Part 29

“Wouldn’t it be better for you to be an honest man?” croaked Hazelton.

“Only death can make an honest man of me,” answered De Vilmarte.

“_My_ death could make an honest man of you,” Hazelton said slowly. It was as if he had read the dark and nameless secret that was lurking in the bottom of De Vilmarte’s heart.

For a moment they two seemed alone in all the earth, the only living beings. They stood alone, their secret in their hands.

Then Hazelton’s lips began to move. “My God!” he said. “Bought by the state and hung in the Luxembourg! Bought by the state and hung in the Luxembourg!” He repeated it as if trying to familiarize himself with some inexplicable fact. “I will not have it!” he went on. “I will not have it! If I’m not bought by the state I shall not go on!”

Raoul looked at him with entreaty. Hazelton came up to the surface of consciousness and his eyes followed Raoul’s. A very frail little old lady was being pushed in a wheel-chair near them.

“My mother,” Raoul whispered.

“I wish to meet her,” said Hazelton.

She bowed graciously and then sat in her chair gazing at the picture bought by the state. Pride was in every line of her old face. She seemed returned from the shadows only to gaze at this picture. Then, in a voice which was cracked with age, she said, turning to Hazelton:

“I know your work, too. Monsieur—the opposite of my son’s. It is as though between you you encompassed all of nature’s moods. To me there has always been—you will laugh I know—a strange similarity, as though you were two halves of a whole, as day and night.”

A cold wave flowed over Hazelton, a feeling as though his hair were lifting on the back of his head. It was as though this frail old lady was linking him irrevocably to Raoul. He was powerless now to take his own.

“Madame,” he said, “I feel as if no one had understood my work before.”

But she had turned to gaze upon her son’s painting. A sort of senility enveloped her, and his drunkenness reached out to it. His gaze had in it respect and tenderness and abnegation. His manner, more eloquent than words, said: “I give up; I resign. Take it.”

He went to the end of the gallery, and Raoul saw him sit down in the attitude of one who waits. When Mme. de Vilmarte left, Raoul joined him.

Hazelton’s head sank deeply between his shoulders; his pugnacity had oozed away. After a time he spoke with an effort. “I understand,” he said. “I understand—”

A curious sense of liberation seized De Vilmarte. His old liking for Hazelton returned. “I am sorry for all of us,” he said.

“My poor friend, there is no way out,” said Hazelton. “I am vile—a beast. But trust me—believe in me.”

“I will,” cried De Vilmarte, deeply touched.

Hazelton’s little jewel-like eyes were blurred with unwonted sentiment. “I am a king in exile,” he muttered over and over. “A king in exile,” he repeated. This sentimental simile seemed to be a well of bitter comfort for him.

This story should end here, for stories should end like this, on the high note; but life is different. Hazelton was a man with a bad liver, and he got no joy from his sacrifice. Moreover, in real life one seldom fights a decisive battle with one’s lower nature. One goes on fighting; it dies hard when it dies at all. There are the high moments when one thinks the battle won, and the next day the enemy attacks again, with the battle to be fought over.

Hazelton had formed the habit of cursing fate and De Vilmarte, and, to revenge himself, of threatening De Vilmarte’s exposure, and he continued to do these things. And De Vilmarte let his mind stray far in contemplating Hazelton’s possible vileness, and in doing this he himself became vile. What he could not recognize was the definite place where Hazelton’s vileness stopped. His life was like a fair fruit rotten within.

It was the summer of 1914, and Hazelton, whose drunkenness before had been occasional, now drank always, and forever in the background of De Vilmarte’s mind was this powerful figure with its red face and black hair and truculent bearing, drunken and obscene, who carried in his careless hand the honor of the De Vilmartes. At any moment Hazelton could rob Raoul of his pride, embitter his mother’s last hours, and make him the laughing stock of his world. Raoul became like an entrapped animal running around and around the implacable barriers of a cage. It is a terrible thing to have one’s honor in the hands of another.

He thought of everything that might end this torment, and he found no answer. Madness grew in him. Wherever Raoul de la Tour de Vilmarte went, there followed him unseen a shadow, swart, dark, and red-faced. It followed him, mouthing, “Ra-o-u-l—Ra-o-u-l!” like a cat. “Ra-o-u-l! Ra-o-u-l!” from morning till night. When De Vilmarte was at a table in a café a huge and mocking shadow sat beside him, and it said, wagging its head in a horrid fashion, “There’s death in our little drama, _hein, mon vieux_?”

The fate that had made their interests one, bound them together. They sought each other out to spend strange and tortured hours in each other’s company, while in the depths of Raoul’s heart a plan to end the torture was coming to its own slow maturity, and grew large and dark during the hot days of July. He could not continue to live. The burden of his secret weighed him down. Nor could he leave Hazelton behind him, the honor of the De Vilmartes in his hands.

