkative. A luxurious deep-blue dressing-gown was wrapped about his form, its color accentuating the gray-blue of his eyes. His valet stood beside his bed, on which there reposed a set of garments suitable for a gentleman bent on spending an evening out.
"Ah, Sylvester! That's right. We poor devils must look as well as the abominable fashions will permit. Did you ever wonder why the men of to-day are so commonplace? It is the clothes they wear." ”

“ He lit a cigarette. "Pest," he said, "most men are participants in life; a few, like myself, are onlookers. It was my choice when I was a mere youngster—wisely or not, I do not know—but the pose has become reality now. I am a jester at the court of the world, a wordy fellow with a touch of melancholy in his humor, watching and commenting on the real things of life. Before there was a war I blew bubbles, and now I am fit for nothing else. Have a cigarette?" ”

“ He remained a detached personality, treading lightly where sorrow was, singing his song of the sunlight wherever ears had become dulled with discouragement. A fantastic, gentle, twinkling-eyed prince in a kingdom of butterflies and violets. Try as I would, I could not refrain from contrasting my life of literary vivisection with his primrose youth that seemed eternal, springing from a genuine joy in living, a youth that was as perfect as a melody of Chopin's. ”

“ Campbell, manager of the Curran Like Mine—they were hardly prepared for the sudden transition from his usual costume of riding-breeches, brown shirt, and lumberman's boots, to the trappings of a British officer. He was a young man of big stature, with broad, restless shoulders that seemed to chafe under the bondage of a tunic, and he had a long, loose-limbed stride oddly at variance with the usual conception of military bearing. His eyes were light blue, his hair an unruly brown that flirted with red—and his name was Campbell. Such men do not wait for the second call when there is war. ”

“ The heinous crime of passing an officer without acknowledgment was laid to the charge of the battle-worn and love-lorn villain from Quebec.
"What have you got to say for yourself?"
Des Rosiers said it. The officer shook his head.
"It's not good enough," he said. "You French-Canadians seem to think there's one law for yourselves and another for everybody else. You throw all your comrades down by deliberately insulting an officer—a staff-officer, who reports it to the G.O.C., and there you are. We're known as a bad battalion just because of a few slackers like you. ”

“ Languidly Montague rose from his bed and lit a cigarette.
"Our civilization," he said quietly, "need not pride itself on raising those men. Men have always been brave since the beginning of time. The terrible failure of our age is that it has produced men like me—a coward."
Mr. Sylvester scratched his head. "Lord bless me, sir!" he ventured, "you're not a coward. Why, look at the jump you took at last year's horse show."
Montague turned on him with a vehemence that the valet had never before seen in his master. "I tell you I am a coward," he said fiercely. ”

“ If he would laugh at the old families of England, let him come to the old homes where every son went without a murmur, and where, too often, the last one fell beside his brothers, because England had called for men.
"If he would make the mothers of England a study for satire, first he should mock the woman at the foot of the Cross, for her love and their love, her grief and their grief, are one."
Like gnomes, the people on Broadway hurried on in an endless, diverging torrent of humanity. ”

“ Some three thousand miles away, a Hohenzollern Emperor had said that the British Empire would crumble into disintegration at the first sound of war. And through the forests of the north and over weary trails men were staggering on, mile after mile, fearful of one thing only—that they might be too late to answer the call which had come, from across the Atlantic, speeding over forests, cities, prairies, lakes, and mountains until echo answered from the shores of the Pacific Coast. ”

“ The landlord's eyes grew wide with horror; his shoulders contracted until they touched his ears.
"Look here, my friend," said Campbell, with a tinge of impatience, "Jacque Noir or Jacque Rouge or Jacque Blanc is not going to keep me out here."
"But, monsieur, once she keel a man."
"My dear fellow——"
"One winter, a man has insult Des Rosiers, and—voilà! Jacque Noir burn her house—keel her family—murdair her"——
With a laugh, the newly created officer thrust the little man aside and entered the sacred precincts of "Les Voyageurs." ”

“ At a time when her grandsons from the four corners of the world are paying, in most cases, their first visit to the Old Country, England offers them the spectacle of a once classic stage given over to inanity and vulgarity. Of course, there are two or three producers who still maintain a commendable standard of art, but in the majority of first-class London theaters one finds a coarseness of innuendo, an utter lack of refinement, and an almost total elimination of humor. ”

“ That night, in bed, the sensitive, delicate features of Basil Norman remained in my memory. I had surprised his secret which he would admit to no one; not to the girl he loved; not to himself. It was the same spirit that had made him defy the whole of Westminster. We had called him Puck and the Blower of Bubbles, and he himself had said he was lighter than air.... But Basil Norman's life had been one endless battle with an indomitable soul that refused to yield to the body. ”