THE BEST SHORT STORIES OF 1918 (continued 7)

“‘More than that,’ put in Mara, ‘it is unwise. They take a poor way to gain favor with us Serbs. For my part, I do not think it safe for the Archduke to come here.’

“‘And there, my mila,’ he declared, with a shrewd, sinister smile, ‘your judgment is perhaps better than even you yourself suppose. Myself, I doubt he will be fool enough to come. At the last we shall be informed, with a grand flourish, that he is ‘indisposed.’ Not sick, you understand. Royalties are never sick. It is not etiquette. Peasants are sick. The middle-classes are ill. The great are only indisposed. Anything else is vulgar. Well, I hope he will know enough to stay away. Otherwise he may indeed become indisposed after his arrival.’

“‘What do you mean, Gavrilo?’ I asked.

“‘That the air of this place is not good for Austrian royalties just now,’ he said. ‘It is Serbian air. There are the germs of freedom in it, and such germs are more dangerous to autocrats than those of kuga,—cholera.’

“‘Be frank,’ I urged. ‘Do you mean that the Archduke’s life is threatened?’

“‘It is known,’ he replied, ‘that the governor has received warning letters. The Archduke is advised not to appear here on our holiday. One understands, moreover, that the Austrian secret police concur in this advice. Which shows that the filthy beasts are not so stupid as they might be.’

“‘Assure me, Gavrilo,’ Mara broke in, ‘that your comitajia has nought to do with this threat!’

“‘Long ago,’ he answered ‘I promised you that while you love me I will not actively participate in anything violent. You may be sure, Maro, mila, that I shall keep my word.’

“‘You keep your word always,’ she replied, ‘but these threats disturb me and I gain comfort from your reassurances.’

“Gavrilo walked slowly over and looked into the bird cage.

“‘You are certain, then, that you do requite my affection?’ he asked her over his shoulder.

“‘You are well aware,’ she said, ‘that I worship you.’

“‘Would that I were as well aware of it,’ he returned, ‘as that I am nothing to be worshiped.’ Then after a pause he added: ‘If you do love me, why not release this poor bird? See how wretchedly it huddles. Its eyes are becoming dull. It will surely die. How can we Serbs talk of freedom for ourselves, yet hold this wild creature prisoner? And of all birds, a kos—the bird of Kossovo! Permit me to open the door of the cage, Maro. Let us celebrate the Serbian holiday by liberating the poor kos. Shvabe cannot prevent that, with all their edicts.’

“Mara looked black.

“‘The holiday is not yet here!’ said she.

“‘When the day comes,’ he answered, ‘the kos will be dead.’

“‘I wish it were already dead!’ she exclaimed petulantly. ‘I wish I had never seen the accursed thing. It has brought me only sorrow!’

“‘Then,’ I interjected, ‘why not let it fly away?’

“‘I have told you both,’ she answered angrily. ‘This means more to me than the life or death of a bird. It is a symbol. I have the feeling that if it were to fly away all my will power would fly with it.’

“‘And to me also,’ returned the boy solemnly, ‘this means more than the life or death of a bird. And likewise to me the kos is a symbol. It should be so to every Serb. Think of Kossovo! This is a bird linked with our racial aspirations. If we free this one, we may, perhaps, ourselves deserve freedom. Otherwise, what do we deserve? Do we merit more than we ourselves give?’

“Having witnessed Mara’s agitation when she first told me of their differences over the bird, I would now have stopped Gavrilo could I have signaled him, but he was engaged in putting some green leaves through the door of the cage. As he finished speaking, Mara rose, dropped her sewing upon the ground, and bursting into tears ran into the house.

“‘Maro, mila!’ Gavrilo cried, attempting to catch her; but the door slammed in his face.

“He was white as he turned to me. ‘Tell me,’ he cried in a tone childlike and baffled, ‘can anyone understand the ways of woman? As men grow older do they understand better, or is it always like this?’

“Deeply concerned about them as I was, the naïveté of this question forced a smile from me.

“‘You must ask some man older than I,’ I answered.

“‘Perhaps we are not intended to understand them,’ he said reflectively. ‘No doubt the Lord made them as they are so that we should forever be enthralled by them, as by any other enigma beyond comprehension. I enjoy lying on my back at night, to gaze up at the stars and think profoundly of eternity whirling about us, and the infinity of space, but I assure you, when my lovely Mara becomes agitated those phenomena of nature seem, by contrast, trifling matters. I believe that if one could but understand Mara, one could understand the riddles of the ages.’

“I left Gavrilo in the garden. At dinner that night he was not with us. I did not see him again until next evening, when I came upon him whispering with three young men upon the stairs. As I passed them they became silent, nor did I like the nervous smile with which Gavrilo greeted me. On the day following I saw him go into a kafana with the same youths. I think he also saw me, and from the haste with which he moved into the little café I gathered the impression that he was avoiding me.

“On the day before the maneuvers I cornered him after luncheon. Clearly he was keyed to a highly nervous tension.

“‘Gavrilo,’ I said, ‘do not tell me anything you do not wish to. I have no desire to pry into your affairs. But I beg you to remember Mara and your promise to her, and not to become entangled in any rash escapade.’

“For a moment he stood looking at me without answering. It was as though he was carefully formulating a reply. Then he said:

“‘I have remembered. I have positively refused to participate in certain matters in which I have been pressed to become active. At this moment that is all that I am enabled to say.’

“‘It is all I desire to know,’ I said. ‘Tell me, what of Mara?’

“‘All is well between us,’ he returned, ‘so long as one mentions not the bird.’

“Later I found them together in the garden. Mara was, as usual, sewing. While I sat and talked with her, Gavrilo started picking fresh leaves to put into the bird cage. Mara, who had been telling me how, upon the morrow, the Serbs were to leave their shutters closed all day, so that they should not see the Austrians, ceased to speak as Gavrilo began gathering the leaves, and watched him narrowly for a moment.

“‘Gavrilo,’ she said, ‘please put no more leaves into the cage.’

“‘Why not?’

“‘Because it is not well for him. He has been pecking at the leaves and I think they poison him.’

“‘No,’ said Gavrilo.

“‘Yes,’ she insisted. ‘He appears miserable to-day.’

“‘But naturally!’ returned the youth. ‘That is not new. He is dying. See how he is huddled with closed eyes in the corner of the cage.’ As he spoke he plucked another leaf.

“Mara’s expression became ominous.

“‘If he should die,’ she said in a quavering voice, ‘it will be because of the leaves which you have given him!’

“‘Impossible,’ Gavrilo replied. ‘Does not a bird live among the leaves?’

“‘I tell you,’ she exclaimed, ‘I have asked the old bird man about it. He says some leaves are good and some are not. He is coming this evening to see the kos and give it medicine in its water.’

“I was relieved when Gavrilo pressed the point no farther but dropped the fresh leaves on the ground. Feeling that a situation had been narrowly averted, I thought best to leave them together.

“That evening, as I was walking toward the hotel from the square at the center of the town, I saw him coming out of the kafana with several of the youths I had come to recognize as his friends. He joined me and we walked along together. At Mara’s garden gate he halted, saying: ‘Let us enter and see the poor bird.’

“‘No, Gavrilo,’ I said warningly. ‘It is not the bird we go to see, but Mara.’

“‘So be it,’ he replied. ‘Let us then visit Mara.’

“Mara was not in the garden. Gavrilo called her name. She answered from the house, and a moment later came out to meet us.

“As she emerged I saw her glance at the bird cage. Then she gave a startled cry.

“‘Look!’ she wailed. ‘The kos is dead!’

“It was true; there lay the bird upon its back among the dry leaves at the bottom of the cage.

