Complete weird tales of.., p.937
Complete Weird Tales of Robert W Chambers, page 937
She sighed unconsciously.
“It is lonely in the Wood of Aulnes,” she said.
“Indeed it must be very lonely here,” he returned in a low voice.
“Yes.... Aulnes Wood is — too remote for them to send our wounded here for their convalescence. I offered Aulnes. Then I offered myself, saying that I was ready to go anywhere if I might be of use. It seems there are already too many volunteers. They take only the trained in hospitals. I am untrained, and they have no leisure to teach ... nobody wanted me.”
She turned and gazed dreamily at the forest.
“So there is nothing for me to do,” she said, “except to remain here and sew for the hospitals.” ... She looked out thoughtfully across the fern-grown carrefour: “Therefore I sew all day by the latticed window there — all day long, day after day — and when one is young and when there is nobody — nothing to look at except the curlew flying — nothing to hear except the vanneaux, and the clocks striking the hour — —”
Her voice had altered subtly, but she lifted her proud little head and smiled, and her tone grew firm again:
“You see, Monsieur, I am truly becoming a trifle morbid. It is entirely physical; my heart is quite undaunted.”
“You heart, Madame, is but a part of the great, undaunted heart of France.”
“Yes ... therefore there could be no fear — no doubt of God.... Affairs go well with France, Monsieur? — may I ask without military impropriety?”
“France, as always, faces her destiny, Madame. And her destiny is victory and light.”
“Surely ... I knew; only I had heard nothing for so long.... Thank you, Monsieur.”
He said quietly: “The Light shall break. We must not doubt it, we English. Nor can you doubt the ultimate end of this vast and hellish Darkness which has been let loose upon the world to assail it. You shall live to see light, Madame — and I also shall see it — perhaps — —”
She looked up at the young man, met his eyes, and looked elsewhere, gravely. A slight flush lingered on her cheeks.
On the doorstep of the house they paused. “Is it possible,” she asked, “that an enemy aëroplane could land in the Aulnes Étang? — L’Étang aux Vanneaux?”
“In the Étang?” he repeated, a little startled. “How large is it, this Étang aux Vanneaux?”
“It is a lake. It is perhaps a mile long and three-quarters of a mile across. My old servant, Anne, had seen the werewolf in the reeds — like a man without a face — and only two great eyes—” She forced a pale smile. “Of course, if it were anything she saw, it was a real man.... And, airmen dress that way.... I wondered — —”
He stood looking at her absently, worrying his short mustache.
“One of the rumours we have heard,” he began, “concerns a supposed invasion by a huge fleet of German battle-planes of enormous dimensions — a new biplane type which is steered from the bridge like an ocean steamer.
“It is supposed to be three or four times as large as their usual Albatross type, with a vast cruising radius, immense capacity for lifting, and powerful enough to carry a great weight of armour, equipment, munitions, and a very large crew.
“And the most disturbing thing about it is that it is said to be as noiseless as a high-class automobile.”
“Has such an one been seen in Brittany?”
“Such a machine has been reported — many, many times — as though not one but hundreds were in Finistère. And, what is very disquieting to us — a report has arrived from a distant and totally independent source — from Sweden — that air-crafts of this general type have been secretly built in Germany by the hundreds.”
After a moment’s silence she stepped into the house; he followed.
The great, bare, grey rooms were in keeping with the grey exterior; age had more than softened and coördinated the ancient furnishings, it had rendered them colourless, without accent, making the place empty and monotonous.
Her chair and workbasket stood by a latticed window; she seated herself and took up her sewing, watching him where he stood before the fireplace fussing over a little mantel clock — a gilt and ebony affair of the consulate, shaped like a lyre, the pendulum being also the clock itself and containing the works, bell and dial.
When he had adjusted it to his satisfaction he tested it. It still struck five. He continued to fuss over it for half an hour, testing it at intervals, but it always struck five times, and finally he gave up his attempts with a shrug of annoyance.
