Read Ebook: The End: How the Great War Was Stopped. A Novelistic Vagary by Gratacap L P Louis Pope

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SAINT CHOISEUL

It is a pretty village, Saint Choiseul, perched on a hillside whose slopes, undeviatingly smooth and moderate, subside into a flowing land of streams and fields and white roadways. Its narrow streets are decorous with straight lines of prim poplars that have a military stiffness, and while the wind stirs their hedged leaves into audible protest--the flutter of a restrained salutation or a salute simply--it seems hardly able to extort from their braced branches the tribute of an obeisance.

The houses are generally simple things of two and sometimes only one story, built of limestone blocks that have weathered into an undecipherable composition of brown blotches, staring white strips, mossy crevices, little pits of black, and crannies of nutritious decomposition, where tiny grass blades have sprouted. Under favorable skies--and they are almost always favorable at St. Choiseul--their uneven walls become fascinating studies of minor-color harmonies, and rising as they do amid beds of flowers, or just grazed grass, from which they seemed in the broad sunshine to gather subtle tints of gayety, by some evanescent reflexion, they become fascinatingly pretty, and commodious, so to say, to an artist's fancy.

Our house was the second in the village on the right hand side of the road, as you came from Paris, just next to Privat Deschat, an old carpet-weaver whose back-yard was as many colored as a flower garden with bright rugs, green, and yellow, and blue, and red, and brown, hung out on lines that webbed the air like a spider's nest, in the spring. And a very pleasant, inviting house ours was with its staid look of reserved happiness, I might say. There it was with its deep-silled windows, filled with geraniums and heart's ease, its wide black door, and big brass knocker, that was a dragon's tongue lolling out of a dragon's scaly jaw, its long slanting shingled roof, with two dormer windows, and its pastiche red bricks peeping in ruddy streaks through the dense ampelopsis that climbed up to the eaves, and then lurked in the dark, to make its way into the house, and lingering there, became pale and white.

There was no veranda or piazza, but just a covered porch with four wooden pillars and two bench seats, where sister Gabrielle and I sat long hours in the evenings in summer time, when we were afraid sometimes to enter the house because--Ah, but I must not tell that now, for just that fear and what it led to, and how it helped us to end the WAR, is the sole reason of my telling this story at all. No, no, that is a long way towards the end, and here I've hardly begun.

Then there was a good big square room on the right of the hall full of books, and friendly chairs, and pictures, with a big desk-table in the centre, where rose toweringly a superb old bronze French lamp, that even then we burned with whale oil. You wound it up, and the oil was pumped on the wicks and--the light was soft and charming and companionable. The windows were high and low; they reached up to the ceiling, and they left spaces for window seats at the floor, and white tapestry curtains shaded them, and then at night--we did it in the winter mostly--there could be drawn over them soft, thick folds of green baize, and we seemed softly entombed in a delicious seclusion--so delicate, so sure. My sister loved the long evenings that way, of winter, and if it stormed and the snow stung the windows with sharp taps, she would laugh almost, with the happiness of security.

And there was a big fire-place on the west side of the room--you see this library was on the west side of the house too--but it was the whole width of the house also, and the southern outlook swept over the low land and gazed straight to Paris. That chimney corner was delightful, and the wisps of light from the soft coal lit up the mantel and played grotesquely over the row of Peruvian Inca figures and face-jars that filled it--I brought them from America--so that they seemed to squint and grin, or just look glum and melancholy. Gabrielle said they came to life in the half dark, and she made them talk to me--for she interpreted them in her odd way--the old Inca warriors and the medicine men and the priests, and the little beggar with a stump for a leg, and the squinting big-toothed demon in red and black.

All that in the winter, but in summer and early fall, with the windows all open, the cooling night air came in, and brought with it odors of the ground and perfumes--O! so delicate and ravishing--of the flowers; St. Choiseul loved flowers; there was not a home without them--and so mixed with these, as if sound and smell had run together in a composite, half of each, the murmur of insects, the endless roundelay of the peeping tree toads, a twittering of birds, and the shivering of leaves in the trees. How we loved it!

