Chapter XIV: The White Island--A Story (3)

“I saw it only once before the war. I tried to buy it for the museum, but those dirty peasants of Tinarloo would not give it up. Ugh--a village of fat farmers smelling of dungheaps and cattle pens and garlic! Their chapel was bastard Gothic--no fit place for such an altar piece. I urged the curé to sell, but he would not. He was ignorant as his peasants, but he was crafty, too. He said the picture was the glory of Tinarloo, the chief joy of the peasants. I offered him twice as much as I first intended, thinking he meant to bargain with me; three times, four times as much. He refused two thousand francs, monsieur!

“Afterward came the war. I am a brave man, monsieur. I am not afraid of the Germans. When they advanced near to Tinarloo I thought of the ‘Virgin of the Stair.’ ‘It must be saved,’ I said to myself. ‘Those peasants, that curé will be glad to give it up now.’ I hurried there in a cart. Eastward, near Namur, the great guns roared. There stood sentries along the roads. Peasants were running away before the Germans with farmcarts piled with goods. They blocked the road, and I had even to beat them out of my way with my whip.

“So I reached Tinarloo. Every one was terrified. I went to the chapel. The curé was there, and the burgomaster, a toothless old man with a dirty beard. ‘Give me the picture, quick,’ I exclaimed. ‘I will save it from the Germans. Quick!’ ‘No, monsieur,’ said the curé. ‘The picture will stay here. It is the glory of Tinarloo; it is the chief joy of our peasants.’

“There came a scream and a roar from the street, monsieur, like the sound of a great storm, and I knew the Germans were shelling the village. The old burgomaster bellowed something. I do not understand Flemish, but I knew he said something of the church and the picture; maybe it was that the Germans always destroy churches and pictures. He hobbled out ‘The picture, the picture, give me the picture!’ I roared at the curé. ‘Give it to me or I will take it. Fool! the Germans will take it if I do not. Give it to me. Quick!’ ‘It is the glory of Tinarloo; the chief joy of our peasants. I will not give it.’ ‘Then I will take it,’ I shouted, for I was stronger than he, monsieur. He clutched me, but I threw him off and grasped the picture by the corner. There came another roar, terrible, and a part of the church tower fell through the roof. The curé screamed and dropped to his knees, praying. I worked to get the picture from the frame.

“Suddenly, monsieur, I was grasped and thrown down. Those brutes of peasants had come into the church; twelve, fifteen of them, following the burgomaster with the dirty beard. They held me fast with their stinking hands. One of them tried to strangle me, and my neck bears the marks to this day. _Bang_--a shell fell in the churchyard and bits of shrapnel ripped the windows. The church was choked with dust and roared with noise. The curé stood up before the picture. He yelled to the animals who held me down. They loosed me, and I stood upright, gasping. One of them had a great club in his hand, another a dung-fork, another a flail. They gathered close to the curé, close to the picture, and talked; the fools talked while shells flew, knowing the Germans always aim at churches; yet they talked.

“Then the curé came down to me where I was standing. ‘They say to give you the picture, monsieur,’ he said. ‘But you must swear by this cross to bring it back when all is safe. It is the glory of Tinarloo; it is the chief joy----’

“Monsieur, there was a scream like devils in torment and a shock like earthquake. I was knocked from my feet. Bricks, timbers fell. Dust covered me, and I lost consciousness. Long afterward I found myself lying in the grass of the churchyard, among the black crosses, and the curé kneeling over me; only the curé! ‘Go,’ he said. His mouth was bleeding from a deep cut and his gown was slashed to ribbon. ‘Go, go,’ he said. I heard him as if in a dream. ‘Go! There is no longer any picture. Go! before the Germans come.’

“So I came away, monsieur.... They are strange beasts, these Belgian peasants.”

IX

A FLEMISH FANCY

“The instant Father Guido died his naked soul leaped from his body and ran up the air as on a stair.” Odile stopped her story. “Hoo-oo,” she sighed reproachfully, crossing her gaunt old hands over her middle and staring at my sleepy head. “Mynheer is not listening!”

Odile always came into my bedroom before I was up in the morning. It was her function to waken me, and then to gossip with me while she opened the green Venetian blinds, tightly closed the windows against the noxious air of morning, laid out linen, and prepared my bath in an adjoining room. Her thin, motherly face was the first thing I saw when I wakened; always smiling, no matter if things had gone well or ill, always ready to tell me a story if that were needed to put me in a good humour. “All well, Odile?” “_Ja_, mynheer, except that the Germans half killed a policeman in front of the house last night. He screamed horribly, mynheer.” Such was a typical morning’s news.

She petted me outrageously, and, although she never summoned courage to assert it to my face, among the servants below-stairs she gave herself airs and boldly called me her _bébé_. I confided to her my love affairs in return for which small flatteries she embroidered my handkerchiefs, criticised my unstarched American shirts, doped me faithfully whenever I fell ill, and protested eloquently against the perils of too frequent bathing. Daily baths might be healthy in America; they were certainly unhealthy in Belgium, said Odile.

The tale of what happened to Father Guido comes back to me in fragments. Perhaps Odile did not tell it to me at all. Perhaps she told it when I was too sleepy to remember. In any event, I cannot now tell how much is hers and how much my own. The words, alas! are mine, in any case.

“Nay, Odile, I am listening. Tell me about Father Guido.”

“He was a holy priest, a canon in his monastery, but he doubted God’s promise of the bliss of heaven!”

“Dreadful!”

