Part 26

“I can see, Madame,” said the stranger, “that you despise me.”

“It is more than that,” answered Lily, her face still covered by her white hands. “I am certain now that I hate you.”

The Uhlan frowned. “I am sorry,” he said, “I thought you were sympathetic.”

The only answer was a laugh, incredibly cold and savage from so beautiful a woman.

Within the château more lights appeared, and in the courtyard there rose the sound of hoofs striking the cobblestones and of orders being shouted back and forth in guttural German. Far away to the east a solitary cannon barked. The noise ripped the blue stillness with the sound of a tapestry being torn.

“You have forgotten,” said Lily, “that I have a son and a lover in the war. You understand, they too are in the cavalry.”

She had scarcely finished speaking when the air was shattered by the terrific rattle of a dozen rifles fired simultaneously below the terrace somewhere among the buildings of the farm. A faint glare trembled above the iron bridge and then a second volley, terrifying and abrupt, and a second brief glare.

The Uhlan did not move but Lily sat up suddenly. They remained thus for some time, the woman in an attitude of listening. It appeared that she was straining every nerve, every muscle, lest the faintest sound escape her. When the volley was not repeated she turned her head, slowly and scornfully, in the direction of her companion. In her eyes there was a look of terrible accusation, a look charged with contempt and hatred. The stranger watched her as if fascinated and unable to remove his eyes from her face. At last she spoke, slowly and distinctly, in an awed, breathless whisper.

“What was that?”

The face of the Uhlan remained smooth and empty of all expression, as clean of all emotion as a bit of smooth white paper. In the flickering light from the lanterns which moved among the trees, the countenance appeared vague and lineless, almost imbecile in its negation. Then slowly his lips moved.

“It is the curé, Madame.... They have shot the curé.” The voice was as smooth as the face. It carried the hard, mocking cruelty of indifference. “They caught him signaling with his lantern from the steeple of the church.”

Without a sound Lily lay back once more and buried her face in her cloak. Her body shook silently.

“I could do nothing else,” continued the smooth voice. It came out from the thin lipped mouth as a serpent from a crevice in a rock. “It was not I who killed. I had nothing to say in the matter. I did what I could not help doing. _Enfin_, it was the monster!”

Across the fields of wheat from the direction of Meaux the faint crackling sound came nearer and nearer. It was as if the grain had caught fire and the flames were rushing toward them. Lily still lay with her eyes covered as if to shut out the picture which had risen in her imagination. M. Dupont ... the friend of dying Madame Gigon, the priest to whom she had told her life ... M. Dupont dead among the dungheaps of the farmyard!

Somewhere in the direction of the Trilport bridge, the solitary cannon fired again and as though it had summoned Madame Gigon back to life, they heard her speaking suddenly inside the lodge. She was talking rapidly in a low voice.

“You need not worry, Henri. To-morrow there will be fresh vegetables in from the barrier. At dark, a balloon with two passengers will be released at the Gare St. Lazare. Gabriel himself told me.” And then for a time she muttered incoherently and when her speech became clear again, she was saying, “There is a notice on the Rue de Rivoli that they are selling animals in the Jardin de Plantes. For food you understand ... I hear at ten sous the pound.” Again more mumbling and then, “Ah, that one was close. Yesterday a shell exploded in the Boulevard Montparnasse. We must place our faith in God.... Yes, we must pray, Henri. There is not enough God in the world.”

Then she became silent for a time and the Uhlan said, “Madame is delirious. She is living through 1870.... You see we have not progressed at all. It is merely turn about, first the French, and then we take a turn.” He laughed a nervous laugh devoid of mirth. “Ah, it is a pretty business, Madame ... a pretty business. The sooner we are all killed off the better. The animals could manage this world better than we have done.”

He had not finished speaking when a sudden rattle of rifles sounded somewhere near at hand, a little to the east by the copse in the long meadow. At the same time the confusion in the stables and the little park redoubled. A horse whinneyed. Men shouted. Water pails were overturned. Out of the darkness a man in rough gray uniform appeared and addressed the Captain in excited, guttural German. The Uhlans had begun to leave the stable. They were making their way through the black trees over the neatly ordered flowers to the gate in the garden wall.

The stranger talked for a moment with the soldier and then rising, he said, “Good-by, Madame. It is not likely that we shall ever meet again. I thank you for the conversation. It saved the night for an insomniac. It is more stimulating to talk with a beautiful woman than with common soldiers.”

