Atlantic Narratives: Modern Short Stories Part 27

'Empty!'

The expostulation was a mistake, but I really could not help it.

'I have never known such a br.i.m.m.i.n.g life,' I added, still more foolishly.

The minister's wife stared at me.

'Why, she has nothing at all,' she said.

'Precisely!' I commented, and went on my way.

A MOTH OF PEACE

BY KATHARINE FULLERTON GEROULD

Anne Marmont, of old the pupil of the nuns, had told her about Andecy: an ancient place, half-manor, half-farm, in the Marne valley, whence you could walk over a wind-swept plain to the battlefields of the Hundred Days.

'The nuns, being exiled, of course can't keep it up any longer, and no one wants to buy. I remember it as a place of heavenly peace--though in my day they used to make the oldest and crossest nun in the order superior at Andecy. However, Madame Francoise de Paule is dead now, and there aren't any nuns anyhow. Do take it, dear. If you want quiet'--Anne Marmont swept her arms out as if to embrace illimitable horizons.

'Nothing but a church-spire or a clump of trees to be seen from edge to edge of the plain. The unstable ocean is nothing to it. And if you want variety, you can walk over to Champaubert and look at the house where Napoleon stayed, the night before the battle. Riddled with bullet-holes it is. There used to be a foolish ancient there who remembered the Hundred Days. He's dead now, I suppose--but then, so is Madame Francoise de Paule, thank Heaven, and her cane, too. I hope they buried the cane.

Do take it, darling. It's dirt cheap, and my dear nuns would be so pleased. They'd probably send the money to the new Nicaragua convent.'

And Miss Stanley had gone to Andecy, had been conquered by the insuperable peace of the plain, and had set up her little household. No place that she had ever seen seemed so good to wait in. When Edmund Laye came back from the Argentine to marry her, she would submit to London; but already she had hopes of enticing him to Andecy for the honeymoon.

The chill of the slow spring warmed her northern blood; she liked the reluctance of the season's green, the roaring fire that met her in the _salon_, the sharp cold click of her boots on the brick-paved corridor.

She was well cared for: a Protestant and a foreigner, who was, none the less, a mysterious well-wisher of 'ces dames,' she found a shy allegiance springing up about her steps as she traversed the plain.

There was always a hot _galette_ for her at 'la vieille Andecy,' an obsequious curtsy at Congy chateau from the housekeeper, who showed with mumbling pride the bed where Henri Quatre had slept; and a welcoming smile from St. Eloi, that holy humorist, in the Champaubert chapel. She sat until twilight, often, on the sinister sh.o.r.e of l'Etang des Loups.

Even the legended 'Croix Jeanne,' leaning against its pine thicket, seemed glad of her awkward Protestant dip. It was a good place--and all for the price of a second-rate hotel splotched with Baedekers.

Loneliness, in the sense of removal from the social scene, did not afflict her. She who shrank almost morbidly from human encounters, had no fear of the peasants. Slim, shy, timorous, she felt safe here. Her terrors were all of people and what people could do to her. The plain ignored her self-distrust. Letters came from Edmund, regularly, if you granted the delay of driving to Sezanne to fetch them. The months rounded slowly, punctually, to winter and her marriage. So might a chatelaine have waited, powerless but trusting.

Then, in full summer-time, the lightning struck, choosing again the Montmirail plain, after a hundred years' respite. The first rumors were vague and vivid--all detail and no substance, like news in the Middle Ages. There was war, and she scarcely knew more. Jacques or etienne turned over night into a reservist, and departed; but had it not been for that, she would hardly have known. The two maid-servants whom she had brought with her clamored for Paris; she gave them money and had them driven to Sezanne. After the mobilization they must have got through, for she never heard again. It did not occur to her to strike out, herself, for the capital; for her common sense told her she was better off where she was until Paris had cleared the decks for action.

Besides, Paris frightened her. She hated being jostled in streets; she resented even a curious stare.

Old Marie and her husband, with their grandchild, came up from their cottage to the manor to sleep; and with the son and nephew gone, there was nothing for them to do but potter about rheumatically in her behalf.

For many days, the click of the rosary was never stilled among the corridors of Andecy.

