Complete weird tales of.., p.203
Complete Weird Tales of Robert W Chambers, page 203
“I was eager; people listened. I thought that if I had a little more money I might carry on this work.... I could not come to you, madame—”
“Why not?” said the Countess, looking at him quickly. “I have never refused you money!”
“No,” he said, “you never refused me. But I knew that La Trappe was mortgaged, that even this house in Morsbronn was loaded with debt. I knew, madame, that in all the world you had left but one small roof to cover you — the house in Morbihan, on Point Paradise. I knew that if I asked for money you would sell Paradise,... and I could not ask so much,... I could not bring myself to ask that sacrifice.”
“And so you stole the crucifix of Louis XI.,” I suggested, pleasantly.
He did not look at me, but the Countess did.
“Bon,” I thought, watching Buckhurst’s deft fingers; “he means to be taken back into grace. I wonder exactly why? And ... is it worth this fortune in diamonds to him to be pardoned by a penniless girl whom he and his gang have already stripped?”
“Could you forgive me, madame?” murmured Buckhurst.
“Would you explain that stick of dynamite first?” I interposed.
The Countess turned and looked directly at Buckhurst. He sat with humble head bowed, nimbly constructing a paper bird. 98
“That was not dynamite; it was concentrated phosphorus,” he said, without resentment. “Naturally it burned when you lighted it, but if you had not burned it I could easily have shown Madame la Comtesse what it really was.”
“I also,” said I, “if I had thrown it at your feet, Mr. Buckhurst.”
“Do you not believe me?” he asked, meekly, looking up at the Countess.
“Mr. Buckhurst,” said the young Countess, turning to me, “has aided me for a long time in experiments. We hoped to find some cheap method of restoring nitrogen and phosphorus to the worn-out soil which our poor peasants till. Why should you doubt that he speaks the truth? At least he is guiltless of any connection with the party which advocated violence.”
I looked at Buckhurst. He was engaged in constructing a multi-pointed paper star. What else was he busy with? Perhaps I might learn if I ceased to manifest distrust.
“Does concentrated phosphorus burn like dynamite?” I asked, as if with newly aroused interest.
“Did you not know it?” he said, warily.
But was he deceived by my manner? Was that the way for me to learn anything?
There was perhaps another way. Clearly this extraordinary man depended upon his persuasive eloquence for his living, for the very shoes on his little, flat feet, as do all such chevaliers of industry. If he would only begin to argue, if I could only induce him to try his eloquence on me, and if I could convince him that I myself was but an ignorant, self-centred, bullet-headed gendarme, doing my duty only because of perspective advancement, ready perhaps to take bribes — perhaps even weakly, covetously, credulous — well, perhaps I might possibly learn why he desired to cling to this poor young lady, whose life had evidently gone dreadfully to smash, to land her among such a coterie of thieves and lunatics.
“Mr. Buckhurst,” I said, pompously, “in bringing these diamonds to me you have certainly done all in your power to repair an injury which concerned all France.
“As I am situated, of course I cannot now ask you to accompany me to Paris, where doubtless the proper authorities would gladly admit extenuating circumstances, and credit you with a sincere repentance. But I put you on your honor to surrender at the first opportunity.”
It was as stupidly trite a speech as I could think of.
Buckhurst glanced up at me. Was he taking my measure anew, judging me from my bray?
“I could easily aid you to leave Morsbronn,” he said, stealthily.
“O-ho,” thought I, “so you’re a German agent, too, as I suspected.” But I said, aloud, simulating astonishment: “Do you mean to say, Mr. Buckhurst, that you would deliberately risk death to aid a police officer to bring you before a military tribunal in Paris?”
“I do not desire to pose as a hero or a martyr,” he said, quietly, “but I regret what I have done, and I will do what an honest man can do to make the fullest reparation — even if it means my death.”
