Complete weird tales of.., p.94
Complete Weird Tales of Robert W Chambers, page 94
“I might have been perfect,” said Red Riding Hood, presently, “but Mademoiselle Hildé could not give me my lesson to-day.”
Harewood answered without turning, “Why?”
“I do not know,” said the child, with a little sigh. Harewood bit his lips; his heart turned sick with the futile bitterness that follows — too late — the knowledge of consequences — consequences that spread like ripples from a pebble in a troubled pool.
“Mademoiselle Hildé will hear your lesson to-morrow,” he said, looking from the window.
“To-morrow,” repeated the child.
He said nothing more. Perhaps he was thinking of those endless to-morrows, passing, passing, each one troubled as the spreading rings in a pool disturb the placid peace that once reigned there. And he had cast the stone.
“Look at me,” said the child.
He turned his head; her dark eyes met his own.
“Is it sadness?” she asked.
“Yes, little one.”
She held his hand a moment, then let it drop. He scarcely noticed it; a moment afterward he heard the click, click, of her little sabots down the stairs outside. An hour later, a bitter hour, he followed, descending the worn stairs silently, fearing the very silence that he dared not break.
Yolette moved about the dining-room singing to herself in an undertone. He passed into the hallway and out to the bird store, where Hildé knelt among the wicker cages.
When she saw him she rose to her knees, hiding her burning face in her hands. He bent close to her and touched the flushed cheeks between the hands. One by one he untwisted the slender fingers, closely interlocked, and at last he raised her head to his. But she would not look at him, her sealed lids pressed the lashes tightly to her cheek.
“Why have you hidden away all day?” he said.
Presently she answered: “Can you ask?”
He raised her from her knees; her eyes were still closed, but her white hands stole around his neck. When at last he released her and the quiet tears had dried in her eyes, without falling, she went to the open door and stood there, looking out into the west. Earth came back to her slowly through the heaven of their kiss — sounds grew through the music of his voice; she heard the cannonade’s dull triple throb, she saw green tree tops stirring in the sun.
He came and stood beside her. Love’s lassitude hung heavy on her limbs; he took her unresisting hand — that little hand, so small, so smooth, fragrant and fraught with mystery, a cool white blossom with five slim petals tipped with pink.
The beauty of life was upon her, the loveliness of the world was in her eyes — the world so kind to her — so kind to all — to all!
In the red west a flaming belt of haze girdled the horizon; in the north plumed clouds suspended from the zenith hung motionless; the glass of the stream mirrored a single tree.
When their silence grew too heavy, too sweet for such young hearts, they broke it; and it broke musically, with the melody of half-caught questions — a sigh, a little laugh re-echoed pure as the tinkle of two crystal glasses, touched discreetly. The softest drumming of the guns stirred the pulsating air like the distant drumming of a partridge; the gemmed azure, veiled with haze, swam and shimmered with its million brilliant atmospheric atoms — tiny points of fierce white dusting the blue like diamond dust.
When the sun was very low and the level meadows ran moulten gilt in every harrow, the sparrows, gathered for the night on tree and roof, filled the street with restless chirping that stirred the caged birds in the shop. Linnet answered thrush, finches whistled wistful answers to the free twittering of the sparrows; a little lark rustled and ruffled; a blackbird uttered a still, thin plaint.
And Hildé, who, when her own heart was free, had never understood captivity, now, when she listened, understood, and her own imprisoned heart answered the plaint of wild caged things.
To her half-spoken thought he answered; together they gathered all the feathered wild things into one great wicker cage. The parrot’s pale eye was veiled in scorn; the monkey flouted freedom with a grimace, shivering and mouthing as the hundred wings beat at the wicker bars.
Harewood took the cage; Hildé walked beside him, in ecstacy at the thought of freedom given by those who know that something else is sweeter. There was a shrub in flower on the glacis — some late-blooming bush, starred with waxen blossoms, breathing perfume. Under this they placed the cage.