And still the rumors grew, terror capping terror, until it seemed that even at Andecy blood might rain down at any moment from the arched heaven. At first Miss Stanley forced herself to drive the fat donkey into Sezanne for news--a half-day's trip with only more terror at the end. The feeble crowds beset the bulletins posted outside the _mairie_, and scattered, murmuring their own comments on the laconic messages.

Sometimes crones and half-grown children on the edge of the crowd got her to report to them, as she emerged from the denser group in front of the mairie wall. She did so as gently as she could, for they were all involved: fathers, husbands, sweethearts, brothers, sons, were facing the enemy at some point or other that only the War Office knew. If some creatures had had nothing to give, it was only because the Prussians had taken all they had, in '70.

There was no insane terror; the people were strangely calm; yet they and theirs had been, of all time, the peculiar food of the enemy, and there was pessimism afloat. The plain was as defenseless as they: its mild crops as fore-ordained to mutilation by feet and hoofs and wheels as they to splintering sh.e.l.ls.

Miss Stanley, who was so shy of unfamiliar action, felt Sezanne too much for her. She stopped going, after a week, and resigned herself to not knowing. She chafed under the censors.h.i.+p, though she knew that Edmund Laye would tell her that it was well done of the 'Powers that Were' to stanch the leakage of news as you would stanch blood from an artery. The General Staff was better off not drained of its vital facts. To be sure, Miss Stanley never read newspapers. Even less, did she subscribe to them. But she longed now for a neutral America, where the extras came hot and hot, where experts of every kind fought out the battles on the front page, and good journalese stimulated the lax imagination.

Her determination to go no more to Sezanne led her for exercise to other quarters of the plain. She would walk quickly, tensely, for an hour, her eyes fixed on a clump of trees or a church-spire far ahead of her at the end of the unswerving road, until the clump and the spire rose up to match her height and she came to the first whitewashed cottage.

Champaubert church was never empty, these days, of wors.h.i.+pers who gazed up at gaudy St. Eloi as if he could help. The crops that waved on the old Montmirail battlefield were thinly harvested by women and an impeding fry of children. The steep little streets of Congy were dirtier than ever, and the ducks and the infants plashed about more indiscriminately in the common mud-puddles. No more galettes at 'la vieille Andecy': the old woman was prostrated by the loss of her reservist grandson.

Finally she gave up the plain too, and withdrew into Andecy itself, waiting, always waiting, for word of Edmund Laye. There had been a touch of loyalty to him in her staying on without plan of escape. News of him would reach her here sooner than elsewhere. If she left, she would be lost in a maelstrom, and might lose some precious word. Until she heard from Edmund of his sailing, or of a change of plan, she would stay where he thought of her as being. When she heard, she would go.

Some atavistic sense in Miss Stanley caused her to look, all through early August, to the provisioning of the manor--some dim instinct to h.o.a.rd food, that might have sprung from the heart of a colonial ancestress behind a stockade of logs: premonition against death and savages. She sent old Marie to buy thriftily, making it clear that her fortress was not for herself alone, but for all who might be in need.

Together, she and Marie and the granddaughter piled provisions in the empty rooms and the dark cellars; and they lived frugally on milk and eggs and _soupe aux choux_.

Sometimes she wondered whether the danger was not a mere fixed idea of the foolish peasants who had all been touched in the wits by '70. True, the able-bodied men were gone, but the reports these people brought her made no sense. Their quality verged on folk-lore. Something gigantic was going on, somewhere, but it had nothing to do with Edmund Laye in the Argentine, or with her at Andecy. Paris in danger? Perhaps: but how to take it on their word? Belgium flowing with blood? Just what did it mean? An aeroplane over Sezanne at dawn? It must often have happened, _allez_! The air was never free, nowadays. The Germans in France? They had been seeing Germans behind every bush for forty years. So she talked with old Marie, scarcely sure whether she or old Marie were the fool.

Since the household no longer drove the fat donkey to Sezanne, none of them knew even what the War Office said--unless what old Seraphine from the next farm reported that her granddaughter had heard in Champaubert from a woman whose married daughter had been to Sezanne two days before, could be called a War Office report. And never, from the first, on the plain of Andecy, had anyone understood _why_. According to the plain, all things were to be believed of the German Emperor, who was usually drunk; but, on the other hand, who could trust an atheist government?

The soil of the Hundred Days had never recovered from Bonapartist tendencies, Miss Stanley had often noted; and even old Marie would sometimes mix up '15 and '70. The White Paper--which Miss Stanley had never heard of--would have been wasted on Champaubert and Montmirail.