“For a time we stood in silence, regarding it through the bars. I knew that Gavrilo and Mara were filled with emotion, and for my own part I was surprised to discover how much the death of the bird seemed to mean to me. When, a day or two before, they had spoken of symbolism in connection with the kos, I knew what they meant, but did not feel it: yet now I felt it strongly, as though I myself were a Serb, with a Serb’s vision and superstition. It was not a dead bird that I saw, but a climax in a parable—a story of scriptural flavor, fraught with uncanny meaning.

“Gavrilo was the first to speak.

“‘Poor kos!’ he said in a low, tragic tone. ‘It is free at last. It was written that it should not be captive when to-morrow dawns.’

“‘What do you mean?’ demanded Mara.

“‘I told you it was destined to die unless you let it go,’ he answered gently.

“‘And as I would not let it go,’ she retorted, ‘you desired that it should die, in accordance with your prophecy! Yes, that is it! You made it die! You placed the leaves of henbane in its cage and killed it!’

“‘You are excited, Maro,’ he returned. ‘You must know that I desired the poor bird to live. Let us dig a little grave here in the garden and bury it, and cease to speak of it until we are calmer. We are overwrought—both of us—because of the bitterness of to-morrow. Where is the spade?’

“‘Do not touch the kos!’ she commanded: ‘It shall not be buried yet.’

“‘Why not?’ I interposed. ‘It will be better for us all.’

“‘The old bird man comes this evening,’ Mara flung back. ‘He will look at the bird and know that Gavrilo has poisoned it with henbane.’

“‘But, Maro,’ I returned, ‘Gavrilo has said that he did not. You know that he is truthful.’

“‘His words mean nothing!’ she cried. ‘Am I not a Serb? Do I not read the meanings in events? Gavrilo lies. Gavrilo killed the kos. He is a murderer. I hate him!’

“‘Ah!’ he exclaimed. ‘You give me the truth at last!’

“‘Yes, the truth!’

“‘So much the better that I know in time!’ cried Gavrilo, and without another word he ran frantically from the garden.

“As for Mara, she seemed almost on the brink of madness. I do not know how long I remained there trying to reason with her, calm her, make her see the folly and danger of what she had done. By the time her passion had abated the late June twilight had settled over the town. Presently I heard the garden gate open, and a moment later a venerable Serb appeared.

“‘Wait!’ Mara said to me. ‘Now you shall learn that I was right!’

“Then, to the old man, she said: ‘You are too late to cure my bird, but you are not too late to tell me from what cause came its death. Look at this leaf that was placed in its cage. Is not that the henbane?’

“The old man took the leaf, inspected it, and shook his head.

“‘No,’ said he. ‘Let me see the bird.’

“‘It lies there in the cage.’

“He opened the cage door and, reaching in, removed the little body.

“‘Ah,’ he said, ‘a kos. Do you not know, my child, that birds of this species cannot long survive captivity?’

“Mara hung her head.

“‘I have heard it said,’ she answered in a low voice.

“‘To imprison wild birds is cruel,’ remarked the old bird man. ‘These birds, in particular, are the Serbs of the air. They are descended from birds that saw the field of Kossovo. They desire only to be free.’ Then, as Mara did not reply, he said: ‘Bring a light.’

“She went into the house and emerged with a lamp, placing it upon a table near the door. The old bird man sat down beside the table and, holding the bird near the light, brushed back the soft plumage of its breast, much in the manner of peasant mothers whom one sees, occasionally, searching with unpleasant suggestiveness in their children’s hair.

“‘Look,’ he said, ‘the bird would have died of these, even had it survived captivity. It is covered with animalculæ. In a cage it could not rid itself of them as nature enables free creatures to do.’

“Looking at the bird’s breast, Mara and I could see the deadly vermin.

“‘Give me a spade,’ said the old man. ‘I will inter the bird here in the garden.’

“Mara indicated a spade leaning against the wall. Then, turning with beseeching eyes to me, she seized both my hands, and said in a low, intense voice:

“‘Go, I pray you, and find Gavrilo! Tell him that I implore his forgiveness. Say that I love him better than all the world and ask only that he come to me at once.’

“I went directly to the hotel and to Gavrilo’s room. He was not there. No one about the place had seen him. I then went to the kafana which I knew he patronized, but the proprietor declared that he knew nothing of his whereabouts. Through the remainder of the evening I diligently searched the town, going to the houses of all his friends, but nowhere could I find a trace of him. Obliged at last to acknowledge myself defeated, I returned to the hotel. Several times during the night I arose and stole to his room, but daylight came without his putting in an appearance. Early in the morning I went again to the kafana, but though I learned there that the Archduke had arrived the night before with his wife and his suite, and was housed at the governor’s palace, I got no word of the missing boy. Wherefore, after breakfast, it became my unpleasant duty to go to Mara, inform her of my failure, and comfort her as best I might.

“She looked ill and terrified. I wished that she would weep.

“Thinking perhaps to find him in the central square of the town before the Archduke, the governor, and the other officials set out for the review, I was moving in that direction when there came to my ears the dull sound of an explosion. Continuing on my way, I encountered as I rounded the next corner a scattering crowd of men, women, and children, running toward me, in the street.

“I asked two or three of them what had happened, but they ran on without reply. Presently, among them, I saw one of the youths with whom I had several times seen Gavrilo, and him I seized by the coat, demanding information.

“‘Let me go!’ he cried. ‘Some one threw a bomb into the Archduke’s carriage! They are arresting everyone. Get away!’ And he tugged violently to escape my hold.

“‘Have you seen Gavrilo?’

“‘Not to-day.’

“‘Is the Archduke dead?’

“‘No. He warded off the bomb and it exploded beneath the carriage which followed. For God’s sake, release me!’

“I did so, and walked on toward the square. Halfway down the block I met some Austrian police. After questioning me briefly they let me go, whereafter I questioned them. The horses drawing the second carriage had been killed, they said, and some officers of the archducal suite injured. The Archduke, however, insisted upon continuing to the review and would presently pass. They advised me to return to my hotel.

“I had hardly reached my room when I heard a bugle and the clatter of hoofs outside. Going to the window, I saw mounted men of the Royal Austrian Guard advancing around the corner. Behind them, between double rows of cavalry, came several landaus, carrying outriders, and driven by coachmen in white wigs and knee breeches. As the first of these vehicles came nearer, I saw that the occupants of the back seat were Francis Ferdinand, Archduke of Austria, heir apparent to the throne of Austria-Hungary, and his morganatic wife, the Duchess of Hohenberg.

“The shutters of most of the houses were closed, but in a few windows I saw faces, and there were scattered knots of people on the sidewalks, closely watched by the policemen who rode ahead on horses and bicycles. As the archducal carriage came along, hats were raised, and once or twice I heard faint cheering, which the Archduke and his consort acknowledged, he by touching the visor of his helmet, she by inclining her head.

“As their carriage came below my window and I saw the expression of condescending good will frozen on both their faces, and thought of the constant apprehension there must be behind those polite masks, it struck me as amazing that a man and woman could be found, in these times, to play the royal part.

“As I was thinking thus I saw a dark-clad figure dart out suddenly from somewhere on the sidewalk, below, pass swiftly between the horses of the bodyguard, and reach the side of the royal carriage. Some of the guardsmen leaped at once from their horses and there was a dash of policemen toward the man, but before anyone laid hands upon him he raised one arm, as though pointing accusingly at the Archduke and his Countess, and there followed, in swift succession, two sharp reports.