I am rambling dully, but you see, kind friend, such strange weird things happened in that house afterwards, and such sorrow came to me after all the blessed joy of years, now lost, forever lost, that I cannot stop my thought picturing everything about it, as if I would leap back into the arms of other days, and let them caress and soothe me and banish my grief.

On the east side of the hall-way was our dining room, a simple room with just straw-bottomed chairs, an immense oak side-board, royally set out with glass and blue plates, and on the walls quaint expressionless portraits of our people, including mother and father, a fat uncle with a pipe, and half closed eye, and a great grandfather in the regimentals of the Revolution--very brave looking and handsome--and some very staring aunts, and great aunts in starched finery, that made them look like owls.

Back of the pantry was the kitchen, with old Hortense, as the high priestess and oracle--our own dear Hortense, with such a kind heart, and a ready ear, and a generous hand--Ah! how we children loved her, and how she loved us, and how she packed our napkins for school, or our baskets for picnics--as the Americans say. She used to shake her wise old head slyly at us when we looked in at the kitchen door, with that little hungry grin on our faces:

And upstairs were the pleasant bed-rooms, so inviting to repose in their demure neatness, with high posters and pavilions, and their broad bottomed rockers, and their rainbow wallpapers, and rag carpet strips, over the bronzed, aged, and russety black wooden floors.

My own room was over the library; it looked north and west, and I would hang out of its window for half an hour at a time, watching the red sun quench itself behind the golden and flaming horizon, whose secrets I yearned to know, whose untrodden wonders I dreamed to penetrate. Those wistful hours awoke the unconfessed but sleepless passion of my heart to sail out over the Atlantic, a passion too of unrest, linked in my disposition with ecstacies and imaginations.

Sister Gabrielle was in the next room to mine, and in her sweet, tasteful, fresh and white bed-room, rose the chimney from the library fire-place below--so that she had her own chimney corner too, in the second story of the house and THERE--Well, wait, that comes later.

Our parents were nervously alert in nature, intelligent and conscientious. In them a strain of Huguenot puritanism was combined with an intellectual appetite that seemed to create in each a physical activity that made them restless in manner, and weak in health. They watched my sister and myself too suspiciously, and their affection became almost an aggravation of kindness, and solicitude, and curiosity, which made me more eager to escape that protecting roof-tree, and see the world. On my sister, as I shall explain, it exercised the most unfortunate influence, and accentuated that peculiar neurosis whose roots--as I was to learn later--were enlaced in a sub-conscious sensitivity to occult and invisible agencies, which indeed I helped to strengthen.

We were provided with neighbors and friends, and while the village of St. Choiseul was sufficiently democratic to tolerate and encourage friendly intercourse with everyone, as a matter of congeniality and temperamental tastes, we knew intimately but five persons in St. Choiseul. These five composed a contrasted and picturesque group, and when all were assembled in our big library, father and mother seemed to me most attractive, for in converse that was stimulating and personal, they attained a serenity of feeling and manner, that made them really delightful. Let me quickly describe our friends.

There was the rug-maker and carpet weaver, Privat Deschat, an elderly, robust Norman, who worked hard at his tasks in the mornings--and his mornings began very early--read as steadily for three or four hours in the afternoon, napped two hours, ate supper with his housekeeper and hunted up a friend with whom he smoked and chatted, or played Demi Rouge for the remainder of his day, which never extended over midnight, and more customarily closed at ten.

Privat Deschat was unquestionably very good company, quiet, attentive, observant, and spasmodically conversational, when his suppressed gift of speech awoke a momentary admiration. He was a short, strong man, with large cheeks, a massive head, an expressive mouth, made more so by very good teeth, and what might be called reticent eyes, in which his delicate and studious self retreated, under the guise of inexpressiveness. Again these quiet eyes would light up with enthusiasm, or it might be with distrust and defiance. His speech accompanied his roused spirit, and no one dared--no one wished--to interrupt, lest the rebuke might return him to silence. You see, he thoroughly delighted us. He was a bit quaint in his way of saying things.