“I can’t do anything with it,” he admitted, smiling cheerfully across the room at her; “is there another clock on this floor?”
She directed him; he went into an adjoining room where, on the mantel, a modern enamelled clock was ticking busily. But after a little while he gave up his tinkering; he could do nothing with it; the bell persistently struck five. He returned to where she sat sewing, admitting failure with a perplexed and uneasy smile; and she rose and accompanied him through the house, where he tried, in turn, every one of the other clocks.
When, at length, he realized that he could accomplish nothing by altering their striking mechanism — that every clock in the house persisted in striking five times no matter where the hands were pointing, a sudden, odd, and inward rage possessed him to hurl the clocks at the wall and stamp the last vestiges of mechanism out of them.
As they returned together through the hushed and dusky house, he caught glimpses of faded and depressing tapestries; of vast, tarnished mirrors, through the dim depths of which their passing figures moved like ghosts; of rusted stands of arms, and armoured lay figures where cobwebs clotted the slitted visors and the frail tatters of ancient faded banners drooped.
And he understood why any woman might believe in strange inexplicable things here in the haunting stillness of this house where splendour had turned to mould — where form had become effaced and colour dimmed; where only the shadowy film of texture still remained, and where even that was slowly yielding — under the attacks of Time’s relentless mercenaries, moth and dust and rust.
CHAPTER X
THE GHOULS
THEY DINED BY the latticed window; two candles lighted them; old Anne served them — old Anne of Fäouette in her wide white coiffe and collarette, her velvet bodice and her chaussons broidered with the rose.
Always she talked as she moved about with dish and salver — garrulous, deaf, and aged, and perhaps flushed with the gentle afterglow of that second infancy which comes before the night.
“Ouidame! It is I, Anne Le Bihan, who tell you this, my pretty gentleman. I have lived through eighty years and I have seen life begin and end in the Woods of Aulnes — alas! — in the Woods and the House of Aulnes — —”
“The red wine, Anne,” said her mistress, gently.
“Madame the Countess is served.... These grapes grew when I was young, Monsieur — and the world was young, too, mon Capitaine — hélas! — but the Woods of Aulnes were old, old as the headland yonder. Only the sea is older, beau jeune homme — only the sea is older — the sea which always was and will be.”
“Madame,” he said, turning toward the young girl beside him, “ — to France! — I have the honour—” She touched her glass to his and they saluted France with the ancient wine of France — a sip, a faint smile, and silence through which their eyes still lingered for a moment.
“This year is yielding a bitter vintage,” he said. “Light is lacking. But — but there will be sun enough another year.”
“Yes.”
“B’en oui! The sun must shine again,” muttered old Anne, “but not in the Woods of Aulnes. Non pas. There is no sunlight in the Woods of Aulnes where all is dim and still; where the Blessed walk at dawn with Our Lady of Aulnes in shining vestments all — —”
“She has seen thin mists rising there,” whispered the Countess in his ear.
“In shining robes of grace — oui-da! — the martyrs and the acolytes of God. It is I who tell you, beau jeune homme — I, Anne of Fäouette. I saw them pass where, on my two knees, I gathered orange mushrooms by the brook! I heard them singing prettily and loud, hymns of our blessed Lady — —”
“She heard a throstle singing by the brook,” whispered the châtelaine of Aulnes. Her breath was delicately fragrant on his cheek.
Against the grey dusk at the window she looked to him like a slim spirit returned to haunt the halls of Aulnes — some graceful shade come back out of the hazy and forgotten years of gallantry and courts and battles — the exquisite apparation of that golden time before the Vendée drowned and washed it out in blood.
“I am so glad you came,” she said. “I have not felt so calm, so confident, in months.”
Old Anne of Fäouette laid them fresh napkins and set two crystal bowls beside them and filled the bowls with fresh water from the moat.
