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

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Ebook has 331 lines and 61466 words, and 7 pages

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:

My project of going to America can be briefly explained, as it may appear almost quixotic and unreasonable otherwise, especially my destination in Texas. But some years before acquaintances, made in Paris, where I was studying law, led to this departure. They had interests in cattle and farm lands, in the great state, and had frequently made me offers to go out, and watch their rights, and report the prospects and conditions, with inducements so advantageous to myself that, conjoined with the long cherished project formed in my own mind to try the chances in the Republic, resulted in this. I accepted their invitations against my parents' wishes, who at first resolutely denied their permission. This was overcome by my own increasing obstinacy, that had begun to approach the earnestness of disobedience.

Blanchette and I had, with the ludicrous solemnity of young lovers, exchanged the pledges of fidelity, and I, in an exuberance of hopefulness, promised to return in five years, which by some fancied finality seemed to both of us the limit of our possible endurance. With forceful vows I had engaged to live most simply and the frugality of my expectations in living--measured the quickness and value of my savings, and indeed, as it happened, I made my way fast.

At San Antonio I became at last established, with the various interests, I was to watch, quite fully comprehended and diligently tended. I do not know that I ever fell in love with San Antonio, but I certainly got to like it very well, and in later years I have recalled it with feelings of tenderness, that came pretty near to affection. I have every reason to be grateful to it, for I was most successful. I had prospered, greatly prospered. When I found at last that the term of my exile came ideally near to the period when I might consider myself well enough off to go back and claim Blanchette, I think that my respect for San Antonio rose to the apex of unaffected enthusiasm.

Because the purpose and body of this history is connected with the utterly unparalleled circumstances of the ending of the monstrous war of this century, I pass over the irrelevant details of my life in America, except only to point out the financial luck that enabled me to return to France, at a critical moment. In five years I was almost rich--in my own modest estimation. At any rate I had enough, and a luxurious indolence, which was part of my nature, fascinated me with its temptations of rest and culture, while the thought of the waiting Blanchette--whose letters were so true-hearted and devoted--kept sensitized my eagerness to return almost to the point of madness. And there was Gabrielle.

I had been most dutiful to Gabrielle. I fulfilled all of the many brotherly resolves I made on the voyage to America, which had been the index of my self-reproach at leaving her so carelessly, and sweetly and reassuringly had she answered. Alas! I only learned much later how devotedly she had hidden her sufferings from me, that I might not be distressed in my new home. Now when I realized that my little fortune--part of it the result of a speculative incident so frequent in the wonderful land of Hope--would not only unite me with Blanchette but enable me to give comfort and happiness to Gabrielle, I was wild with impatience to get away. It was my last month in San Antonio; the leave for my return had been received by me, from my employers, and the successor to my position would be at any moment in my office ready to take charge.

I sighed contentedly; the future just then, however dark the sky might be, was radiant with the most varied lights of anticipation and of promise. My hand moved an apparently unopened letter, or perhaps, in its vague stirring over the desk before me, had dislodged it from some crevice in the drawers, or beneath the folios and baskets, and I abruptly became conscious of ITS presence. It was a human utterance--that letter--it might have cried out to me with the incisive agony of its menacing contents. It might I say--perhaps it did--but through the coarse obstructive mechanism of my ears its voice, that should have crashed around me like the call of Fate, was utterly unheard, and it lay there just an overlooked and silent scrap of paper.

I turned to it lazily, but in the next instant my eyes, apprehensive through that nervous divination of thought, that writes a message in our souls before we read or hear it, recognized the hand-writing of Gabrielle. I felt the racing blood leave my cheeks, and stir my heart with feverish palpitations. No letter from my sister was due now; only last week I had received one. I could scarcely keep my fingers still enough to tear open its cover. I knew; I knew. O! God how certainly I knew, that in the blackness of the darkening day a greater blackness, behind that spotless white paper, would rush out to overwhelm my life!

In the fading light leaning against the door-sill as the men and women of the street hurried homeward, with backward glances at the now onrushing columns of dusky vapor in the sky, I read the letter. I shuddered in the fear lest in the uncontrolled frenzy of my heart some treacherous cry, some blackguard defiance of the Almighty, might bring them around me in consternation and in anger.

My eyes glazing slowly with the rising paralysis of terror read this:

The paper crumpled in my hands; something like a vapor clouded my eyes, and hearing in my ears was suffocated in a sullen roar that came from nowhere, and then I felt myself smashed against the pavement, at the door of the office, and some undissipated residue of cognition recorded the fact, that I was being lifted and carried away.

