Robert W. Chambers

“ Gray laughed too, disagreeably, stretching his facial muscles, but no sound issued.
"We're all going crazy together up here; that's my idea," he said. "I don't know which I can stand most comfortably, your voices or your silence. Both make me sick."
"Some day a salamander will nip you; then you'll go loco," observed Gary, balancing another tennis ball in his right hand. "Give me a shot at you?" he added. "I feel as though I could throw it clean through you. You look soft as a pudding to me."
Far, clear, from infinite depths, the elf-like hail of the cuckoo came floating up to the window. ”

“ And now she must take him unaided, or kill him there in the starlight under the looming bells.
"Maryette!" he called. She did not stir.
"Maryette!" he whispered. "Where are you, little sweetheart? Forgive me, I could not wait any longer. I adore you——"
All at once he discovered her standing motionless in the shadow of the great bell Bayard—sprang toward her, eager, ardent, triumphant.
"Maryette," he whispered, "I love you! I shall teach you what a lover is——"
Suddenly he caught a glimpse of her face; the terrible expression in her eyes checked him. ”

“ In a moment, beneath the bell tower, the ground was swarming with Huns; every inch of the earth became infested with them; fields, hedges, alleys crawled alive with Germans. They overran every road, every street, every inch of open country; their wagons choked the main thoroughfare, they were already establishing themselves in the redoubt below, in the trench, running in and out of dugouts and all over scarp, counter-scarp, parades and parapet, ant-like in energy, busy with machine gun, trench mortar, installing telephones, searchlights, periscopes, machine guns. ”

“ There's Gary, Captain in the Athabasca Battalion, a Yankee if the truth were known; there's Flint, a cockney lieutenant in a Calgary battery; there's young Gray, a lieutenant and a Prince Edward Islander; and here's me, a major in the Yukon Battalion—four of us on the top of a cursed French mountain—ten months of each other, of solitude, silence—and the whole world rocking with battles—and not a sound up here—not a whisper! I tell you we're four sick men! We've got a grip on ourselves yet, but it's slipping. We're still fairly civil to each other, but the strain is killing. ”

“ Then, tier on tier, the bells of the carillon, fixed to their great beams, appeared above them—a shadowy, bewildering wilderness of bells, rising, rank above rank, until they vanished in the darkness overhead. Beside them, almost touching them, loomed the great bell Clovis, a gigantic mass bulking enormously in that shadowy place.
A sonorous wind flowed through the open tower, eddying among the bells—a strong, keen night wind blowing from the north.
The airman walked to the south parapet and looked down. ”

“ Small wonder, perhaps, that the peasant holds it in horror—this sleek, furry, powerfully winged creature marked with skull and bones, which whirrs through the night and comes thudding against the window, and shrieks horridly when touched by a human hand.
"So that is what turns into the Death's Head moth," said the girl in a low voice as though to herself. "I never knew it. I thought those things were legless cock-chafers when I dug them out of potato hills. Karl, why do you keep them?"
"Ah, mademoiselle! To study them. To breed from them the moth. The Death's Head is magnificent." ”

“ There was nobody at the pool; Maryette saw that as she came out of the hazel copse through the meadow. And very soon she was on her knees at the clear pool's edge, bare of arm and throat and bosom, her blue wool skirts trussed up, and elbow deep in snowy suds.
Overhead the sky was a quivering, royal blue; the earth shimmered in its bath of sunshine; the west wind blowing carried away eastward the reverberations of the distant cannonade, so that not even the vibration of the concussions disturbed Sainte Lesse. ”

“ But now all things American, including accent and odd, perverted humour, had become very dear to her. The clink-clank of the muleteer's big spurs always set her heart beating; the sight of an arriving convoy from the Channel port thrilled her, and to her the trample of mules, the shouts of foreign negroes, the drawling, broken French spoken by the white muleteers made heavenly real to her the dream which love had so suddenly invaded, and into which, as suddenly, strode Death, clutching at Love. ”

“ The mistress of the bells struck the keyboard with armoured hands—beautiful, slender, avenging hands; the bells above her crashed out into the battle-song of Flanders, filling sky and earth with its splendid defiance of the Hun.
The airman, bomb in hand, stood at the head of the stone stairs; the ancient tower rocked with the fiercely magnificent anthem of revolt—the war cry of a devastated land—the land that died to save the world—the martyr, Belgium, still prone in the deathly trance awaiting her certain resurrection. ”

