Tales from a Famished Land Including The White Island—A Story of the Dardanelles

VII

THE DESERTER VII THE DESERTER It was five o’clock in the morning. A riotous sunrise deluged the Campine as I slipped into my clothes and ran down the narrow, twisting tower-stair to keep a secret tryst with the Baas , or overseer. Little slits in the tower wall, cut for mediæval archers, let in the arrows of the sun; and as I ran through the gloomy armoury and the high-roofed Flemish dining hall—stripped of their treasure of old pikes, swords, crossbows, and blunderbusses by the diligent Germans—out to the causeway, and over the creaking draw-bridge on my way to the stables and the dismantled brewery, I imagined myself an escaped prisoner from the donjons of Château Drie Toren. In truth, I was running away from Baron van Steen’s week-end house-party for a breath of rustic air while the others slept. The stables, tool sheds, hostlers’ barracks, bake-oven, and brewery were thatch roofed and walled with brick, toned to a claret-red, pierced with small windows and heavy oaken doors. The doors were banded with the baronial colours—blue stripes alternating with yellow, like stripes on a barber pole—and in the centre of the hollow square of farm buildings fumed a mammoth brown manure pile. A smell of fresh-cut hay and the warm smell of animals clung about the stables, and I heard the watch-dog rattle his chain and sniff at the door as I passed. I found the Baas standing before his door, his face wrinkled with pleasure, his cap in his hand. Behind him his wife peered out at us, wiping her fat hands on her skirts, and two half-grown children stared from the nearest window. The Baas and his wife were the parents of sixteen children! “Good day, mynheer!” every one shouted in chorus. “Good day, madame; good day, Baas.” (I used the Flemish title for overseer—the word from which has come our much-abused word “Boss.”) “I’m a deserter this morning: the rest of the Baron’s party sleeps.” “Ah, so,” laughed the wife. “Mynheer is like the German soldiers who desert by dozens nowadays. And would your Honour hide in the forest like them—like the Germans?” “To be sure. The Baas is to show me the deepest coverts, where mynheer the Baron will never find me more.” We laughed and passed on. A girl with a neckyoke and full milk pails came by from the dairy; nodding faces appeared at the windows of the farm buildings as we walked toward the woods; bees sped up the air from conical straw hives close to our path; and in a few minutes we were threading our way through a nursery of young pines, tilled like corn rows in Kansas, and all of equal age. “Monsieur, there is a soul in trees,” said the Baas, affectionately patting an ancient linden on the border of the old forest. The Baas was a man from the Province of Liége, and he preferred to speak French with me rather than Flemish. He had, too, a Walloon lightness of wit which went sometimes incongruously with his heavy frame, as when he said to me once when we were debating the joys of youth versus age, “To be old has its advantages, monsieur. One can then be virtuous, and it is not hard!” “There is a soul in trees,” he repeated. “All together the trees have a soul. A forest is one spirit. These trees are old men and old women, very patient and kindly and sluggish of blood. They nod their heads in the wind like peasants over a stove. And they talk. Sometimes I think that I can understand their talk—very wise and patient and slow. Men hurry apart, monsieur, but the trees remain together like old married people and watch their children grow up around them. “Here”—we had turned down a path and were in the fringes of another forest of small pines—“here the Germans have taken trees for their fortifications, slashed and cut, and those trees that are left are like wounded soldiers: they have arms too long or too short, heads smashed, feet uprooted, and yet they wish to live, because they are one spirit.” “What is this?” I demanded abruptly, for at my feet yawned a little pit, with lumpy clay still fresh about it and a fallen cross lying half hidden in the weeds. “Ho, that? It is the grave of a German,” said the Baas heartily. He spat into the raw pit. “The German has been taken away, but the children of Drie Toren are still afraid. They will not come by this path on account of the dead Deutscher .” His foot crushed the rude cross as he talked, and we walked on. But I was vaguely troubled. That vile pit and the thought of what it had contained had spoiled my promenade. As I had found on a thousand other occasions, my freedom in Belgium was only a fiction. The war could not be forgotten, even for an