I hurried to the rescue, and together we walked up to the bishop. Off came Mr. Beckett"s hat; and both officers saluted us. One was a general, the other a colonel.
If I"d had time to rehea.r.s.e, I might have done myself some credit. As it was, I stammered out some sort of explanation and introduced Jim"s father.
"I remember young Monsieur Beckett," the bishop said. "He was not one to be forgotten! Besides, he was generous to Meaux. He left a n.o.ble present for our poor. And now, you say, he has given his life for France? What is there I can do to prove our grat.i.tude? You have come to Meaux because of his letters? Wait a few minutes, till these brave messieurs have gone, and I myself will show you the cathedral. Oh, you need not fear!
It will be a pleasure."
He was as good as his word, and better. Not only did he show the splendid Gothic cathedral, pride of the "fair ile-de-France," but the bishop"s house as well. Bossuet had lived there, the most famous bishop Meaux had in the past. It was dramatic to enter his study, guided by the most famous bishop of the present; to see in such company the room where Bossuet penned his denunciation of the Protestants, and then the long avenue of yews where he used to walk in search of inspiration. We saw his tomb, too--in the cathedral (yes, I believe Brian saw it more clearly than we!), one of those grand tombs they gave prelates in the days of Louis XIV: and when the Becketts had followed Jim"s example in generosity, we bade adieu to the--oh, _ever_ so much kindlier heir of the great controversialist. I"m afraid, to tell the truth, the little old lady cared more to know that her Jim"s favourite cheese--Brie--was made in Meaux, than anything else in the town"s history. Nevertheless, she listened with a charmed air to Brian"s story of Meaux"s great romance--as she listens to all Brian"s stories. It was you, Padre, who told it to Brian, and to me, one winter night when we"d been reading about Gaston, de Foix, "Gaston le Bel." Our talk of his exploits brought us to Meaux, at the time of the Jacquerie, in the twelfth century. The common people had revolted against the n.o.bles who oppressed them, and all the ile-de-France--adorable name!--seethed with civil war.
In Meaux was the d.u.c.h.ess of Orleans, with three hundred great ladies, most of them beautiful and young. The peasants besieged the d.u.c.h.ess there, and she and her lovely companions were put to sore straits, when suddenly arrived brave Gaston to save them. I don"t quite know why he took the trouble to come so far, from his hill-castle near the Spanish frontier, but most likely he loved one of the shut-up ladies. Or perhaps it was simply for love of all womanhood, since Gaston was so chivalrous that Froissart said, "I never saw one like him of personage, nor of so fair form, nor so well made."
From Meaux our road (we were going to make Nancy our centre and stopping place) followed the windings of the green ribbon Marne to Chateau-Thierry, on the river"s right bank. There"s a rather thrilling ruin, that gave the town its name, and dominates it still--the ruin of a castle which Charles Martel built for a young King Thierry. The legend says that this boy differed from the wicked kings Thierry, sons and grandsons of the Frankish Clovis; that he wanted to be good, but "Fate"
would not let him. Perhaps it"s a judgment on those terrible Thierry kings, who left to their enemies only the earth round their habitations--"because it couldn"t be carried away"--that the Germans have left ruins in Chateau-Thierry more cruel than those of the crumbling castle. In seven September days they added more _monuments historiques_ than a thousand years had given the ancient Marne city.
Jim Beckett had written his mother all about the town, and sent postcard pictures of its pride, the fortress-like, fifteenth-century church with a vast tower set upon a height. He liked Chateau-Thierry because Jean de la Fontaine was born there, and called it "a peaceful-looking place, just right for the dear fable-maker, who was so child-like and sweet-natured, that he deserved always to be happy, instead of for ever in somebody"s debt." A soldier having seen the wasted country at the front, might still describe Chateau-Thierry as a "peaceful-looking place." But it was the first glimpse the Becketts had had of war"s abominable destruction. I took up nursing in the south of France before the Zeppelins made much visible impression on London; and as I volunteered for a "contagious" hospital, I"ve lived an isolated life far from all horrors save those in my own ward, and the few I saw when I went to nurse Brian. Perhaps it was well for us to begin with Chateau-Thierry, whose gaping wounds are not mortal, and to miss tragic Varreddes. Had Sermaize-les-Bains, which burst upon us later, been our first experience, the shock might have been too great for Mrs. Beckett.
