Complete weird tales of.., p.940
Complete Weird Tales of Robert W Chambers, page 940
Sticky Smith finally pushed aside his drained glass and surveyed an empty plate frankly and regretfully, unable to continue. He said:
“I’m going to bed and I’m going to sleep twenty-four hours. After that I’m going to eat for twenty-four more hours, and then I’ll be in good shape. Bong soir.”
“Aw, stick around with the push!” remonstrated Kid Glenn thickly, impaling another potato upon his fork and gesticulating with it.
Smith gazed with surfeited but hopeless envy upon Burley’s magnificent work with knife and fork, saw him crack a seventh bottle of Bordeaux, watched him empty the first goblet.
But even Glenn’s eyes began to dull in spite of himself, his head nodded mechanically at every mouthful achieved.
“I gotta call it off, Jack,” he yawned. “Stick and I need the sleep if you don’t. So here’s where we quit — —”
“Let me tell you about that girl,” began Burley. “I never saw a prettier—” But Glenn had appetite neither for food nor romance:
“Say, listen. Have a heart, Jack! We need the sleep!”
Stick had already risen; Glenn shoved back his chair with a gigantic yawn and shambled to his feet.
“I want to tell you,” insisted Burley, “that she’s what the French call tray, tray chick — —”
Stick pointed furiously at the fowl:
“Chick? I’m fed up on chick! Maybe she is some chick, as you say, but it doesn’t interest me. Goo’bye. Don’t come battering at my door and wake me up, Jack. Be a sport and lemme alone — —”
He turned and shuffled out, and Glenn followed, his Mexican spurs clanking.
Burley jeered them:
“Mollycoddles! Come on and take in the town with us!”
But they slammed the door behind them, and he heard them stumbling and clanking up stairs.
So Burley, gazing gravely at his empty plate, presently emptied the last visible bottle of Bordeaux, then stretching his mighty arms and superb chest, fished out a cigarette, set fire to it, unhooked the cartridge-belt and holster from the back of his chair, buckled it on, rose, pulled on his leather-peaked cap, and drew a deep breath of contentment.
For a moment he stood in the centre of the room, as though in pleasant meditation, then he slowly strode toward the street door, murmuring to himself: “Tray, tray chick. The prettiest girl in the world.... La ploo belle fille du monde ... la ploo belle....”
He strolled as far as the corral down in the meadow by the stream, where he found the negro muleteers asleep and the mules already watered and fed.
For a while he hobnobbed with the three gendarmes on duty there, practicing his kind of French on them and managing to understand and be understood more or less — probably less.
But the young man was persistent; he desired to become that easy master of the French language that his tongue-tied comrades believed him to be. So he practiced garrulously upon the polite, suffering gendarmes.
He related to them his experience on shipboard with a thousand mutinous mules to pacify, feed, water, and otherwise cherish. They had, it appeared, encountered no submarines, but enjoyed several alarms from destroyers which eventually proved to be British.
“A cousin of mine,” explained Burley, “Ned Winters, of El Paso, went down on the steamer John B. Doty, with eleven hundred mules and six niggers. The Boches torpedoed the ship and then raked the boats. I’d like to get a crack at one Boche before I go back to God’s country.”
The gendarmes politely but regretfully agreed that it was impracticable for Burley to get a crack at a Hun; and the American presently took himself off to the corral, after distributing cigarettes and establishing cordial relations with the Sainte Lesse Gendarmerie.
He waked up a negro and inspected the mules; that took a long time. Then he sought out the negro blacksmith, awoke him, and wrote out some directions.
“The idea is,” he explained, “that whenever the French in this sector need mules they draw on our corral. We are supposed to keep ten or eleven hundred mules here all the time and look after them. Shipments come every two weeks, I believe. So after you’ve had another good nap, George, you wake up your boys and get busy. And there’ll be trouble if things are not in running order by tomorrow night.”