Lily lay buried in her cloak. She did not even uncover her face, but the Uhlan bowed in a polite ironic fashion and slipped away through the trees, vanishing at once like a shadow. The uproar in the château gardens and in the stable increased. It swallowed the stranger.

As the sound of his footsteps died away, she raised herself cautiously and looked about her. The sound of firing continued. The air was full of an unearthly red glow. Supporting herself on one elbow she saw that the light came from the opposite side of the river. The farm had been fired by the departing troops. For a time she watched the flames, eating their way slowly at the windows and along the eaves, growing always in intensity. The iron bridge was filled with retreating Uhlans, all black against the red haze. The thunder of hoofs on the planks again filled the air.

LXXXIII

Thus she remained as if under a spell, ignoring the uproar that had arisen all about her, in the fields, in the château garden and along the tow-path. When at last she moved, it was to sit up and place her feet upon the ground where they struck some hard object that made a clicking, metallic sound as it grated against the stone. Reaching down, her fingers closed over the cold metal of a lugar pistol. In the confusion and the shouting it had slipped from its holster. The stranger had forgotten it. Slowly she raised the weapon and held it up in the glow of the burning farm. For a long time she regarded the pistol as if it held some sinister fascination and presently, leaning upon the back of her chair, she rose slowly and concealed it in the folds of her cloak. When she had gained a full sense of her balance, she moved off from the terrace through the black trees in the direction of the iron bridge.

The firing had increased. There were cries in French and in guttural German, and from the shrubbery along the garden wall the low moan of a wounded soldier. With the long cloak trailing across the dewy grass she continued to move in an unswerving line to the garden gate. As she passed through it a stray bullet, striking the wall beside her, chipped the ancient mortar into her face and her thick, disordered hair. Outside on the towpath she walked until she stood on the little knoll above the iron bridge.

In the center of the structure could be discerned the figures of three men silhouetted against the flames of the burning farm. Two were kneeling at work on some object which absorbed all their attention. The third stood upright shielding his eyes from the glow, keeping watch and urging them to hurry. He was slim and very neat, and carried himself with a singular air of scorn. Unmistakably he was the visitor, the stranger upon the terrace. At the far end of the bridge, three horses, held in check by the rider of a fourth horse, curvetted and neighed in terror at the leaping flames.

All this Lily saw from the eminence of the low knoll. And when she had watched it for some time she raised her arm, holding the lugar pistol, and slowly took careful aim. The cloak slipped from her shoulders into the grass. Once she fired and then again and again. The slim, neat man stumbled suddenly, struck his head against an iron girder of the bridge and slipped struggling into the river. There was a faint splash and he disappeared. Of the other two men, one fell upon his face, struggled up again and, aided by his companion, crawled painfully toward the terrified horses. The flames roared wildly. The horses leapt and curvetted for a moment and then disappeared with their riders, followed by the horse whose rider lay at the bottom of the Marne.

On the low knoll the pistol dropped from Lily’s hand and slipped quietly into the river. A party of three French infantrymen coming suddenly out of the sedges along the river discovered her lying in the thick wet grass. Bending over her they talked volubly for a time and at last carried her back through the gate into the lodge. They could wring from her no sort of rational speech. She kept talking in the strangest manner, repeating over and over again, “It is simply a matter of chance ... like roulette ... but one of a million chances ... but one ... but one.... Still one chance is too many.”

Inside the lodge, one of the soldiers struck a sulphur match and discovered in the bed by the window the body of an old woman. He summoned his companions and they too leaned over the body. Beyond all doubt the old woman was dead.

LXXXIV

From that night on the sound of firing grew steadily more faint and the glow in the sky more dim. There were times when Lily, lying delirious in the lodge under the care of Madame Borgue, the farmer’s wife, behaved in the wildest manner. When the wind blew from the north, it carried the sound of the guns across forests and wheatfields into the park at Germigny and the barrage, no longer confused and close at hand, took on a pulsing regular throb like the beating of surf upon a beach of hard shingle. At such times Lily would sit up and talk wildly in a mixture of French and English of Mills and monsters, of cauldrons, of white hot metal that absorbed the very bodies of men. The distant rumbling was for all the world like the pounding which had enveloped Cypress Hill in the days of Lily’s youth. But Madame Borgue, knowing nothing of all this, could make no sense of the ravings of her patient.

She remained a long time ill. While she lay unconscious with the fever, Madame Gigon was buried among the beaded _couronnes_ of the cemetery at Trilport between her obscure husband, the curator, and the father who had been ruined by his loyalty to Napoleon the Little.