I gazed at him in admiration — real admiration — because the gross bathos he had just uttered betrayed a weakness — vanity. Now I began to understand him; vanity must also lead him to undervalue men. True, with the faintest approach to eloquence he could no doubt hold the “Clubs” of Belleville spellbound; with self-effacing adroitness to cover stealthy persuasion, he had probably found little difficulty in dominating this inexperienced girl, who, touched to the soul with pity for human woe, had flung herself and her fortune to the howling proletariat.
But that he should so serenely undervalue me at my first bray was more than I hoped for. So I brayed again, the good, old, sentimental bray, for which all Gallic lungs are so marvellously fashioned:
“Monsieur, such sentiments honor you. I am only a rough soldier of the Imperial Police, but I am profoundly moved to find among the leaders of the proletariat such delicate and chivalrous emotions—” I hesitated. Was I buttering the sop too thickly?
Buckhurst, eyes bent on the floor, began picking to pieces his paper toy. Presently he looked up, not at me, but at the Countess, who sat with hands clasped earnestly watching him.
“If — if the state pardons me, can ... you?” he murmured.
She looked at him with intense earnestness. I saw he was sailing on the wrong tack.
“I have nothing to pardon,” she said, gravely. “But I must tell you the truth, Mr. Buckhurst, I cannot forget what you have done. It was something — the one thing that I cannot understand — that I can never understand — something so absolutely alien to me that it — somehow — leaves me stunned. Don’t ask me to forget it.... I cannot. I do not mean to be harsh and cruel, or to condemn you. Even if you had taken the jewels from me, and had asked my forgiveness, I would have given it freely. But I could not be as I was, a comrade to you.”
There was a silence. The Countess, looking perfectly miserable, still gazed at Buckhurst. He dropped his gray, symmetrical head, yet I felt that he was listening to every minute sound in the room.
“You must not care what I say,” she said. “I am only an unhappy woman, unused to the liberty I have given myself, not yet habituated to the charity of those blameless hearts which forgive everything! I am a novice, groping my way into a new and vast world, a limitless, generous, forgiving commune, where love alone dominates.... And if I had lived among my brothers long enough to be purged of those traditions which I have drawn from generations, I might now be noble enough and wise enough to say I do forgive and forget that you—”
“That you were once a thief,” I ended, with the genial officiousness of the hopelessly fat-minded.
In the stillness I heard Buckhurst draw in his breath — once. Some day he would try to kill me for that; in the mean time my crass stupidity was no longer a question in his mind. I had hurt the Countess, too, with what she must have believed a fool’s needless brutality. But it had to be so if I played at Jaques Bonhomme.
So I put the finishing whine to it— “Our Lord died between two thieves” — and relapsed into virtuous contemplation of my finger-tips.
“Madame,” said Buckhurst, in a low voice, “your contempt of me is part of my penalty. I must endure it. I shall not complain. But I shall try to live a life that will at least show you my deep sincerity.”
“I do not doubt it,” said the Countess, earnestly. “Don’t think that I mean to turn away from you or to push you away. There is nothing of the Pharisee in me. I would gladly trust you with what I have. I will consult you and advise with you, Mr. Buckhurst—”
“And ... despise me.”
The unhappy Countess looked at me. It goes hard with a woman when her guide and mentor falls.
“If you return to Paradise, in Morbihan,... as we had planned, may I go,” he asked, humbly, “only as an obscure worker in the cause? I beg, madame, that you will not cast me off.”
So he wanted to go to Morbihan — to the village of Paradise? Why?
The Countess said: “I welcome all who care for the cause. You will never hear an unkind word from me if you desire to resume the work in Paradise. Dr. Delmont will be there; Monsieur Tavernier also, I hope; and they are older and wiser than I, and they have reached that lofty serenity which is far above my troubled mind. Ask them what you have asked of me; they are equipped to answer you.”
It was time for another discord from me, so I said: “Madame, you have seen a thousand men lay down their lives for France. Has it not shaken your allegiance to that ghost of patriotism which you call the ‘Internationale’?”