“I saw the royal pair fall forward. Simultaneously the carriage stopped and was at once surrounded by an agitated group of soldiers, policemen, and servants; while another and more violent group pressed about the individual who had fired the shots, beating him as they swept him away down the street. Before they had gone a dozen yards, however, a high official, who had jumped out of the second carriage, ran up and directed them to take the man to the sidewalk. This brought the crowd in my direction, and it was only as they turned toward me that I caught a glimpse of the face of their prisoner. As I had dreaded, it was poor Gavrilo.”

For a moment all of us were too thunderstruck to speak. Somehow the picture he had given us did not seem to be that of an assassin, as one imagines such a man.

“You mean to say,” asked the man by the window slowly, “that this very boy you’ve been telling us about was the one who shot the Archduke?”

“Yes,” said the other, “he was Gavrilo Prinzip of Sarajevo.”

“Good Lord!” exclaimed the third. “The boy who brought on the war!”

“As we were saying earlier,” returned the one who had told the tale, “historians will doubtless trace the beginnings of the war to Gavrilo’s shot. Certainly Austria used the shot as her excuse, alleging that a plot to kill the Archduke had been hatched in Serbia—which was absolutely untrue, for Serbia was afraid of nothing so much as of giving offense to Austria, knowing well that Austria was only seeking a pretext to pounce upon her, precisely as she had earlier pounced upon Bosnia and Herzegovina, annexing them.”

After a thoughtful pause he added: “Poor Gavrilo! I am glad to know that he is free at last. Like Mara’s starling, he was not one to live long in a cage. And it is perhaps because I was so fond of him, and also because Austria’s excuse was so transparently despicable, that I shall always go behind the shooting in thinking of the beginning of the war. As I conceive it, it was Mara’s anger that released Gavrilo from the promise which, otherwise, would have withheld him. And it was the death of the caged starling that brought on her anger. And it was the animalculæ that caused the bird’s death.”

“That is,” put in the man by the window, “you prefer to trace the war down to such a small beginning as the death of that caged bird?”

“Rather,” replied the other, “to a still smaller and more repulsive beginning—to the vermin which destroyed the bird. It seems to me I see them always crawling through the explanations, apologies, excuses, war messages, and peace overtures of the Teutonic autocrats.”

AT ISHAM’S

By EDWARD C. VENABLE

From Scribner’s Magazine

Copyright, 1918, by Charles Scribner’s Sons.

Copyright, 1919, by Edward C. Venable.

It was a place where men went who liked to talk of curious things. It was not, of course, advertised as that; there was no sign to the public saying as much. Indeed, the only sign of any sort said “Wines, Ales, and Liquors,” just below the name “Isham.” But, nevertheless, that is what it distinctively was—a place where men went who liked to talk of curious things.

It was a curious place to look at, too, in a way—the wrong way. It was a three-story house among houses fifteen, twenty, and thirty stories high; it was a house sixty years old, living usefully among houses, most of which were scarcely as many months old. But sixty years is no great age for a house in most places, and three stories is not out of the common. It is thirty stories that are extraordinary. In the right way Isham’s was a very ordinary place to look at, in very curious surroundings—only it took a moment’s thought to find it out.

Old Isham himself, though, would have been curious anywhere in the world. He was seventy years old, and he looked precocious. Perhaps having lived so long in an atmosphere of “wild surmise” had robbed him of the gift of wonderment, the last light of infancy to go out in the world, and so he was absolutely grown up. That is what he was, absolutely grown up. Looking into his face you could not imagine his ever being surprised, quite without a previous experience of the present. As one of his customers said, he could take the gayest dinner-party that ever was, and with a single glance of his faded blue eyes reduce it to a pile of dirty dishes and the bill. He was saturated with the gayety of thirty thousand dinners. He never condescended to the vulgarity of a dress suit, but always wore plain black with immaculate linen. So he would move in the evening, ponderously—for he must have weighed two hundred pounds—among the tables, listening imperturbably to praise and blame. Yes, chops were almost always properly broiled, beer had been flat from the beginning of the world—Lucullus with a dash of Cato.

Twinkle Sampson was his oldest patron. He was as old as Isham, and had been dining there once or twice a week ever since he was thirty; but he was the antithesis of Isham in appearance. He had the face of a very young child; it was all wonderment. The whole world was for him a wild surmise. His hobby was astronomy. He liked, as he said, to talk about the moon. Any of the heavenly bodies would interest him, but the moon was his own peculiar sphere. His knowledge was for the most laboriously gleaned, unassisted, from books; but twice in his life he had looked at the moon through a great telescope, and those two occasions were to Twinkle Sampson what one wedding and one funeral are to most men. He looked like a moon-lover, too, a pale, weak reflection of masculinity. The nearest he ever got to anger was when some ignorant person at Isham’s threatened to divert the talk from his hobby when once he had dragged it thither.

“I know a man—,” began one of these imprudently on one occasion.

“We don’t care if you know a million men,” interrupted Twinkle. “We want to talk about the moon.”

And he sat for five minutes thereafter, blinking at the interloper like an exasperated white-haired owl. Even in that outburst, though, he characteristically took refuge in the plural.

Such little “flare-ups” were very, very frequent at Isham’s. Indeed, they were inevitable, because there people talked of what they had thought about. It is the talk for talk’s sake that is only a string of wearying agreements; the drunkard over a bar, a débutante at a dinner-table, a statesman among his constituents. Talk at Isham’s was intelligently sharp, interrupted, disputative. And, in any case, Savelle would have made it so. He was eaten up by the zeal of his cause, which was Christianity and capitalism. Capitalism, he preached, was founded on Christianity, was a development and an inevitable development of the social implication of the Gospels. It was a curious plea; it had the power of exasperating human beings otherwise kindly and meditative, such as chiefly affected Isham’s, to something like fury when Savelle eloquently expounded it. He called it Christian economics. He argued that just as Christianity was developing the social relations of human beings to one of pure love, so it was developing also their economical relations to one of pure trust. The two developments had gone on side by side throughout the Christian era, from the days when merchants hauled ponderous “talents of silver” about with them in their trading, until now, when one could control all the wealth of the world by the tapping of a telegraph key. And not only was their growth thus synchronous, but each was the exactest exponent of the other; it was only in Christian countries, he explained, that the capitalistic system was to be found at all, and in the quasi-heathen it was invariably established in exact proportion with the spread of Christian ethics. He was full, too, of frequent instances and recondite dates, such as the invention of the bill of exchange by the Hebrews, and the advice of Jesus to his Apostles anent carrying money about with them. There were only two crimes in Christian economics, just as in the ethics; dishonesty, which he claimed was the commercial form of the sin against the Holy Ghost, and bankruptcy, or the refusal of trust, which was simply a denial of the economic implication of the teaching of love one another. Socialism, of course, was merely a new, subtle sacrilege, and Marx the newest incarnation of anti-Christ. His faith or fanaticism would always burn its fiercest in talking of these specific instances. Twinkle Sampson would sit blinking astigmatically at him for an hour in silence when he preached so. He was the only man of them all whom Twinkle Sampson never interrupted, never tried to drag away to the moon.

It was only an occasional horrified Christian or exasperated Socialist who ever diverted him, and then he would descend to embittering personalities with disconcerting quickness. He was of French descent, Gascon, a tall, fair, pale man, and had the racial instinct for combat. In the daytime he was the Wall Street reporter for one of the evening dailies, and people who knew him down there said he went about his work in that district like a pious pilgrim in Judea. But what you did daytimes never mattered at Isham’s. It was what you could say evenings after dinner, in the back of the dining-room beside the bar, that counted, and there Savelle, next to Twinkle, was the best listened-to man in Isham’s.