hour. A partridge thundered up at our feet and rocketed to earth again beyond the protecting pines. In a little glade we surprised four young rabbits together at breakfast. The Baas laid his hand lightly on my arm. “It is sad, monsieur, isn’t it?” he said. “The poachers steal right and left nowadays. The gardes champêtres are no longer armed, so the thieves do as they will. There is more pheasant in the city markets than chicken, and more rabbit than veal. The game will soon be gone, like our horses and cattle. “You remember, monsieur, the sand dunes by Blankenberghe and Knocke on the Belgian coast? Ah, the rabbits that used to be in those dunes! But now the firing of cannon has driven them all away.” A silence fell upon us both. The thickets grew denser, and we pushed our way slowly toward the deeper coverts. I found myself thinking of the little crosses along the seaside dunes which marked where greater game than rabbits had fallen—the graves of men—the biggest game on earth—the shallow pits and the frail wooden crosses, like that which the Baas’s leather boot had crushed a half hour before. We had reached the deepest woods when a gasping, choking cry stopped us short. The thicket directly before us stirred and then lay still as death. The cry had been horrible as a Banshee’s wail, and as mysterious, but it was not the cry of an animal; it was human, and it came from a human being in agony. The Baas crossed himself swiftly and leaped forward, and instantly we had parted the protecting bushes and were looking down on a man lying flat on the ground—a spectre with a thin white face, chattering teeth, enormous frightened eyes, and a filthy, much-worn German uniform. “What are you doing here?” I demanded. The soldier did not answer, he did not rise, he lay motionless and hideous, like a beast. Then I caught sight of his left ankle, enormously swollen and wrapped in rags, and his hands—they were thin as sticks. The man was helpless, and he was starving. And now came a strange thing. We two walked slowly around the man on the ground, as if he were a wild creature caught in a snare. We felt no pity or astonishment; only curiosity. Utterly unemotionally we took note of him and his surroundings. He had no gun, no knife, and no blankets. He lay on some broken boughs, and he seemed to have covered himself with boughs at night. The wild, haggard eyes turned in their sockets and watched us as we moved, but otherwise no part of the man stirred. He seemed transfixed, frozen in an agony of fear and horror. “Ashes! He has had a fire here, monsieur, but it was days ago.” At the man’s feet the Baas had discovered the remnants of a little fire. “Holy blue!” he added in astonishment, “he has eaten these!” A pile of small green twigs lay near the fire. The bark had been chewed from them! At the end of our search we turned again to the man on the ground. “Who are you? What are you doing here?” I demanded again. There was no answer. “Baas, have you a flask?” The old man slowly drew a little leather-clad bottle from his breast pocket and passed it to me in silence. He offered it with obvious reluctance, and watched jealously as I knelt and dropped a little stream of liquid between the parted lips of the creature on the ground. The man’s lips sucked inward, his throat choked at the raw liquor, he opened his mouth wide and gasped horribly for breath, his knees twitched, and his wrists trembled as if he were dying. Then the parched mouth tried to form words; it could only grimace. For a moment I felt a mad impulse to leap on that moving mouth and crush it into stillness; such an impulse as makes a hunter wring the neck of a wounded bird. Instead, I continued dropping the stinging liquor and listening. Then came the first word. “More!” the black lips begged, and I emptied the flask into them. The Baas sighed plaintively. “German?” the soldier whispered. “No. American,” I answered. “The other one?” “Belgian.” The frightened eyes closed in evident relief. The man seemed to sleep. “But you?” I asked. “I’m German—a soldier,” he said. “Lost?” “Missing.” He used the German word vermisst —the word employed in the official lists of losses to designate the wounded or dead who are not recovered, and those lost by capture or desertion. “You understand, Baas?” “No, monsieur.” “He says he is a German soldier—a deserter, I suppose, trying to make his way over the frontier to Holland. And he is starving.” The Baas’s face became a battleground of emotions. His kindly eyes glared merrily, his lips twisted until his beard seemed to spread to twice its natural width. Instantly his face became grave again, then puzzled, even anxious. A stream