When Hildé opened the cage a feathered whirlwind circled about her head: there came a rush of wings, a thrilling whir-r! and she clasped her hands and stepped forward. Out over the valley the bird flock rushed, bore to the left, circled, rose, swung back on a returning curve, but always rising higher, higher, until far up in the deepening evening sky they floated, and chose their course, due south.
She watched them driving southward; she could tell the finches by their undulating flight, the thrushes, the clean-winged starlings. She sighed contentedly; she had opened the door of pity when love opened the door to her heart.
“Look!” whispered Harewood; “there is one little bird that will not leave us.”
“It is dead — God forgive me,” faltered Hildé. A rush of tears blinded her; she knelt beside it on the grass — a frail mound of fluff and feathers, silent and still.
“Freedom and death — life is so sweet — so sweet,” she whispered. “And somewhere in the south where the others have gone, there is summer, eternal summer — life — life.”
“Winter is close,” he answered sombrely. With an unconscious movement he drew her to him; he bent and searched her changed face.
The wind, too, had changed; there was frost somewhere in the world, and the solemn harmony of the cannon swelled with the swelling breeze, and the breeze stirred a broken feather on the dead bird’s stiffening wing.
CHAPTER XV.
THE ANATOMY OF HAPPINESS.
THAT NIGHT THEY closed the empty bird store; Harewood lifted the wooden shutters into place and locked them; Hildé carried the monkey into the dining-room and installed it in a warm corner. Mehemet Ali, the parrot, viewed these proceedings with contempt. It mattered little to him where he passed his pessimistic days; weariness and a vicious melancholy had marked him for their own; even when he ate, he ate as if he were making an ironical concession to the weakness of some one else. Curiosity he had subdued, sinister solitude he courted — and bit when it was denied him. There had been a time in earlier days when he whistled the “Marseillaise” — when he croaked “Vive l’Empereur!” Now for a year he had been mute, brooding in silence among the noisy feathered inhabitants of the bird store, dreaming, perhaps scheming — for he had the sly, slow eye of the Oriental.
He bit Harewood when that young man was bearing him to the dining-room, and, when dropped, diplomatically sidled under a sofa. From this retreat he made daily excursions, mounting all the furniture by aid of beak and claw, sullenly menacing those who approached.
Schéhèrazade had not recovered from her fright. The characteristics of the big house-cat had almost disappeared; she cowered when approached, she slunk when she moved; there was a blankness in her eyes; a stealth, almost a menace, in the slow turning of her head. Already in these early days of the siege milk was becoming too expensive to buy for a lioness; meat also had increased so swiftly in price that Yolette was frightened, and haunted the market wistfully, scarcely daring to buy. Vegetables, bread and wine, however, were plenty; so were proclamations from the Governor of Paris assuring everybody that the city had ample provisions for months to come. Most people thought that the increase in the price of meat was only temporary — a mere flurry caused by the consummation of an event that was not yet entirely credited — the actual advent of the Prussian army before Paris.
The arrival of the Germans was like a theatrical entrance: the audience was all Paris, the orchestra, a thousand cannon. They tuned up by batteries, west, south, and finally north, as the vast circle of steel closed closer, closer, and finally welded with the snap of a trap. Then, when the city and outer ring of forts were in turn themselves encircled by a living iron ring, when the full-throated thunder from the battery of the Double Crown was echoed from Saint Denis to Mont-Valérien, from Saint Cloud to Charenton, and again from the southeast northward to Saint Denis, Paris began to understand.
The first futile curiosity, the foolish terror and fear of instant bombardment, died out as the weeks passed and the crack of the Prussian rifled cannon had not yet awakened the hill echoes of Viroflay. The silly proclamations urging the instant tearing up of pavements, the fortifying of cellars, the assuring of a water supply, were forgotten. People began to realise that it takes months to establish siege batteries — that for every gun capable of throwing a shell into Paris, the Germans would have to send to Germany. Fear vanished; how long it would take to convey heavy cannon from Berlin across France to the Seine? And would not the convoys be cut off by the Franc-tireurs, by the provincial armies now organising, by an uprising of outraged people? Surely the very land, the elements themselves, would rise and destroy these barbarians and their wicked cannon. Trochu, the sombre mystic, the Breton Governor of republican Paris, moved on his darkened way, a flash of tinselled pomp, a shred of pageantry, the last paladin riding back into the gloom of the middle ages, seeking light, fleeing light, wrapped to the eyes in the splendid mantle of the Trinity.