MY RETURN

It is fifteen years today since Blanchette died. I have grown old since then with an age not of years, though by reason of a sister's love, I have been consoled, strengthened, even, and now, in the presence of the world's disaster, succumb to some unutterable conviction that the ends of God have little need of the prayers of men.

After my delirium in San Antonio had passed, I resumed my normal self-possession, though a nervous weakness--since developing into a muscular paralysis--made me at moments inert or half trembling with a deceitful dread that set my heart beating curiously. How well I recall it all; those days of anguish, with the twilight glimmering of joy that I had come in time to see her, and with too a mystical sense of attachment between us both, lasting beyond death, and bathed, as with a consecration, in the bitterest waters of Marah.

I looked up at the silent house charming in its vines, flowers, into the walled garden blushing now in the hectic flush of royal gladiolus, up at the empty windows, and above, far above into the depthless blue sky, where we men and women somehow place the everlasting dwelling-place of the Almighty. Almost as I reached the door it opened, and in its frame stood Gabrielle, much changed; I saw that at once, through all my sadness, but solemnly beautiful I thought. My heart leaped towards her; in the fast approaching desolation she, my blessed sister, would save me, lift me up from the terrors of bereavement, not with strength, but with the divine compassion that I felt now visibly abided in her.

"Gabrielle, is there no hope--no hope?" The words choked me like some insurmountable obstruction in my throat.

"Yes Alfred," the voice, always soft and delightful, was just a little tremulous with sympathy, her own deep love. "There may be; the fever has subsided a little, but--Well, come in. Blanchette asks for you so much. Come, the spare room is at the head of the stairs. Be noiseless. I will fix everything."

We ascended the stairs, and I waited outside the closed door with my head pressed against its lintels, murmuring--what were they?--Prayers? Possibly.

It opened softly in a few minutes, and Gabrielle with a gesture of invitation to enter and with her finger on her lips, moved before me into the room. I saw the waiting group at the side of a low wide bed. The captain, erect, still, with features blanched into a pallor that matched his white disordered hair, his figure bent slightly forward as he leaned on his cane, and kept his eyes unchangingly riveted upon the bed, whose occupant I could not see. At the bed-side was the watching doctor, and to him now Gabrielle approached, withdrawing then a little to one side with her head bowed, but with her eyes noting the sick girl whom yet I could not see.

I did not see what I saw afterwards, the shrunken figure, the hollow cheeks, the paling lips, the slow hideous change of emaciation. No! nothing; only her eyes, and in them shone something so fathomless, so beatific, that it suddenly lifted the intolerable weight of pain, it smote the clouds of misunderstanding or rebellion, and they vanished. It filled my ears with music, in place of groans, it summoned by the wand of a supernatural enchantment unheralded figures of blessing, and in those eyes I read the futurity of our endless happiness.

I moved my head towards her, and despite the restraining hand of the doctor kissed her lips, slowly, slowly, that the lingering embrace might fill her soul with confidence, and against her heated cheeks I swept my lips again and again. It was over. Our tryst was kept. Gabrielle called me gently, and Blanchette fell from me in a fainting spell, while the doctor firmly lifted me up to my feet, and the captain caught my unsteady body.

They came from far and near; they were men and women, girls and boys, some carrying candles, some wreaths, some little crosses of Easter palms which they would throw in the grave, or on it. The altar boys carried lighted candles, and the air was so still that the almost invisible wisps of flames rose straight upward, and were revealed by the undulous smoke that sprang from their tips as the candles wavered in the hands of the acolytes. Slowly we moved on--somehow I seemed half unconscious, and yet most sensitive to the day's supreme charm--the shrill chanting of the boys, mingled almost indistinguishably in my ears with the murmurous hum of belated cicadas, the slow rustling of footsteps before and behind me, the occasional whisper of the vacantly stirred foliage in the trees, the distant pipings of birds, and the far-off wail of some wandering or bereaved dog.

It was a dream almost, and ever and anon, like some spiritual effluence, the fragrance of the dying season from the field, the distant woods, the savory banks of the meadow-streams, invaded and enmeshed my feelings, with a strange fervor of complacency, as though I followed, not the dead body of my love, but was on my way to meet her elsewhere. So indeed it seemed to me in the little church, where all the frail magnificence our little church could summon for her funeral was so loyally displayed, and where the soft voiced father spoke with the brave and cordial accent of confidence, that Blanchette Bleu-Pistache was most surely now in Paradise. Then I felt my own soul leaving me amid the tapestries and lights, and upward with her, hand in hand, I was hastening to fields of asphodel and unbroken choirs of the celestial, and that then I swooned sideways, and for an instant the captain held me, when the reverberant senses returned, with the rush of whirring sounds, and I was myself again.