As it was, we worked slowly to the climax. Yet even so, we travelled on with a hideous mirage of broken homes, of intimacies brutally laid bare, floating between the landscape and our eyes. We could not get rid of this mirage, could not brush it away, though the country was friendly and fair of face as a child playing in a waterside meadow. The crudely new bridges that crossed the Marne were the only open confessions of what the river had suffered. But the Marne spirit had known wars enough to learn "how sweet it is to live, forgetting." With her bits of villages scattered like strewn flowers on her green flood, she floats in a dream of her adventurous past and the glorious future which she has helped to win for France.
It was hard to realize that the tiny island villages and hamlets on the level sh.o.r.es had seen the Germans come and go; that under the gray roofs--furry-soft as the backs of Maltese cats--hearts had beaten in agony of fear; that along the white road, with its double row of straight trees like an endless army on parade, weeping fugitives had fled.
We were not aiming to reach Nancy that night, so we paused at epernay.
The enemy behaved better there than in most Marne towns, perhaps because Wagner once lived in it, or, more likely, under the soothing influence of epernay"s champagne, which has warmed the c.o.c.kles of men"s hearts since a bishop of the ninth century made it famous by his praise.
Nevertheless, there are ruins to see, for the town was bombarded by the Germans after they were turned out. All the quarter of the rich was laid waste: and the vast "Fabrique de Champagne" of Mercier, with its ornamental frieze of city names, is silent to this day, its proud facade of windows broken. Not a big building of the town, not a neighbouring chateau of a "Champagne baron" has a whole window-pane visible, though three years have rolled on since the cannonading did its work! Nowadays gla.s.s is as dear as diamonds in France, and harder to get.
Outside Champagnopolis, in the wide wooden village of hospital huts, a doctor told us a war ghost story. One night the Germans made a great haul of champagne, of a good year, in a castle near by. They had knocked off the heads of many bottles, naming each for a French general of yesterday or to-day, when some officer who knew more history than the rest remembered that Henri IV had taken epernay in 1592. He named his bottle for Henri de Navarre, and harangued his comrades on the superiority of Wilhelm von Hohenzollern. As the speechmaker cracked the neck with his sword, the bottle burst in a thousand pieces, drenching everyone with wine. A bit of gla.s.s struck the electric lamp over the table, and out went the light. For an instant the room was black. Then a white ray flickered on the wall, as if thrown through the window by a searchlight. Out of its glimmer stepped a man, with a long, laughing face and a pointed beard. Round his neck was a high ruff. He wore a doublet of velvet, and shining silk hose. In his hand was a silver goblet, frothing over the top with champagne. "He drinks best who drinks last!" cried he in French, and flung the goblet at the face of him who named the bottle. At the same second there was a great explosion, and only one soldier escaped; he who told the story.
Think, Padre, it was near Chalons that Attila was defeated, and forced to fly from France for ever! I ought to say, Attila the first, since the self-named Attila II hasn"t yet been beaten back beyond the Rhine.
We--you, and Brian and I--used to have excited arguments about reincarnation. You know now which of us was right! But I cling to the theory of the spiral, in evolution of the soul--the soul of a man or the soul of the world. It satisfies my sense of justice and my reason both, to believe that we must progress, being made for progression; but that we evolve upward slowly, with a spiral motion which brings us at certain periods, as we rise, directly above the last earth-phase in our evolution. If it"s true, here, after nearly thirteen centuries, are the Huns overrunning Europe once more. Learned Huns, scientific Huns, but always Huns, repeating history on a higher scale, barbarously bent on pulling down the liberty of the world by the power of brute force. Again they"re destined to be conquered as before, at a far bigger price. What will the next turn of their spiral bring, I wonder? A vast battle of intellect, perhaps, when wars of blood have been forgotten. And I wonder, too, where has Attila been, since he was beaten in this Champagne country of the Marne, and died two years later at his wedding-feast in Hungary!