He loved to tell us:

Poor Emile Chouteau, he died before I came back from America, though long before that he had been pensioned, and lived with his mule in the same way that he had lived all the long unchanged years of his teaching in the little school house. And Sarah? Sarah seemed to miss something after Emile's funeral--the country side followed Emile's body with candles, for Emile was a devoted Catholic--and not long afterwards she was found in the school-house. She had broken in the door and walked in; was she looking for Emile? The last time I saw Sarah she was ploughing a field in Briois.

Emile's successor was the fifth acquisition we boasted of in our little company of intimates--Lorenzo Sebastien Quintado--a Spaniard.

Yes that does bring back to my mind the way, the poise even, and the sprightly liveliness, the almost expectant jubilation of Lorenzo. He sang well, and in the long dusks, when the quivering lights of the sunset died out of the sky along the burning west, where black fringes of the thick-set trees seemed dipped in fire, his voice rose richly, in caressing and ear-catching melodies. I almost hear him now, singing so carelessly, with an untaught art, a simple song praising the charms of Spanish girls. His voice was a high barytone.

"I can see a long way over the farms, and suddenly the moon broke through with a wonderful light--it was full moon--and the wind shifted, piling the clouds up in swirling masses, black as ink, and still, at moments flashing with lightning, and crashing with thunder. I could see the lands far off towards Bienne shining with great lakes of water, the dark walls of forest, and in the fields huddled cattle, in droves. Then it seemed to me as if the light grew stronger in the sky--it was about two in the morning then--so strong it grew, that I felt there must be some fires about, perhaps towards Briois. I went outside in the road. It was ankle deep with mud, but I ploughed through it to the edge of the slope of the road, from Paris, and looked towards the east, for the clear spaces of the sky were there. Then came the vision."

The speaker stood up among his now fascinated hearers; they were all leaning toward him, as if drawn by a magnet, and while I closed my hand more tightly around the warm fingers of Blanchette I too, with her, strained my ears to hear Deschat's words which were less loud.

GABRIELLE

My sister Gabrielle was singularly circumstanced in temperament, as she had been too curiously abused in treatment. I left her a young man of twenty-one--she was two years older than I--and only knew of her changing experiences from letters sent to me at San Antonio, Texas. Mother and father were always a trifle worried over Gabrielle's retired and shrinking ways, her abnormal shyness before people, a physical timidity almost that kept her face averted, her rich, deep, large eyes half closed as if in dreams, and controlled her speech, impeding and denying it.

Her languid action and the frequent recurrent fits of a semi-stupor passing off into reveries, when the loosened current of her thought found an unexpected vent in rambling half-lucid, oftentimes poetic apostrophes and ascriptions, wrought in them a transparent terror that embarrassed the grieving girl.

Something of the sort had disturbed me before I left home, because I loved Gabrielle dearly, and remembered so many intimacies between us. In our walks around fair Briois we--both perhaps prematurely serious and inquisitive--talked of things invisible and beautiful, as angels and fairies, and in an old graveyard back of a church beyond the village and on the edge of a wood where the birds nested and sung, wondered over the dead. We amused our fancies with inventions of their work and play, now their bodies were so securely anchored in the earth. Because of all this, yes, and because Gabrielle was very pretty too, I tried to break the mystery of her modesty and lonely habits.

Well, before I left home, before I found myself hung, as it were, over the bottomless Atlantic in a big sea-worthy American ship, booked for Galveston, Texas, mother and father decided to send Gabrielle to Paris to a training school of nurses. It had occurred to them that my sister with her gentleness, and a real skill in the use of her fingers, would do well, while the contact with doctors and surgeons--rather direct, imperious, and active men--would wear away her apparent mistrust and nervousness.