Blanchette was buried in our church-yard, somewhat towards its western wall, where the ivy clung late in the winter to the stones, where a tall Lombardy poplar planted too against the wall, stood like some impossibly gigantic sentinel, and where afterwards indeed the flowers that I watered, in an agony of trust that Blanchette knew I kept thus alive within me the imperishable union of our hearts--spread the sweet wantonness of abundant color and perfume above her, flowers that when they died in the autumn's cold and the winter's searing frosts and snows, were replenished with others plucked from the conservatory of our home, and placed under the white cross like some herbal sacrifice.

After Blanchette's death I stayed with the captain for some months, until a grave disease struck me down almost to death's door, which indeed I craved to open and to close behind me. It was a nervous fever, from which I have never quite recovered, as it left me with recurrent fits of weakness and a debility of energy quite unlike my former self. The captain adopted an orphan girl, who was like an incarnation of his daughter, and who infinitely blessed him, with a similar gentleness and sanity and beauty.

Gabrielle and myself became again closely knit together in sympathy. She had nursed me in my sickness, and she read to me in my convalescence, and then she told me of the harsh and repulsive life of the hospital; how its penury of grace afflicted her, and the physical destitution of the hideously sick had overcome her with an irrepressible repulsion, and the half savage nakedness of exposures and surgery had thrown her into momentary spasms of despairing melancholy. But she had not complained; it was the ordeal of preparation, she said; she had undergone extreme dread and misery of heart and mind, and, under the visitations of her distress, those ecstasies--as she now slowly and tearfully confessed--of desire to see the ghostly and immaterial had returned and strengthened, and to her had come visions and voices, and again and again in her prayers the apparent touch of fingers tracing the braid of her hair, or even smoothing the temples of her head had actually been felt.

None of these things were told to me by Gabrielle until I was effectually improved, and then they became the outpouring of her heart. She had been unwilling to speak of them to father and mother since they would have, beyond any question, regarded them as the symptoms of mental infirmity, and their solicitude might have readily taken the form of some new insistence upon the avocations of the city. Gabrielle, after the death of Blanchette had persisted in her refusal to return to the hospital in Paris, and, after a brief and a little unpleasant disagreement, mother and father permitted her to stay at home. Then came my sickness, when Gabrielle proved most useful, and then by a natural adjustment--for exactly as it had been in the old days of childhood we became inseparable--Gabrielle assumed domestic duties, and our home life was reinstituted and complete.

It was delightful, though the happiness it brought to me was a solemn tenderness of feeling and thought simply. I had brought back from America a small sum of uninvested funds, and when this was carefully invested, with the interest from the moneys held by me in America and with my father's maintenance, our living became, more than ever, free from anxieties, and comfortably luxurious. Nor were we careless of our duties to the less fortunate; the instruction of our parents had always laid emphasis upon the invincible demands of charity in the Christian life, and no one more thoughtfully than they furnished to us examples of its most admirable exercise.

Certainly to Gabrielle the Catholic symposium of saints, and its hierarchy of visible and invisible powers, appealed overwhelmingly. She surrendered to the full harvest of its supernatural offerings, with the gladness, the rapture, of the energumen. Now too that the psychiatric sense or control had started within her nature, she rose to the strange contingency of communication with the dead, with a transcendent joy. No longer thrust upon the abhorrent carnalities of the hospital, graciously as she acknowledged their necessity and kindness, Gabrielle, with me, her emotional companion too, returned to all the quietism of our life in St. Choiseul, and revelled in her exuberance of mystical detachment. It was a partial aberration of mind, I almost now think, despite its wondrous results, accompanied with the enthralled wonderment and pleasure of a temperament poetical and structurally imaginative. Gabrielle became neurotic. Her hospital life and its terrors had something to do with it.

It was probably about six months after Blanchette's death, that I ventured to speak to Gabrielle about the hope I almost treacherously nourished--for the practice is forbidden by the Church--that she might be able to summon Blanchette from the world of spirits. It was towards the evening of a spring day, that just began to intimate the glorious oncoming of the new season's wealth of beauty--a beauty I longed for, for with the reawakening earth, with the fresh laughter of the whole wide sphere of living things, I knew the dead weight of my grief would be lightened. The sunlight, the song of birds, the flowing vesture of the colored earth, would enter and dissolve it, and thus, mellowed into sadness only, it would encumber me no longer with leaden hopelessness. We were standing together at the bottom of the garden, watching the first sproutings of the crocus from beneath a film of sheltered snow, and the cheering warmth of the full sun filled us with the instincts of life. It opened my lips.