“Ho fois!” she said, “love and the heart may change, but not the Woods of Aulnes; they never change — they never change.... The golden people of Ker-Ys come out of the sea to walk among the trees.”
The Countess whispered: “She has seen the sunbeams slanting through the trees.”
“Vrai, c’est moi, Anne Le Bihan, qui vous dites cela, mon Capitaine! And, in the Woods of Aulnes the werewolf prowls. I have seen him, gallant gentleman. He walks upright, and, in his head, he has only eyes; no mouth, no teeth, no nostrils, and no hair — the Loup-Garou! — O Lady of Aulnes, adored and blessed, protect us from the Loup-Barou!”
The Countess said again to him: “I have not felt so confident, so content, so full of faith in months — —”
A far faint clamour came to their ears; high in the fading sky above the forest vast clouds of wild fowl rose like smoke, whirling, circling, swinging wide, drifting against the dying light of day, southward toward the sea.
“There is something wrong there,” he said, under his breath.
Minute after minute they watched in silence. The last misty shred of wild fowl floated seaward and was lost against the clouds.
“Is there a path to the Étang?” he asked quietly.
“Yes. I will go with you — —”
“No.”
“Why?”
“No. Show me the path.”
His shotgun stood by the door; he took it with him as he left the house beside her. In the moat, close by the bridge, and pointing toward the house, L’Ombre lay motionless. They saw it as they passed, but did not speak of it to each other. At the forest’s edge he halted: “Is this the path?”
“Yes.... May I not go?”
“No — please.”
“Is there danger?”
“No.... I don’t know if there is any danger.”
“Will you be cautious, then?”
He turned and looked at her in the dim light. Standing so for a little while they remained silent. Then he drew a deep, quiet breath. She held out one hand, slowly; half way he bent and touched her fingers with his lips; released them. Her arm fell listlessly at her side.
After he had been gone a long while, she turned away, moving with head lowered. At the bridge she waited for him.
A red moon rose low in the east. It became golden above the trees, paler higher, and deathly white in mid-heaven.
It was long after midnight when she went into the house to light fresh candles. In the intense darkness before dawn she lighted two more and set them in an upper window on the chance that they might guide him back.
At five in the morning every clock struck five.
She was not asleep; she was lying on a lounge beside the burning candles, listening, when the door below burst open and there came the trampling rush of feet, the sound of blows, a fall ——
A loud voice cried:— “Because you are armed and not in uniform! — you British swine!” —
And the pistol shots crashed through the house.
On the stairs she swayed for an instant, grasped blindly at the rail. Through the floating smoke below the dead man lay there by the latticed window — where they had sat together — he and she ——
Spectres were flitting to and fro — grey shapes without faces — things with eyes. A loud voice dinned in her ears, beat savagely upon her shrinking brain:
“You there on the stairs! — do you hear? What are those candles? Signals?”
She looked down at the dead man.
“Yes,” she said.
Through the crackling racket of the fusillade, down, down into roaring darkness she fell.
After a few moments her slim hand moved, closed over the dead man’s. And moved no more.
In the moat L’Ombre still remained, unstirring; old Anne lay in the kitchen dying; and the Wood of Aulnes was swarming with ghastly shapes which had no faces, only eyes.
CHAPTER XI
THE SEED OF DEATH
IT WAS DR. Vail whose identification secured burial for Neeland, not in the American cemetery, but in Aulnes Wood.
When the raid into Finistère ended, and the unclean birds took flight, Vail, at Quimper, ordered north with his unit, heard of the tragedy, and went to Aulnes. And so Neeland was properly buried beside the youthful châtelaine. Which was, no doubt, what his severed soul desired. And perhaps hers desired it, too.
Vail continued on to Paris, to Flanders, got gassed, and came back to New York.
He had aged ten years in as many months.
Gray, the younger surgeon, kept glancing from time to time at Vail’s pallid face, and the latter understood the professional interest of the younger man.