But here was their mistake. The analysis was correct, the procedure hopelessly wrong. Gabrielle, always obedient and gravely mute about her own wishes, assented, and entered a training school for nurses and almost at once encountered the terrors of the operating room. Her sensitive and refined sense shuddered at the sight of suffering and disease, her pity for it--willing and self-sacrificing as was her desire to help--caused her involuntary agony of mind. The vulgarities of treatment, the raw necessities of the exposure, mutilations, and the repulsion she felt for blood, and the naked sightlessness of wounds, amputations, incisions--all the obtrusive physical facts of the hospital offended her. Too delicate in feeling, too aesthetic in temperament, too limpid in her affinities, as of a spirit discarnate, soaring, and apprehensive, she underwent mental tortures--hard to realize to others differently conditioned--in this enforced service.

Perhaps I was not myself solicitous enough about her, and her welfare; because--well, it is clear I am sure--because I was much in love with Blanchette, and as the days brought me nearer to that moment when I would leave home, and struggle for that wealth America seems to hold so temptingly out in her outstretched hands to everyone, I felt almost bitterly the probability that--in the nature of things--Blanchette would not, could not wait for me. When might I return--Ah when?--the thought wrenched me like a physical violence, and the nightly scarlet of the evening skies almost, to my despairing heart, seemed stained with the drops of my own blood.

It was a sudden impulse, and its very awkwardness showed the sincerity of my feeling, its impetuous earnestness; and deliciously was it rewarded. Blanchette caught my face in her soft long hands, and brought it down to her own; our lips met, and the pledge of our future life together unuttered, was sworn so deeply in our hearts, that we were dumbfounded with the overmastering passion of the moment.

That night I leaned out of the window of my room, and the night, calm and gloriously light with the gibbous moon half flooding the broad distances with its pale splendors, seemed to bathe my spirit in incredible consolations of hope, ambition. An exorbitant confidence seized me. Anticipation and resolve raised innumerable visions, and the bending salutation of Success almost audibly filled my ears with its siren promises.

Gabrielle shook her dear head, and the sweet yearning eyes watched me with a sad disillusionment that I had deserted her, and, I, in the madness of my joy and in the eagerness of my plans, recurred to the artifice of commonplaces, and the flat sophistries of comfort.

I came upon her one morning weeping quietly in her room with her head leaning against the mantel piece, her white slender fingers pressed upon her eyes and the tears slipping through them. I caught her in my arms, and turned her head upon my breast with the real anguish of self-reproach.

"Gabrielle, Gabrielle, what hurts you? You break my heart. Have I been forgetful? O! believe me Gabrielle it will be all well, and if--if--perhaps--I know, you say I have been only thinking of myself. Ah forgive me, Gabrielle; surely you know that I love you from the very bottom of my heart and if you could only see it you would believe."

"Why Gabrielle, what do you mean? Visions! You have never told me of that before. What visions?"

It was some time before I could contrive to make her tell me more, and when she finally drew me to a sofa at the window, keeping her face fixed outward on the sweet pageantry of the little gardens on the hill, and the far-away loveliness of the forests, and the shifting radiances of the lowlands, she held me spell-bound with the strange confession. Her voice was at first very low, almost inaudible, but slowly she regained her composure, and the story came from her lips with an unstudied grace and realism that imposed its truthfulness upon its hearer. Indeed my own latent sympathy in nature with that of Gabrielle's, from the first, enthralled me in a trance of confidence.

"Why, Alfred, a year ago I was standing at my bed-side--it was late and the night was dark. I had put out my lamp, and was about to say my prayers, when softly there seemed to steal into the room a light. It came at first from the ceiling of the room, and then it shifted and shone like a phosphorescent ball, or a little cloud of glowing fire half concealed behind a veil. I was not frightened--No, not at all, but I felt a delicious calmness, a wonderful soothing self-surrender to an unseen influence, as if the effluence of some mind controlled me, and--I thought so--I sank slowly to the floor, while the light rose and expanded and grew before my eyes into a shape, a form of flowing lines of light, with shades between them, and the faintest pencillings of a rosy tint ran here and there over it, and then--perhaps then Alfred I had swooned; but there was no fear. It was just like a delicious lapse in unconsciousness into sleep, and with that came voices in my ears--faint, very faint, murmurous, indistinguishable, and then--"

"And then?" I exclaimed, now thoroughly excited myself, and catching Gabrielle's hands, bringing her face to mine, and gazing into her eyes with mute expostulating curiosity.