Here was food for thought, or rather fodder for asses — the Police Oracle turned missionary under the nose of the most cunning criminal in France and the vainest. Of course Buckhurst’s contempt for me at once passed all bounds, and, secure in that contempt, he felt it scarcely worth while to use his favorite weapon — persuasion. Still, if the occasion should require it, he was quite ready, I knew, to loose his eloquence on the Countess, and on me too.
The Countess turned her troubled eyes to me.
“What I have seen, what I have thought since yesterday has distressed me dreadfully,” she said. “I have tried to include all the world in a broader pity, a broader, higher, and less selfish love than the jealous, single-minded love for one country—”
“The mother-land,” I said, and Buckhurst looked up, adding, “The world is the true mother-land.”
Whereupon I appeared profoundly impressed at such a novel and epigrammatic view. 103
“There is much to be argued on both sides,” said the young Countess, “but I am utterly unfitted to struggle with this new code of ethics. If it had been different — if I had been born among the poor, in misery! — But you see I come a pilgrim among the proletariat, clothed in conservatism, cloaked with tradition, and if at heart I burn with sorrow for the miserable, and if I gladly give what I have to help, I cannot with a single gesture throw off those inherited garments, though they tortured my body like the garment of Nessus.”
I did not smile or respect her less for the stilted phrases, the pathetic poverty of metaphor. Profoundly troubled, struggling with a reserve the borders of which she strove so bravely to cross, her distress touched me the more because I knew it aroused the uneasy contempt of Buckhurst. Yet I could not spare her.
“You saw the cuirassiers die in the street below,” I repeated, with the obstinacy of a limited intellect.
“Yes — and my heart went out to them,” she replied, with an emphasis that pleased me and startled Buckhurst.
Buckhurst began to speak, but I cut him short.
“Then, madame, if your heart went out to the soldiers of France, it went out to France, too!”
“Yes — to France,” she repeated, and I saw her lip begin to quiver.
“Wherein does love for France conflict with our creed, madame?” asked Buckhurst, gently. “It is only hate that we abjure.”
She turned her gray eyes on him. “I will tell you: in that dreadful moment when the cavalry of France cheered Death in his own awful presence, I loved them and their country — my country! — as I had never loved in all my life.... And I hated, too! I hated the men who butchered them — more! — I hated the country where the men came from; I hated race and country and the blows they dealt, and the evil they wrought on France — my France! That is the truth; and I realize it!”
There was a silence; Buckhurst slowly unrolled the wrinkled paper he had been fingering.
“And now?” he asked, simply.
“Now?” she repeated. “I don’t know — truly, I do not know.” She turned to me sorrowfully. “I had long since thought that my heart was clean of hate, and now I don’t know.” And, to Buckhurst, again: “Our creed teaches us that war is vile — a savage betrayal of humanity by a few dominant minds; a dishonorable ingratitude to God and country. But from that window I saw men die for honor of France with God’s name on their lips. I saw one superb cuirassier, trapped down there in the street, sit still on his horse, while they shot at him from every window, and I heard him call up to a Prussian officer who had just fired at him: ‘My friend, you waste powder; the heart of France is cuirassed by a million more like me!’” A rich flush touched her face; her gray eyes grew brighter.
“Is there a Frenchwoman alive whose blood would not stir at such a scene?” she said. “They shot him through his armor, his breastplate was riddled, he clung to his horse, always looking up at the riflemen, and I heard the bullets drumming on his helmet and his cuirass like hailstones on a tin roof, and I could not look away. And all the while he was saying, quietly: ‘It is quite useless, friends; France lives! You waste your powder!’ and I could not look away or close my eyes—”
She bent her head, shivering, and her interlocked fingers whitened. 105
“I only know this,” she said: “I will give all I have — I will give my poor self to help the advent of that world-wide brotherhood which must efface national frontiers and end all war in this sad world. But if you ask me, in the presence of war, to look on with impartiality, to watch my own country battling for breath, to stop my ears when a wounded mother-land is calling, to answer the supreme cry of France with a passionless cry, ‘Repent!’ I cannot do it — I will not! I was not born to!”
Deeply moved, she had risen, confronting Buckhurst, whose stone-cold eyes were fixed on her.
