Part 3

McTeague stared as if he were just recovering from a trance, shook himself clumsily, and muttered through the “Marseillaise”: “Strange, isn’t it, how artistic these Belgians are? Now if you and I were arranging a dance----”

The loud howls of the Germans beneath us interrupted McTeague’s moralizings. Swift feet were upon the stair, the proprietor of the café and his wife burst in upon us, weeping, gesticulating, talking all at once. Guilbert lay quietly in the middle of the floor, still acting his part; the poet at the piano pounded lustily. Yvette, more practical than they, ran to a window at the back of the hall and looked out, then ran back to us and grasped us. “Come quickly,” she exclaimed. “We can escape before the Germans come.”

“But your husband, and Guilbert?” I asked.

“Drag them behind us, then,” she replied, shrugging her naked shoulders. “Come at once. The Germans are on the stair!”

Directly beneath our feet we heard a tumult of rough voices, a clatter of dishes and pans, and then tramping boots coming up the winding stair. Panic seized on McTeague and me simultaneously. We leaped at the performers and hustled them across the floor behind the twinkling feet of the dancing-girl. Before we reached the window she had already scrambled through it and dropped to a roof five or six feet below. We leaped after her and ran across a space sloping like a deck. Guilbert and the poet had not yet spoken a word. I had begun to laugh--a wild, hysterical laugh which irritated McTeague, so that while we ran he remonstrated with me: “Germans--’ll hear--come after us,” he panted. “What--’s matter--now?”

Yvette stopped abruptly before a whitewashed wall and gazed up at an open window three feet above the level of her head.

“Lift me up, messieurs,” she whispered, catching her breath.

“Why?” I demanded.

“Quick! We must escape this way.”

“_Jamais de la vie!_” I stuttered. “It’s right to escape, but I won’t be caught breaking and entering somebody’s house.”

“But quick!”

“No!”

“But I know this room,” she sobbed. “I have the right.”

“You have what?”

“The right to enter. _Mon Dieu! C’est la chambre de mon ami, messieurs!_”

* * * * *

Nothing is stranger than truth; nothing more grotesque, more dramatic, more truly unreal. I can imagine how this revelation would have been received on the stage in any of the five continents: the gestures of the outraged husband, the tableau of the horrified perceptor, and the amazement of the guests. But clinging to our precarious footing on the roof, we received it only as a stroke of luck--a means of escape from our awful predicament. We thanked Heaven for Yvette’s lover!

“Up with her!” I hissed at the poet. “Stoop down, man, and I’ll lift her into the room.”

He leaned obediently against the bricks. I grasped the dancer firmly by the sole of her soft dancing buskin and boosted her against the wall, the poet clumsily bent lower still, and she clambered over him to the window sill. Scraping, gasping, struggling, she reached it, slipped her arms over the sill, and rose. There was a flutter of stiff dancing skirt, her twinkling, white-clad legs and feet slipped over the ledge and out of sight. Then came a pause. McTeague and I stared at each other soberly. “Hm!” he breathed deeply. “Hm! Hm!”

Her head, with the Liberty Cap ridiculously awry, peeped over the window ledge. “It’s all right. He isn’t here. I’ll help you in, messieurs,” Yvette said calmly, and in two minutes more we stood beside her in the unlighted bedroom of her _ami_.

“Follow,” she said. “If you please. Here is my hand.”

In single file we tiptoed across the room and reached the door. I heard the knob turn softly; a rush of hot air streamed over our perspiring faces, we pattered out to a landing from which descended another flight of stairs, and stood breathlessly listening. The night seemed to pant with the heat, the dull heavy noises of life spoke behind closed doors, and far away I heard the tramp of a squad of soldiers off to relieve the guard.

“Come,” said Yvette softly. “It would not do for my friend to find us here, _n’est-ce pas_? One of you, messieurs, he might mistake for a rival!” I am afraid I laughed as she said this; for McTeague, who usually treated me with great respect, laid his hot moist hand on my mouth. “Hush!” he said. “You mustn’t laugh at her. You mustn’t approve. These people don’t look at these things as we do. They’re unmor----”

A door slammed in the darkness below us, and the scrape of heavy boots echoed from the stair-well! “_Mon Dieu!_” Yvette whispered. “It is he! It must be he! Here!” She leaped back into the gloom, hustling us with her, and crouched in the farthest corner of the hall. McTeague was first in the line; then I; then the poet; then Guilbert; then Yvette. The heavy tread of the newcomer sounded louder and louder, but no louder than the anguished beating of our hearts. He reached the top of the stair. An odour of lambic or faro scented the fetid air. We could see in the darkness an immense bulk, and Yvette trembled. It was her that he must have heard, for even while his hand was on the knob, he turned.

