L. P. Gratacap

“ I learned that from a colonel who had been at the crossing of the Meuse, where, so he said, "the Germans spent their thousands to gain their end, squadrons upon squadrons, slaughtered like pigeons from a trap, coming on, stuck together like an army of termites, and beaten into death by the merciless fire from our guns. But they got over," he said, "and that was what they wanted to do. Why, living men were thrown into the gaps to be rained down with shot and shell, like so much earth and stone into a pit that must be crossed." ”

“ I repeated, aroused now into a sudden repulsion of these renewed surrenders to the old-time madness.
"Yes, Alfred, Prayers. I do not hear them now in Paris, but at St. Choiseul the night long they have assailed my ears with piteous prayers. I have endured it without confiding it to anyone, the dreadful matter, but I have so wanted to tell you."
"But Gabrielle, why do you surrender to this delusion? It will wear you to death. Ah sister, be very careful. We are alone in this great world now, and you are everything to me. These nightmares will turn your reason, unhinge your strength. ”

“ But the invisible PRESENCE that held this world of men stiffened into immobility. What was it? Where was it? We moved through it, Gabrielle and I, but felt nothing; nothing more than the faintly heated air of spring. Would it shine illimitably again at night? Well, we should see. And the Enemy—How was it with them? The thought made us hasten.
We had walked until noon, and had reached the trenches. There stretched the pitch-forked angular line, the shelters, the dug-outs, the wire embarbments, the peering snouts of cannon. Men had crawled out and lay recumbent in the full light unharmed. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Everything, as I despairingly gazed upon it was so eloquent of beauty and peace and—realization! And what lay in the house before me? I almost fell to my knees in the crushed agony of suspense, but Ah! No! it was not suspense. I knew; that psychic power which dwelt in my Gabrielle, which brought to her the myriad voices of the dead in their awful supplications—Eh bien, not that now—some of that power was with me too, and every step I went forward to that pitiless revelation of defeat, accompanied the stern record in the thought that hope was delusion. ”

“ That chimney corner was delightful, and the wisps of light from the soft coal lit up the mantel and played grotesquely over the row of Peruvian Inca figures and face-jars that filled it—I brought them from America—so that they seemed to squint and grin, or just look glum and melancholy. Gabrielle said they came to life in the half dark, and she made them talk to me—for she interpreted them in her odd way—the old Inca warriors and the medicine men and the priests, and the little beggar with a stump for a leg, and the squinting big-toothed demon in red and black. ”

“ They feel the pain of those who have lost them—whom they have lost too. A voice came to my ears, clear and calm: [Pg 191] 'Help us! Help us! Our sadness is yours. We wished to live. Death for us is wrong—too soon—too soon—too soon;' and then it died away, like a fading bell-note, far, far away. And Alfred the voice sounded to me like Sebastien's. O! Alfred there are others too—and some—" she shuddered in my arms, and clasped me convulsively, as if the pain of the recollection were too great to bear.
"Gabrielle," I answered, now aroused and almost terrified, "stay here. Are you quite well? ”

“ 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. ”

“ Her voice became almost inaudible. I struggled with an overwhelming agony of sorrow, because—never had the thought been altogether absent—Gabrielle too might leave me, and then Ah God,—then I would be just a drifting relic, on the ocean of chance, unnoticed, unloved—ALONE. It seemed too hard, too cruel. Yet even amid the distracting misery of this anticipation, a curious malignancy of suspicion—No, not that—a pained wonder surprised me. Did Gabrielle love Sebastien Quintado? Did she seek him in Heaven? And Dora? What about her? ”

“ It is fifteen years today since Blanchette died. I have grown old since then with an age not of years, though by reason of a sister's love, I have been consoled, strengthened, even, and now, in the presence of the world's disaster, succumb to some unutterable conviction that the ends of God have little need of the prayers of men.
After my delirium in San Antonio had passed, I resumed my normal self-possession, though a nervous weakness—since developing into a muscular paralysis—made me at moments inert or half trembling with a deceitful dread that set my heart beating curiously. ”