“You say I hold you unworthy,” she said. “Others may hold me, too, unworthy because I have not reached that impartial equipoise whence, impassive, I can balance my native land against its sins and watch blind justice deal with it all unconcerned.
“In theory I have done it — oh, it is simple to teach one’s soul in theory! But when my eyes saw my own land blacken and shrivel like a green leaf in the fire, and when with my own eyes I saw the best, the noblest, the crown of my country’s chivalry fall rolling in the mud of Morsbronn under the feet of Prussia, every drop of blood in my body was French — hot and red and French! And it is now; and it will always be — as it has always been, though I did not understand.”
After a silence Buckhurst said: “All that may be, madame, yet not impair your creed.”
“What!” she said, “does not hatred of the stranger impair my creed?”
“It will die out and give place to reason.”
“When? When I attain the lofty, dispassionate level I have never attained? That will not be while this war endures.”
“Who knows?” said Buckhurst, gently. 106
“I know!” replied the Countess, the pale flames in her cheeks deepening again.
“And yet,” observed Buckhurst, patiently, “you are going to Paradise to work for the Internationale.”
“I shall try to do my work and love France,” she said, steadily. “I cannot believe that one renders the other impossible.”
“Yet,” said I, “if you teach the nation non-resistance, what would become of the armies of France?”
“I shall not teach non-resistance until we are at peace,” she said— “until there is not a German soldier left in France. After that I shall teach acquiescence and personal liberty.”
I looked at her very seriously; logic had no dwelling-place within her tender and unhappy heart.
And what a hunting-ground was that heart for men like Buckhurst! I could begin to read that mouse-colored gentleman now, to follow, after a fashion, the intricate policy which his insolent mind was shaping — shaping in stealthy contempt for me and for this young girl. Thus far I could divine the thoughts of Mr. Buckhurst, but there were other matters to account for. Why did he choose to spare my life when a word would have sent me before the peloton of execution? Why had he brought to me the fortune in diamonds which he had stolen? Why did he eat humble-pie before a young girl from whom he and his companions had wrung the last penny? Why did he desire to go to Morbihan and be received among the elect in the Breton village of Paradise?
I said, abruptly: “So you are not going to denounce me to the Prussian provost?”
He lifted his well-shaped head and gazed at the Countess with an admirable pathos which seemed a mute appeal for protection from brutality.
“That question is a needless one,” said the Countess, quietly. “It was a cruel one, also, Monsieur Scarlett.”
“I did not mean it as an offensive question,” said I. “I was merely reciting a fact, most creditable to Mr. Buckhurst. Mon Dieu, madame, I am an officer of Imperial Police, and I have lived to hear blunt questions and blunter answers. And if it be true that Monsieur Buckhurst desires to atone for — for what has happened, then it is perfectly proper for me, even as a prisoner myself, to speak plainly.”
I meant this time to thoroughly convince Buckhurst of my ability to gabble platitude. My desire that he should view me as a typical gendarme was intense.
So I coughed solemnly behind my hand, knit my eyebrows, and laid one finger alongside of my nose.
“Is it not my duty, as a guardian of national interests, to point out to Mr. Buckhurst his honest errors? Certainly it is, madame, and this is the proper time.”
Turning pompously to Buckhurst, I fancied I could almost detect a sneer on that inexpressive mask he wore — at least I hoped I could, and I said, heavily:
“Monsieur, for a number of years there has passed under our eyes here in France certain strange phenomena. Thousands of Frenchmen have, so to speak, separated themselves from the rest of the nation.
“All the sentiments that the nation honors itself by professing these other Frenchmen rebuke — the love of country, public spirit, accord between citizens, social repose, and respect for communal law and order — these other Frenchmen regard as the hallucinations of a nation of dupes.
“Separated by such unfortunate ideas from the nation within whose boundaries they live, they continue to abuse, even to threaten, the society and the country which gives them shelter.
“France is only a name to them; they were born there, they live there, they derive their nourishment from her without gratitude. But France is nothing to them; their mother-land is the Internationale!”