“ She was silent.
"The males seek the females," he said in his pedantic, monotonous voice. "And so ardent are the lovers that although there be no female moth within five, eight, perhaps ten miles, yet will her lover surely search through the night for her and find her."
Maryette shuddered again in spite of herself. The thought of this creature marked with the emblems of death and possessed of ardour, too, was distasteful.
"Amour macabre—what an unpleasant thought, Karl. I do not care for your Death's Head and for the history of their amours." ”

“ The girl, kneeling there in the clover, flashed a smile at him over her shoulder. The quick colour reddened his face and powerful neck. The girl had been right; her smile had been an answer that he was not going to ignore.
"What a pretty spot for a lavoir," he said, stepping to the edge of the pool; "and what a pretty girl to adorn it!"
Maryette tossed her head:
"Be pleased to pass your way, monsieur. Do you not perceive that I am busy?"
"It is not impossible to exchange a polite word or two when people are busy, is it, mademoiselle?" ”

“ Sainte Lesse as yet knew nothing personally of the American mule or of Burley. Sainte Lesse heard both before it beheld either—Burley's loud, careless, swaggering voice above the hee-haw of his trampling herds:
"All I ask for is human food, Smith—not luxuries—just food!—and that of the commonest kind."
And now an immense volume of noise and [pg 161] dust enveloped the main street of Sainte Lesse, stilling the quiet noon gossip of the town, silencing the birds, awing the town dogs so that their impending barking died to amazed gurgles drowned in the din of the mules. ”

“ The room swarmed; they were crawling all over the tumbler, the table, the bed. The room was filled with the soft, velvety roar of whirring wings beating on wall and ceiling and against the tumbler where Madam Death sat imprisoned, quivering her wings, her eyes two molten rubies, and the ghastly skull staring from her back.
How Maryette ever brought herself to do it; how she did it at last, she had no very clear idea. The touch of the slippery, mousy bodies was fearsomely repugnant to her; the very sight of the great, skull-bearing things began [pg 288] to sicken her physically. ”

“ And that was how Kid Glenn and Sticky Smith, American muleteers on duty at Saint Lesse, came to lunch on freshly caught tench at the Inn of the White Doe.
After luncheon, agreeably satiated, they rose from the table in the little dining room and strolled out to the garden in the rear of the inn, their Mexican spurs clanking. Maryette heard them; they tipped their caps to her; she acknowledged their salute gravely and continued to cultivate her garden with a hoe, the blond, consumptive Belgian trundling a rickety cultivator at her heels. ”

“ After a few moments' patient waiting, his gaze rested again on Madam Death, squatting there with wings sloped, and the skull and bones staring at him from her head and distended abdomen.
After all there was an odd resemblance between himself and Madam Death. He had been born to fulfill one function, it appeared. So had she. And now, in his case as in hers, death was immediately to follow. This was sentiment, not science—the blind lobe of the German brain balancing grotesquely the reasoning lobe. ”

“ Below him in the starlight, like an indistinct map spread out, lay the Nivelle redoubt and the trench with its gabions, its sand bags, its timbers, its dugouts.
Very far away to the southeast they could see the glare of rockets and exploding shells, but the sound of the bombardment did not [pg 242] reach them. North, a single searchlight played and switched across the clouds; west, all was dark.
"They'll arrive just before dawn," said the airman, placing his sack of bombs on the pavement under the parapet. "Come, little bell-mistress, take me to see your keyboard." ”

“ The youth lay asleep now. As she extinguished the candle and stole from the room, all the pupæ of the Death's Head began to squeak in the darkness.
The student-gardener could do no more work for the present. He lay propped up in bed, pasty, scarlet lipped, and he seemed bald and lidless, so colourless were hair and eye-lashes.
"Can I do anything for you, Karl?" asked Maryette, coming in for a moment as usual in the intervals of her many duties. ”

“ The Herr Professor snatched up his net—struck heavily toward the winged thing—a silent, terrible, sweeping blow with net and rifle clutched together. Brown went down with a crash.
At the shocking sound of the impact Stent wheeled from the abyss, then staggered back under the powerful shove from Von Glahn's nervous arm. Swaying, fighting frantically for foothold, there on the chasm's awful edge, he balanced for an instant; fought for equilibrium. Von Glahn, rigid, watched him. ”