of invective and imprecation in mingled French and Flemish poured from his troubled lips, and he stamped his feet vigorously. “He can’t stay here,” I concluded. “It is death to help him,” said the Baas. “For you, yes; for me, no. The Germans can only disgrace me as a member of the Relief Commission. They cannot kill me.” “He must not be left to die here, monsieur.” “The Germans will probably search your house if we take him there.” “He may betray us if we help him.” “That is possible. But you see he is very weak—almost dead.” “He may be a spy.” “That again is possible. But see! He has eaten twigs!” “He is a damned pig of a German!” “But you do not feed even pigs on sticks and leaves.” “I am afraid, monsieur.” “So am I, Baas. Yet you must decide, and not I. It is much more dangerous for you than for me.” We stared into each other’s eyes, trying to guess each other’s thoughts. Every one in Belgium knows that the German army sows its informers everywhere. We could not even trust each other in that stricken country. Deserters and traitors were tracked like dogs. Any one who gave aid or comfort to such persons did so at the risk of his life. It is said that pretended deserters deliberately trapped Belgians into aiding them, and then betrayed their hosts. Something of the sort was hinted in the famous case of Miss Edith Cavell. Knowledge, then, bade us be cautious; instinct alone bade us be kind. The Baas’s wide eyes turned again to the creature on the ground, and he sighed plaintively. “Monsieur,” he began, in a very low, gentle voice, “I will help him. Give me my flask and I will go for food and drink. Then we must plan. Does it please you to remain here?” “I shall stay here with him.” “Good! I will go.” I knelt beside the soldier and chafed his filthy hands until blood flowed again in his dry veins. The swollen pupils of his eyes brightened. He talked continuously in a thin trickling whisper—a patter of information about dinners he had eaten, wines he had drunk, his military service, his hardships, and his physical and mental sensations. I had read of victims of scurvy in the Arctic snows dreaming and talking day and night of food, only of food. So it was with the starving soldier. The liquor had made him slightly delirious, and he babbled on and on. His broken ankle pained him. When I moved him about to rest it, his lightness astonished me. The man had been large and heavy; he was shrunken to a bag of bones. His uniform hung about him like a sack, and it seemed as if the slightest jar would snap his arms and legs. Tears welled under his heavy, dirty eyelids. “Mother! Mother!” he whispered once. “Art thou there? Mother!” Then, as his eyes again cleared and he saw the trees interarched above him—the trees which the Baas had told me were one spirit; the grim, silent, sepulchral trees; the haunted, malignant trees which had wooed him with their shelter and then broken him and starved him; the trees beneath which his forest-dwelling ancestors had cowered for thousands of years and to which they had offered human sacrifices—he broke down and sobbed horribly. “She is not here! She is not here! No, she is not here!” he repeated over and over again. When the Baas returned, we covered the deserter with our coats and fed him. Perhaps we did wrong to give him food, although I think now that he was doomed before we found him. We did our best, but it was not enough. In less than an hour, after a horrible spell of vomiting, the poor man was beyond all help of ours. His eyes rolled desperately, his breath came in horrid gasps, and he grew rigid like a man in an epileptic fit. We tore open the breast of his uniform to ease his laboured breathing. A metal identification disk hung on a cord from about his neck over a chest which was like a wicker-work of ribs. His belly was sunken until one almost saw the spinal column through it. His tortured lungs subsided little by little, the terrifying sound of his breathing sank to nothing, his head thrust far back and over to the right side, his arms stiffened slowly, his mouth fell open. We watched, as if fascinated, the pulsing vein in his emaciated neck, still pumping blood through a body which had ceased to breathe. The top of the blood column at last appeared, like mercury in a thermometer. It fell half an inch with each stroke of the famished heart. It reached the base of the neck and sank from sight, and still we stared and stared. The man was dead, yet I seemed to have an awful vision of billions of sentient cells, billions of little selfish lives which had made up his life, fighting, choking, starving to death within that cooling clay. The Baas bent his head, uncovered, and