“Yes, wasn’t it, mynheer? So he died, and his soul ran up the air as on a stair. And now listen! The soul of Father Guido stopped for breath and wheezed hard. It was not used to running. It stood stark naked in the sunlight just three meters above the bell-tower of the monastery where he had lived and served God twenty-seven years. The garden looked very sheltered and inviting. You must know that Father Guido loved gardening, mynheer. The soul could see his favourite mulberry tree, and acolytes in gray gowns walking beneath, meditating. One of the acolytes lifted a hand and stole a berry. ‘Rogue!’ the soul thought. It was about to walk down into the garden and remonstrate with the thief when suddenly it leaped into the air as if a wasp had stung it. The heavy monastery bell just below it clanged like an explosion. _Bang!_ went the bell; then again, _bang!_ and after a pause, again, _bang!_ ‘Some one is dead,’ thought the soul. It licked its lips thoughtfully. They tasted damp and oily. And suddenly it remembered--that was the oil of extreme unction. ‘I am dead,’ said the soul of Father Guido with resignation, ‘and on my way to bliss--I hope.’

“The soul began to climb up long vistas of air, but abruptly it stopped. ‘My God, I’m stark naked!’ it thought; ‘stark naked, and the eye of all the world is on me.’ Not once since Father Guido donned his habit had he been unclothed in public. But the waste of air about the poor soul offered no shelter, and there was no returning the way it had come. Its chest heaved with sorrow and its eyes peered everywhere, above, below, beside it; but nothing--not even a summer cloud--came near to give it shelter. ‘I’m thin and withered and I’ve a belly like a tun,’ the soul said bitterly, and it slapped its thin shanks as it ran, and breathed hard.

“A hawk circled in space, and the soul turned and climbed in the direction of the swinging bird. It got within two meters of the hawk and hailed him in Flemish--for all the birds understand Flemish, mynheer--but the hawk sailed by unheeding, its eye on the distant earth. Father Guido’s soul was disappointed. ‘But if I can’t be heard or seen, it doesn’t much matter about my clothes,’ it said, and climbed on slowly.

“The high air grew very cold, but the exertions of the soul kept it in a healthy perspiration. It gathered strength and agility as it climbed; it seemed to leap from hilltop to hilltop of the atmosphere, and below it earth fell away like a ball dropped into a well. A shadow came crawling from the east, devouring the earth as Father Guido’s soul watched and climbed; the shadow floated like pitch over all the world, silently, swiftly eating everything. It reached the centre of the world. It devoured the monastery and went on, gathering all things into its mouth. Long afterward the sun dropped out of sight, and darkness leaped upon the soul high in air and cloaked it in freezing night.

“The soul was dreadfully alone now, alone with millions of winking stars, but it climbed on and on and on.

“Mynheer, no man has ever told how lonely the dead are; how they cry out in the darkness and stretch out their arms; where yesterday there was warmth and light and friendly hands and soft laughter there is only cold, emptiness, nothing. Oh, how lonely the dead are! How lonely the dead are!

“Men do not know how many months or years or centuries the soul climbed up through the swarming stars, but at last it came to the foot of battlements shooting up into space--battlements that rose like flames rooted in clouds, and burning so brightly that the strained eyes of the soul pinched with the bliss of gazing. And still the soul of Father Guido climbed and climbed and climbed.

“‘It’s too beautiful for purgatory; this must be heaven,’ said the soul to itself, ‘but there’s no door.’ And indeed, mynheer, there seemed to be no door, for the poor soul climbed up and up those topless cliffs, but found no entrance at all. ‘There’s no door! There’s no door! There’s no door!’ the soul of Father Guido repeated like a prayer as it climbed beside the battlements.

“‘God and Mary help us!’ it sobbed at last in despair; and no sooner had it said these words than it saw a little gate opening into the jewelled heights, and it flew up hopefully.

“Outside the doorway it paused. There was a door, half closed, and the soul was afraid. It felt conscious again of its nakedness, although the paunch was gone from constant exercise and hard muscles showed under its star-burned skin. ‘I’m a thin old codger, though; not presentable to St. Peter at all. I’ll wait behind the door-post until somebody appears.’ So it pressed its ribs close against the door-jamb and waited. An hour went by, or a minute, or an age; still nobody appeared. Father Guido’s soul grew anxious. ‘I’ll look inside--just one peek,’ it whispered. ‘One peek won’t matter.’ So it gently pried open the pearly door and looked in.

“An armchair, mynheer, carved of jewels, like the battlements, stood beside the door, but the chair was empty. The soul looked farther. ‘Hum!’ it said thoughtfully; ‘there’s no _pater hospitalis_ here. I’m disappointed. And St. Peter’s left no substitute.’

“Father Guido, you must understand, mynheer,” said Odile, by way of parenthesis, “had been _pater hospitalis_ in his monastery. He took care of the guests, he selected the wines, he was jovial in welcoming those who came and tearful in bidding adieu to those who went; so he was distressed that no one should meet him at the gate of heaven.”

I nodded sympathetically, and she went on: “A little weed grew in a crack in the golden pavement where the holy saint’s feet had worn the flagstone smoothest, and a green scurf of moss pushed out here and there in the golden gutters. ‘That’s strange; that’s strange indeed,’ said the soul of Father Guido; but it had little time to wonder at small things like these, for the whole of heaven towered before its eyes. Streets and mansions and gardens blazed with lights of a thousand colours; mansions of silver and amethyst and jacinth rose amid bowers of roses; towers and roofs and walls and lattices shone like jewels in changeless sunlight, and avenues of strange trees stretching farther than eye could see glowed green as emerald along streets of gold.

“But there was no sound anywhere, mynheer. Father Guido’s soul held its breath with holy awe and fear. In spite of the warmth of the eternal sunlight sluicing its bare limbs, cold perspiration came out on its neck and face, and goose-flesh pricked its legs. The soul hid itself in a rose hedge and waited breathlessly. Nothing appeared. Still there was no sound. Presently the soul crept out again and pattered cautiously up the golden avenue, picking little rose thorns from its sides and back as it marched.