It happened that on the very day of the lonely funeral, Madame de Cyon died in Paris of indigestion brought on by overeating and the loss of twenty francs at bridge, played secretly to be sure, for in those days no one played bridge in Paris. So Madame Gigon, by dying first, was cheated out of her triumphant, “I told you so!” Of course, it may have been that in another world she knew this satisfaction; for it was true that Nadine “went off just like that.”

And in early October, on the first day that Lily ventured from the lodge out upon the green terrace, she read in the Figaro that she had been decorated with the Croix de Guerre. The citation appeared in the midst of the military news.

“_Shane, Madame Lily. Widow. American by birth. Decorated for valor at Germigny l’Evec during the Battle of the Marne, when she prevented a detachment of Uhlans from destroying an iron bridge of the utmost importance to our troops._”

This she read aloud to Madame Borgue. It was tiny paragraph, printed in very small black type, and it caused Lily to laugh, bitterly, mirthlessly. Letting fall the Figaro by the side of her chair, she lay back.

“As if,” she said, “I had ever thought of the bridge! As if I even knew that they were trying to destroy it!”

And when Madame Borgue, alarmed by this outburst, sought to lead her back into the house, Lily said, “I am not delirious.... Truly ... I am not. It is so absurdly funny!” And she laughed again and again.

She never knew that it was M. de Cyon who brought the affair to the attention of the Ministry of War and secured her the distinction.

Slowly it became clear that fate had not allotted to the dead Uhlan the chance of Césaire’s death. She received no news of him. Even M. de Cyon, in the government at Paris, could discover nothing. The hours grew into days and the days into months until, at last, she was able to leave the lodge and visit Jean in the hospital at Neuilly. There came at length a day when there was no longer any doubt. The Baron was simply among the missing ... the great number concerning whom there was no news. It was as if he had bade her farewell at the vine-covered gate and galloped off on the black horse into a darkness which swallowed him forever.

In Paris, the house in the Rue Raynouard acquired an air of complete desolation. There was no one, not even Jean who lay at the hospital in Neuilly with his right leg amputated at the knee, to share it with Lily. The mirrors reflected nothing save the figures of the mistress, the servants and M. de Cyon who appeared to find consolation for his recent loss in visits to the big house at Numero Dix.

Ellen, escaped at last from Central Europe, had returned to America. Madame Gigon was dead. Of her friends none remained. Madame de Cyon was in her grave. Madame Blaise still lived in a polite madhouse, convinced that the war was only a revolution which would place her friend, the wine merchant, upon the throne of a glorified and triumphant France. The others? Some had gone into the provinces, and of those who remained, all were interested in their own families. They had sons, brothers, nephews, cousins, at the front.... There were no more _salons_. It was impossible to go alone to the theater. There remained nothing to do but visit Jean (a sad business though he seemed cheerful enough) and sit in the big empty house, so silent now, so empty of chatter, of music, of laughter. Even the great piano under the glowing Venice of Mr. Turner remained closed and silent save in the rare moments when Lily, as if unable any longer to endure the silence, opened it and played with only half a heart the tunes which once had filled the house and overflowed into the garden. It was clear that it required more than mirrors, jades, pictures and old carpets to make a dwelling endurable. As Lily remarked to M. de Cyon at tea one afternoon in early November, these things, each one the reminder of some precious association, only rendered Numero Dix the more unbearable.

“I can understand,” she said, “that sometimes my mother must have died of loneliness in the house at Cypress Hill.”

She told M. de Cyon the history of the burned house, bit by bit, from the day it was built until the day it was destroyed. Indeed she told him all the story of her father, of her own childhood, of the Mills and the Town. She even told him something of Irene’s story, though not enough to be sure for him to evolve the whole truth, for there were certain barriers beyond which she allowed no one to penetrate; no one save an old village priest who was, after all, not a man but an agent of God himself. And he was dead now.

In those days the pair drew more closely to each other, as if they found in the friendship a consolation for the melancholy and overwhelming loneliness. And it is true that Lily had grown more sympathetic. The old carefree gaiety had given place to a new and more gentle understanding. The indolence, it seemed, had vanished before a new determination to dominate her own aimless existence. She had grown more calm. Indeed there were times now when she became wholly grave and serious, even pensive, as she sat quietly with the pleasant, white-haired Frenchman who found her company so agreeable that he seldom permitted a day to pass without calling at Numero Dix on his way from the Ministry of War. She became, as she had observed to Willie Harrison, more and more like her mother.