“Yas, suh, Mistuh Burley,” nodded the sleepy blacksmith, still blinking in the afternoon sunshine.
“And if you need an interpreter,” added Burley, “always call on me until you learn French enough to get on. Understand, George?”
“Yas, suh.”
“Because,” said Burley, walking away, “a thorough knowledge of French idioms is necessary to prevent mistakes. When in doubt always apply to me, George, for only a master of the language is competent to deal with these French people.”
It was his one vanity, his one weakness. Perhaps, because he so ardently desired proficiency, he had already deluded himself with the belief that he was a master of French.
So, belt and loaded holster sagging, and large silver spurs clicking and clinking at every step, John Burley sauntered back along the almost deserted street of Sainte Lesse, thinking sometimes of his mules, sometimes of the French language, and every now and then of a dark-eyed, dark-haired girl whose delicately flushed and pensive gaze he had encountered as he had ridden into Sainte Lesse under the old belfry.
“Stick Smith’s a fool,” he thought to himself impatiently. “Tray chick doesn’t mean ‘some chicken.’ It means a pretty girl, in French.”
He looked up at the belfry as he passed under it, and at the same moment, from beneath the high, gilded dragon which crowned its topmost spire, a sweet bell-note floated, another, others succeeding in crystalline sweetness, linked in a fragment of some ancient melody. Then they ceased; then came a brief silence; the great bell he had heard before struck five times.
“Lord! — that’s pretty,” he murmured, moving on and turning into the arched tunnel which was the entrance to the White Doe Inn.
Wandering at random, he encountered the innkeeper in the parlour, studying a crumpled newspaper through horn-rimmed spectacles on his nose.
“Tray jolie,” said Burley affably, seating himself with an idea of further practice in French.
“Plait-il?”
“The bells — tray beau!”
The old man straightened his bent shoulders a little proudly.
“For thirty years, m’sieu, I have been Carillonneur of Sainte Lesse.” He smiled; then, saddened, he held out both hands toward Burley. The fingers were stiff and crippled with rheumatism.
“No more,” he said slowly; “the carillon is ended for me. The great art is no more for Jean Courtray, Master of Bells.”
“What is a carillon?” inquired John Burley simply.
Blank incredulity was succeeded by a shocked expression on the old man’s visage. After a silence, in mild and patient protest, he said:
“I am Jean Courtray, Carillonneur of Sainte Lesse.... Have you never heard of the carillon of Sainte Lesse, or of me?”
“Never,” said Burley. “We don’t have anything like that in America.”
The old carillonneur, Jean Courtray, began to speak in a low voice of his art, his profession, and of the great carillon of forty-six bells in the ancient tower of Sainte Lesse.
A carillon, he explained, is a company of fixed bells tuned according to the chromatic scale and ranging through several octaves. These bells, rising tier above tier in a belfry, the smallest highest, the great, ponderous bells of the bass notes lowest, are not free to swing, but are fixed to huge beams, and are sounded by clappers connected by a wilderness of wires to a keyboard which is played upon by the bell-master or carillonneur.
He explained that the office of bell-master was an ancient one and greatly honoured; that the bell-master was also a member of the municipal government; that his salary was a fixed one; that not only did he play upon the carillon on fête days, market days, and particular occasions, but he also travelled and gave concerts upon the few existing carillons of other ancient towns and cities, not alone in France where carillons were few, but in Belgium and Holland, where they still were comparatively many, although the German barbarians had destroyed some of the best at Liége, Arras, Dixmude, Termonde, and Ypres.
“Monsieur,” he went on in a voice which began to grow a little unsteady, “the Huns have destroyed the ancient carillons of Louvain and of Mechlin. In the superb bell-tower of Saint Rombold I have played for a thousand people; and the Carillonneur, Monsieur Vincent, and the great bell-master, Josef Denyn, have come to me to congratulate me with tears in their eyes — in their eyes — —”
There were tears in his own now, and he bent his white head and looked down at the worn floor under his crippled feet.