“Hello, old fellow,” he called jocularly. “What have you got there? Let me see?”

In the vague semi-darkness I saw McTeague scramble slowly to his feet. I thought he would surrender at discretion, but the sound of his voice disillusioned and astonished me. “Go into that room, you villain,” he roared, advancing on the friendly inebriate and bawling fit to wake the dead. “Go in! Go in!”

His voice or his impressive advance frightened Yvette’s friend. The door banged open; there was a short pause; then it slammed shut and I could hear a panting, frightened human mass flung hard against it to keep out the intruder.

“Go away, you dirty Germans!” bawled a muffled voice. “_Sales Boches!_”

McTeague gripped the handle of the door and tried to turn it, but Yvette--more wise than he--clutched him about the waist and flung him with all her force toward the stair. “Hurry, hurry, we must run!” she sobbed. “Hurry, hurry!” And we charged down the dark well.

At the door we peered cautiously out. No one had been aroused. The hot night breathed about us as softly as a sleeping child, ignorant, indifferent, and calm. Tragedy, comedy, farce--we had played them all unwittingly, and no one knew or cared but we!

An old herdick hitched to a decrepit horse stood in the shadow of the street corner! We thrust Yvette, Guilbert, and the poet into its shelter and waved them good-night. “_Au revoir, messieurs!_” the three called to us gaily.

“Adieu!” McTeague responded. “It is not au revoir: it is good-bye!” Then he added, _sotto voce_, to me, “They are true artists--unmoral--like marionettes--just figures of the dance, aren’t they?... Come!” he said, after a pause. “They have forgotten it already, but we must go back to the Café du Cid and get the proprietor out of this scrape. Right?”

“Right,” I responded. And we slowly followed the creaking herdick down the narrow street.

V

THE SAVIOUR OF MONT CÉSAR

Rain fell softly, as it frequently falls in Belgium, drenching the ripening fields of Brabant and the ghosts of ruined towns. By six o’clock in the evening we had reached Louvain. My motor-car rolled through the porte de Bruxelles and down the narrow, slippery Flemish streets into the heart of the city. From a sentry box marked with barber-pole stripes in the German colours--black, white, red; black, white, red again--a bearded Landsturm man leaped out, wearing a helmet like a Yohoghany miner’s cap, a faded gray-green service uniform, and high, mud-coloured boots. The car skidded past him over the moist cobblestones. “Halt!” he shouted, waving his rifle; but I flaunted my celluloid-covered pass-case at him and yelled in tourist German, “Amerikanische Hilfskomite,” and he nodded and crawled back into his shelter.

It was the first anniversary of the destruction of Louvain.

Before the majestic Hôtel de Ville--its six slender open towers riding high like a stranded ship in a waste of ruins--sole relic of the old glories of Louvain’s Grand’ Place, Pierre stopped the car and looked back at me inquiringly.

“I shall spend the night at Mont César, Pierre.”

“Good, monsieur.”

“Go to the Kommandantur and ask the commandant for a garage for the Relief Commission’s car.”

“Good.”

“I shall walk to the monastery,” I added in response to his unspoken question. “You may go now.”

“Pardon, but is monsieur to assist at the ceremony in memory of the saviour of Mont César?”

“What saviour, Pierre?”

“Monsieur has not heard--the German officer who saved the monastery: the Prussian who would not burn the monastery, although he was so ordered. Monsieur has not heard?”

“Nonsense, Pierre,” I laughed. “What foolishness is this?”

“_Si, si, si, monsieur!_ It is true,” he insisted vehemently, “every word. I swear it. He would not burn the monastery, that German; and so to-night and for one hundred years the monks sing and march in procession for him.”

“Go find a garage!” I ordered in disgust. The idea of Belgian monks holding service for a German was absurd. Chauffeur tales, I had found, while often interesting, were not always true. “Pierre must think me a fool indeed to tell me such a stupid falsehood,” I thought, as I went grumblingly up the street.

