Everyman's Land Part 5

The thought of Brian's plan is for the two old people like an infusion of blood in emptied veins. They say that they would never have thought of it themselves, and if they had, they would not have ventured to attempt it alone, ignorant of French as they are. But this is their generous way of making us feel indispensable! They tell us we are needed to "see them through"; that without our help and advice they would be lost. Every word of kindness is a new stab for me. Shall I grow callous as time goes on, and accept everything as though I really were what they call me--their "daughter"? Or--I begin to think of another alternative.

I'll turn to it if I grow desperate.

The bright spot in my darkness is the joyful change in the Becketts.

They feel that they've regained their son; that Jim will be with them on their journey, and that they've a rendezvous with him at "_his_ chateau," when they reach the journey's end. They owe this happiness not to me, but to Brian. As for him, he has the air of calm content that used to enfold him when he packed his easel and knapsack for a tramp.

Blindness isn't blindness for Brian. It's only another kind of sight.

"I shan't see the wreck and misery you others will have to see," he says. "Horrors don't exist any more for my eyes. I shall see the country in all its beauty as it was before the war. And who knows but I shall find my dog?" (Brian lost the most wonderful dog in the world when he was wounded.) He is always hoping to find it again!

He doesn't feel that he accepts charity from the Becketts. He believes, with a kind of modest pride, that we're really indispensable.

Afterward--when the tour is over--he thinks that "some other scheme will open." I think so too. The Becketts will propose it, to keep us with them. They will urge and argue, little dreaming how I drew them, with a grappling-hook resolve to become a barnacle on their s.h.i.+p!

To-morrow we move to the Ritz. The Becketts insist. They want us near them for "consultations"! This morning the formal request was made to the French authorities, and sent to headquarters. On the fourth day the answer will come, and there's little doubt it will be "yes."

Can I bear to go on deceiving Jim Beckett's father and mother, or--shall I take the other alternative? I must decide to-night.

Since I wrote that last sentence I have been out, alone--to decide.

Padre, it was in my mind never to come back.

I walked a long, long way, to the Champs-elysees. I was very tired, and I sat down--almost dropped down--on a seat under the high canopy of chestnut trees. I could not think, but I had a sense of expectation as if I were waiting for somebody who would tell me what to do. Paris in the autumn twilight was a dream of beauty. Suddenly the dream seemed to open, and draw me in. Some one far away, whom I had known and loved, was _dreaming me_! What I should decide about the future, depended no longer on myself, but upon the dreamer. I didn't know who he was; but I knew I should learn by and by. It was he who would come walking along the road of his own dream, and take the vacant place by me on the seat.

Being in the dream, I didn't belong to the wonderful, war-time Paris which was rus.h.i.+ng and roaring around me. Military motors, and huge _camions_ and ambulances were tearing up and down, over the gray-satin surface of asphalt which used to be sacred to private autos and gay little taxis bound for theatres and operas and b.a.l.l.s. For every girl, or woman, or child, who pa.s.sed, there were at least ten soldiers: French soldiers in _bleu horizon_, Serbians in gray, Britishers and a sprinkling of Americans in khaki. There was an undertone of music--a tune in the making--in the tramp, tramp, of the soldiers' feet, the rumble and whirr of the cars-of-war, the voices of women, the laughing cries of children.

I thought how simple it would be, to spring up and throw myself under one of the huge, rus.h.i.+ng _camions_: how easily the thing might be taken for an accident if I stage-managed it well. The Becketts would be angels to Brian when I was gone! But the dreamer of the dream would not let me stir hand or foot. He put a spell of stillness upon me; he shut me up in a transparent crystal box, while outside all the world moved about its own affairs.

The mauve light of Paris nights filtered up from the gleaming asphalt, as if through a roof of clouded gla.s.s over a subterranean ballroom lit with blue and purple lanterns. Street lamps, darkly shaded for air-raids, trailed their white lights downward, long and straight, like first-communion veils. Distant trees and shrubs and statues began to retreat into the dusk, as if withdrawing from the sight of fevered human-folk to rest. Violet shadows rose in a tide, and poured through the gold-green tunnel of chestnut trees, as sea-water pours into a cave.