"I knew nothing more--all vanished, apparition and voices, and I woke up leaning against my bed and bathed in perspiration."

We were both silent for a time, and without any encouragement Gabrielle resumed her story, but she had freed herself from my arms, and walked to the center of her room--its walls were well filled with pretty colored prints, for the most part religious figures--and with her hands crossed behind her back, stood before me and continued--and now her rueful expression, and the rebuking tenderness of her eyes, had disappeared, and in their place was an old familiar smile, inexplicably reminiscent, like a visible soliloquy. It often arose to her face and it became her.

"And when it came the second time, was it different?" I almost cried aloud, abruptly guessing that it portended mischief to Blanchette.

The forlorn misery returned to her eyes, and the despairing gesture, as she brought her hands forward and leaned them against my shoulders and with a keen interrogation fixed her gaze upon my own, revealed her unwillingness to go to Paris. She went on:

"In those trances--if they are really trances--the voices come in all sorts of ways to me. I cannot understand it; it scares me and yet I have grown to wish to hear them--some of them. For they are very, very different. Some voices are like children talking low, almost lisping, and always musical, and others are cold and hard; but--Alfred, is not this wonderful? I can drive those hard, stern voices off, by just wishing them away; my mind does it somehow, and the others come to me when I wish them to--O! but it is marvelous."

Her eyes were lit again with a saintly joy--a little wild I thought--and for a moment I shuddered at the thought that perhaps Gabrielle was losing her mind, under the stress of her hallucinations. Ah! but were they hallucinations? I was not unwilling to believe them. Both Gabrielle and I had indulged in the reading of ghostly tales, when children, and because it was just a little difficult for us to gratify our fancy for the weird and the supernatural--all the eccentricities of the disembodied--we had loved them the more.

We were interrupted in our talk by some call for Gabrielle, and I was left alone to ponder the strange matter, with I think, a crude kind of expectancy that we approached transcendent mysteries, dwelling unconfessed in my mind. But I was not a little alarmed also. Gabrielle's delicate texture, her spiritualized emotions, which also in their poignant intensity of feeling assumed now to me the aspect of a thaumaturgic power, might induce some mental derangement. Uncertain what to do, and unwilling to tell the affair to our parents, who would only see in it a new urgency for Gabrielle's transportation to changed fields of association, I concluded to confide everything Gabrielle had told me to Blanchette.

Blanchette was incredulous. She could not believe it. It offended her robust sense of actual living and the sharp realization in her of the materiality of the senses. You see in Blanchette something of the captain's skepticism, his naked Voltairism had developed. She was silent for a while, and then answered very slowly my question, "What is best to do?"

I did not know it, and I was ill disposed at first to adopt Blanchette's view. But she was very tender and affectionate, and I was blind and too happy--too miserable too, as I must soon leave her--to do justice to Gabrielle. And so it came about that I argued the matter with Gabrielle, and insisted that she must try Paris, and the school, and the doctors, and forget the visitations, and mingle with the world a little, and, amongst new acquaintances, put to flight the aggravating "voices," for--the other marvel--the shining image--had never returned.

This latter fact contributed a better efficacy to my persuasions, as it seemed to prove that the whole business was some delusion of the mind. Gabrielle was not a bit convinced, but she was so dutiful, so resigned, and so faithful, that she yielded, put on the address of willingness she did not really feel, just to please me.

Well, there were so many things to think of, and Blanchette was so eager to see me every minute, that when I had taken leave of all of our friends, and father and mother had invoked blessings on my head, and exacted promises that I would write each week, and the captain had made me very sure that he wanted a few pounds of the Texas pecan nuts sent to him, and Privat Deschat asked for a half dozen hanks of Texas cotton, if they could be found in the Galveston stores, Emile Chouteau , wished only my happy return, that the waters would be propitious, the winds and the waves, and, if storms, why then:

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