Dusk and the gray rain fell together, covering the gray city with an impenetrable shroud. Ghostly walls and empty balconies, bricks, ashes, gaunt wooden fences to hide the worst of the ruins; a stray dog which snapped as he ran past; women with black shawls over their bent heads hurrying along the street; a file of stodgy German Landsturm plodding through the rain--these things I saw as I walked through the city where Lipsius had taught, the city which had been the home of learning and art and the seat of Catholic piety for more than five centuries, the city whose ruin is one of many eternal blots on the ’scutcheon of Germany.

I climbed up past the tall stately hill called Mont César--a height on which local legend says Cæsar built a camp and a fortress--where the dour, unbeautiful monastery of Mont César broods over the wrecked city.

The _pater hospitalis_, Jan Heynderyckx, greeted me with grave pleasure. He was not old, yet the beard which just touched the breast of his Benedictine habit was almost white, his eyes were gray and tired, and his skin, in the fluttering candlelight, was like the vellum of mediæval manuscripts. I had an odd fancy that his face was a perfect transcript of his life, limned by the hands of life and death, fear, ecstasy, hope, ambition, love, and hate. He bowed me into a small reception room at the right of the arched door and went for sherry and tobacco. Far away, from the chapel, came the faint thunder of bass voices chanting a service. It echoed and re-echoed through the hollow halls, roaring and subsiding like distant waves. The monks were singing litanies for the murdered city.

The room where I sat was curious; little larger than a closet. On the four walls hung old oil paintings of fathers-superior of the Benedictine order: Dom Pothier, Dom Schmitt, Dom Egbert--sombre, saintly men whose bones long since were dust. But over the wooden mantel opposite me hung a framed photograph. It amused and fascinated me--that one touch of modernity in the bleak monastic hall--and I stared at it dreamily.

“Ah, the photograph, monsieur?” The monk had entered quietly and stood beside me. He, too, gazed at the picture, while his hands poured the wine and set forth Turkish cigarettes. “To your good health, monsieur le Délégué. The photograph?” He took a huge pinch of snuff, flourished his handkerchief, and breathed noisily. “You may look at it if you wish.”

“A thousand thanks, brother,” I answered indifferently, rising and going toward the little frame. The monk followed me, catching up a flickering candle and holding it close to the glass for me to see the better.

“My God!” I almost shouted the words in my astonishment. “It is a German officer!” The picture before us was a cheap cabinet photograph of a lieutenant of infantry, evidently a Prussian, his crop head showing beneath his cap, his steady, narrow eyes gazing straight into ours! His right cheek was slashed with _Schmizzes_ of student duels; his hard mouth was half covered with bristling moustaches, and the white and black ribbon of the Iron Cross, second class, peeped from his buttonhole. “Mahn, _Ober-Leutnant_,” I read, written across the lower half of the photograph with a military flourish, and under it in fine Flemish script in another hand, “The saviour of Mont César, Louvain, August, 1914.”

“Monsieur is puzzled?”

“Puzzled? I am thunder-struck! Is this Belgium, or is it Germany, brother?”

Father Jan gazed at me sorrowfully. “You do not yet understand. This is still Belgium, and God will punish the guilty. Listen, monsieur, you understand Latin?” He pointed down the corridors where the bass voices were chanting again in unison. “You hear what they are singing?”

“No,” I said.

“Listen, monsieur le Délégué, _Primo_--_anno_--_magni_--_belli_--in the first year of the Great War--_sub_--_bono_--_rege_--_Alberto_--in the reign of good King Albert--_praefectus Mahnius_--_monasterium_--_montis Caesarii_--_ab exitio_--_servavit_--_laus Deo_!--Officer Mahn saved from destruction the monastery of Mont César.”

“We had fled to Malines, monsieur, we monks of Mont César, and two days after Louvain had been put to the torch Dom Egbert ordered me to return to the monastery and care for it. Such lamentations, monsieur! My brothers and I knew I was going to my death, and my blood froze even to think of what the Germans might do to me; but I went, monsieur, I went guided by God, doubtless, through the hordes of refugees along the roads, and the Belgian outposts, and the Germans, and so at dusk I reached the porte de Malines and saw our sacred monastery still unharmed by the fires, untouched by the vandals.

“Louvain flared like a furnace. From kilometres away I saw it like a red blot on the sky, and the stench of its burning spread thoughts so mournful that one entered veritably as if into the house of death.

“Monsieur le Délégué, there was no sound here at our monastery, so I knocked, and then suddenly some one had me by the throat with harsh hands and a voice grunted in German, ‘So, spy! I have thee?’