“Glorious beyond the prophecies of saints and evangels was heaven, rising terrace on terrace, height upon height, glowing with the light of gems, bourgeoning with gardens, and flashing with pools of clear blue water; so that the soul of Father Guido climbed and climbed, speechless and marvelling. And still there was no sound but those of its bare feet slapping the golden pave.

“So the solitary soul came at last to the summit of all Created Things; to the Mountain that is like a Diamond, with the sunlight flashing naked swords above it; to the Palace which is carved like a human heart from a Jewel for which there is No Name; and the soul knew that this was the Home of the King of Kings, of the Verigod of Verigods, and it knelt on the pavement in terrified awe and worshipped.

“But, mynheer, the naked toes of the poor soul of Father Guido nestled into the heart of a little thistle growing in the grass beside the golden stair leading up to the Palace of God, and the prick roused it from its devotions, so that it sprang to its feet abruptly, and bent over and rubbed the hurt digits. ‘God save us!’ it ejaculated piously. ‘Salvation or damnation, that hurts! But I must go on!’ And it pattered up the palace steps.

“Mynheer, there were no guards at the steps. There were no watchmen at the door. There were no angels inside the door. The corridors were empty. But at the far end of the central corridor the soul saw a curtain hanging from ceiling to floor, red as blood, tremendous, veiling mysteries.

“The soul of Father Guido went forward to see what the curtain concealed. It reached the curtain. It stretched out its hand. It touched the curtain. Then it caught the hem and pulled.”

Odile stopped and drew a long breath, watching me narrowly.

“Please go on,” I begged.

“Mynheer, there was nothing inside!”

“What?”

“There was nothing inside!”

“Ugh! Served him right, then,” I grunted.

“But no, listen. You have forgotten the power of God. The soul of Father Guido dropped the curtain and fell flat on the ground. It could not believe what it had seen, and it fell to screaming, the most horrible screams that heaven ever heard. It screamed again and again, like a child in the dark, like a little lost child.

“And then suddenly, mynheer, there was a roar of wings, and loud singing, and a brightness new, like lightning, and the air was thick with angels playing and dancing and whistling. Father Guido had believed, you see, or else his soul would not have been disappointed and would not have screamed. He doubted as you doubt, mynheer!

“And now, when St. Peter is tired, the soul of Father Guido sits in the chair beside the little gate to welcome newcomers, as he used to do in the monastery, and he is kind to those who come, mynheer, for he, too, has known what it is to doubt.”

X

THE SWALLOWS OF DIEST

My automobile broke down on the outskirts of Diest, and I was obliged to spend the night in the _Gouden Kat_--a typical Flemish inn. A dozen little round tables stood outside on the flagstones bordering the Grand’ Place, the supper room within was divided about equally among food, drink, and billiards, and madame sat in state behind a showcase of cigarettes. There were no Germans lodged in the _Gouden Kat_ so I was given the best room, and as I came down the tiny, twisted stair after a good night’s sleep in a high bed with carved posts at either corner, a tester and lacy hangings, under a black crucifix and the faded eyes of a colour print of King Albert, a small gray feather spun slowly down and fell at my feet in the doorway. There was a flutter of wings, and a swallow skimmed over my head, almost touching me, and out through the open door.

A few gloomy citizens, an occasional housewife, small boys and girls in neat cheap clothes and noisy wooden shoes stalked across the open square before the cathedral. A squad of German soldiers tramped by on their way to the Kommandantur in the Stadthuis. Soon mass was over, and a flood of grave, black-clad figures filled the square and melted away into the by-streets. A worn black flag fluttered from a pole on the very top of the church.

“Madame, what is the black flag on your cathedral?” I asked, sipping black coffee.

“It was once white, that flag, monsieur.”

“But, madame! it is coal black.”

“Monsieur, it is the flag which we of Diest hoisted when the Germans came. Aerschot, Louvain, Schaffen--they were destroyed by the Germans. Diest,” she shrugged her shoulders, “Diest is as you see it.”

Across the Grand’ Place, behind the gates of a porte cochère belonging to a rival inn, I found my chauffeur, Alexis, busy with the broken motor.

“Monsieur, this is the cylinder which does not march,” he called loudly, his tricky eyes eager for praise and his mouth smiling blandly behind his curved moustaches. “More oil!” he ordered imperiously from the bent old innkeeper who stood, cap in hand, watching; and while the man shuffled off with a wash-bowl, Alexis loudly continued to explain to me the difficulty. “I am mechanician as well as chauffeur, monsieur,” he declaimed, although I was well aware of the fact. “I will arrange everything. In an hour all is arranged.”

A side glance gave me the clue to Alexis’s authoritative tone. The young wife of the innkeeper, a heavy flaxen-haired Flemish woman, watched smiling from the open door. Alexis’s gestures and mouthings were for her.

In the rafters over the motor-car I heard soft cheeping, and a swallow slid from a mud cup fixed to one of the timbers and stole out into the morning sunshine. There were other earthen cups, lined no doubt with feathers, in the shadow above us: three or four cups brimming with swallow babies. One after another the gray-blue mothers came and went, circling fearlessly over us, engaged in the sensible business of filling the world with swallows.

“In an hour, monsieur, all is arranged,” Alexis repeated, trying to get rid of me. So I determined to stay.

“Madame, a cup of the white beer of Louvain, if you please,” I ordered.

She answered my French with a question in Flemish. “_Wat segt U, mynheer?_”

“_Wittebeer van Leuven, als ’t je belieft, madame._”

“_Een potteke Lovens voor mynheer, Marieke, allez!_” chuckled the bent old innkeeper, coming up with a bowl of oil and shoving her with his shoulder.

“_Goed, goed_,” she answered, and disappeared, still smiling.