So he rode, esquired by Faith, dreaming of saints and quests of chivalry, pondering miracles. As a figure for a Gobelin tapestry, General Trochu would have been useful; in no other capacity, save perhaps in a cloister, would he have been of use in the nineteenth century.
When, on the seventeenth of September, the Prussian advance guard was signalled and saluted by the forts of the west and south, General Vinoy’s brave corps passed the gates and advanced to Cretail. The affair was not serious — nothing was serious then. And yet that was the very time when a crushing success might have electrified the whole nation into such resistance that the end of the war would not have arrived with the capitulation of the capital. Was it not possible to rapidly mass the two corps of Vinoy and Ducrot to crush the few thousand men of the advance guard? The moral effect of such a stroke would have been stupendous.
But in this first engagement under the walls of Paris, the deplorable system was inaugurated, and invariably followed in all subsequent operations around Paris: fighting without a fixed objective, forcing new troops not sufficiently habituated to fighting, and, on the contrary, when a serious object was in view, operating with insufficient numbers and inadaquate artillery.
On the eighteenth of September, when Vinoy’s corps fell back, the Prussian investment began; the various railroads were cut, and at three o’clock in the afternoon the last train from Paris for Rouen left the Saint Lazare station. From every direction the German masses poured into the country; the Prince of Saxony advanced from the north, saluting Saint Denis with a thousand trumpets, the Prince of Prussia rode up from the south through Fontenay aux Roses and woke Aunay woods with the hurrahs of his horsemen.
Two vast crescents formed the circle; the ring was soldered at Versailles in the east; the other gap closed at Saint Germain.
Then, on the nineteenth of September, Ducrot was attacked in the south, flanked, driven pellmell under the Châtillon redoubt, where the great forts of Vanves and Montrouge shielded him. At four o’clock the few cannoniers spiked the last guns in the unfinished Châtillon redoubt and retired; Clamart, Villejuif and Meudon swarmed with Prussian cavalry. Night came, and Paris knew that its southern key had been stolen when the Prussian flag crept up the shattered staff on the ramparts of Châtillon.
So was lost the southern key to Paris, the great unfinished redoubt of Châtillon. Let those high officers of engineers remember — let others in high places of the land remember — and be remembered.
Scarcely had the investment of Paris been completed when the humiliating interview at Ferrières between Jules Favre and Bismarck became known to the public. Had Jules Favre carefully considered the matter, had he offered terms, for example, as follows:
First — An indemnity.
Second — The dismantling of one or two of the eastern forts.
Third — The cession of Cochin China.
Fourth — The cession of a few ironclads.
Doubtless Germany — coerced by Europe — would have accepted.
But it was not to be. The poor representative of the republic left the Prussian headquarters with Bismarck’s harsh voice ringing in his ears, and the next day all Paris knew that it was to be a struggle to the death.
Stung again into action, Vinoy, supported by the forts, hurled a division of the 13th corps on Villejuif and carried it. On September 30 Chevilly and Choisy-le-Roi were attacked. Again the fatal lack of sufficient artillery nullified the advantage gained at Villejuif; the sphere of action had scarcely been enlarged at all.
From the ramparts of Paris these first engagements under the walls were scarcely visible to the people — scarcely audible, save for the thunder from the supporting forts. A high rampart of yellow mist stretched from the Montrouge fort to Arcueil; beyond it, denser volumes of smoke poured up into the sky from l’Hay. At moments the wind brought the crackle of the fusillade through lulls in the cannon din — scarcely louder than the crackle of a bonfire. This was all that the Parisians could see or hear from the southern bastions. Great crowds of women and children watched the infantry passing through the Porte Rouge; the cavalry sang as they rode between dense masses of excited people; the cannoniers swung their thongs and chanted gaily:
Gai! Gai! serrons nos rangs,
Espérance
De la France
Gai! Gai! serrons nos rangs,
En avant, Gaulois et Francs!
to the air of “Gai! Gai! Marions nous!” and the Franc-tireurs took up the song savagely:
Quoi! ces monuments chéris,
Histoire
De notre gloire,
S’ecrouleraient en débris,
Quoi! les Prussiens à Paris!
and the people roared back the chorus:
Gai! Gai! serrons nos rangs!