“I was as one dead, monsieur, and fell flat on the stone; but that one said, ‘Up, spy. Ha! Ha! In priest’s costume, art thou, eh? We shall have sport with thee--a spy-priest!’ For he had felt of my cassock in the darkness and he believed, as all the Germans believe, that Belgian officers wore the garb of priests, that they spied disguised as priests, that they even directed rifle-fire and artillery-fire gowned as priests--in a word, they believed every lie which their generals could invent of us. And so my captor dragged me through the doorway and down the black corridor, where all smelled of naphtha as if one were ready to kindle a great fire.

“He stopped; he beat softly on a door; a voice called ‘_Herein_’: the door opened, and I was flung into the very cell where we sit, monsieur.

“There sat a man at the table where you sit, monsieur le Délégué--the man whose photograph you see--a man young, and hard, and cruel, in the costume of a German officer. He sat alone before his untasted supper dishes. At either end of the table a candle dripped and sputtered. The man’s elbows were propped against the edge of the table, and his head hung forward between the candles, as if he were ill or broken with anxiety.

“He had been reading, monsieur, and he thrust a paper into the breast of his uniform as we entered--the sentry and I. His hand trembled, and his voice trembled, too, but he roared out, ‘Speak, one of you.’

“‘A spy, _Herr Leutnant_,’ grunted the soldier behind me. ‘He was prowling round the door.’

“‘So?’

“‘He says he is a monk of this monastery.’

“‘So?’

“‘He says he ran away before we burned Louvain.’

“‘So?’

“‘He is a damned spy--a damned _franc-tireur_. Else why did he come back?’

“I was speechless, monsieur. My throat ached horribly, for I was half throttled; my senses ebbed and flowed like water; I could say nothing.

“‘You understand German, spy?’ the Lieutenant spat at me. ‘You understand German bullets, _nicht_? You understand Leffe, Latour, Gelrode, Bovenloo?’ He named over some of the towns where our brother-priests had been done to death.

“I spoke. I said, ‘I am Brother Jan, of this monastery.’

“‘You are a spy!’

“‘I am no spy! I am Brother Jan of Mont César!’

“His eyes seemed to probe me in the candlelight. ‘Come here!’ he ordered.

“I advanced a step.

“‘Nearer.’

“I stood directly opposite.

“‘You see this revolver?’ He slipped a metal thing from its holster and placed it beside his plate. ‘I will shoot you if you move so much as a millimetre! Now we shall see who you are.’ He stared past me at the sentry. ‘Fetch the caretaker!’ he ordered.

“Then, monsieur, when we were alone together, the German became strangely quiet. He became as one who is puzzled and who wishes to believe something which he scarcely dares believe. ‘Who are you?’ he asked, almost gently.

“‘I am a Benedictine--Brother Jan Heynderyckx.’

“‘You are of this monastery?’

“‘I am of this monastery.’

“‘You know the monastery?’

“‘As I know my hand.’

“‘Why are you here?’

“‘My father-superior ordered me back from Malines to stay in the monastery--to care for it.’

“The German leaned forward. He took up the revolver and tapped it against the nearer candlestick. ‘If you lie, you die,’ he said roughly, yet it seemed to me, monsieur, as if he wished to believe me, as if he desired something of me, as if a new thought had risen in his mind, or a new and better impulse in his soul, and as if he had resolved on a higher course. I have been a parish priest, monsieur; I needs must know the human heart.

“The door opened and the sentry entered, pushing before him old Piet, the man-of-all-work in the monastery cellars--old Piet whom we had forgotten and left behind when we fled to Malines. He was trembling like an aspen leaf and he bent almost to the floor.

“‘Stick him with the bayonet if he doesn’t stand up,’ the Lieutenant roared. ‘Do you know this person?’ He pointed at me.

“Piet did not look up.

“‘Speak out!’ thundered the officer. ‘Do you know him?’

“‘I cannot understand.’

“‘_Hein? hein?_ You know him?’

“Piet stole a glance at me. ‘Nay,’ he whispered.

“The Lieutenant rose from his chair. His face became the face of a madman. He whipped the revolver from the table and pointed it wildly. His hand shook, his eyes rolled, so that even the sentry was terrified and tried to hide behind old Piet and me. ‘_Bitte! Bitte!_’ he ejaculated, ‘_Bitte, Herr Leutnant!_’ But suddenly my courage came, and I spoke swiftly in the familiar Flemish.

“‘Don’t you know me, Piet?’ I asked. ‘I am Brother Jan. Surely you know me!’