Did he appear in our world again, in the form of some great, cruel general or king, or did his soul rest until it was reincarnated in the form that claims his name to-day?
I could scarcely concentrate upon Chalons, though it"s a n.o.ble town, crowded with grand old buildings. My mind was busily travelling back, back into history, as Peter Ibbetson travelled in his prison-dreams. It didn"t stop on its way to see the city capitulate to the Allies in 1814, just one hundred years before the great new meaning came into that word "allies." I ran past the brave fifteenth-century days, when the English used to attack Chalons-sur-Marne, hoping to keep their hold on France. I didn"t even pause for Saint-Bernard, preaching the Crusade in the gorgeous presence of Louis VII and his knights. It was Attila who lured me down, down into his century, buried deep under the sands of Time. I heard the ring of George Meredith"s words: "Attila, my Attila!" But I saw the wild warrior Attila, fighting in Champagne, not the dead man adjured by Ildico, his bride. I saw him "short, swarthy, broad-chested,"
in his crude armour, his large head, "early gray," lifted like a wolf"s at bay. I saw his fierce, ugly face with its snub nose and little, deep-set eyes, flushed in the fury of defeat as he ordered the famous screen of chariots to be piled up between him and the Romano-Gauls. I saw him and his men profiting by the strange barrier, and the enemy"s exhaustion, to escape beyond the Rhine, with eyes yearning toward the country they were to see no more.
History calls that battle "one of the decisive battles of the world,"
yet it lasted only a day, and engaged from a hundred and seventy-four thousand to three hundred thousand men. Oh, the spiral of battles has climbed high since then!
I think I should have had a presentiment of the war if I"d lived at Chalons, proud city of twenty-two bridges and the Ca.n.a.l Rhine-Marne. The water on stormy days must have whispered, "They are coming. Take care!"
At Vitry-le-Francois there is also that same sinister ca.n.a.l which leads from the Marne to the Rhine, the Rhine to the Marne. The name has a wicked sound in these days--Rhine-Marne; and at Vitry-le-Francois of all places. The men from over the Rhine destroyed as much as they had time to destroy of the charming old town planned by Francis I, and named for him. All the villages round about the new Huns broke to pieces, like the toy towns of children: Revigny, sprayed from hand pumps with petrol, and burnt to the ground: Sermaize-les-Bains, loved by Romans and Saracens, obliterated; women drowned in the river by laughing German soldiers, deep down under yellow water-lilies, which mark their resting place to-day: everywhere, through the fields and forests, low wooden crosses in the midst of little votive gardens, telling their silent tale.
Ah, but it is good that Mother Beckett saw Chateau-Thierry first, or she might have covered her eyes and begged to go back to Paris! Here all speaks of death and desolation, save the busy little hut-villages of the Quakers. The "Friends" quietly began their labour of love before the Battle of the Marne was ended, and they"re "carrying on" still. The French translate them affectionately into "_les Amis_."
It was at Bar-le-Duc that I met disaster face to face in so strange a way that it needs a whole letter to tell you what happened.
CHAPTER VIII
There were so many things to see by the way, and so many thoughts to think about them, that Father Beckett and Brian decided on an all night stop at Bar-le-Duc. The town hadn"t had an air raid for weeks, and it looked a port of peace. As well imagine enemy aeroplanes over the barley-sugar house of the witch in the enchanted forest, as over this comfortable home of jam-makers!