The bloody answer to the riddle leaped out at him. Hazelton’s death—that was the answer. Then De Vilmarte could depart in peace. For two mad, happy days he saw life simply. First Hazelton, then himself.

One day he stopped short, for he realized he could not go until his mother—went. He must stay a while—until she died.

He had to wait until she died. He watched her, wondering if his endurance would outlast her life. He tried not to let her see him watching—for he knew there was madness in his eyes—and he would go out to find his dark shadow, for often it was less painful to be with him than away from him—he knew then what Hazelton was up to. He spent days in retracing the steps which had brought him to this desperate _impasse_. They had been easy, but he knew that weakness was at the bottom of it—perhaps, unless he did it now, he would never do it—perhaps an unworthy desire for life—and love—might hold back his hand.

So De Vilmarte lived his days and nights bound on the torturing pendulum of conflict.

――――

Suddenly Europe was aflame. France stood still and waited. And as he waited, with Europe, Raoul for a moment forgot his torment. War is a great destroyer, but among other things it destroys the smaller emotions. Its licking flame shrivels up personal loves and hates. When war was declared, old hates were blotted out, and hopeless lovers trembling on the brink of suicide were cured overnight. Small human atoms were drowned in the larger hate and the larger love. Men ceased to have power over their own lives since their lives belonged to France.

So when war was declared, choice was taken from Raoul’s hands. A high feeling of liberation possessed him. He walked along the street, and suddenly he realized that instead of going toward his home he was seeking his other half, the dark shadow to whom he had been so bound.

On Hazelton’s door a note was pinned, addressed to him.

“My friend,” it said, “you have luck! You will have your regiment, while nothing better than the ambulance, like a _sale embusque_, for me. If harm comes to you, don’t fear for your mother.”

This letter made him feel as though Hazelton had clasped his hand. He no longer felt toward Hazelton as an enemy, since France had also claimed him.

Madness had brushed him with its dark wings. By so slender a thread his life and Hazelton’s had hung! Yes—and his honor!

“Thank God!” he said, “for an honorable death!” It was the last personal thought that was his for a long time. War engulfed him. Instead of an individual he was a soldier of France, and his life was broken away from the old life which now seemed illusion, the days which streamed past him like pennants torn in the wind.

Later, in the monotony of trench warfare, he had time to think of Hazelton. He desired two things—to serve France, and to see Hazelton. Raoul wanted a word of friendship to pass between them, and especially he wanted to tell Hazelton that he need not worry about his wife. He wrote to him, but got no answer. Life went on; war had become the normal thing. The complexities of his former life receded further and further from him, and became more phantasmal, but the desire to see Hazelton before either of them should die remained with Raoul.

When he was wounded it was his last conscious thought before oblivion engulfed him. There followed a half-waking—pain—a penumbral land through which shapes moved vaguely; the smell of an anesthetic, an awakening, and again sleep. When he wakened fully he was in a white hospital ward with a sister bending over him.

“In the next bed,” she said, “there is a _grand blessé_.” She looked at him significantly. “He wishes to speak to you—he is a friend of yours.”

In the next bed lay Hazelton, the startling black of his shaggy hair framing the pallor of his face.

With difficulty Raoul raised his head. They smiled at each other. From the communion of their silence came Hazelton’s deep voice.

“Why the devil,” he said, “did we ever hate each other?”

Raoul shook his head. He didn’t know. He, too, had wanted to ask Hazelton this.

“It has bothered me,” said Hazelton. “I wanted to see you—” His voice trailed off. “I’ve wanted to ask you why we have needed this war—death—to make us know we don’t hate each other.”

“I don’t know,” said De Vilmarte. It was an effort for him to speak; his voice sounded frail and broken.

“Raoul,” Hazelton asked, tenderly, “where are you wounded? Is it bad?”

“I don’t know,” Raoul answered again.

“It’s his head,” the sister answered for him, “and his right hand.”

Hazelton raised his great head; a red mounted to his face; his old sardonic laughter boomed out through the ward. With a sharply indrawn breath of pain: “Oh, la—la!” he shouted. “_’Cré nom! ’Cré nom!_ What luck—imperishable! I’m dying—your right hand—your _right_ hand!” He sank back, his ironic laughter drowned in a swift crimson tide.

The nurse beckoned to an orderly to bring a screen....

Tears of grief and weakness streamed down Raoul’s face. To the last his ill luck had held. He hadn’t been able to make his friend understand, or to make amends. His right hand was wounded, and he could no longer serve France.

The sister looked at him with pity. She tried to console him.

“Death is not always so mercifully quick with these strong men,” she said.