And the shadow-sea had a voice like the whisper of waves. It said, "The dream is Jim Wyndham's dream." I felt him near me--still in the dream.

The one I had waited for had come.

I was free to move. The transparent box was broken.

What the meaning of my impression was I don't know. But it must have a meaning, it was so strong and real. It has made me change my mind about--the other alternative. I want to live, and find my way back into that dream.

CHAPTER VII

Padre, you were right. My greatest comfort, as of old, is in turning to you.

I think you had a glimpse of the future when you left me that last message: "Write to me, in the old way, just as if I were alive and had gone on a long journey."

When I lock my door, and get out this journal, it seems as if a second door--a door in the wall--opened, to show you smiling the good smile which made your face different from any other. I don't deserve the smile. Did I ever deserve it? Yet you gave it even when I was at my worst. Now it seems to say, "In spite of all, I won't turn my back on you. I haven't given you up."

When I first began to write in this book (the purple-covered journal which was your last present to me), I meant just to relieve my heart by putting on paper, as if for you, the story of my wickedness. Now the story is told, I can't stop. I can't shut the door in the wall! I shall go on, and on. I shall tell you all that happens, all I feel, and see, and think. That must have been what you meant me to do.

When Brian and I were away from home a million years ago, before the war, we wrote you every day, if only a few paragraphs, and posted our letters at the end of a week. You said those letters were your "magic carpet," on which you travelled with us. Poor Padre, you'd no time nor money for other travelling! You never saw France, till the war called you. And after a few bleak months, that other great call came. I shall write to you about France, and about myself, as I should have written if you were back at home.

First--about myself! A few pages ago I said that there was no one alive who could prove me a liar, to the Becketts or Brian: that I was "safe--brutally safe." Well, I was mistaken. I am _not_ safe. But I will go back to our start.

Everyone warned the Becketts that they would get no automobile, no essence, and no chauffeur. Yet they got all three, as magically as Cinderella got her coach and four. The French authorities played fairy G.o.dmother, and waved a wand. Why not, when in return so much was to be done for France?

The wand gave a permit for the whole front (counting in the American front!) from Lorraine to Flanders. It produced a big gray car, and a French soldier to drive it. The soldier has only one leg: but he can do more with that one than most men with two. Thus we set forth on the journey Brian planned, the Becketts so grateful--poor darlings--for our company, that it was hard to realize that I didn't _belong_.

It was a queer thought that we should be taking the road to Germany--we, of all people: yet every road that leads east from Paris leads to Germany. And it was a wonderful thought, that we should be going to the Marne.

Surely generations must pa.s.s before that name can be heard, even by children, without a thrill! We said it over and over in the car: "The Marne--the Marne! We shall see the Marne, this autumn of 1917."

Meanwhile the road was a dream-road. It had the unnatural quietness of dreams. In days of peace it would have been choked with country carts bringing food to fill the wide-open mouth of Paris. Now, the way to the capital was silent and empty, save for gray military motors and lumbering army _camions_. The cheap bowling alleys and jerry-built restaurants of the suburbs seemed under a spell of sleep. There were no men anywhere, except the very old, and boys of the "cla.s.s" of next year.

Women swept out the gloomy shops: women drove omnibuses: women hawked the morning papers. Outside Paris we were stopped by soldiers, appearing from sentry-boxes: our papers were scanned; almost reluctantly we were allowed to pa.s.s on, to the Secret Region of Crucifix Corner, which spying eyes must not see--the region of aeroplane hangars, endless hangars, lost among trees, and melting dimly into a dim horizon, their low, rounded roofs "camouflaged" in a confusion of splodged colours.

There was so much to see--so much which was abnormal, and belonged to war--that we might have pa.s.sed without glancing at a line of blue water, parallel with our road at a little distance, had not Brian said, "Have we come in sight of the Ourcq? We ought to be near it now. Don't you know, the men of the Marne say the men of the Ourcq did more than they to save Paris?"

