Complete weird tales of.., p.99
Complete Weird Tales of Robert W Chambers, page 99
Some soldiers piled pews and chairs into heaps under the stained-glass windows. On each of these heaps an officer climbed, field glasses levelled. The men lay down on the floor. Many of them slept.
The cannonade now raged furiously; for an hour the wretched village was covered with bursting shells. Suddenly the tumult ceased, and Harewood, clinging to a shattered window, heard from the plain to the northward the long roll of volley firing. A moment later he was in the street, running beside a column of Mobiles. Everywhere the French bugles were ringing, the cobblestones echoed with the clatter of artillery dashing past, summoned from Drancy by rocket signal.
Harewood, perched astride a stucco wall, looked across the plain and saw dark masses of the Prussian Guard advancing in silence through the rain. The French shells went sailing out over the plain, dropping between the Prussian skirmishers and the line of battle; the Prussian cannon were silent.
It seemed to him that, after a while, the dark lines ceased to advance, but were swinging obliquely toward Blanc-Mesnil. Presently he saw that the Germans were actually retiring and he wondered, while the troops along the wall muttered their misgivings as the Prussian lines faded away in retreat, accompanied by shotted salutes from the Fortress of the East and the unseen batteries of Aubervilliers.
All day he roamed about the village, trying to form some idea of its defensive possibilities, and at night he returned to the church. The rain had ceased again, but, through the fog, a fine drizzle still descended, freezing as it fell, until the streets glistened with greasy slush. There were fires lighted along the main street; across the red glare silhouettes passed and repassed.
Harewood looked up at the gothic portal of the church, all crimsoned in the firelight. Above it the rose-window glittered with splendid hues, dyed deep in the flames’ glow, and still, above the rose-window, the cross of stone, dark and wet, absorbed the ruddy light till it gleamed like a live cinder. Somewhere in the village a battalion was marching to quarters; he heard the trample of the men, the short, hoarse commands of the officers, the clatter of a mitrailleuse dragged along by hand.
“The carbiniers are insubordinate,” said an officer beside him. “I wish the General was here.”
“The carbiniers?” repeated Harewood; “I thought they had run away.”
“Part of them ran,” said an artillery officer, sulkily; “two companies got lost near Blanc-Mesnil and had to come back when the cannonade began.”
“They’re in the next street,” said another officer; “they are quarrelling because there has been no distribution. Damn them,” he added, “the distribution they deserve is a volley from a gatling.”
Harewood listened a moment to the chorus of denunciation that arose from the group around the fire. From it he gathered that Flourens and his carbiniers had fled at the first attack on Le Bourget, and, on the whole, he was rather glad, for he had no desire to encounter any of the battalion that the Undertakers had sent out. He went to the corner of the street and looked down the short transverse alley where the camp-fires of the two carbinier companies blazed fiercely. Curiosity led him on and in a moment he had done the very thing that he intended to avoid — he was standing in the midst of a group of carbiniers, listening to their angry bickerings.
The two companies were fantastic enough in their strange uniforms. Hunger had made them sullen. They cursed their officers, their generals and Le Bourget. At daylight they intended to leave for Paris — they had had enough of this sortie foolishness. They were freezing, they were tired, they were hungry, and, above all, the stereotyped phrase was on every carbinier’s lips: “Treason! Our Generals have betrayed us!”
Disgust succeeded Harewood’s curiosity; he glanced around the fire and started to retrace his steps. As he passed out of the fire circle he looked back at the mutinous carbiniers, and, as he looked, he distinctly saw Buckhurst and Mortier come out of a house with their arms full of plunder. Startled, he stepped back into the shadow of a gate and watched them. And now he recognised Speyer and Stauffer, both in the full uniforms of carbinier officers, holding pillow-cases, while Buckhurst dumped his plunder into the improvised sacks and Mortier tied them tight.
The plundering had become general; bands of the carbiniers began smashing windows and breaking down doors all along the street; others came out loaded with the wretched household articles of the poorer peasantry, clocks, dishes, pewter vessels, clothing, bed linen, and even furniture. The latter they flung onto the bonfires; Harewood saw a baby’s cradle tossed into the fire.