Alexis sulked, but worked; the innkeeper watched admiringly; I sat in a tiny chair propped against the inn door and talked with madame, while the swallows circled and cheeped overhead. The motor backfired when it was tested, and the swallows screamed in fright and fled through a cloud of stifling smoke which rose into their nests. But in a moment they were back again at work, filling the world with swallows.

“Like the cannon, is it not?” said madame in sluggish, country-bred Flemish, speaking of the motor’s tricks. “But the swallows return.” She laid her hand on her breast with a curious, passionate gesture.

“He is your husband?” I pointed to the old innkeeper, bent almost double over the motor as he watched Alexis.

“Yes, mynheer.”

“You have children?”

“I shall have one in three months--about All Saints’ Day, mynheer.” She spoke with the simplicity of a peasant, to whom life and death and birth and growth are the simplest things in a complex world.

“Are you glad, madame?”

“Glad? No,” she said after a pause, smiling still.

“Are you sorry?”

“No, mynheer.”

“He is an old man, your husband,” I remarked after a long silence.

“Yes, he is old, mynheer.”

“You love him?”

“Love him? No.”

“Do you hate him, then?”

“No, mynheer. Why should I hate him?”

“Alexis, there, is a jolly fellow. What do you think of him?”

“I do not think of him, mynheer.”

I changed the subject. She was only a peasant, yet she knew how to rebuff my levity. “Why did you marry, madame?” I asked, and my tone was serious, befitting the question.

“Why does any one marry, mynheer? I was of the age--sixteen.”

“But why did you choose him?” I gestured again toward the old man, still bent over Alexis as he tugged at the cylinder core.

“I did not choose, mynheer. The swallows,” she pointed to the earthen nests, “do they choose? Other people, do they choose?”

“No,” I admitted, astonished at her. “It is Nature. They do not choose.” I felt a sudden respect for the dully smiling enigma before me. Love? choice? romance? the adventure of living?--what were they after all? The stress of towns has bred these fantastic ideas in men’s brains. This country woman knew she was no different from birds and beasts, and she knew that it did not really matter to anybody--not even to herself. In a few slow words, still smiling, she sketched the dull drama of her life: peasant-born, unbeautiful, bought from her family by the old innkeeper as soon as the Church permitted her to marry, twice a mother, but both her children dead, pregnant again: that was the whole story. She did not know that her recital was sad, or that it could inspire pity. She did not even know that it was interesting. She seemed to tell it instinctively, as a bird cries in the thicket or as a tired dog whines at the door.

“Alexis, is the motor ready?” I called.

“Almost, monsieur,” he answered; then turning to the innkeeper he bawled, “Get me a pan and matches!” He rested his hands on his hips and stared insolently at the woman and me. “Monsieur has seen the flag on the cathedral?” he asked. He continued in Flemish, “The brave men of Diest ran up a white flag while the Germans were still at Liége! Madame says they did well to surrender.”

“I said that to surrender is nothing, myne heeren,” she interrupted slowly, looking at me but addressing us both. “Every thing surrenders.”

“Ha, madame! Foolishness! Talk like a Belgian patriot if you please. We never surrender, we Belgians: we fight, fight, fight!” Alexis swung his arm and waited confidently for my applause.

“Madame,” I turned to her. “You think these things do not matter?”

“They do not matter, mynheer,” she said, smiling.

“The invasion of Belgium?--that does not matter?”

“It does not matter, mynheer.”

“Murder? arson? rape? pillage? millions dead and maimed? millions enslaved? Madame!” I found myself addressing her as if she were a logician instead of a peasant.

“It is nothing, nothing; I know it is nothing. I feel it here.” Again she laid her hand on her breast with the singular passionate gesture I had marked before. “It does not change anything; it does not change the soil of the earth, it does not change the man, it does not change the woman, it does not change the child. Then it is nothing. We of Belgium are like rain falling on a field: they [the Germans] are like rain falling. We do not choose: they do not choose. It is all--nothing.”

Alexis leaped forward, his tricky eyes blazing, his moustaches stiff with anger. These patriotic outbursts were no new thing to me, yet I was astonished at him. He trembled with honest emotion. “Madame! You are no Belgian, you are no Christian, you are no woman!” he shouted. “You have no sense of honour, you have no patriotism, you have no decency. Bah! you would have us handed over to the Boches!” He stopped his tirade abruptly and addressed me in French, “Monsieur, the car is ready in a moment, if you please. This woman--this woman----” He raised his arm as if he would strike her. All this time she had stood watching and listening, still smiling heavily and making no move. “This woman is a peasant, she is not human, she is a beast.... Here!” he called to the innkeeper, who had reappeared, “give me the matches. Hold the basin there.” He jumped back to his place and pressed the self-starter. The motor hummed with curious coughs and gasps from the jury-rigged cylinder. “It will march until we reach home,” called Alexis, his voice still keyed high with anger. “Monsieur is ready?”

I paid the modest reckoning and climbed into the tonneau. The woman stared past me at Alexis; even my “good day” was unheard or at any rate unnoticed. The motor roared and the frightened swallows flew. The innkeeper flung open the double gates, removing his cap and bowing low, and we rolled slowly into the square.

There was a patter of slippers on the cobblestones behind us, a gasp and a choking cry, and madame was hanging to the running-board beside Alexis, pouring forth a torrent of passionate Flemish. The German sentries before the Stadthuis across the square stared anxiously, passersby stopped as if thunder-struck, I looked back and saw the old innkeeper standing open-mouthed and motionless in the doorway.

“Mon Dieu, monsieur, she wants to go with me!” muttered Alexis, mechanically stopping the car. The woman flung her arms toward me with a piteous gesture. Her heavy, ugly face streamed tears. All her reserve, her self-control were gone. She had chosen at last, and she had chosen this!