“ Again on the twenty-sixth the allies reluctantly yield—yielding everywhere with fierce retributive blows on their part, and consolidating as they retreat, every energy of resistance behind them, while they prepare new lines of defense, and gather together every available scrap of support, material and human. On the twenty-seventh the news is received that the battle line reaches from Maubeuge to the mountains of the Vosges, and that the Germans number one million men. Against this mountainous avalanche of soldiery and guns the grimmest determination alone can hold its ground. ”

“ Gabrielle and myself became again closely knit together in sympathy. She had nursed me in my sickness, and she read to me in my convalescence, and then she told me of the harsh and repulsive life of the hospital; how its penury of grace afflicted her, and the physical destitution of the hideously sick had overcome her with an irrepressible repulsion, and the half savage nakedness of exposures and surgery had thrown her into momentary spasms of despairing melancholy. ”

“ Where are the huge military establishments—where the drill, drill, drill, of uniformed and gun-carrying men, where the war bureaus and the generals, where that "power of the sword" that the Teuton blindly worshipped, where the Gospel of Power? Blotted out, and in its place the sanctification of Peace. The vision I had on that battlefield, when Gabrielle and I walked in the midst of the unshriven dead has been realized. The flags of the nations wave still, but with them waves the flag of their common Brotherhood. ”

“ I sprang to my feet. The lamp was flickering as if about to go out, but its light fell on my watch, which recorded the hour as 2:30 past midnight. Someone stood at my side. I felt the presence, as we instinctively do—a cognition like a telepathy. It was Gabrielle again. Her face was pale and her eyes gazed, as if in a spell, upon the space above my head; her hands gropingly rested now on my arm. I waited for her to speak, and almost immediately the flickering flame of the lamp expired. We were in darkness. ”

“ Choiseul, and descend, visible, luminous, vocal, from the glowing skies, and from us, Gabrielle, will proceed a terrible Paralysis—Ay more—an undeniable dread and weakness.
"'It will, like a contagion, spread throughout the armies from rank to rank, from private to general, and back again; it will freeze the blood, it will dwindle the heart, it will thrill the brain. Before it bravery becomes a shrinking, ambition a regret, the thought of conflict a remorse. It will do more. ”

“ I yielded to the impression that a peculiar nervous excitation, a thrilled expectancy, as though the next instant some miracle of strangeness would befall me, was due to this influence of an invisible flood of spirits, or souls, or what you will, that had invaded the room. It was Gabrielle's voice that spoke in my ears, it was her arms again that encircled my neck.
"Alfred, again! They are all about us; and Alfred," the voice sank to a whisper, "the spirit of Sebastien Quintado is here too." ”

“ She would grow stronger; the life of the great city would be full of wonders, and captivate her mind with its marvels. [Pg 33] Then there would be fresh friendships, the gayety of companionships, innumerable alleviations of l'ennui.
Gabrielle shook her dear head, and the sweet yearning eyes watched me with a sad disillusionment that I had deserted her, and, I, in the madness of my joy and in the eagerness of my plans, recurred to the artifice of commonplaces, and the flat sophistries of comfort. ”

“ And then, benumbed with wonder, I saw the shades part, and slowly descending upon me, [Pg 267] the figure of Gabrielle, like some floating dream of shape, drew near. It stopped above my head, and the face bent forward, and the lips—those sweet lips of truth and innocence—opened, and to me came the REVELATION.
"Alfred! Alfred! There can be no separation between loving hearts. I shall always be with you. But it is appointed that there are times and seasons. I am called, you remain. Life and Death have no meaning to the immortal soul. ”

“ What is more bitter than the remembrance of careless acts, thoughtless things we have done which caused grief to those we loved, and yet, while loving, neglected. It all came wrong, and still—assurement le bon Dieu, Il le faisait—it ended the war!
That night—I well recall it, I think, each minute of it—Blanchette ravished me with her loveliness, her joyous salutation, her infectious gayety, and lost in my own pleasure, the foolish vanities of doting youth, poor Gabrielle in her loneliness, was altogether forgotten. ”