"Gabrielle," I said, "I want you to bring Blanchette back to me."

My sister was not surprised; she turned to me with the most natural gesture of willingness, placing her hands upon my shoulders and looking straight into my eyes.

"Oh! Gabrielle what has Blanchette said to you? Was it in words? Gabrielle, Gabrielle, it cannot be. Do not fool me with mere fancies."

"I do not fool you Alfred. Why should I? It is so simple and it is so true. See."

She left me, beckoning for me to follow her. She walked to a walnut tree, a low precarious sapling which had furtively pushed its way upward into some semblance of a tree, and leaned against its slender trunk, with her eyes pressed upon her crossed hands. I stood irresolute, half expectant, half miserably self-reproachful. Suddenly Gabrielle spoke. Her voice was itself strange, very distinct but chilled into a sepulchral gravity.

"It is all very dim, yellow and blue clouds float up and down, and here and there a figure moves, and there are voices, and now a great light--too bright--too bright--it shatters all!"

Her voice had risen to a tone louder than conversation, and she had raised her head with a quick upward movement, as if it had been jerked backward. Almost instantly she turned again to me, her face blanched, and her eyes just a little wild and strained, with no recognition in them. The oddness passed almost as quickly as it came, and Gabrielle smiled, and shook her head apologetically, and for one moment we watched each other with curiosity. But Gabrielle was quite herself, and coming close to me, she whispered:

"Brother, you do not know what you are asking me. It is impossible--it would rob me of life, for I should not know then whether to really live in this world and to die in the other, or to leave you and mother, and father and home here, and to live the more glorious life beyond. Now I live in both worlds. Yes truly--in the mornings the clouds of angels waken me, through the nights my bed-side is covered with the spread haloes of the dead, and in my ears sound the sweetest whispers, and salutations of the saints. Throughout the day, if I only shut my eyes, and ask for their appearing, the visions continue, and even my face is brushed by fairy hands, or my lips feel the imprint of unseen, unknown faces."

My sister's face shone with an interior illumination, impossible to describe, and as she talked to me I felt the astonishment that might come to one who converses with some incarnate spirit. It did appeal to my sympathy, for I lived now myself half immersed in the daily contemplation of another world; it met my own anticipations vividly, and I could not condemn, nor evade its fascination. But I wondered and so questioned her more closely.

We both got up and walked slowly towards the house.

"Of course you have said nothing of any of these things to mother or father?" I queried.

"Ah, Alfred, I could not. They would not understand, and then why--why should I?"

She was almost laughing now, and studying her attentively I could not see any of those symptoms in feature, or eyes, or voice, or manner, that betray to the alienist the disordered brain. Gabrielle never to me looked lovelier.

The next moment as we entered the hall-way I caught her arm and turned her abruptly to myself; "Gabrielle, show me Blanchette."

This language was the only indication, at the moment, that I possibly could have regarded as idiotic--in the common sense--and I was half inclined to believe that Gabrielle--not without fun and humour--meant to bewilder me with it, as a joke.

I think that I was not disinclined to live in it myself, but with me the material stringency of affairs was unmistakable, and I did, spasmodically at least, revolt against this extreme spiritualism. I hunted along my book-shelves, and found the Martian book, and chasing through its pages I stopped at this incomprehensible passage:

"For when the life of the body ceases and the body itself is burned and its ashes scattered to the winds and waves, the infinitesimal, imponderable, and indestructible something we call the soul is known to lose itself in a sunbeam and make for the sun, with all its memories about it, that it may then receive further development fitting it for other systems altogether beyond conception."

And then came the intolerable fancy of these Martian souls getting into the bodies of animals, and into men and women, and how the particular Martia influenced the divine Englishman, and made him write wonderful transforming books, and he thought of a life

"where arabesques of artificial light and interwoven curves of subtle sound had a significance undreamt of by mortal eyes or ears, and served as conductors to a heavenly bliss unknown to earth."

GABRIELLE'S SEANCE

It was only a few minutes later that, shaking off the dreary sluggishness of my grief, I started out of the house for a brisk walk. Down through the village, out into the broad highway towards Briois, where the Diligence from Paris then shot past me, with salutations shouted from its windows, and handkerchiefs waved from its Imperial and still on, along the fields growing verdant, while the warm tremulous air, with its procreative touch, unclasped the glutinous envelopes of the buds in the alders and poplars, and afar towards Bienne, and the ruined chateau, the massed background of the walled forests spanned the horizon with a palpitating purple haze, as of an arrested atmosphere or emanation, and in the very zenith above me a creamy rosiness, like an etherial colored lymph, dripped from cloudlet to cloudlet.

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