And, measured by that scale, little Norvel was his farthest neighbor. He was the least listened-to man, because he rarely spoke, and the best listener. Indeed, he was the only genuine listener. The others listened only under force majeure. He, on the contrary, would dine sparely, for he was very poor, apparently, and sit smoking all evening until ten o’clock, and go away without ever speaking to any one, except the waiter who served, and a “Good evening” and “Good night” to Mr. Isham himself. His prestige was due solely to one effort. He had propounded a query which Isham’s had discussed more than any other ever raised there, more than Twinkle’s lunar hypotheses, or Savelle’s Christian economics, and which had never been settled. It was the one common topic among them. Other subjects owed their existence and prosperity to the protection and loyalty of one man, but little Norvel, having put his afoot, retired into silence and cigar smoke, and left its life to the care of others. He had injected the conundrum into a conversation of Twinkle Sampson’s about the inhabitants of Mars, in whose existence Twinkle Sampson not only believed, but took a far deeper interest than in those of his fellow earthmen.

“If,” little Norvel began, “if Mars is inhabited by a race so similar to ourselves—if—”

“Well, well, Mr. Norvel,” Twinkle Sampson interrupted, “that is fairly well conceded, I think. If—what?”

“If,” continued little Norvel tranquilly, “if it is so, what means of communication between us is there that is so unmistakably of human origin that a sight of it, or a sound from it, would immediately convince them of our relationship?”

It had seemed, when the quiet little man first spoke, as if it was a question easily brushed aside; but a little discussion, genuine Ishamic, soon proved it to have greater weight. Norvel sat aside, contributing nothing then or ever thereafter. Indeed, the only result the question had, or seemed to have, for him was the winning by it of the deep affection of Twinkle Sampson.

The early discussion of the matter eliminated all possibilities of the sense of hearing. That one of the five senses had to be discarded from the possibilities of communication. There is no sound which humanity can create which nature, in some other form, cannot perfectly imitate. Except laughter? That suggestion was Savelle’s. But it was not successful, though he defended himself with his own peculiar fervor. It appealed to the intense emotionalism of the man, that idea of the ultimate expression of humanity being laughter. He took up its defense as recklessly as his school of economics, and with something of the same breadth of vision and indefinite reasoning. Laughter was, he claimed, beyond the narrow limits of the question discussed, that very thing, the ultimate expression of humanity. Man was distinctively not, as he has been defined, the unfeathered biped, not the tool-using animal; he was the animal who laughs, and in proof he instanced the great poet. When he wished to imbue men with his own immense pessimism that the wrath of the Zeus was not the mysterious working of nature but the malignity of men, he made that terrible phrase, the most terrible ever spoken, “The laughter of the gods.”

“Think of it yourselves,” he demanded. “Put it into your own words. The laughter of God!” He was standing up then in the heat of his pleading. “What that’s divine is left then? He can only be a man, a fearful superman.”

But they beat down the orator with instances of gurgling brooks and hyenas. He strove Homerically with his attackers, thundering his defense of his vision until old Isham had to come up to the table and look at them all with his faded blue eyes and precocious face of seventy years. But though he failed of conviction his argument did just what he said; it put the question outside the “narrow limits” Norvel had laid it in. Savelle always did that with every question. After he had spoken the phrase they all remembered was his—the ultimate expression of humanity. It was by such phrases, such ideas, Isham’s lived, as a place to which talk-hungry people learned to go.

Old Sampson, who always listened to Savelle, though he deplored his tendency “to wander in his talk,” away from the moon and kindred subjects, took a new lease of life from that night. At last a day had come when people really liked to talk about the moon, or Mars, which was almost as good. He became a mental manufacturer of objects of origin so exclusively human that once they were conveyed to Mars, once that difficulty overcome, would produce instant understanding. Almost nightly he would turn up with a new one, and invariably some one would overthrow his hopes by suggesting a natural, in distinction to his human, phenomenon. He would always feebly defend his invention, and then fall silent—apparently intent upon a new one.

It was Philbin, the novelist, whose hobby was “Weltpolitik,” and who revelled in prophecies those days of a European cataclysm, who put him, as it were, finally out of this particular misery.

“It seems to me,” complained Twinkle, in his plaintive voice, blinking almost tearfully at the table-cloth, “as if nature imitates everything.”

“Twinkle,” said Philbin, who was sitting next to him, “lend me your ears. I want ‘to whisper into their furry depths.’ Have you ever thought of going yourself?”

Twinkle, lifting his eyes to the other’s face, blinked and shook his head.

Savelle was the only man who did not laugh. He never laughed either at Sampson or Philbin. “Don’t you see,” he cried sharply, in his eager idea-driven way, “don’t you see what the man has discovered? Your ears will need cropping soon. ‘Nature imitates everything!’ That is, he has found, he has perceived, he is establishing by his own experiments that man, after all his effort and his boasting, after all his science and learning, which has made a joke of the teaching of Jesus and the poetry of Milton, that this creature itself has in turn created nothing. That man, after all, has only, can only, imitate nature.”

He let fall his fist on the table, looking around at his listeners. He always had listeners at Isham’s, and perhaps nowhere else in New York. For the moment he had forgotten his tiff with Philbin, had forgotten Philbin himself, and was all for rushing ahead on his idea-driven course to some unimaginable distance. But Philbin’s vanity never forgot slights. It was not the words—he gave and took sharper every day of his life—but the manner in which he was thrown aside as an unnoticeable obstruction in the other’s path of thought, the rush past him of the faster mind that mortified him. He knew Savelle, knew him better than any one in the room did, for that was his business, and he knew how fast he was going and how sharp he would fall, and then, like a mischievous little boy, with his foot, he stuck out his tongue and tripped him.

“That’s contrary to every teaching of Christ you ever raved about,” he said quickly.

Savelle did come down with rather a crash. Even his defenders admitted that much. But then he had been going very fast. Moreover, he was a man who habitually used too many words. He used too many to Philbin—a great deal too many. Philbin’s faults were almost all on the outside, and even through the casual communion of Isham’s he had made them pretty plain to every man there. He was vain, slightly arrogant, over-given to sneering. Savelle, in his defense of his position, managed to comment briefly upon each quality, and he put into the personalities the same vigor that he used to defend his theory of the universe. At the very best he showed a lamentable lack of proportion. At the worst he was vulgarly offensive.

That is the danger of such talk as men plunged into at Isham’s; it lacks proportion. Personalities and universalities get all mixed up, and sometimes it takes long patience and a good deal of humor to straighten out the tangle. Philbin and Savelle were in just such a tangle over little Norvel’s query. And neither of them had patience and Savelle had no grain of humor. If he had, he could not have come down from a discussion of his theory of the universe to criticism of Philbin’s personality. The matter was quite hopeless. The tangle only grew tighter until there was only one way of ending it. Philbin took it. He was a little man, and very nervous, and when he stood up his finger-tips just touched the table, and he was trembling so they played a tattoo on the table-cloth. Then he bowed and went out.

He had behaved the better of the two, but every one was glad to see him go—except old Sampson, to whom anything like ill-feeling gave genuine pain. He liked a placid world in which one could babble in amity about the moon. But to the rest Philbin was a bore. His Weltpolitik was uninteresting. His European cataclysm was a tale told by an idiot, full enough of learning, but signifying little or nothing. One could imagine baseball games on Mars, and make the matter realistic; but Philbin’s imaginings dealt in palpable absurdities. Even at Isham’s talk had limitations. Philbin had been a war correspondent in the Balkans, and they thought it had upset his mind.