“Wants what, you fool?” I exclaimed, appalled. “Drive on, Alexis. Make her go back. You know the Germans would arrest us at the first sentry-post. Damn you, anyway!” I roared, my anger mounting to outraged brutality to think that a chauffeur’s cheap amour might land us both in a German jail. “What have you done to get us into this mess?”

He thrust his fist into the pleading face. “Go back, go back,” he grunted, apparently without a trace of feeling for her.

“You must go back, madame,” I exclaimed. “You must go back!”

She ignored me and again burst into a storm of entreaty, all aimed at Alexis. “No, no, no, no,” he shouted in answer to her pleas. “Go back to your husband! Go, you--animal!”

At that word she dropped from the car. “Go on, Alexis, quick!” I exclaimed.

Her hand flew to her breast with the old gesture. As the automobile leaped forward, she walked a few steps toward the inn. I turned and watched her: Alexis stared straight in front of him. She wheeled and looked after us, her hand still at her breast, her body swaying from side to side. Then she looked at the inn, and again at the fleeing car. Finally, as we dashed away from the square, I saw her stumbling toward the wretched old man, who still stood in the blazing sunlight which streamed through the open doorway, while the swallows of Diest circled and cried over his hoary head.

XI

PENSIONERS

Wilson belonged emphatically to the genus _Homo sapiens_; species, _Texicana_; habitat, southwestern parts of the United States and Antwerp, Belgium. He was tall and lithe and handsome, and also sentimental. He was the only member of the American Commission for Relief in Belgium who flatly refused to fly the American flag from his automobile; he was the only member who publicly declared that he said his prayers every night, but, as he confided to me once in a moment of great emotion, he had never in his life prayed for the President of the United States. The reason for these startling facts was that Wilson was an unreconstructed rebel and wore pinned in his shirt, just over his heart, a little butternut badge which his grandfather had worn in ’63--a symbol of the dead Confederacy and the Lost Cause.

We used to sing him a gay song which ran:

An unreconstructed rebel, that is what I am.
For this fair land of freedom I do not give a damn!
I’m glad we fought against them: I’m sorry that they won,
And I do not ask your pardon for anything I’ve done.

I fit with Stonewall Jackson: of that there is no doubt;
Got wounded in three places a-storming Fort Lookout.
I coched the rheumatism campaigning in the snow,
But I killed a sight o’ Yankees, and I wisht it had been mo’.

I hates the Yankee nation and everything they do.
I hates the Declaration of Independence, too.
I hates the Yankee eagle with all his scream and fuss,
But a lying, thieving Yankee, I hates him wuss and wuss!

We called him “Johnny Reb,” “Tex,” or “Stonewall Jackson,” just as it happened to strike us.

Wilson was disturbed about something. “The Socialists are right,” he said, thoughtfully, drawing his six feet two from the chair beside my office desk. “There’s only one way to prevent wars--kill the spirit of patriotism. Look at that old fool out there!” he continued, bitterly, pointing toward a gray-bearded Landsturm soldier in shapeless flat service cap, faded gray-green uniform and high hob-nailed boots, who, with gun on shoulder, strode along the pavement of the Graanmarkt on his way to the _Kommandantur_: “That old fellow is probably a toy-maker in Nuremberg or a barber in Munich, and here he is wandering round Belgium ready to die for Kaiser and Vaterland!”

“Mankind’s a failure,” I acknowledged cheerfully. “Go on, Wilson.” I knew these moods.

“The trouble is this,” he drawled. “There are five old Belgians in the outer office who have come to ask about their pension money. It’s the first time I’ve had to do with Yankee pensioners. They were here yesterday,” he went on, impressively, “and for a solid hour I listened to one of ’em making patriotic speeches and telling me how he fought and bled and died for my country--_my country!_--a damned Yankee pensioner.”

I laughed gleefully, and Wilson turned on his heel. “Sit down, you Johnny Reb,” I gasped. “What’s it all about? Are they Belgian citizens who fought in our Civil War?”

“‘Civil War’!” he quoted. “There you go again! Haven’t I explained to you that you mustn’t call it the ‘Civil War?’ It’s the ‘War between the States.’”

A timid, eminently respectful knock interrupted us, and Peeters, the clerk, thrust his head through the half-open door, bowing to each of us in turn. “The men have come,” he announced.

“What men, Peeters?”

“The men who saw Mr. Wilson yesterday.” He coughed apologetically. “The men for the pensions. They want to see you, sir.”

I looked at Wilson, who was still meditating flight and cursing under his breath. “Send them right in, Peeters. Mr. Wilson and I are delighted to see them.”

“Delighted, are we?” my victim snarled; then his voice changed to honeyed sweetness--the sweetness underlying all Southern courtesy and hospitality, which is the sweetest in the world. “_Aah, goeden dag, myneheeren, quel plaisir de vous revoir! Mynheer van der Aa, Mynheer de Vos, Mynheer Dekkers, Mynheer van Oolen, Mynheer Anderson._” He introduced them with a flourish--a little file of old men, dressed in dingy Sunday best, with heavy leather shoes in place of the customary slippers or wooden _blokken_, each holding his cap in his hand, each bearded and bewhiskered, each with thick weather-worn skin and little eyes folded deep in wrinkled cheeks. These were the pensioners.

The first of them was scarcely five feet high. Little black eyes snapped out from beneath his bushy brows, and he wore a sweeping white moustache and an imperial. The second was tall and had once been blond; now he was bald as a prophet, and his great white beard swung from his heavy head like a broad pendulum ticking off the minutes. The third was blind; his graceful, narrow head tilted forward, a flickering smile played about his mouth, and I noticed that when his attention was strongly attracted his eyes occasionally turned up with a strange abortive movement, as if he might take the darkness by surprise and change it into light. The fourth man stood straight and soldierly, his knees tight together, his great feet splayed out from his ankles, and his arms hanging perpendicularly. He had an ox-like head, and his wide shoulders were heavy and stooped with age. The fifth man was an aged negro, and feeble-minded.