"Jim always asked for currant jam of Bar-le-Duc on his birthdays, ever since he was a little, little boy," Mrs. Beckett remembered aloud. "And even when he was grown up! But then, he wouldn"t wait for birthdays. He wanted it every day for breakfast; and for tea at those grand New York hotels, where I wouldn"t go without him, any sooner than in a lion"s den. Oh, it will be nice to stay at Bar-le-Duc! If there"s been a jam factory blown up, we"ll help build it again, to please Jim."
Father Beckett was shrewdly of opinion that the jam factories could take care of themselves, which rather disappointed his wife. She was vaguely disappointed too, in Bar-le-Duc. I think she expected to smell a ravishing fragrance of Jim"s favourite _confiture_ as we entered the town. It had been a tiring day for her, with all our stops and sightseeing, and she had less appet.i.te for history than for jam. We had pa.s.sed through lovely country since Chalons, decorated with beautiful tall trees, high box hedges, and distant, rolling downs golden with grain and sunlight. Also, whenever our road drew near the railway, we"d caught exciting glimpses of long trains "camouflaged" in blurry greens and blues, to hide themselves from aeroplanes. Nevertheless, Mother Beckett had begun to droop. Her blue eyes hardly brightened to interest when Brian said we were in the famous region of the Meuse, part of the Austrian Empire in Charlemagne"s day: that somewhere hereabout Wittekind, the enslaved Saxon, used to work "on the land," not dreaming of the kingly house of Capet he was to found for France, and that Bar-le-Duc itself would be our starting-point for Verdun, after Nancy and the "Lorraine Front."
For her Bar-le-Duc had always represented jam, endless jam, loved by Jim, and talk of the dukes of Bar brought no thrill to Jim"s mother. She cared more to see the two largest elms in France of which Jim had written, than any ruins of ducal dwellings or tombs of Lorraine princes, or even the house where Charles-Edouard the Pretender lived for years.
Fortunately there was a decent hotel, vaguely open in the upper town on the hill, with a view over the small tributary river Ornain, on which the capital city of the Meuse is built. One saw the Rhine-Marne Ca.n.a.l, too, and the picturesque roofs of old fifteenth-century houses, huddled together in lower Bar-le-Duc, shut in among the vine-draped valleys of Champagne.
As we left the car and went into the hotel (I lingering behind to help Brian) I noticed another car behind us. It was more like a taxi-cab than a brave, free-born automobile, but it had evidently come a long way, as it was covered with dust, and from its rather ramshackle roof waved a Red Cross flag.
In the good days before the war I should have thought it the most natural thing on earth if a procession of twenty motors had trailed us.
But war has put an end to joy-rides. Besides, since the outskirts of Paris, we had been in the _zone de guerre_, constantly stopped and stared at by sentinels. The only cars we pa.s.sed, going east or west, were occupied by officers, or crowded with _poilus_, therefore the shabby little taxi became of almost startling interest. I looked back, and saw that it was slowing down close behind our imposing auto, from which a few small pieces of luggage for the night were being removed.
The Red Cross travellers were evidently impatient. They did not wait for our chauffeur to drive away. The conductor of the car jumped down and opened the door of his nondescript vehicle. I made out, under a thick coat of dust, that he wore khaki of some sort, and a cap of military shape which might be anything from British to Belgian. He gave a hand to a woman in the car--a woman in nurse"s dress. A thick veil covered her face, but her figure was girlish. I noticed that she was extremely small and slim in her long, dust-dimmed blue cloak: a mere doll of a creature.
The man"s back was turned toward me as he aided the nurse; but suddenly he flung a glance over his shoulder, and stared straight at me, as if he had expected to find me there.
He was rather short, and too squarely built for his age, which might be twenty-eight or thirty at most; but his great dark eyes were splendid, so gorgeously bright and significant that they held mine for a second or two. This vexed me, and I turned away with as haughty an air as could be put on at an instant"s notice.
The hotel had no private sitting rooms, but the landlord offered Mr.
Beckett for our use a small _salle de lecture_, adjourning the _salon public_. There were folding doors between, for a wonder with a lock that worked. By the time we"d bathed, and dressed again, it was the hour for dinner, and Mr. Beckett suggested dining in our own "parlour," as he called it.