“The miserable savages,” he muttered. “Why don’t they turn the cannon on them!”
The tumult of the orgie was attracting attention now; an officer galloped up on a jaded horse, gesticulating furiously, but the carbiniers menaced him with their rifles, and he withdrew in time to save his skin.
Consoling himself with the hope that, on General Bellemare’s return from Paris, a court-martial would probably settle Buckhurst and his carbiniers, Harewood went back to the church, where the camp-fires roared and sent showers of sparks into the fog, and the rose-window glimmered and glistened, red as blood.
Inside the church the officers were at dinner. He accepted an invitation and sat down on the altar steps with his bit of bread and morsel of dry beef.
The wavering flare from the camp-fire filtered through the stained glass; the sombre depths of the church were tinged with violet and crimson — dusky clustered columns glittered purple; the crucifix was bathed in shadow save where a single trembling beam of light, red as blood, lay like an open wound across the pierced side of our dying Lord.
He looked up into the vaulted roof, stone ribbed, black with the shadows of centuries; he heard the roar of the camp-fires, the crackle of damp logs, the scrape and stamp and stir of sleepy horses, the deep breathing of sleeping men. He rose noiselessly and crept out into the street. The fog hung thick on the heavy flying buttresses, on flèche and gargoyle and on the fluted robes of saints and martyrs, peering down from their niches into the fire glow, where, swathed in their cloaks, lay the martyrs to be, not saints, but men, sick, freezing, starving things, called the 128th of the line.
They lay there like lumps on the church steps, in doorways — they nestled in the gutter, they huddled against doorposts, these clods of breathing clay — sodden and ragged and filthy, sinful, lustful and human, sleeping their brief sleep till the white dawn roused and summoned them home forever.
Faint cries from the sentries, fainter responses, the crackle and snap of logs afire, and the tall shadows wavering, these were all that he saw and heard. The carved stone gargoyles dripped water from every fantastic snout; the reflected flames played over pillar and column, saint and martyr, cross and crown.
All day he had driven thoughts of Hildé from him, but now, at midnight, when the lamp of life burns lowest and the eyes close, and death seems very near — he thought of her; and lying down in the street beside the fire, he questioned his soul. At night, too, the soul, stirring in the body — perhaps at the nearness of God — awakens conscience.
He had never before thought seriously of death. Its arrival to himself he had never pictured in concrete form. In the abstract he had often risked it, never fearing it, because mentally too inert, too lazy to apply such a contingency to his own familiar body.
Now, for the first time in his life, he closed his eyes and saw himself, just as he lay, but still, wet, muddy and horribly silent. He opened his eyes and looked soberly at the fire. After a little he closed his eyes again, and again he saw himself lying as he lay, wet, muddy, motionless, as only the dead can lie. He had known fear, but never before the dull foreboding that now crept into his heart. To open his eyes and see the fire was to live: to shut his eyes was to reflect the image of death upon his closed lids. At first he disdained to shake it off — this mental shadow that passed across his sense. What if it were true? He had lived. It was the old selfishness stifling the sense of responsibility — his responsibility to the world, to himself, to Hildé. To Hildé?
He sat up in his blanket and stared into the fire. Slowly the comprehension of his responsibility came to him, his duty, all that was due to her from him, all that he owed her, all that she should claim, one day, claim in life or in the life to come. Die? He couldn’t die — yet. There was something to do first! Who spoke of death? There was too much to do, there were matters of honour to arrange first, there was a debt to pay that neither death nor hell nor hope of paradise could cancel. Was death about to prevent him from paying that debt?