Savelle affected to ignore his going away, and went on with his expounding of Twinkle Sampson’s discovery—so he was pleased to call it. He ridiculed Philbin’s criticism more fiercely than before. He, Sampson, had given a marvellously stimulating example, Savelle said, of what religious thought meant, that it was not in man to create, only in God. All that was human was imitation, even as man himself was God’s image. In truth, Philbin’s attack had stimulated him, and he talked that night better than he had ever talked. He felt that he had come off a second best in the encounter, and he determined to wipe out the remembrance from the memory of his hearers. Poor old Twinkle, hearing himself eulogized for the first time in his life, probably, sat in silence, winking almost tearfully, too amazed to be pleased.

And always after he made a point of emphasizing this theory of his—or of Sampson’s—as he called it. It became the rival in this talk of Christian economics. He did so without argument, for Philbin did not come back. A Futurist painter, who had found out Isham’s purely by accident, gradually took his place. At Isham’s places were always taken gradually. To make up for it they were generally taken for a very long time. Philbin’s was the first defection, in fact, since Twinkle’s low-toned monologues about the moon, with old Isham for the only listener, in the corner by the fireplace, had started it all eleven years ago. Philbin, too, had never been in very good standing; his trick of sarcasm hurt too many sensibilities. And then he was agnostic in everything, and Isham’s collectively believed in almost everything. Every man of them, except the Futurist painter who took his place and had scarcely known him, had some little hurt somewhere to remember him by, and so, of course, wanted to forget him.

They had almost succeeded, too, when suddenly that happened which brought his name up in all thoughts, the war. That night, the night when all rumors and surmises were solidified into the single, soul-stunning fact, nobody mentioned his name, though each knew the others were thinking of it. It seemed uncivil when they had each heard the rest make such fun of his theories. But after a few days some bolder soul broke the spell.

“Philbin—do you remember, he always prophesied it?”

But that was all, and Savelle sat silent even then.

In truth, the war changed Isham’s. Of course, it changed somehow almost everything in the world, but it changed Isham’s peculiarly. Before it had been a place where people went to talk of curious things, and now the same people went there—Sampson and Savelle and little Norvel and the Futurist painter, and old Isham himself was unchanged, nothing could alter him, and they still talked of curious things, more curious things than they had ever imagined before, but Isham’s had changed by ceasing to be different, because everywhere people were talking of the same things. Talk at Isham’s was just like talk on any street corner. In fact, the world had caught up with Isham’s.

Then one night Philbin did come back. It was in the second year of the great war, and it had been nearly five since he had gone away after his tiff with Savelle. He did not come directly into the back room, as he had been used to do, but dined by himself at a small table in front. He sat there a long time after dinner over his coffee, with his back turned to his old place. Every one of them had seen him and recognized him, and talk that night was slow. Though he had spoken to none of them and turned his back to them, each knew somehow that he would speak and that he had come there especially to speak, and that he would say something important, and they sat nervously waiting.

At last he did come, pushing back his chair and walking slowly up the room. They noticed then how he had changed. He had grown very much older. He had been scarcely fifty when he had left, and now he looked and walked like an old man, and his dress, which had always been very neat and careful, showed an old man’s carelessness. They all got up when he came and greeted him by name and with genuine cordiality. The little stings of five years since had vanished long ago. Savelle got up last and a little doubtfully, but it was Savelle he especially picked out.

“Ah, Savelle,” and he put out his hand.

Then he sat down in his old place and ordered more coffee and talked for a while quietly to his right-hand neighbor, who was little Norvel. He said nothing of himself and very little of any subject, seeming distrait and very depressed. After a little, abruptly he took the conversation in his own hands.

“Gentlemen,” he said, leaning forward with his hands folded on the cloth in front of him, “since I was here last I have had a very great sorrow. I have lost my son.”

Then he fell silent again, and apparently not hearing any of the things that were said to him.

“He was killed,” he began a second time, just as he had begun the first, “in Flanders, six weeks ago. He was twenty-two years and four months old. Before he died they pinned this on him.” He fumbled in his waistcoat, and picking out something threw it across the cloth over in front of Savelle. It was a little bronze cross known the world over, with two words on it, “For valor”. “I sent them my son and they sent me back that,” said Philbin.

It was the old Philbin voice—the same that had in turn galled each one of them.

“He went out in the night,” he went on, “and pulled back to life two London fishmongers. Then he died—going back for a third fishmonger. There is some six inches in a London newspaper telling about it. That same paper gave a column and a half last week to a story I wrote. And they gave six inches to my son. That’s queer, too, isn’t it?”

Nobody answered him. They were all afraid to—his tone was too bitter. No one was quite sure what he would say.

“We used to talk here years ago,” he went on presently, “about curious things. I think this curious enough to talk about. They gave a ‘stick’ to the death of my son and a column to the birth of my book. Savelle, you are a newspaper man, tell us about it?”

Savelle was looking at him with his eyes blazing, and he answered not a word.

“I suppose it’s logical,” said Philbin. “Any man may have a son. But I have written twenty books and had only one son.”

The only answer came from quite an unexpected quarter. It was little Norvel, who was sitting at Philbin’s elbow.

“Did you say, sir,” he asked, “that he went back three times?”

“Yes, Mr. Norvel, three times—three fishmongers.”

The man’s sneers would have been disgusting if they had not been so plainly aimed at himself first. As it was, they were almost terrible.

“Whether the three fishmongers lived or died,” he went on, “I don’t know. The six inches neglected to state. Want of space, possibly. You are a newspaper man, Savelle, perhaps you can explain.”

“I wish you would explain this, Mr. Savelle,” said little Norvel.

“What?” said Savelle.

“What part of nature Mr. Philbin was imitating when he went back?”

All the pent-up intensity of Savelle’s being rushed out in his answer: “I am maliciously misrepresented. There is no human element in such action. It is the divine phenomenon of Calvary.”

“Savelle,” put in Philbin, “when my son was alive he was a man. I believe, too, he died like a man. I prefer that to an imitation of anything—even God.”

The width of the table was between the two men, and the whole meaning of the universe. Their antagonism was irreconcilable. In that instant it had recovered all its bitterness of five years before. Time could do nothing. Not even chance could. It was literally immutable, the only thing in the world neither of those great forces can effect.

But the only pitiful part of it was, Sampson sitting between them, turning now to one, now to the other, with dim sight and faulty hearing, and wanting of either merely something human.

DE VILMARTE’S LUCK

By MARY HEATON VORSE

From Harper’s Magazine

Copyright, 1918, by Harper and Brothers.

Copyright, 1919, by Mary Heaton O’Brien.

What Hazelton’s friends called his second manner had for a mother despair, and for a father irony, and for a godmother necessity. It leaped into his mind full-grown, charged with the vitality of his bitterness.

Success had always been scratching at Hazelton’s door, and then hurrying past. The world had always been saying to him, “Very well, very well indeed; just a little bit better and you shall have the recognition that should be yours.” Patrons came and almost bought pictures. He was accepted only to be hung so badly that his singing color was lost on the sky-line. Critics would infuriate him by telling him that he had almost—almost, mind you—painted the impossible; that his painting was what they called “a little too blond.”

How Hazelton hated that insincere phrase which meant nothing, for, as he explained to Dumont the critic, as they sat outside the Café de la Rotonde after their return from the Salon, Nature was blond—what else? He, Dumont, came from the Midi, didn’t he? Well, then, he knew what sunshine was! How could paint equal the color of a summer’s day, the sun shining on the flesh of a blond woman, a white dress against a white wall? Blond? Because he loved the vitality of light they wanted him to dip his brush in an ink-pot—hein? Dumont would be pleased if he harked back to the gloom of the old Dutch school, or if he imitated the massed insincerities of Boecklen, Hazelton opined from the depths of his scorn.