THE WHITE BATTALION

_By_ FRANCES GILCHRIST WOOD From _The Bookman_ _Copyright, 1918, by Dodd, Mead and Company, Inc._ _Copyright, 1919, by Frances Gilchrist Wood._

An orderly ushered two officers of the Foreign Legion, young men in mud-stained khaki, through the door of a dugout back of the fighting line in France. As they entered the hut a French officer in horizon blue, equally muddy, rose and returned the American’s salute.

“You will be seated?” He pushed camp chairs toward them.

A guttering candle, stuck in a bottle neck, veiled rather than revealed the sordid interior. The light flickered across the young Frenchman’s face, threw gaunt shadows under his eyes emphasized the look of utter weariness and—there was something more.

The senior officer of the Legion, Captain Hailes, looked at him keenly.

“Major Fouquet, we report at headquarters in an hour, sir. Lieutenant Agor, commanding platoon at extreme right—contact platoon with your battalion, sir, reports we lost touch with the French forces between the advance and the first trench. Thought it might have been his watch, but the timepiece checks up to a second.”

The captain hesitated uneasily, “We are not presuming to question, sir, but Lieutenant Agor says he saw—we felt there might have been some cause, some reason that did not appear, so we came—”

The Frenchman lifted his head in a stupid way altogether foreign to his usual manner.

“Merci, Captain Hailes. We were—forty seconds slow in attacking the first trench, sir.” He went on mechanically as if delivering a rehearsed report. “Caught up and reached the second trench on time. Few prisoners besides the children. Enemy practically wiped out.”

He concluded heavily, a dazed look blotting all expression.

“There was a cause for the forty seconds delay, Major?”

Fouquet struggled up out of the curious apathy. He cleared his throat, made several attempts to speak and finally blurted out.

“You won’t believe it—I saw it and I cannot! But there are the children—and a first-line trench full of dead Huns—without a mark on them! Barres was flying over us—he saw the Battalion—knew them for old comrades. The women—all of them saw the faces of their dead! I don’t believe it, sir,—but how did we do it? The women never thrust once in the first trench—the children haven’t a wound—that’s got to prove it!”

He stopped abruptly—looking from one to the other with a gesture of hopeless protest. The Americans regarded him with puzzled eyes.

“Was it some new trick of the Huns? God knows they’ve given them to us in plenty! Can you tell us—it might—?”

Fouquet pulled himself forward, his knuckles whitening with his grip of the table edge.

“You know the history of the section of the Front the Avengers retook to-day?”

“No, Major Fouquet. We came in later, with the Canadians.”

“It began with the great retreat of 1914, sir, when the Germans were driving us back toward Paris. They had crowded our army against the river. Between the slow crossing and their terrible artillery fire, new to us then, we faced annihilation!”

There was a rustle at the door of the dugout and a whispered password. Fouquet did not pause.

“To the —nth Battalion was given the honor of acting as rear guard. Ah, sir,—” his voice steadied—guttural with pride and emotion, “our men stood like a barricade of rock against which the waves of German infantry dashed themselves, only to break and be withdrawn for re-formation. Each receding wave showed where it had bit into the red and blue barrier, for we were wearing the old uniform then, but the bits slid together, closing up the gaps to stand against the next flood. When the eroded wall went down, undermined and over-whelmed at last, the main army of France was across the river and safe.

“Only two of us lived to rejoin our army, Lieutenant Barres and myself. Barres’s leg was shattered, hopelessly crippling him for the infantry, but when the wounds healed—France could not spare so brave a man, so they strapped him to the seat of a plane in the winged section of the army, where he is still fighting!”

The sharp click, click of crutches tapped across the floor as Barres of the Aviation Squad came into the fringe of light. He saluted, then broke in upon Fouquet’s story.

“But you do not tell them, mon camarade, but for you I would have died with the rest! He does not tell you, sir, that he put his own chance of escape into peril by dragging me—a helpless burden—with him!”

He looked at Fouquet with an anxious frown, “I thought there might be enquiry about to-day. You are—?”

A look flashed between them, the love of men who have faced death together.

“Yes, Barres, I shall need you. It is the history of the Avengers I am telling—to explain—”

He turned to the Americans.

“In the years of struggle that came after the retreat, our women of France have taken the places of men behind the lines, while our soldiers held the Front. But when Russia freed herself the news filtered through the provinces that the women of Russia when the revolution needed them formed themselves into the Battalion of Death. We also heard that German women were in the army.

“Then the flame of a common inspiration touched the widows of the —nth. They sought and found each other and petitioned as their right that they be entered and drilled as the —nth Battalion of Avengers.

“Military objections refused them again and again, but the women stood as firm in their purpose as their men who had held the post of rear guard. Always they asked, Why should France be left a nation of sorrowful women only? Let the widowed women of the —nth take the place of men in the chance of death—they would welcome it—and so save men to France.