“‘You, mynheer Jan, you? Of course, of course I know you. I was afraid,’ the old man babbled. ‘I was afraid of him--the mad devil in the chair. He is going to burn the monastery. He has put naphtha in all the rooms. He is going to burn Mont César!’

“The Lieutenant smiled like one who is pleased, and slid down again into his chair. ‘What does he say?’ he asked.

“‘That you are going to burn Mont César.’

“‘Good, good! You are an honest man, Herr monk. I asked you to see if you would lie to me. I understand Flemish. Take the old man away,’ he ordered, turning again to the sentry, ‘then come here.’

“Then, monsieur, there happened the strangest thing of all. The door closed. We stared into each other’s faces, we were like gamblers with all at stake, haggard, eager, watchful--a priest against a soldier.

“The German leaned forward. ‘Herr monk,’ he said in a voice which was like a whisper, ‘I am not going to burn your monastery. You see before you the saviour of Mont César!’

“Monsieur, for one breathless moment I stood like a stone. I could not believe my ears. The man had gone mad, or else I was myself mad.

“‘You see before you the saviour of Mont César,’ he repeated softly.

“I screamed at him. I thought a thousand horrible things in a moment, men pierced on stakes, boiled in oil, crucified. I screamed, ‘Kill me! Kill me quickly, but do not murder me with words. I will not talk with a madman!’

“‘Herr monk,’ he answered, ‘I am not mad. See!’ He thrust his hand into the bosom of his uniform and pulled out a crumpled paper, ‘See! Here is von Manteuffel’s order; it is dated August 26th. It directs me to burn Mont César. The paper shall be yours, and the monastery is saved!’

“‘You lie!’ I screamed again. ‘What is this new trick of a scrap of paper?’

“‘It is von Manteuffel’s order for me to burn Mont César.’

“‘Ha!’ I laughed at him. ‘A German is ordered to burn a monastery and he disobeys! That is indeed droll! A German who has murdered scores in Belgium, who has burned and pillaged and outraged, now saves a monastery! Ha, ha! That is likely, is it not?’

“‘I have saved Mont César,’ he repeated steadily. ‘Here is the order.’ He thrust the crumpled paper into my hand.

“I stared at it. Monsieur, though the thing is incredible, it is true. The paper was an order from Major von Manteuffel directing Ober-Leutnant Mahn to burn Mont César! The thing was not a forgery. It is incredible, but it is true. I held in my hand the thing which could destroy Mont César!

“‘Give it to me,’ he said. I gave it. ‘It shall be yours, if----’

“‘If----’

“‘If you do not forget him who saved Mont César.’

“‘Ha!’ I laughed at him again. ‘You disobey an order--you who are a lieutenant of infantry--but does that save Mont César? Yours is a relentless, cruel race. You have saved our monastery for a day, maybe: von Manteuffel will burn it to-morrow!’

“This, monsieur, I said because I doubted God’s providence, because I feared men more than God!

“‘Manteuffel will not burn it to-morrow or ever, Herr monk,’ he replied. ‘I have learned that Berlin is angry at the scandal of Louvain, and has forbidden more burnings. Two days have gone by. Your monastery is saved. I have saved Mont César.’

“A third time the sentry entered, and a third time the officer’s face grew stern and his voice rose angrily: ‘Take this monk through the monastery; then bring him here. Be quick. There is no time to lose,’ he said. And I followed the sentry out into the black corridor.

“He secured a lantern and I followed him down the long halls. In each monastery cell, in the refectory, in the kitchen, in the library, everything had been piled in a heap, soaked in naphtha, and prepared for burning. Everything was ready, monsieur, and had been ready for two days. This lieutenant alone had defeated the machinations of that man-devil--that Manteuffel who commanded in Louvain. Why? I do not know, except that it was the will of God that Mont César should be preserved, and the good God, monsieur, uses even the vilest of men to work His will. The Good God uses even Germans----

“Again I stood in the little cell before the saviour of Mont César. ‘_Herr Offizier_,’ I said, ‘Give me the order, and by the good God whose instrument you are----’

“‘This is not God’s work: it is the devil’s!’ he exclaimed bitterly.

“‘What is the devil’s work--that you have saved the monastery? No. That is of God.’

“‘God or the devil, I am disgraced.’

“‘By God’s will you are saved.’

“‘Saved?’

“‘God will not forget.’

“‘God has forgotten already. I shall be shot for this. I have disobeyed orders.’