Each day was like the one before, and this monotony to Lily must have been a new and painful experience. The only variation occurred when Paul Schneidermann, returning from a hospital in Cannes, arrived in Paris and became a second visitor at the house in the Rue Raynouard. But even in this there was an inexpressible sadness, for the bullet which had wounded Schneidermann paralyzed forever his left arm. He was never again able to play the piano in the long drawing-room nor the cello he had brought to the house when Ellen was there.

With Ellen gone, the American newspapers no longer found their way into the house. Indeed it seemed impossible to obtain them anywhere in Paris, even if Lily had been capable of such an effort. So there were no more clippings for the enameled box. The last one bore the date of the first month of the war. Since then there had been nothing. It was as if Krylenko, too,--the Krylenko whose progress Lily watched from so great a distance--had died or gone away like all the others. There remained only the wreckage of a life which had once been complete, content, even magnificent in its quiet way.

When at last Jean was able to leave the hospital, he secured through M. de Cyon an appointment at the Ministry of War. As for Lily, she undertook presently the establishment of a soup kitchen for soldiers who passed through Paris on leave. But at this diversion she was no more successful than she had been at knitting socks for the strikers; and after a few months she abandoned it completely to the care of women less wealthy and more capable. She continued, however, until the end to supply it lavishly with money. In her enthusiasm for the charities of the war she succeeded in exhausting for the first time her annual income. She even dipped into her principal. The two hundred thousand dollars which the Town paid her for Cypress Hill she used to provide food and comfort for the soldiers of another nation.

LXXXV

In the Town no new railway station raised its splendors because in those years the Town and the Mills were too busy making money. In all the haste even the new railway station was forgotten. The deserted park became a storing place for the shells which the Mills turned out in amazing numbers. Gas shells, high explosives, shrapnel cases ... all these things were piled high along the brick paths where delphiniums and irises once flourished. Even the Venus of Cydnos and the Apollo Belvedere, cracked and smudged in the niches of the dead hedge, were completely buried beneath munitions. Because somewhere in the world men were being killed, the Mills did an enormous business. The Town grew as it had never before grown. Prices were tremendous. The place reeked with prosperity and progress. People even said that the war would finish Germany, that no longer would she be able to compete in the great steel markets of the world. And that, of course, meant more prosperity, more riches.

The flames leapt high above the furnaces. The great sheds echoed with such a pounding as had never before been heard upon this earth. Girls in gas masks worked long hours filling shells with corroding acids which turned their faces haggard, and yellow as the aprons they wore. Little clerks acquired automobiles. Men who dealt in real estate grew rich. Every one would have been content, save for an insatiable appetite for even greater wealth.

Once, to be sure, there occurred an explosion which was for all the world like the end of everything. Forty-seven blackened bodies were carried out under white sheets which clung to the scorched flesh. Of seventeen others nothing at all was found save a few bones, a hand or a foot, a bit of blackened skin; and from these it was impossible to construct any thing. So they were dumped into great trenches, and when the earth had covered them, the world rushed merrily on. The flames leapt higher and redder than ever. The sheds fairly split with the sound of hammering. The little clerks dashed about madly in the sudden luxury of their motors. Every one had money. The Town was prosperous. It grew until it was the biggest in the state. Progress rattled on like everything, so nothing else mattered.

In Paris the war came to an end. One or two statesmen and a whole flock of politicians, after swooping about for a time, descended upon the peace.

In those days Paris acquired an insane and desperate gaiety such as it knew neither before nor since. The bright boulevards swarmed with the soldiers of fourteen nations clad in ten times as many gay uniforms. It became gay and frantic with the neurotic excitement of a madhouse. Street walkers from the provinces, even from Italy and England and Spain, rushed to Paris because business there was so good. In dives and cabarets a barbaric abandon reigned. Every one learned new vices and depravities. Brutes, vulgarians, savages stalked the avenues. Overnight boys became old men, burdened with a corroding wisdom which otherwise they might never have known.

And in the Town people shook their heads sagely and said that war was a great thing when it was fought in a just cause. “It purifies!” they said. “It brings out the finest side of men!”

What was prosperous was right. Wasn’t success its own vindication? About this there could be no argument. Money talks, my boy! Money talks! What is successful is right, Germany, the bully among nations! Germany, the greedy materialistic Germany, was done in forever.

Of course it may have been that when they spoke of War as the Great Purifier, they were thinking of the vast army of the Dead.

LXXXVI