Peeters handed me a little paper which I read aloud: “Jan van der Aa, Pieter de Vos, Georges Dekkers, Willem van Oolen, David Anderson. Is that right?”

“_Ja, ja, mynheer_”--“_Parfaitement, monsieur_”--“Yes, sair,” the voices quavered.

“Don’t you all speak English?” I demanded. “You’re entitled to American pension money, yet you don’t speak our language? _Vous ne parlez pas_----”

The little man with the imperial burst into volcanic speech. “Sir,” he ejaculated, “they have forgotten the Eengleesh, but I--I speak it pairfectly.”

Wilson sighed. “Yes, hang it, he does!” he whispered to me. “He’s the damnedest, convincingest, Fourth-of-July orator you ever listened to. Now he’s off! You can’t stop him!”

“You are Jan van der Aa?” I interrupted, after the first sentence.

“Jan van der Aa, sir,” he acknowledged, bowing, and continued impressively: “Sirs, you see beforre you five men who fought in the Grrand Arrmy of the Rrepublic, in the grrandest arrmy of the grreatest rrepublic of the earth.” He rolled the rr’s like thunder down the valleys of his speech. “It was not for nothing that we fought. Liberrty and Union are not little things. They are eterrnal. They are the same in everry country and in everry time. We five were at Gettysburrg and Cold Harrbourr, de Vos was at Antietam, Dekkars was wounded at Atlanta, I was at Chickamauga underr Thomas, Anderson was at Peterrsburrg”--the strange, foreign accent turned the familiar battle names into mighty voices, voices to conjure dead men from the grave and dead deeds from the old books where they lie buried; the man before us was a born orator, he was winsome, sweet, powerful, pathetic, by turns--“Forrt Fisherr, Culpeperr Courrt-House, Vicksburrg, Shiloh, Champion’s Hill, Cairro, Chattanooga.” The tremendous words rolled forth; the file of old men stirred; they awoke and threw up their heads as he trumpeted forth these names, and I seemed to see them young again and soldiers of the Republic.

But Van der Aa stopped abruptly. He turned half apologetically to the others, speaking a most vulgar and harsh Flemish: “’_k Heb ’t verget_--I’d forgotten what we came for--our moneys,” he said. “Sirs”--he addressed Wilson and me once more--“our pension moneys are overdue. We have received nothing since Antwerp was captured. The American Consul-General writes, but we receive nothing. Will you tell Washington of us? The Government have forgotten; we are far away, and so they have forgotten us.”

I turned inquiringly to Wilson.

“Oh, tell them you’ll get their money for them. Tell them anything,” he whispered, harshly, fumbling his handkerchief. “Stop that devil of a Van der Aa! You don’t understand; that man can talk you to tears!”

“Mr. Wilson knows all about the case,” I said. “He will cable to Washington the first time he goes to Rotterdam. We shall do everything in the world to get your money.”

Van der Aa thanked me with a gesture and a low bow, and repeated my words in Flemish to the others. They thanked us slowly. “And now, sirs----” he began again.

“Stop him, for God’s sake!” groaned Wilson.

“Mynheer van der Aa----”

“----the only things men gladly die for, freedom and union. Freedom and union, one and inseparable, now and forever.”

The spell came over us like a ghost--the ghost of something high and splendid--and the voice of America spoke in conquered Belgium. Not through American lips, but through the lips of an alien; and not the voice of America to-day, divided, disunited, enslaved in a thousand ways to fear and base interests; not the America, I suppose, of the sixties, blatantly provincial, cursed with over-confidence, torn with civil war; but the voice of the ideal America--that America of the spirit which Lincoln must have seen as Moses saw the Holy Land from Mount Nebo, the America which may be, which must be; the mighty nation like a city set upon a hill, with the glory of heaven shining upon her, and young men and women singing in her streets.

I mopped my eyes; Wilson coughed and blew his nose. The five old men stood imperturbable, and Van der Aa spoke on and on. He was pitiless and glorious. As he talked I saw a flag borne to the tops of tall mountains, flung over precipices, whipped through morasses and dismal swamps, flung up from the sea and set firm in rocky earth; and that flag was the American flag--the flag of Wilson’s country and my country. These men had followed that flag--these five aliens. I saw freedom and union like simple things, things to be held in the hand as well as in the heart; necessary, elemental, homely things. And I saw the world-wide war which is waged in every land against freedom and union--the fight of caste against caste, of class against class, of masters with slaves, of the state against its citizens, of the thousand and one Frankenstein monsters of commerce and industry and politics and religion, fighting against the human beings who have created them. Everywhere I gazed there was war.

“Liberty and union, one and inseparable, now and forever,” concluded Van der Aa, his right arm outstretched to emphasize his last period, the eyes of the blind man straining up to catch the vanished sun.

* * * * *

Next morning Wilson’s motor car arrived an hour late at the office, and I noticed that from a staff wired to the wind-shield there floated a little American flag.

“Yes,” he said, defiantly, “I say kill patriotism and you kill war. I’m taking the first step. I used to be for the South against the world, now I’m for America against the world, and maybe some day I’ll be for all the world against the world.

“I’ll see you late to-night,” he added, very seriously. “I’ve got to go to Rotterdam to cable Washington about those old pensioners.”