The Becketts had hardly heard of the Ourcq. As for me, I'd forgotten that part in the drama of September, 1914. I knew that there was an Ourcq--a ca.n.a.l, or a river, or both, with a bit of Paris sticking to its banks: knew it vaguely, as one knows and forgets that one's friends'

faces have profiles. But Brian's words brought back the whole story to my mind in a flash. I remembered how Von Kluck was trapped like a rat, in the _couloir_ of the Ourcq, by the genius of Gallieni, and the glorious cooperation of General Manoury and the dear British "contemptibles" under General French.

It was a desperate adventure that--to try and take the Germans in the flank; and Gallieni's advisers told him there were not soldiers enough in his command to do it. "Then we'll do it with sailors!" he said.

"But," urged an admiral, "my sailors are not trained to march."

"They will march without being trained," said the defender of the capital. "I've been in China and Madagascar, I know what sailors can do on land."

"Even so, there will not be enough men," answered the pessimists.

"We'll fill the gaps with the police," said the general, inspired perhaps by Sainte-Genevieve.

So the deed was dared; and in a panic at sight of the mysteriously arriving troops, Von Kluck retreated from the Ourcq to the Aisne. It was when he heard how the trick had been played and won by sheer bravado, that he cried out in rage, "How could I count on such a _coup_? Not another military governor in a hundred would have risked throwing his whole force sixty kilometres from its base. How should I guess what a dare-devil fool Gallieni would turn out? But if Trochu, in '70, had been the same kind of a fool, we should never have got Paris!"

Half the ghosts in history seemed to haunt this Route de Strasbourg, and to meet us as we pa.s.sed. You know how you see the characters in a moving-picture play, and behind them the "fade ins" that show their life history, visions that change on the screen like patterns in a kaleidoscope? So on this meadow-bordered road, peaceful in the autumn sunlight, we saw with our minds' eyes the soldiers of 1914: behind them the soldiers of 1870: farther in the background Napoleon the Great with his men: and fading into the distance, processions of kings who had marched along the Marne, since the day Sainte-Genevieve ordered the gates of Paris to be shut in the face of Attila.

Such a gay, gold-sequined blue-green ribbon of a river it looked! Almost impudent in gaiety, as if it wished to forget and be happy. But souls and rivers never really forget. When they know what the Marne knows, they are gay only on the surface!

It was at Meaux where we had our first close meeting with the Marne: Meaux, the city nearest Paris "on the Marne front," where the Germans came: and even after three years you can still see on the left bank of the river traces of trench--shallow, pathetic holes dug in wild haste.

We might have missed them, we creatures with mere eyes, if Brian hadn't asked, "Can't you see the trenches?" Then we saw them, of course, half lost under rank gra.s.s, like dents in a green velvet cus.h.i.+on made by a sleeper who has long ago waked and walked away.

From a distance the glistening gray roofs of Meaux were like a vast crowd of dark-winged doves; but as we ran into the town it opened out into dignified importance, able to live up to its thousand years of history. There was no work for the Becketts there, we thought, for the Germans had time to do little material harm to Meaux in 1914: and at first sight there seemed to be no need of alms. But Jim had loved Meaux.

His mother took from her blue morocco bag his letter describing the place, mentioning how he had met the bishop through a French friend.

"Do you think," she asked me timidly, "we might call on the bishop? Who knows but he remembers our Jimmy?"

"He's a famous bishop," said Brian. "I've heard _poilus_ from Meaux tell stories of how the Germans were forced to respect him, he was so brave and fine. He took the children of the town under his protection, and no harm came to one of them. There were postcard photographs going round early in the war, of the bishop surrounded by boys and girls--like a benevolent Pied Piper. It's kindness he's famous for, as well as courage, so I'm sure we may call."

Near the beautiful old cathedral we pa.s.sed a priest, and asked him where to find the bishop's house. "You need not go so far; here he comes," was the answer. We looked over our shoulders, almost guiltily, and there indeed he was. He had been in the cathedral with two French officers, and in another instant the trio would have turned a corner. Our look and the priest's gesture told the bishop that we were speaking of him. He paused, and Mr. Beckett jumped out of the stopped car, agile as a boy in his excitement.

"Oh, I forgot, I can't talk French! Mary, you must see me through!" he pleaded.