crossed himself. With a quick stooping motion he closed the wide-open eyes and straightened the bent limbs. Then he rose to his full height and looked at me sadly. “This man had a mother, monsieur,” he said. “We must forget the rest.” In the pit where the other German had lain we buried the body of the deserter, and we found and repaired the little lath cross and set it up at the grave’s head. But first I took from about the neck of the corpse the oval medallion which told the man’s name and regimental number. It was a silver medal, finer than those usually worn by privates in the German army. I have it by me as I write, and on it is etched the brave sentence, “God shield you from all dangers of warfare, and render you back to us safe and victorious!” I was late for breakfast at the Château, but Van Steen kindly made room for me at his right hand. “Aha, monsieur,” he called gaily, “we thought you were helping to find the deserter.” “Wha-what, monsieur le Baron?” I stuttered in amazement. “The German deserter. A file of soldiers woke us up at seven o’clock, inquiring for one of their men who ran away from Mons a month ago. They are searching the stables and the forest. They have traced him here to our commune. I hope they catch him!” My fingers clutched the silver disk in my pocket. “I think they will not catch him, messieurs. He ran away a month ago, you say?” “A month ago.... But it is nothing to us, eh? Let us eat our breakfasts.” The Baron bowed grandly to me. “Monsieur le Délégué,” he began in his smooth, formal voice, “once again we remind ourselves that it is thanks to you and the generous American people that we have bread. It is thanks to you that our noble Belgium is not starving.... Eh bien! Let us eat our breakfasts.” And so we did. VIII THE GLORY OF TINARLOO A second time we seated ourselves at our little round table in the restaurant on the boulevard Anspach—the director of the art museum and I. A mug of light Belgian beer was before each of us, and a copy of La Belgique telling of the Somme battles. The director’s hands shook as he reached for the newspaper and his half-finished beer. His breath came in short, apoplectic gasps. He was wildly angry. A couple of minutes before a Flemish newsboy had rushed into the restaurant and shouted, “Aeroplane! The Germans are shooting it!” And the restaurant had emptied like a hive, filling the boulevard, where every one gazed at the dull gray dragonfly droning at an immense height over the city, pursued with soft white smoke-flowers which thudded as they bloomed in the upper air. While we watched, an old peasant in wooden shoes and padded black petticoats dropped her market basket on the director’s toes. He forgot aeroplane and anti-aircraft guns, war, the crowds, and me, his guest. He howled, he cursed, he danced; and now that we were safe again at our table in the restaurant, anathema and malediction still tumbled from his full red lips. “ Ces sales paysants, ils sont des brutes! Imbéciles! Idiots! Cochons! ” he stuttered, his feet prancing under the table. “They are beasts truly, monsieur: not men, but beasts, these peasants. What a temper I am in. But these beasts of peasants. Ah!...” he smiled suddenly and went on, “I will tell you a story of them. “You have heard, monsieur, of Van de Werve, the artist? He was of the school of Rubens; he died in Italy, very young. He had only twenty-three years when he died. He was not rich; he was very poor. But he had the spirit, the genius, the flair , and Rubens loved him. The Master said one day, ‘You must go to Italy to study. Here is a purse of gold. Here are letters of introduction to my friends. Here is a horse. Go to Italy.’ And the young man started. Months went by and no word of him came to Rubens or the other friends he had in Antwerp. He did not arrive in Italy. The purse of gold, the letters of introduction, the horse, the pupil of Rubens—all were completely lost to sight. After a year some friends set out to search for him, and behold! in the village of Tinarloo in Brabant they found him, painting an altar piece for the chapel of that place, and kissing and clipping the daughter of the burgomaster, who sat on his knee! He was always gallant, was Van de Werve, and as he rode into Tinarloo on his way to Italy, he had seen and fallen in love with the burgomaster’s daughter and sat at her feet for a year. “But the altar piece, monsieur! You have never seen it? Ah, that was magnificent—‘The Virgin of the Stair’—gold, green, ravishing! What atmosphere! What feeling! What soul! “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:

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