He was walking now, moving aimlessly to and fro under the porch of the church. A sentry, huddled against a column, regarded him apathetically as he passed out into the street. And always his thoughts ran on:
“If I have this debt to pay, what am I doing here? What right have I to risk death until it is paid? And if I die — if I die—”
His thoughts carried him no further. Hildé’s pale face rose before him. He read terrible accusation in her eyes. And he repeated aloud, again and again, “I must go back.” For he understood now that his life was no longer his own to risk — that it belonged to Hildé. Nor would he ever again have the right to imperil his life until they had risen together from their knees, before the altar, as man and wife. He looked out into the mist, ruddy with the camp-fire glow. Would morning ever come? Why should he wait for morning? At the thought, he caught up his pouch and blanket, rolled, strapped and adjusted them, and stole out into the darkness.
Almost at once he heard somebody following him, but at first he scarcely noticed it. Down the main street he passed, over the slippery cobblestones, eyes fixed on a distant fire that marked the last bivouac in the village before the street ends at the ruined bridge across the Mollette. It was as he approached this camp-fire that he realised somebody had been following him. He paused a moment in the circle of firelight and turned around. Nothing stirred in the darkness beyond. He waited, then started on again, crossing the Lille highway to the line of bushes that marked the water’s edge. No sentinel challenged him; he waded the ford below the wrecked stone bridge, climbed the bank opposite, and started across a wet meadow, beyond which lay the muddy road to Paris. Half-way through the meadow he halted again to listen. The unseen person was wading the ford — he could hear him in the water; now he was climbing the bank; the bushes crackled; a footstep fell on the gravel.
Harewood waited, peering through the gloom. He could see nothing; the silence was absolute. Whoever was following him had stopped out there somewhere in the darkness.
A little unnerved, Harewood turned again and hastened through the meadow to the highway. When he reached the road he could scarcely see it, but he felt the mud and gravel beneath his feet, and started on. In a moment he heard the footsteps of his follower, not behind, now, but in front — between him and Paris. He stopped abruptly and drew his revolver. A minute passed in utter silence. Then there came a soft footfall close in front, a whining voice:
“Monsieur!”
“Who are you?” said Harewood, sharply.
“The Mouse, monsieur.”
In his astonishment, the revolver almost fell from Harewood’s hand. “What the devil are you doing here?” he demanded; “and why the devil are you sneaking about like this? Answer, you fool! I nearly shot you just now!”
The Mouse crept up to Harewood as a sulky, vicious cur comes to his punishment.
“Answer,” repeated Harewood; “why are you following me?”
“I wasn’t sure it was you,” muttered the Mouse.
“What? Why did you come to Le Bourget?”
“I don’t know,” said the Mouse, sullenly.
Harewood’s amazement turned to impatience.
“You’d better answer me,” he said; “you certainly didn’t come here for love of my company!”
But that was exactly the reason why the Mouse had come. The instinct of a savage cur for its master, the strange attraction that decency and courage have for the brutally vicious, the necessity that dwarfed intelligence feels for the companionship and guidance and protection of healthy mentality — all these started the Mouse out of Paris as an abandoned mongrel starts to find its missing master.
Harewood understood this at last, and it touched him — not that the Mouse explained it. He could not have explained it even if he himself comprehended the reason of his seeking Harewood. All he knew was this — that he missed Harewood, that he was used to him, that he felt uncomfortable without him. So he came. Even a gutter cat, forcibly transported into distant parts, turns up again in its old haunts. Harewood’s company had become the haunt of the Mouse. So he came back to it.
The wretched creature was nearly starved. Harewood drew him into the thicket beside the road and gave him his last morsel of bread and meat.
“Imbecile!” he whispered, while the Mouse gnawed the crust, squatting on his muddy haunches, “there may be Prussian pickets anywhere along the fields. Didn’t you know it?”
“Yes,” said the Mouse, tranquilly; “there’s a picket of Uhlans just ahead.”
This was startling news for Harewood.
“Where?” he demanded under his breath.
“About a kilometre over that way,” replied the Mouse, jerking his thumb toward the southeast. He was going to add something more when the sudden tinkle of a horse’s shod foot striking stones broke out in the night. They crouched low in the thicket listening. The road was lighter now: a grey shadow passed, a horseman trailing a lance. Others rode up, mounted on wiry little horses, all carrying tall lances that rattled in their saddle-boots.