The landlord himself brought a menu, which Mother Beckett accepted indifferently up to the entremets "_omelette au rhum_." This she wished changed for something--anything--made with Jim"s favourite jam. "He would want us to eat it at Bar-le-Duc," she said, with her air of taking Jim"s nearness and interest in our smallest acts for granted.
So "_omelette a la confiture de groseilles_" was ordered; and just as we had come to the end of it and our meal, some one began to play the piano in the public drawing room next door. At the first touch, I recognized a master hand. The air was from Puccini"s "La Tosca"--third act, and a moment later a man"s voice caught it up--a voice of velvet, a voice of the heart--an Italian voice.
We all stopped eating as if we"d been struck by a spell. We hardly breathed. The music had in it the honey of a million flowers distilled into a crystal cup. It was so sweet that it hurt--hurt horribly and deliciously, as only Italian music can hurt. Other men sing with their brains, with their souls, but Italians sing with their blood, their veins, the core of their hearts. They _are_ their songs, as larks are.
The voice brought Jim to me, and s.n.a.t.c.hed him away again. It set him far off at a hopeless distance, across steep purple chasms of dreamland. It dragged my heart out, and then poured it full, full of an unknown elixir of life and love, which was mine, yet out of reach forever. It showed me my past hopes and future sorrows floating on the current of my own blood like ships of a secret argosy sailing through the night to some unknown goal. So now, when I have told you what it did to me, you will know that voice was like no voice I ever heard, except Caruso"s. It _was_ like his--astonishingly like; and hardly had the last note of "Mario"s" song of love and death dropped into silence when the singer began anew with one of Caruso"s own Neapolitan folk-songs, "Mama Mia."
I had forgotten Mother and Father Beckett--even Brian--everyone except my lost Jim Wyndham and myself. But suddenly a touch on my hand made me start. The little old lady"s, small, cool fingers were on mine, "My daughter, what do the words mean?" she asked. "What is that boy saying to his mama?" Her eyes were blue lakes of unshed tears, for the thought of her son knocked at her heart.
"It isn"t a boy who sings, dear," I said. "It"s supposed to be a young man who tries to tell his mother all about his love, but it is too big for any words he can find. He says she must remember how she felt herself when she was in love, and then she will understand what"s in his heart."
"Oh, it"s wonderful!" she whispered. "How _young_ it sounds! Can it be a _man_ singing? It seems too beautiful for anything but a gramophone!"
We broke out laughing, and the little lady blushed in shame. "I mean, it"s like one of the great singers they make records of," she explained.
"There, he"s stopped. Oh, James, don"t let him go! We _must_ hear him again. Couldn"t you go next door and thank him? Couldn"t you beg him to sing some more?"
An Englishman would sooner have died a painful death then obey; but, unabashed, the American husband flung wide open the folding doors.
At the piano sat the short, square-built young man of the Red Cross taxi. Leaning with both elbows on the instrument stood the doll-like figure of his companion, the girl in nurse"s dress. His back and her profile were turned our way, but at the sound of the opening door he wheeled on the stool, and both stared at Mr. Beckett. Also they stared past him at me. Why at me, and not the others, I could never have guessed then.
Our little room was lit by red-shaded candles on the table, while the _salon_ adjoining blazed with electricity. As the doors opened, it was like the effect of a flashlight for a photograph. I saw that the man and the girl resembled each other in feature; nevertheless, there was a striking difference between the two. It wasn"t only that he was squarely built, with a short throat, and a head shaped like Caruso"s, whereas she was slight, with a small, high-held head on a slender neck. The chief difference lay in expression. The man--who now looked younger than I had thought--had a dark, laughing face, gay and defiant as a Neapolitan street boy. It might be evil, it might be good. The girl, who could be no more than twenty, was sullen in her beauty as a thundercloud.
The singer jumped up, and took a few steps forward, while the girl stood still and gloomed.