XII

DOÑA QUIXOTE

Her parents had always regarded her as a sort of stepchild. There was Elaine, her elder sister, docile, petite, with fair looks and a proper dot, married at eighteen and mother of two babies; but Virginie was twenty and unwed. Although I did not know her until 1914, I can fancy the picture in the ancient moated castle of Drie Toren two years before when Virginie faced the old Baron, her father, and declared her independence of parental restraints of all sorts. The old Baron, bearded like a Numidian lion, had a special vocabulary for matters which concerned his unmarried daughter. “_Incroyable! pénible! triste! terrible! effrayante! bête!_”--I heard them dozens of times a day--and the shy, wilted floweret of a Baroness, her mother, sat with hands placidly folded, waiting for the final catastrophe which was sure to overwhelm her “_pauvre Virginie_.”

La Baronne Virginie was delighted to tell me of the famous interview with her father. She told it with shrieks and giggles, between puffs from one of my strongest cigarettes, her cold, gray-blue eyes--inherited from some merciless Viking ancestor who had once harried the coasts of Flanders--dancing with delight, and her bright golden hair waving as she tossed her head to give point to the jest.

“_‘Mais, ma chérie,’ il m’a dit._

“‘_Mais, mon père,’ j’ai dit_.... The devil! I forget always and speak French. That morning I was very angry, so I slid down the banisters and shrieked with the top of my breath, and there was my father at the foot of the stair, like this!” She made an adorable caricature of the leonine astonishment of her father at sight of the apparition of his daughter, her foot caught in her skirt, kicking vigorously to free herself and spreading tatters of lace petticoat over the Chinese carpet. “‘Come here,’ he roared, as if I were a servant. ‘Come here, cher _Papatje, s’il te plaît_. I have something to say,’ I answer very respectfully, as a Belgian girl must always speak: ‘I will not marry. I will not worship some man like Jules. (Jules is my brother-in-law. He has red hair and a wart on his nose. Ugh!) I will not have babies. I will not be as Elaine. No, no, no, no, no, I will not. I am going to England to be a suf-fer-a-gette. I will burn churches and bite people. I hate men!’”

“But do you hate us, really?” I interrupted.

“Of course!” The light of her eyes was like the light on Swiss glaciers. “I hate all men--you especially.”

I was hurt, and showed it.

“Ha! I do,” she repeated, following up her advantage. “And I hate my father--enough, not much, just a little. ‘_Oufff!_’ he says to me, ‘what for a person is this my daughter! Have I not give you all in the world, miserable one?’ ‘No,’ I answer. ‘Freedom? No.’ ‘Freedom!’ he says. ‘Yes, freedom,’ I answer again. ‘It is the century of the woman. We must have freedom.’ (I got that from an American book, but I did not tell him. He was so troubled already.)

“So next day I went to England, and in England I burned one church and bit two people.”

* * * * *

It was I who named her Doña Quixote. For all her Viking eyes she was a perfect Spanish type, such a type as one occasionally finds nowadays in villages of the Dutch Province of Zeeland or in the Belgian Provinces of East Flanders and Antwerp, almost the sole reminders of the days when the Dons lorded it in the Low Countries. She was not brunette, but a Spanish blonde, with a magnificent complexion burnished on the cheeks, straight, aristocratic nose, and jeweled mouth. The oval of her face was positively Mediterranean, and seeing her glorious hair I knew what the Elizabethan poets meant by singing of “golden wires.” She was adorable, perfect, and cold as frost.

“But, mademoiselle,” I began.

“Madame!” she interrupted. “Always call me madame.”

“Pardon, but why?”

“Never ask me the why of anything. It is because I choose. Isn’t that enough?”

“No,” I burst out angrily. “I’m a reasonable being, I’ll have you to know, and I must be treated reasonably. What the dickens----?”

She laughed suddenly and delightedly. “Ice, ice, I thought you were of ice. I thought all Americans were of ice, Monsieur. Good! You thaw. I shall tell you, because you know how to get angry like a Belgian.”

“Stop teasing me,” I muttered, ashamed, sorry, and indignant.

“At the convent school in Bruges where I went to school the nuns call us ‘madame’. It is a school for the petty nobility, you understand, so we are called ‘madame’ just as the little Princess Marie-Jose is called ‘Madame’ and not ‘Mademoiselle la Princesse.’ I like it.”

“Well, I don’t.”

“That is all one to me,” she responded calmly. “You are to call me ‘madame’.”

“I won’t. Not until you are married, and maybe I won’t even then. Maybe I’ll call you by your first name.”

She examined curiously my flushed face, stubborn, unhappy, disgusted with my own boorishness, but seeing no way out. Her cold gaze took in all that she wanted; noted that I was a fly in her spider-net; and she dimpled and thawed graciously. “Please!” she begged.

“Mademoiselle--er--er----” I stuttered, “do you know Spanish?”

“Not a word. But I have read ‘Don Quixote,’ of course.”

“Doña--that is Spanish for a noble lady. I shall call you Doña--Doña Quixote.”

“Wha-at?”

For the first and, I was about to say, the last time, I caught her off her guard, astonished, wounded, a bit angry. But the one word was all I wanted. It showed me I could bully her. That word had been warm and human, utterly unlike the icy flood which normally came from her lips. “Doña Quixote!” I repeated blandly.

“You shall do nothing of the sort. Don Quixote was a madman.”

“Yes, and you are a madwoman. You won’t listen to the people who love you.”

“You are not to say that word to me again.”

“What word?”

“That word! You know--_that_ word.”

“Doña?”

“The other one: the one that begins with _l_ and has four letters!”

XIII

IN THE STREET OF THE SPY

The Commissaire of the Arrondissement of Metseys beat on the glass front of the limousine and arrested the mad career of the Government automobile in which we were riding. The soldier-chauffeur (a Belgian in the near-British uniform which the Belgian army now wears, with a small round button in his cap marked with the Belgian colours in concentric circles--black, white, red) turned and looked back into the car inquiringly. “We stop here,” the Commissaire announced in pantomime.