“ She turned to the stone stairs again, descended a dozen steps, opened a door on a narrow landing.
And there, in the starlight, he saw the keyboard and the bewildering maze of wires running up and branching like a huge web toward the tiers of bells above.
He looked at the keyboard curiously. The little mistress of the bells displayed the two wooden gloves with which she encased her hands when she played the carillon.
"It would be impossible for one to play unless one's hands are armoured," she explained. ”

“ An old peasant woman was cooking, while a young one washed dishes.
"Are the American gentlemen still at table, Julie?" she inquired.
"Mademoiselle Maryette, they are devouring everything in the house!" exclaimed old Julie, flinging both hands toward heaven. "Tenez, mamzelle, I have heard of eating in ancient days, I have read of Gargantua, I have been told of banquets, of feasting, of appetites! But there is one American in there! ”

“ So, belt and loaded holster sagging, and large silver spurs clicking and clinking at every step, John Burley sauntered back along the almost deserted street of Sainte Lesse, thinking sometimes of his mules, sometimes of the French language, and every now and then of a dark-eyed, dark-haired girl whose delicately flushed and pensive gaze he had encountered as he had ridden into Sainte Lesse under the old belfry.
"Stick Smith's a fool," he thought to himself impatiently. "Tray chick doesn't mean 'some chicken.' It means a pretty girl, in French." ”

“ And old Julie slid open the wooden shutter on the crack and Maryette bent forward and surveyed the dining room outside.
They were laughing very loud in there, these three Americans—three powerful, sun-scorched young men, very much at their ease around the table, draining the red Bordeaux by goblets, plying knife and fork with joyous and undiminished vigour.
The tall one with the crisp hair and clear, grayish eyes—he of the three chickens—was already achieving the third—a crisply browned bird, fresh from the spit, fragrant and smoking hot. ”

“ Gary got Gray by the elbow: "Reggie, it's this way. We flip up for cuckoo. Whoever gets stuck takes a shot apiece from our automatics in the legs—eh, what?"
"It's perfectly agreeable to me," assented Gray, in the mincing, elaborate voice characteristic of him when drunk.
Flint wagged his head. "It's a sportin' game. I'm in," he said.
Gary looked at Carfax. "A shot in the dark at a man's legs. And if he gets his—it will be Blighty in exchange for hell." ”

“ He spoke abruptly, dryly:
"Anybody can weep for a friend. But few avenge their dead."
She looked up, bewildered.
They drove under the old Sainte Lesse gate as he spoke. The sunlight lay pink across the walls and tipped the turret of the watch tower with fire.
The town seemed very still; nothing was to be seen on the long main street except here and there a Spahi horseman en vidette, and the clock-tower pigeons circling in their evening flight.
The girl, Maryette, looked dumbly into the fading daylight when the cart stopped before her door. ”

“ Ah, my Djack, it belongs more rightly to you, who would not let me go alone to Nivelle that dreadful day. Why do they not give you the cross? They must be very stupid in Paris.
All day my happy thoughts have been with you, my Djack. It all seems a blessed dream that we love each other. ”

“ The blackbird came quite near to watch her; the bullfinch, attracted by her childish voice as she sang the song she was making, whistled bold response, silent only when the echoing slap of the paddle startled him where he sat on the trembling tip of an aspen.
Blue dragon flies drifted on glimmering wings; she put them into her song; the meadow was gay with butterflies' painted wings; she sang about them, too. Cloud and azure sky, tree tops and clover, the tiny rivulet dancing through deep grasses, the wind furrowing the fields, all these she put into her chansonnette de laveuse. ”

“ The staff officer thought it very doubtful. He stood in the snow switching his wet puttees and looking out across a world of tumbled mountains. Over on his right lay Germany; on his left, France; Switzerland towered in ice behind him against an arctic blue sky.
It grew warm on the Falcon Peak, almost hot in the sun. Snow was melting on black heaps of rocks; a black salamander, swollen, horrible, stirred from its stiff lethargy and crawled away blindly across the snow.
"Our case is this," continued Carfax; "somebody's made a mistake. We've been forgotten. ”