“ In such a grandiose style should the last act of HIS interposition be culminated, and the races of the earth should learn from the cavernous receptacles of spirit, from the shrined multitudes of the DEAD, enwrapped in the boundless fields of sky and star and cloud, issuing perchance from the wide-swung gates of Paradise, or Heaven, or of Hell itself—of the overwhelming pressure of the OTHER WORLD, learn thus too of the maintenance of sympathy between the affairs this side, and the affairs that side, of the narrow gap of DEATH! ”

“ After lifting a number of the limp bodies of men, in whose faces shone at times the benediction of gratitude, and at others rested just the pallid smile of recognition, or else were filmed with the bleaching shades of death, I went to the top of the ridge beyond which our forward flung companies had routed the Germans. The fearful clash, body against body, was resumed in a ploughed field but the horrors were augmented—though too it had a splendor in it—by the added carnage of the plunging cavalry that now thickened the fight into a crucial contest. ”

“ Between the double cordon of the armies, moving along the broad and narrow corridor that separated their lines, we were excluded from the world. Around us lay the sleepers, shuddering in unutterable nightmares, and in our diversified roadway there was nothing but the ruins of villages, the shattered walls, the holed ground, the catacombs of [Pg 263] trenches, deflowered woods, the sinuous storm-marked track of war's desolation. We, Gabrielle and I, alone lived in this camerated solitude. ”

“ Everywhere they were found strayed and masterless, and seemingly confused, foraging as best they might upon the scanty herbage, in the ruined fields, and probably escaping beyond the army confines into the surrounding country. I found two most serviceable mares, and, as Gabrielle was a good equestrienne, our journey was more rapid, while it too grew more and more fabulous, gathering to itself like a figment of fiction, the unreal, the incredible and in it rested the denouement of a great mystery. ”

“ I took one last look through the broad gap in the parapet. The clouds of glory were still descending, sometimes in rolling folds, and the billowy masses or reservoirs of light that had reached the earth were visibly hastening onward along the track of that distant endless marshalled host, like dust-storms of countless sparks. I thought too, different from the [Pg 238] colossal moan of the multitude, I caught the sharp note of distant cries. Was that the beginning of that "terrible Paralysis" Quintado in his vision to Gabrielle had threatened? I thought so. ”

“ I had been driven to the verge of exhaustion with work in the Red-Cross and with service in Paris. The dispersion southward of the war-cloud roused my spirits, and then I was requested to follow the troops to Meaux—that was in September just after Quintado died—and I was more than glad. There was much work to do there, and I knew the leaders thought that the Germans were trapped. There had been some evidence of shortage of ammunition with them, and their loss had been crippling—so it seemed, though like some scourge of insects extinction was impossible. ”

“ Is there not peace? Did not Gabrielle leave me? Is it not well known that the very day after the visions disappeared, the stir in the camps began? Is it not a common attested fact that the droves of soldiers broke out from all command—indeed that there was no command, the officers with the men being seized with one irresistible impulse—and streamed in disordered legions, over the country, seeking, this way and that, their homes, and hurting no one; all reduced to a childlike weariness of limb and spirit? ”

“ In years I am yet young, but I am old in spirit. The sharp experiences I have passed [Pg 274] through; the transcendent Miracle I have been a part of, have delivered me from the trivial considerations of life. But too I have my part in life, and the darling prettiness of St. Choiseul, the noble friendship of Père Grandin, and the holy consolations of Père Antoine, the honest service of Julie, are not unconsidered. And—there is Dora. ”

“ I felt embraced by the manifold tendernesses of form and picture and color and furnishment. Around the table of the dining room that evening in the cheerful splendor of the old oil lamp, with the shadows, grotesquely friendly, moving over the walls, we sat together, while Hortense and Julie outdid themselves in overloading the table with les pièces precieuses de la cuisine. I hardly dared to taste these delicacies. It seemed a profanation. Those suffering patient men at the front, so often almost starving! It was an impiety against patriotism to feast so lavishly. ”