Just five minutes before we had rushed directly under a battery of heavy French guns blazing away like furnaces. I did not know they were French guns--although the accent was marked!--until the Commissaire told me; but then he knew every battery, every cantonment, every airdrome, and every hospital in that little bit of Belgium behind the Yser lines which is still free from the invaders. As we passed the battery, a wave of sulphur had engulfed us, the glass of the limousine rattled dangerously, and that mad chauffeur, putting on all power, had rushed us down the winding Flemish road, scattering stray groups of mild-eyed Belgian infantrymen and cavalrymen and grazing the metallic flanks of lumbering British motor lorries, their canvas sides splashed with Flanders mud, on their way down to the lines. He had rushed us over a little canal where two or three soldiers were fishing sleepily, in spite of the noise of the bombardment. He had dashed us alongside a field of over-ripe wheat, through a long avenue of stunted willows, across an acre of barbed-wire entanglements, and into the town of Zandt, its gray walls gleaming in the splashing sunlight which had just followed the customary morning shower, its claret-red roofs burnished like the morocco binding of old books.

We stepped stiffly from the car on to the slippery cobblestones and stared about us.

“The Germans shell Zandt almost every day,” said the Commissaire coolly. “That French battery we just passed will probably wake them up. Put the car in the lee of that wall, Pierre,” he called to the chauffeur. “We shall be back in ten minutes.”

“This, gentlemen,” he said, as we walked down the principal street of Zandt, “is called the Street of the Spy, because, up to this moment, no German shells have fallen in it. The population of Zandt pretend that it is because the Germans have a spy living in this street. Droll, isn’t it?”

We laughed with him. It is true that no shells had fallen in the Street of the Spy, but they had missed it by inches, not yards or rods. If I have ever said that the Germans do not use heavy calibre shells on unfortified villages and towns, I apologize. They use their very heaviest shells on these little defenceless villages of west Flanders just behind the Yser lines; they throw almost daily shells which are as destructive as cyclones into three or four room dwelling-houses. A row of such houses falls like a sand castle when such a shell arrives.

“But the people want to stay here, of course,” explained the Commissaire. “Where can they go? The peasant and the man of the small town has no capital except his farm or his house or his _winkel_--his little shop. He has no bank account. He is primitive. He is simple. All he has in the world is here in Zandt. And so he stays. Yes, we give them gas-masks, for the Germans use asphyxiating gas very often here. But it is hardest on the children and the little babies.

“Those boys we are sending away to-morrow to a safe place in France.” He pointed to two youngsters, nine and seven years old, peering through the broken glass of a near-by window.

“Are you glad to go, _manneken_?” he asked the elder.

“Oh, yes, yes, mynheer.”

“But why?”

“Because one has fear of the bombardment, mynheer,” said the boy, shivering.

* * * * *

“This you must see,” said the Commissaire, ducking his head and leading us into a small passageway between two brick walls. “It is the most interesting person in Zandt. She is eighty-three years old. She lost her only grandson in the war. She has nothing to eat except from her little garden. There, see!”

We had emerged on the edge of a tiny plot of land, perhaps twenty-two feet square. A gray one-story cottage, covered with mossy thatch, bounded it on one side; low walls and an outhouse inclosed it on the others. The little plot was cultivated, densely, compactly, expertly--a mosaic of fruits and green vegetables. Two apricot trees trimmed in the French fashion were trained along the wall, and a low vine, with some sort of pendent fruit, hung from the outhouse.

But strangest of all there were three beds of ornamental flowers. I stared hard at them, and suddenly I saw that they were graves!

“Good-day, madame,” the Commissaire called, touching his hat. “See, these are American gentlemen come to look at your little garden.”

She came slowly from the cottage, a wisp of lace in her white hair, wearing the ceremonial black frock which a peasant woman puts on for such feast days as the Feast of the Assumption, a white apron, and leather shoes. “You are welcome, gentlemen, you are welcome,” she said, with the grace of a chatelaine.

“But aren’t those graves?” I asked, pointing to the beds of nasturtiums, geraniums, and marigolds which covered three long mounds at the end of the garden, taking up almost half of the room available for vegetables and fruits. “Madame, aren’t those graves?”

“Oh, yes, mynheer,” she said.

“They have not been here long, madame?” I was looking at the transplanted geraniums, well rooted in the mud, but not yet wholly at home, and the raw, muddy rim about the edges of the three mounds.

“Since April, mynheer. I tend them myself,” she added proudly.

I turned to the Commissaire. “None of those is her grandson’s grave?” I asked in a low voice.

“Oh, no,” he muttered. “Her grandson died in Germany. He was taken prisoner at Liége in August, 1914. Madame,” he said to her, “the gentleman asks if he may look at your graves.”

“Oh, yes, mynheeren.” She fluttered down before us, bent rheumatically at the first mound, and pulled at a weed which the rain had freshened.

“‘Pray for the soul of Franz Mueller,’” I read in breathless amazement. “A Boche?”

“A Boche, of course!” said the Commissaire.

“And the other two--they are Boches also? ‘Pray for the soul of Max Edelsheim’ and ‘Pray for the soul of Erich Schneider,’” I read aloud. The neat wooden crosses bore also the regimental numbers of the men and the date of their death.

“Boches, too. It happens that they were killed in this garden on a reconnaissance.”

“But why don’t you remove them? You can put them somewhere else, and then this poor old woman can use all her garden. I should think she could hardly raise enough to eat from all this little plot, let alone from half of it.”

We had spoken in French, and of course the old proprietress had not understood. The Commissaire now turned to her, speaking the rhythmic, metrical Flemish of west Flanders. “Madame, the mynheer says that we should take up these bodies and place them in the churchyard. Do you wish it done so?”