“At last they were accepted and trained. Each added to her equipment a small packet of cyanide of potassium as her Russian sisters had taught her. One further request they made, that the position assigned to them might be in the course of the advance to retake the ground held to the death by their men. To me was given the great honor to be their commander.”

He drew himself up with pride. “They have justified their petition for enlistment, sir, they wear the strap of a battalion commended for bravery. We have been fully trusted to hold our share of the Front in safety.”

As if at the significance of his own words his head dropped, then lifted again grimly.

“It was for to-day’s work that this battalion was assembled and trained to invincibility. We need no one to interpret the meaning of the Front to us, but to the women—to retake this strip of ground sodden with the blood of the rear guard barricade built of their men, meant being given the denied rite of closing glazed eyes, the crossing of arms on rigid breasts, the lighting of candles at head and feet and the last kiss on frozen lips. They were mad for it—not in revenge but to right a wrong.”

Fouquet’s voice thrilled, “That is the history, sir, and the temper of the Battalion of Avengers who held the trench at your right!

“When the order came for attack to-day, they waited, taut as arrows in held bowstrings, at the foot of the ladders for the signal to go over the top. Like shafts released they sprang up the sides of the ditch. There was sure death to the Hun in every gripped bayonet as they bent to follow the barrage of fire across the craters and snarled wire of No Man’s Land.

“No human sound comes through the hell of battle artillery and yet we knew the strangling gasp that ran the length of the line as the protective barrage made its final jump, lifted and showed us the trench we were to take. The women stood as motionless as the corpses of the old —nth!

“Thrust shield-wise above the heads of the Huns, crowning the ditch as with protective spikes, frightened and sobbing, cowering before us were hundreds of little children!”

Fouquet’s chair went spinning back as he leaned across the table.

“God! men—they knew! The devil tells them! They knew this section was held by women! For us to hold the Front—our share of the Front—these mothers must bayonet their way through crying, helpless babies!”

His groan found gasping echo.

“They were children of the French villages held by the Germans—we could tell! Some of them had been shot by the last of our barrage fire after the Huns had shoved them over the top. It was hell to see the children’s torn bodies writhing—we’re used to it with men! The smallest—babies—were clinging to the older ones—children of five or six—trying to hide—between the Huns and—us!

“If we went on—took the ditch—these mothers must cut through a barricade of children! If we did not go on, we betrayed our trust, lost our share of the Front—let the Huns behind the lines through a gap made by the failure of the women of the —nth!

“We seemed to stand there for hours, but it was only a second. The Huns had thrust their guns between the children, and were holding their fire—the devilish cat and mouse game!

“Then one of the women captains stumbled forward and made the sign of the cross. It is the voiceless battle cry of the Avengers and signs supreme sacrifice for all the Front means. She lifted her right hand in the sweep of victory—on her wrist was bound the packet of death they carry in case of capture by the kultur beasts—and fell, for the Huns opened fire the instant they saw her gesture.

“But the message had gotten over! They could charge—they must—and the cyanide would erase the intolerable memory forever! I looked at those nearest and saw they would go through with it, but men—their faces were set with the look of the face of Christ on the cross!”

He stopped, breathing heavily, and looked from one American to the other.

“You won’t believe it—I saw it and I cannot—but the proof is there! As the women gripped to thrust, leaning forward as if to force rebellious bodies toward that barricade, there swept down upon us from the rear or above, a sudden striding mist—a battalion of marching shadows in a blur of the old red and blue that outstripped the Avengers’ advance. There was a flash of charging steel and the waving colors of the old —nth as they swept over the untouched children into the trench.

“It’s all a blur, sir, I can’t tell you clearly, but they turned their faces as they passed and—we knew our dead. You could see the women cry out and lift their arms, each to her own man as he halted an instant beside her.

“Madame Arouet was sobbing as if caught by a bullet, ‘Jean—Jean!—to have seen you again! Ah, my God!’ The tall corporal, just beyond, threw herself with high piercing scream—arms outstretched—toward the smiling shadow that was passing.

“The bravest man in the old —nth, where all were brave, dropped behind as he bent over the fallen captain. There was a quivering smile of recognition just as the jerking heap settled into quiet; then, as if he waited for it, a slender blur in horizon blue sprang to his side and swept forward with the Battalion—though the captain still lay where she had fallen!”

Fouquet gripped his comrade, arm and crutch together, with a cry.

“Did you see our brave captain salute as he passed? Joyously I shouted as I fell into step beside him, but—I dropped back—I could not keep that pace! Barres—Barres—you saw them? You must have seen them? It was the old —nth come back to save their women from the last hellish trap set by fiends! We know they had the right. This was their battleground where once before they had saved an army of France!”

Lieutenant Agor was leaning across the table with staring eyes: “Then—that was what I—saw, sir?” He turned to his commander, “I told you it was like the fog blowing in off Frisco bay, and—”