Dumont poised himself for flight on the edge of his hard metal chair. He was bored, but he had to admit that if ever Hazelton was justified in bitterness it was to-day when, after a long search through the miles of canvases, he had finally discovered his two pictures hung in such a position as to be as effective as two white spots. He escaped, leaving Hazelton hunched over the table, his forceful, pugnacious, red countenance contrasting oddly with the subtle anemia of his absinthe. He was followed by Hazelton’s choleric shouts, which informed him that he, Hazelton, could paint with mud for a medium if he chose.

His profession of art critic had accustomed Dumont to the difficulties of the artistic temperament, and he thought no more of Hazelton until he ran into him some ten days later. There was malice in Hazelton’s small, brilliant eyes, and an air of suppressed triumph in his muscular deep-chested figure. His face was red, partly from living out of doors and partly from drink. He rolled as he walked, not quite like a bear and not quite like a seafaring man—a vigorous, pugnacious person whose vehement greeting made Dumont apprehensive until he glanced at Hazelton’s hands, which were reassuringly small.

“Well,” he said, “you remember our conversation? It was the parent, my dear Dumont, of dead-sea fruit of the most mature variety.” Hazelton considered this a joke, and laughed at it with satisfaction. He was very much pleased with himself.

Dumont went with Hazelton to his studio. On Hazelton’s easel was a picture of dark, wind-swept trees beaten by a storm. They silhouetted themselves against a sinister and menacing sky. The thing was full of violence and fury, it was drenched with wet and blown with wind.

“Who did this?” asked Dumont. “It is magnificent!”

“You like it?” asked Hazelton, incredulously. And then he repeated himself, changing his accent, “You like it, Dumont?”

“Certainly I like it,” Dumont answered, a trifle stiffly. “There is vitality, form, color! Because you are not happy unless you are in the midst of a sunbath, at least permit others to vary their moods.”

At this Hazelton burst into loud laughter.

“You amuse yourself,” Dumont observed, but Hazelton continued to laugh uproariously, shaking his wide shoulders.

“Do you know the name of that picture? The name of that picture is ‘La Guigne Noire’—I painted it from the depths of my bad luck.”

“Hein?” said Dumont. “You painted that picture?”

“This picture—if you call it that—I painted.”

“I call it a picture,” Dumont asserted, dryly.

“I call it a practical joke,” said Hazelton. “One does not paint pictures with the tongue in one’s cheek. I know how one paints pictures.”

“How one paints pictures makes no difference,” Dumont replied, impatiently. “Who cares if you had your tongue in your cheek? You had your brush in your hand. The result is that which matters. This work has completeness.”

Hazelton slapped his thigh with a mighty blow. “Mon Dieu!” he cried. “If this fools you, there are others it will fool as well—and I need the money! And from that bubbling artesian well from which this sprang I can see a million others like it—like it, but not like it. Hein, mon vieux? Come, come, my child, to Mercier’s, who will sell it for me. The day of glory has arrived!”

A sardonic malice sparkled on Hazelton’s ugly face, and his nose, which jutted out with a sudden truculency, was redder than ever. He took the picture up and danced solemnly around the studio.

It was in this indecorous fashion, to the echo of Hazelton’s bitter laughter, that his second manner was born, and that he achieved his first success, for his second manner was approved by the public.

Three years went past. Hazelton was medaled. He was well hung now, he sold moderately, but he never sold the work which he respected. At last his constant failure with what he called “his own pictures” had made him so sensitive that he no longer exposed them.

Hazelton’s position was that of the parent in the old-fashioned fairy tale who had two children, one beautiful and dark-haired, whom he despised and ill-treated and made work that the child of light might thrive. That, in his good-tempered moments, was how he explained the matter to his friends.

Dumont explained to Hazelton that he had two personalities and that he had no cause to be ashamed of this second and subjective one, even though he had discovered it by chance and in a moment of mockery.

“You have an artistic integrity that is proof even against yourself,” was his analysis.

The insistence of the public and of Dumont, in whose critical judgment he had believed, gave him something like respect for his foster-child. His belief in his judgment was subtly undermined.

“I shall leave you,” he told Dumont. “I shall secrete myself in the country undefiled by the artist’s paintbrush and there I will paint a chef d’œuvre entitled ‘Le Mal du Ventre.’ On its proceeds I will return to my blond.”

While engaged on this work, which later became Hazelton’s most successful picture, Hazelton met Raoul de Vilmarte. This young man was a poor painter, but a delightful companion, and he endeared himself to Hazelton at once by his naïve enthusiasm for Hazelton’s former pictures.

“What grace they had—what beauty—what light! What an extraordinary irony that you should throw away a gift that I should so have cherished!” he exclaimed.

His words were to Hazelton like rain to a dying plant. He stopped work on “Le Mal du Ventre,” and began to paint to “suit himself” again. He had a childish delight in surprising De Vilmarte with his new picture.

“Why, why,” cried his new friend, “do you permit yourself to bury this supreme talent? No one has painted sunlight as well! Compared with this, darkness enshrouds the canvases of all other masters! Why do you not claim your position as the apostle of light?”

Hazelton explained that critics and the public had forced these canvases into obscurity.

“Another name signed to them—a Frenchman preferably—and we might hear a different story,” he added.

A sudden idea came to De Vilmarte. “Listen!” he said. “I have exposed nothing for two years. Indeed, I have been doubtful as to whether I should expose again. I know well enough that were my family unknown and were not certain members of the jury my masters, and others friends of my family, I might never have been accepted at all—it has been a sensitive point with me. Unfortunately, my mother and my friends believe me to be a genius—”

“Well?” said Hazelton, seeing some plan moving darkly through De Vilmarte’s talk.

“Well,” said De Vilmarte, slowly, “we might play a joke upon the critics of France. There is a gap between this and my work—immeasurable—one I could never bridge—and yet it is plausible—” He glanced from a sketch of his he was carrying to Hazelton’s picture.

Hazelton looked from one to the other. Compared, a gulf was there, fixed, unbridgable, and yet— He twisted his small, nervous hands together. Malice sparkled from his eyes.

“It is plausible!” he agreed. He held out his hand. A sparkle of his malice gleamed in De Vilmarte’s pale eyes. They said no more. They shook hands. Later it seemed to Hazelton the ultimate irony that they should have entered into their sinister alliance with levity.

The second phase of the joke seemed as little menacing. You can imagine the three of them outside the Rotonde, Hazelton and De Vilmarte listening to Dumont’s praise of De Vilmarte’s picture. You can enter into the feelings of cynicism, of disillusion, that filled the hearts of the two farceurs. De Vilmarte’s picture had been accepted, hung well, then medaled. The critics had acclaimed him!

They sat there delicately baiting Dumont, bound together by the knowledge that they had against the world—for they, and they alone, knew the stuff of which fame is made. They were in the position of the pessimist who has proof of his pessimism. No one really believes the world as bad as he pretends, and here De Vilmarte and Hazelton had proof of their most ignoble suspicions; here was the corroding knowledge that Raoul’s position and popularity could achieve the recognition denied to an unknown man. He was French, and on the inside, and Hazelton was a foreigner and on the outside.

“Well,” said Raoul, when Dumont had left them, “we have a fine gaffe to spring on them, hein? It’s going to cost me something. My mother is charmed—she will take it rather badly, I am afraid.”

“Well, why should she take it?” asked Hazelton, after a pause. “Why should we share our joke with all the world?”

“You mean?” asked Raoul.

It was then that the voice of fate spoke through Hazelton.

“You can have the picture,” he said, jerking his big head impatiently.