Hildé, standing at the door, heard them singing at sunrise, caught the distant glint of bayonets, saw the sun, white and fierce, crinkling the polished surface of helmet and breastplate.
At night, too, lingering on the steps, she heard the movement and murmur of marching masses; she saw the rockets drifting through the sky, the jewelled string of signal lamps swinging like a necklace from the Porte Rouge battlements. All day long the rue d’Ypres rang with a clang of bugles and the vibrating crash of drums; all day long the cannoniers of the Prophet drilled and manœuvred and played at firing, but the night came and found the Prophet’s lips still sealed and the long bronze fetish motionless, reaching toward heaven in its awful attitude of prayer.
Since those early practice shots that had shattered the window glass, the Prophet had not spoken; yet, all day long, its gigantic mass, thrust out over the ramparts, swung east and west at the monotonous commands, sweeping the points of the compass with the smooth movement of a weather vane turning in a June breeze.
Harewood, locking the dusty wooden shutters for the last time, turned to watch the Prophet as it swept to the west, stopped, sank at the breech as a horse sinks on his haunches. For the hundredth time he thought they were going to fire, but the gun captain took up his mechanical call: “Elevation at 1,500, at 2,000, at 2,500,” and the pointeur mounted the bastion and called the class of instruction to the breech.
In the evening glow the ramparts burned red, the dust in the street gleamed like powdered rubies; long, mousey shadows stretched across the grass, soft and velvety as the bloom on a purple plum.
When Harewood had finally locked the shutters, he climbed up and unhooked the sign of the shop. Hildé watched him without speaking; he lifted the signboard to his shoulder and carried it into the darkened shop. To Hildé it was the last scene in the prologue of a drama — the drama of a new life, just beginning. She went into the shop and looked at the sign, that was standing upside down against the wall.
“It is one of my landmarks,” she said; “they are all going now, one by one. Yesterday my Sainte Hildé of Carhaix fell and broke on the tiled floor, and I shall miss the birds, too.” She added hastily: “I am glad that they flew away; you must not think I regret anything.”
Harewood, standing close beside her, said: “You regret nothing, Hildé?”
After a long while she answered, “Nothing — and you?”
“What have I to regret?” he said, in an altered voice, unconscious of the axiom and its irony — unconscious that he stood there, the mouthpiece of his sex, voicing the dogmas of an imbecile civilisation. She bent her head; her white face rested on his shoulder. All the million questions that stir and flutter in a love-wrung heart awakened, trembled on her lips, — all that she would know, all that she should know, all that she feared. Yet, of the million questions, she could not utter one, least of all the eternal question, more surely asked and answered in silence. With her love came terror, too, lasting the space of a heartbeat, dying out with a quick sigh, a flutter of silken lashes, a parting of scarlet lips divinely wistful.
As for the man beside her, he stood thrilled yet thoughtful, following his thoughts through the dim labyrinths of his heart that beat deeply, heavily, against her yielding breast. What had happened he scarcely comprehended; he only knew that love is sweet. The beginning was already so long ago, so dim, so far away. When had it been? Had they not always loved? And, if the beginning of love was already half forgotten, the end loomed vaguer still, the distant future promised nothing yet, a veil of mist, rose-tinged, exquisite, although behind the veil something was already stirring, a shape — nothing — because he refused to see. Yet it was there; Hildé felt its presence, unconsciously shrinking, in her lover’s arms, and again the questions stung her lips. “Is it love — love for me? Is it truly love? Is it forever? Is it truth and faith and constancy, forever and forever?” Her breathless lips parted, but no question passed them; and they were sealed again in silence.