“Alas,” he said, “for Denyn — and for Saint Rombold’s tower. The Hun has passed that way.”
After a silence:
“Who is it now plays the carillon in Sainte Lesse!” asked Burley.
“My daughter, Maryette. Sainte Lesse has honoured me in my daughter, whom I myself instructed. My daughter — the little child of my old age, monsieur — is mistress of the bells of Sainte Lesse.... They call her Carillonnette in Sainte Lesse — —”
The door opened and the girl came in.
CHAPTER XV
CARILLONETTE
STICKY SMITH AND Kid Glenn remained a week at Sainte Lesse, then left with the negroes for Calais to help bring up another cargo of mules, the arrival of which was daily expected.
A peloton of the Train-des-Equipages and three Remount troopers arrived at Sainte Lesse to take over the corral. John Burley remained to explain and interpret the American mule to these perplexed troopers.
Morning, noon, and night he went clanking down to the corral, his cartridge belt and holster swinging at his hip. But sometimes he had a little leisure.
Sainte Lesse knew him as a mighty eater and as a lusty drinker of good red wine; as a mighty and garrulous talker, too, he became known, ready to accost anybody in the quiet and subdued old town and explode into French at the slightest encouragement.
But Burley had only women and children and old men on whom to practice his earnest and voluble French, for everybody else was at the front.
Children adored him — adored his big, silver spurs, his cartridge belt and pistol, the metal mule decorating his tunic collar, his six feet two of height, his quick smile, the even white teeth and grayish eyes of this American muleteer, who always had a stick of barley sugar to give them or an amazing trick to perform for them with a handkerchief or coin that vanished under their very noses at the magic snap of his finger.
Old men gossiped willingly with him; women liked him and their rare smiles in the war-sobered town of Sainte Lesse were often for him as he sauntered along the quiet street, clanking, swaggering, affable, ready for conversation with anybody, and always ready for the small, confident hands that unceremoniously clasped his when he passed by where children played.
As for Maryette Courtray, called Carillonnette, she mounted the bell-tower once every hour, from six in the morning until nine o’clock in the evening, to play the passing of Time toward that eternity into which it is always and ceaselessly moving.
After nine o’clock Carillonnette set the drum and wound it; and through the dark hours of the night the bells played mechanically every hour for a few moments before Bayard struck.
Between these duties the girl managed the old inn, to which, since the war, nobody came any more — and with these occupations her life was full — sufficiently full, perhaps, without the advent of John Burley.
They met with enough frequency for her, if not for him. Their encounters took place between her duties aloft at the keyboard under the successive tiers of bells and his intervals of prowling among his mules.
Sometimes he found her sewing in the parlour — she could have gone to her own room, of course; sometimes he encountered her in the corridor, in the street, in the walled garden behind the inn, where with basket and pan she gathered vegetables in season.
There was a stone seat out there, built against the southern wall, and in the shadowed coolness of it she sometimes shelled peas.
During such an hour of liberty from the bell-tower he found the dark-eyed little mistress of the bells sorting various vegetables and singing under her breath to herself the carillon music of Josef Denyn.
“Tray chick, mademoiselle,” he said, with a cheerful self-assertion, to hide the embarrassment which always assailed him when he encountered her.
“You know, Monsieur Burley, you should not say ‘très chic’ to me,” she said, shaking her pretty head. “It sounds a little familiar and a little common.”
“Oh,” he exclaimed, very red. “I thought it was the thing to say.”
She smiled, continuing to shell the peas, then, with her sensitive and slightly flushed face still lowered, she looked at him out of her dark blue eyes.
“Sometimes,” she said, “young men say ‘très chic.’ It depend on when and how one says it.”
“Are there times when it is all right for me to say it?” he inquired.
“Yes, I think so.... How are your mules today?”
“The same,” he said, “ — ready to bite or kick or eat their heads off. The Remount took two hundred this morning.”