Wonder stirred at last even in old Marie's fatalistic mind at the lack of panic in this shy young foreigner--who could not chaffer, who could not bully, who could not endure even the mimic urbanity of Sezanne.

Strange that she should be willing to stay quietly pacing up and down the cobbled courtyard of Andecy for sole exercise! Past mid-August, Marie put a vague question.

'When I hear from him, I shall go, Marie,' Miss Stanley answered. 'But I leave everything here to you and Theophile. The British fleet holds the sea, they say, and I shall be better off in England. I shall surely come back when the war is over, and perhaps I shall bring my husband with me.'

Some dim muscular effort deepened the wrinkles in the old woman's face.

It was as if a knife had cut them in the living flesh.

'I hope so--if Theophile and I are here. To be sure, you must go where it is your duty. We will keep such of the provisions as can be kept--'

'Keep nothing. It is all for you who have been so kind to me--you and yours. Not a child, not a creature, for a dozen miles about that I would not wish to share with, as you know. But--listen, Marie.' Miss Stanley blushed faintly as she bent her head nearer Marie's good ear.

'It _is_ my duty. My first duty, that is, must be to my future husband.

When he returns from America' (she had long ago learned the futility of distinguis.h.i.+ng, for Marie, between 'l'Amerique du nord' and 'l'Amerique du sud'; and was patient with her belief that New York was a suburb of Cayenne) 'he will wish me there. He was to have sailed last month. A letter--a telegram--must have gone astray in the confusion. When I hear, he will doubtless be in England. And when he reached England, I was to go to my friends and be married to him. My heart bleeds for France; but I am not French, and my duty is not here. I am American, you see, dear Marie, and my _fiance_ is English.'

'Ah!' Marie shook her head. 'My old head is turned with all they tell me, and the buzzing in my bad ear is like cannon. But I had thought that the English, for some reason I do not understand, were fighting with us.

They have been telling us for ten years that we do not hate the English--that we love them. And Theophile thought that an English army was against the Germans. But perhaps I am wrong. _Monsieur votre fiance_ will not have to fight, then? I congratulate you, mademoiselle.'

'The English are fighting with the French, Marie. But all Englishmen are not soldiers. Monsieur Laye is not a soldier. He is an engineer.'

'He is perhaps past the age.'

'There is no conscription in England, Marie. No man is a soldier unless he chooses.'

'No service to make?'

'None.'

'_C'est beau, ca!_ All Frenchmen must fight. So England may go to war, and still have men to till the fields. But where do their armies come from?'

'Any man who wishes may go. But none are compelled--except the soldiers by profession. There will be enough, never fear. England will not desert France.'

The old woman nodded. 'I am not afraid of that. And you are not afraid that _monsieur le fiance_ will fight? I do not understand these things.

As Theophile says, what I comprehend I do not hear, and what I hear I do not comprehend. I go to fetch mademoiselle's soup. They are lucky, all the same, to get the crops in, in time of war.' She clattered from the room.

Miss Stanley felt her heart grow heavy, she did not know precisely why.

If only word would come! Perhaps she was a fool to stay. There must be trains through to Paris now. Anything to get nearer Edmund, away from this historic, war-bound plain! She crouched by the window to eat her _soupe aux choux_ and stale bread. If only some boy would come riding into the courtyard with a letter for her! She had bribed half the urchins who loitered by the mairie in Sezanne to rush to her hot-foot with anything that came.

The lightning that had struck once at Champaubert and Montmirail was to strike again before she heard from Edmund Laye. Suddenly, with no warning, the heavens opened with that reiterant flash. Frightened stragglers over the plain, refugees from the north pus.h.i.+ng on from beyond Sezanne in a blind stumbling dash to the southward; rumors that sprang up out of the ground so that she had but to stand still to hear the world move; indescribable distant noises, commotions less seen than sensed, on the far horizon; a casual smudge of aeroplanes on the great blue round of heaven; an earth, for no visible reason, tumultuously vibrating beneath her,--and then, at last, one hot noon, a frightened boy falling exhausted at her feet. She gave him the piece of gold which for many days had been waiting for him in her pocket, and bade him rest where he lay until he was ready for food. Marie and Theophile crouched beside him, listening to his winded babbling.