“Do you mean that I can have it—to keep?”

“Have it if you like. Money and what money buys is all I want from now on,” said Hazelton, and he shook his shoulders grossly and sensually while his nervous hands, the hands whose work the picture was, twisted themselves as though in agonized protest.

Hazelton went back to his studio and stood before his blond pictures, the children of his heart. It was already evening, but they shone out in the dim light. He was a little tipsy.

“So,” he said to them—“so all these years you have deceived me, as many a man has been deceived before by his beloved. Your flaunting smiles made me think you were what you are not. Dumont was right—my foster-child is better than you, for she made her way alone and without favor. I tried to think I had painted the impossible. Light is beyond me. Why should I think I could paint light? I am a child of darkness and misfortune. I know who my beloved is. You shall no longer work to support your sister!”

“What are you doing?” came his wife’s querulous voice. “Talking and mumbling to yourself before your pictures in the dark? Are you drunk again?”

Some months passed before De Vilmarte and Hazelton met again. They ran into each other on the corner of the Boulevard Raspail and the Boulevard du Montparnasse.

“Hey! What are you doing so far from home?” cried Hazelton.

“Looking for you.”

“I was going to you,” Hazelton acknowledged.

They stared at each other scrutinizingly, each measuring the other with dawning distrust. Each waited.

“Let us go to the Rotonde,” Hazelton suggested.

They talked of other things, each waiting for the other to begin. Hazelton had the most resistance; he had flipped a penny as to whether he should go to seek De Vilmarte, but De Vilmarte had made his decision with anguish. It was he who finally said:

“You know—about the matter of the picture—my mother is quite frantic about my success. She is failing—”

“Toc!” cried Hazelton. “My poor wife has to go to the hospital.”

“Nothing to do, I know,” said De Vilmarte, looking away diffidently, “but for one’s mother—”

“But for one’s wife,” Hazelton capped him, genially. “An aged mother and a sick wife, and a joke on the world shared between two friends— What will a man not do for his sick wife and for his aged mother!”

A little shiver of cold disgust ran over Raoul. For the first time he felt a vague antipathy for Hazelton, his neck was so short and he rolled his big head in such a preposterous fashion.

They said good-by, Hazelton’s swagger, De Vilmarte’s averted eyes betraying their guilty knowledge that they had bought and sold things that should not be for sale.

Just how it came to be a settled affair neither De Vilmarte nor Hazelton could have told. Now an exhibition occurred for which De Vilmarte needed a picture; now Hazelton dogged by his need of money would come to him. Hazelton’s wife was always ailing. Her beauty and her disposition had been undermined by ill-health and self-indulgence, and he was one of those men temperamentally in debt and always on the edge of being sued or dispossessed.

But in Hazelton’s brain a fantastic and mad sense of rivalry grew. He had transferred his affection to his darker mood. Every notice of De Vilmarte’s name rankled in his mind. De Vilmarte’s growing vogue infuriated him. He felt that he must wring from the critics and the public the recognition that was his due so that this child of his, born of his irony and his despair, and that had been so faithful to him in spite of abuse, might be crowned. Just what had happened to both of them they realized after the opening of the Salon next year.

“Take care,” Hazelton had warned De Vilmarte, “that they do not hang you better than they do me. That I will not have.” He had said it jokingly; but while De Vilmarte’s exhibit was massed, and he had won the second medal, Hazelton’s was scattered, and he had but one picture on the line; worse still, the critics gave Hazelton formal praise while they acclaimed De Vilmarte as the most promising of the younger school of landscape-painters.

De Vilmarte sought out Hazelton, full of a sense of apology. He found him gazing morosely into his glass of absinthe like one seeing unpleasant visions.

“It is really too strong,” Raoul said. “I am sorry.”

“It’s not your fault,” Hazelton replied, listlessly. “It’s got to stop, though!” He did not look up, but he felt the shock that traveled through De Vilmarte’s well-knit body. “It’s got to stop!” he repeated. “It’s too strong, as you say.”

There was a long silence, a silence full of gravity, full of despair, the silence of a man who has suddenly and unexpectedly heard his death sentence, a silence in whose duration De Vilmarte saw his life as it was. He had begun this as a joke, after his first agonized indecision, and now suddenly he saw not only his mother but himself involved, and the honor of his name. He waited for Hazelton to say something—anything, but Hazelton was chasing chimeras in the depths of his pale drink. As usual, his resistance was the greater. He sat hunched and red, his black hair framing his truculent face, unmindful of Raoul.

“It has gone beyond a joke,” was what Raoul finally said.

“That’s just it,” Hazelton agreed. “My God! Think how they have hung you—think how they have hung me. Where do I get off? Have I got to work for nothing all my life?”

“The recognition—you know what that means—it means nothing!” cried Raoul.

Hazelton did not answer.

“But I can’t—confess now!” Raoul’s anguish dragged it out of him. “I could afford to be a farceur—I cannot afford to be a cheat.”

Hazelton looked at him suddenly. Then he laughed. “Ha! ha! The little birds!” he said. “They stepped in the lime and they gummed up their little feet, didn’t they?” He lifted up his own small foot, which was well shod in American shoes. “Poor little bird! Poor little gummed feet!” He laughed immoderately.

Disgust and shame had their will with Raoul.

Hazelton was enchanted with his own similes, and, unmindful of his friend’s mood, he placed his small hand next Raoul’s, which was nervous and brown, the hand of a horseman.

“Can you see the handcuffs linking us?” he chuckled. “‘Linked for Life’ or ‘The Critics’ Revenge.’” He laughed again, but there was bitterness in his mirth. “We should have told before,” he muttered. “I suppose it is too late now. I cannot blame you or myself, but, by God! I’m not going to paint for you all my days. Why should I? We had better stop it, you know.” He drank deeply. “Courage, my boy!” he cried, setting down his glass. “I will have the courage to starve my wife if you will have the courage to disappoint your mother.”

They left it this way.

When De Vilmarte again entered Hazelton’s studio, Hazelton barked at him ungraciously: “Ho! So you are back!”

“Yes,” said Raoul, “I am back.” He stood leaning upon his cane, very elegant, very correct, a hint of austerity about him that vanished charmingly under the sunshine of his smile.

Hazelton continued painting. “Well,” he said, without turning around, “you have not come, I suppose, for the pleasure of my company; but let me tell you in advance that I have no time to do any painting for you. I am not your bonne à tout faire.”

By Hazelton’s tone De Vilmarte realized that he was ready to capitulate; he wanted to be urged, and he desired to make it as disagreeable as he could because he was not in a position to send De Vilmarte to the devil any more than De Vilmarte could follow his instinct and leave Hazelton to come crawling to him—for there was always the chance that Hazelton might be lucky and would not come crawling.

“It’s your mother again, I suppose,” said Hazelton, ungraciously.

De Vilmarte grew white around his mouth; he grasped his cane until his hand was bloodless. “Some one unfortunately told her that they were urging me to have a private exhibition, and her heart is set upon it.”

“There are a number of things upon which my wife’s heart is set,” Hazelton admitted after a pause, during which he painted with delicate deliberation and exquisite surety while, fascinated and full of envy, De Vilmarte watched the delicate hand that seemed to have an independent existence of its own that seemed to be the utterance of some other and different personality than that which was expressed in Hazelton’s body. He turned around suddenly, grinning at De Vilmarte.

“How much are you going to pay for my soul this time?” he asked.

They had never bargained before. In the midst of it Hazelton stopped and looked De Vilmarte over from top to toe. No detail of his charm and of his correctness escaped him.

“How are you able to stand it?” he asked. “It must be hard on you, too.” The thought came to him as something new.