“I saw them pass,” said the girl. “I thought perhaps you also might be departing.”
“Without coming to say good-bye — to you!” he stammered.
“Oh, conventions must be disregarded in time of war,” she returned carelessly, continuing to shell peas. “I really thought I saw you riding away with the mules.”
“That man,” said Burley, much hurt, “was a bow-legged driver of the Train-des-Equipages. I don’t think he resembles me.”
As she made no comment and expressed no contrition for her mistake, he gazed about him at the sunny garden with a depressed expression. However, this changed presently to a bright and hopeful one.
“Vooz ate tray, tray belle, mademoiselle!” he asserted cheerfully.
“Monsieur!” Vexed perhaps as much at her own quick blush as his abrupt eulogy, she bit her lip and looked at him with an ominously level gaze. Then, suddenly, she smiled.
“Monsieur Burley, one does not so express one’s self without reason, without apropos, without — without encouragement — —”
She blushed again, vividly. Under her wide straw hat her delicate, sensitive face and dark blue eyes were beautiful enough to inspire eulogy in any young man.
“Pardon,” he said, confused by her reprimand and her loveliness. “I shall hereafter only think you are pretty, mademoiselle — mais je ne le dirais ploo.”
“That would be perhaps more — comme il faut, monsieur.”
“Ploo!” he repeated with emphasis. “Ploo jamais! Je vous jure — —”
“Merci; it is not perhaps necessary to swear quite so solemnly, monsieur.”
She raised her eyes from the pan, moving her small, sun-tanned hand through the heaps of green peas, filling her palm with them and idly letting them run through her slim fingers.
“L’amour,” he said with an effort— “how funny it is — isn’t it, mademoiselle?”
“I know nothing about it,” she replied with decision, and rose with her pan of peas.
“Are you going, mademoiselle?”
“Yes.”
“Have I offended you?”
“No.”
He trailed after her down the garden path between rows of blue larkspurs and hollyhocks — just at her dainty heels, because the brick walk was too narrow for both of them.
“Ploo,” he repeated appealingly.
Over her shoulder she said with disdain:
“It is not a topic for conversation among the young, monsieur — what you call l’amour.” And she entered the kitchen, where he had not the effrontery to follow her.
That evening, toward sunset, returning from the corral, he heard, high in the blue sky above him, her bell-music drifting; and involuntarily uncovering, he stood with bared head looking upward while the celestial melody lasted.
And that evening, too, being the fête of Alincourt, a tiny neighbouring village across the river, the bell-mistress went up into the tower after dinner and played for an hour for the little neighbour hamlet across the river Lesse.
All the people who remained in Sainte Lesse and in Alincourt brought out their chairs and their knitting in the calm, fragrant evening air and remained silent, sadly enraptured while the unseen player at her keyboard aloft in the belfry above set her carillon music adrift under the summer stars — golden harmonies that seemed born in the heavens from which they floated; clear, exquisitely sweet miracles of melody filling the world of darkness with magic messages of hope.
Those widowed or childless among her listeners for miles around in the darkness wept quiet tears, less bitter and less hopeless for the divine promise of the sky music which filled the night as subtly as the scent of flowers saturates the dusk.
Burley, listening down by the corral, leaned against a post, one powerful hand across his eyes, his cap clasped in the other, and in his heart the birth of things ineffable.
For an hour the carillon played. Then old Bayard struck ten times. And Burley thought of the trenches and wondered whether the mellow thunder of the great bell was audible out there that night.
CHAPTER XVI
DJACK
THERE CAME A day when he did not see Maryette as he left for the corral in the morning.
Her father, very stiff with rheumatism, sat in the sun outside the arched entrance to the inn.
“No,” he said, “she is going to be gone all day today. She has set and wound the drum in the belfry so that the carillon shall play every hour while she is absent.”
“Where has she gone?” inquired Burley.
“To play the carillon at Nivelle.”
“Nivelle!” he exclaimed sharply.