“You think I look ill?” he asked, finally.
“You don’t look very fit, Doctor.”
“No.... I’m going West.”
“You mean it?”
“Yes.”
“Why do you think that you are — going West?”
“There’s a thing over there, born of gas. It’s a living thing, animal or vegetable. I don’t know which. It’s only recently been recognized. We call it the ‘Seed of Death.’”
Gray gazed at the haggard face of the older man in silence.
Vail went on, slowly: “It’s properly named. It is always fatal. A man may live for a few months. But, once gassed, even in the slightest degree, if that germ is inhaled, death is certain.”
After a silence Gray began: “Do you have any apprehension—” And did not finish the sentence.
Vail shrugged. “It’s interesting, isn’t it?” he said with pleasant impersonality.
After a silence Gray said: “Are you doing anything about it?”
“Oh, yes. It’s working in the dark, of course. I’m feeling rottener every day.”
He rested his handsome head on one thin hand:
“I don’t want to die, Gray, but I don’t know how to keep alive. It’s odd, isn’t it? I don’t wish to die. It’s an interesting world. I want to see how the local elections turn out in New York.”
“What!”
“Certainly. That is what worries me more than anything. We Allies are sure to win. I’m not worrying about that. But I’d like to live to see Tammany a dead cock in the pit!”
Gray forced a laugh; Vail laughed unfeignedly, and then, solemn again, said:
“I’d like to live to see this country aspire to something really noble.”
“After all,” said Gray, “there is really nothing to stifle aspiration.”
It was not only because Vail had been gazing upon death in every phase, every degree — on brutal destruction wholesale and in detail; but also he had been standing on the outer escarpment of Civilization and had watched the mounting sea of barbarism battering, thundering, undermining, gradually engulfing the world itself and all its ancient liberties.
He and the young surgeon, Gray, who was to sail to France next day were alone together on the loggia of the club; dusk mitigated the infernal heat of a summer day in town.
On the avenue below motor cars moved north and south, hansoms crept slowly along the curb, and on the hot sidewalks people passed listlessly under the electric lights — the nine — and — seventy sweating tribes.
For, on such summer nights, under the red moon, an exodus from the East Side peoples the noble avenue with dingy spectres who shuffle along the gilded grilles and still façades of stone, up and down, to and fro, in quest of God knows what — of air perhaps, perhaps of happiness, or of something even vaguer. But whatever it may be that starts them into painful motion, one thing seems certain: aspiration is a part of their unrest.
“There is liberty here,” replied Dr. Vail— “also her inevitable shadow, tyranny.”
“We need more light; that’s all,” said Gray.
“When light streams in from every angle no shadow is possible.”
“The millennium? I get you.... In this country the main thing is that there is some light. A single ray, however feeble, and even coming from one fixed angle only, means aspiration, life....”
He lighted a cigar.
“As you know,” he remarked, “there is a flower called Aconitum. It is also known by the ominous names of Monks-Hood and Helmet-Flower. Direct sunlight kills it. It flourishes only in shadow. Like the Kaiser-Flower it also is blue; and,” he added, “it is deadly poison.... As you say, the necessary thing in this world is light from every angle.”
His cigar glimmered dully through the silence. Presently he went on; “Speaking of tyranny, I think it may be classed as a recognized and tolerated business carried on successfully by those born with a genius for it. It flourishes in the shade — like the Helmet-Flower.... But the sun in this Western Hemisphere of ours is devilish hot. It’s gradually killing off our local tyrants — slowly, almost imperceptibly but inexorably, killing ’em off.... Of course, there are plenty still alive — tyrants of every degree born to the business of tyranny and making a success at it.”
He smoked tranquilly for a while, then:
“There are our tyrants of industry,” he said; “tyrants of politics, tyrants of religion — great and small we still harbor plenty of tyrants, all scheming to keep their roots from shriveling under this fierce western sun of ours — —”