“Oh,” said Raoul, with awful sarcasm, “you think it is hard on me?”

“You must be fond of your mother,” said Hazelton. This time he had not meant to be brutal, and he was sorry to see De Vilmarte wince, but he did not know how to mend matters. “How are we going to break through?” he said. “What end is there for us? I do it for my wife, whom I don’t love, poor wretch, but for whom I feel damned responsible; and you sell your soul to please your mother. And do you get nothing for yourself, I wonder—” He half closed his little eyes, which glinted like jewels between his black lashes. “Appreciation and applause must be pleasant. One can buy as much with stolen money as one can with money earned.... There is only one way out—it is for one of us to die, or for one of them. There is death in our little drama, hein, mon vieux?”

It was the private exhibition that fixed De Vilmarte’s reputation as an artist. It also marked in his own mind the precariousness of his position. And now the matter was complicated for him because he fell in love with a young girl who cared for his talent as did his mother. She was one of those proud young daughters of France who had no interest in rich and idle young men. Each word of her praise was anguish to him. The praise of the feuilletons he could stand better, because some way they seemed to have nothing to do with him. It was the price which he paid willingly for his mother’s happiness.

He cared so much that he had tried not to care for her, and again his mother intervened. It was in every way a suitable match, and his mother told him that she did not wish to die without a grandchild. “You have obligations to your art,” she said, “but your obligations to your race are above those.”

She was now very feeble. His wedding and his next Salon picture filled her mind. She was haunted by the presentiment that she would not see the summer come to its close.

So Raoul would hurry from her room to Hazelton to see how the picture was coming on. Hazelton was painting as he had never painted before. It seemed, indeed, as if he had a double personality, and as if each one of these personalities was trying to outstrip the other. As happens sometimes to an artist, he had made a sudden leap ahead. No picture that he had painted had the depth or the beauty or the clear, flowing color of this one. But he lagged along. It was as though the beauty of the picture which De Vilmarte was to sign tortured him, and he did not wish to finish it. He would stand before it, lost in the contemplation of its excellences like a devotee, refusing to paint.

The picture Hazelton was painting for his own signature was dark and magnificent, but the picture which he was painting for De Vilmarte had a singular radiance. It was as though at last Hazelton had painted the impossible; light shone from that picture. Yet it was not finished. Days passed, and Hazelton had not brought the picture further toward completion.

One day when De Vilmarte came in he found Hazelton brooding before it. He had been drinking. Tears were in his eyes. “It is too beautiful—too beautiful! Light is more beautiful than darkness. The taste for the black, the menacing, is the decadent appreciation of a too sheltered world. I cannot finish this picture for another to sign.”

“No,” De Vilmarte soothed him, “of course not.”

“Oh, my beautiful!” cried Hazelton, addressing his picture. “I cannot finish you! Come, De Vilmarte, we will drink.”

De Vilmarte went with Hazelton. He watched over him as a mother over her child. He talked; he reasoned; he sat quiet, white-lipped, while Hazelton would speculate as to what De Vilmarte got out of it.

“You are, I think, like the victim of a drug,” he said, jeering at De Vilmarte, his brilliant eyes agleam. That was truer than Hazelton knew. He could not stop. His mother, his fiancée, his friends, the critics, his world, expected a picture from him. He visualized them sometimes pushing him on to some doom of whose exact nature he was ignorant. Again it was to him as though they dug a dark channel in which his life had to flow.

Meantime he had to nurse Hazelton’s sick spirit along. He would go with him as he drank, stand by him in his studio, urging him to paint. In this way they spent hideous days together.

Hazelton developed a passion for torture. He was tortured himself. Alcohol tortured him, his embittered nature tortured him. He loved to see De Vilmarte writhe. He was torn between his desire to finish the picture and the anguish which he felt at seeing it about to pass into another’s hands. There were days when its existence hung in the balance.

“You see this palette-knife,” he would tell De Vilmarte, “and this palette of dark paint? A twist, my friend, a little twist of the knife and a little splash, and where is this luminous radiance? Gone!” And he would watch De Vilmarte as he let his brush hover over the brilliant surface.

How it hurt Raoul he knew, because when he thought of destroying the picture it was as though a knife were twisted in his own heart.

One afternoon De Vilmarte nursed Hazelton from café to café, listening to his noble braggadocio.

“Remember,” Hazelton urged Raoul, “the wonderful Mongolian legend of the father and son who loved the same woman, and whom for their honor they threw over a cliff! That’s the idea—the cliff! You shall throw our love over the cliff—you shall destroy the picture yourself. Come back with me!” He was as though possessed. Full of apprehension, De Vilmarte followed him.

They stood before the picture. It shone out as though indeed light came from it. Hazelton put the palette into De Vilmarte’s hand.

“Now, my friend, go to it!” he cried. “Paint, De Vilmarte—paint in your own natural manner! A few strokes of the brush of the great master De Vilmarte, and color and light will vanish from it. Why not—why not? You suffer, too—your face is drawn. You think I do not know how you hate me. I don’t need to look at you to know that. We always hate those who have power over us. Paint—paint! If I can bear it, surely you can. Paint naturally, De Vilmarte! Paint into it your own meagerness and banality! Paint into my masterpiece the signature of your own defeat.”

The afternoon was ebbing. It seemed as though the room were full of silent people, all holding Raoul back—his world, the critics, his fiancée, his mother. Besides, he had no right to destroy this beautiful thing to save his honor.

“You are not yourself,” he said.

“Aha! I know what you think of me. Ha! De Vilmarte, but I am a master, a great painter. Paint, and betray yourself. Ha! sale voyou, you will not? You are waiting to steal from me my final beautiful expression. You stand there— How is it that you permit me to call the Vicomte de la Tour de Vilmarte names? Why do you not strike me?”

“Oh, call me what you like,” Raoul cried. “Only finish the picture. There is very little more to do.”

“I tell you what I shall call you,” Hazelton jeered at him. “I will call you nothing worse than Raoul—Ra-oul—Ra—o—u—l!” He meowed it like a tom-cat. “How can I be so vile when I paint like an angel, Ra—o—u—l ... Ra—o—u—l!”

Sweat stood on Raoul’s forehead. He stood quiet. The picture was finished.

“Sign, my little Raoul, sign!” cried Hazelton. And with murder in his heart, a bitter tide of dark and sluggish blood mounting, ever mounting, Raoul signed and then fled into the lovely spring evening.

“This is the end,” he thought. “There shall be no more of this. Not for any one—not for any one, can I be so defiled!” For he felt the mystic identity between himself and his mother—that he was flesh of her flesh, and that in some vicarious way she was being insulted through him.

But it was not the end. It was with horror that Raoul learned that the picture had been bought by the state, that he was to receive the Legion of Honor. His mother was wild with joy.

“Now,” she cried, embracing him—“now I can depart in peace.” She looked so fragile that it seemed as if indeed her spirit had lingered only for this joy. She looked at him narrowly. “But you have been working too hard—you look ill. A long rest is what you need.”

“A very long rest,” Raoul agreed. He left the house, and, as if it was a magnet, the great exhibition drew him to it, and in front of his picture stood the thick, familiar figure of Hazelton, his nose jutting out truculently from his face, which was red and black like a poster. He broke through his attitude of devoted contemplation to turn upon Raoul.

“Bought by the state!” he cried. “To be hung in the Luxembourg!” He pointed menacingly with his cane at De Vilmarte’s neat little signature. “Why, I ask, should I go to my grave unknown, poor, a pensioner of your bounty? Why should you be happy—fêted?”

The irony of being accused of happiness was too much for De Vilmarte. He laughed aloud.

“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!”