As Harewood strained his eyes, the moon broke out overhead — a battered, deformed moon, across whose pale disk the flying scud whirled like shredded smoke.
A gutteral voice began in German:
“Where are the scouts — eh?”
Then in the moonlight Harewood saw Speyer and Stauffer, clad in the uniform of the carbiniers, salute the Uhlan officer and hand him a thin packet of papers. The Mouse beside him trembled like a terrier at a rat hole; Harewood clutched his arm and stared at the group in the road.
There was a brief parley, a word of caution, then the Uhlans wheeled their horses and galloped back toward Paris, and the two traitorous carbiniers struck off across the meadow toward Le Bourget, then made a demi-tour and followed the bank of the river. Very cautiously Harewood crept out to the road when the gallop of the Uhlans had died away.
The Mouse stood beside him, an open claspknife in his fist, nostrils quivering in the freshening wind.
Harewood glanced at the knife and said, “What are you going to do? Cut your way to Paris? Come back to Le Bourget, you fool!”
Half-way back across the wet meadow the Mouse asked: “And if we overtake Speyer?”
“Are you the public executioner?” said Harewood sharply. “Put up that knife, I tell you!”
The Mouse closed his knife and plodded on in silence.
After a while Harewood asked him about Bourke and Hildé and Yolette, but he knew little more than Harewood did, for he had left the house on the ramparts the morning after Harewood’s departure, and since then had been following him up.
Morning was breaking as they forded the Mollette and answered the sentry’s challenge from the ruined highway. It was Sunday, the thirtieth of October — a desolate Sunday in a desolate land. They hurried through the main street, where sleepy reliefs were marching to replace the pickets along the river, and at last they reached the church, where a group of officers stood on the steps in attitudes of dejection.
“Colonel Martin,” cried Harewood, “send a file of men to arrest two captains of the carbiniers, Speyer and Stauffer. I charge them with treason! Here is my witness!” He dragged the Mouse up the steps and led him forward. In half-a-dozen sentences he told what he had seen; the Mouse nodded his corroboration, stealing cunning glances about him and shuffling his muddy shoes, partly to inspire self-confidence, partly because he appreciated the importance of his present position.
“But,” said an artillery officer, “the carbiniers have already gone. I heard them breaking camp before daylight.”
“Gone!” repeated Harewood.
“They followed the river bank toward Blanc-Mesnil.”
Before Harewood could speak again, a cannon shot from the end of the street brought the soldiers out of the church on a run. At the same moment a shell struck a house opposite and burst.
Colonel Martin, now ranking officer in the village, turned quickly to Harewood and said: “If I live to get out of this I’ll have the carbiniers before a drum-head court-martial. Are you going back to Paris?”
“If I can,” said Harewood.
“If you get there have these carbinier officers arrested by the first patrol.”
Harewood started again toward the river, calling impatiently for the Mouse to follow. The bombardment from the Prussian guns had suddenly become violent; shells fell everywhere, exploding on slate roofs, in court-yards, in the middle of the street.
The Mouse, half dead with terror, shrieked as he ran, ducking his head at every crash, one hand twisted in Harewood’s coat, one shielding his face.
“This won’t do,” cried Harewood, dragging the Mouse into a hallway; “we’ve got to wait until the bombardment stops. Here, break in this door! Quick!”
Together they forced the door and entered. The house was dark and empty. Harewood climbed the stairs, groped about, unfastened the scuttle and raised himself to the roof. North, east and west the smoke of the Prussian guns curled up from the plain. In the north, vast masses of troops were moving toward Le Bourget, cannonaded by the Fortress of the East at long range.
There was no chance to reach Paris; he saw that at the first glance. He saw, too, the French pickets being chased back into Le Bourget by Uhlans, and he heard the drumming of a mitrailleuse in the west end of the village, where columns of smoke arose from a burning house. Far away in the grey morning light the Fortress of the East towered, circled with floating mist, through which the sheeted flashes of the cannon played like lightning behind a thundercloud.
