Part 6

“And now, when St. Peter is tired, the soul of Father Guido sits in the chair beside the little gate to welcome newcomers, as he used to do in the monastery, and he is kind to those who come, mynheer, for he, too, has known what it is to doubt.”

X

THE SWALLOWS OF DIEST

My automobile broke down on the outskirts of Diest, and I was obliged to spend the night in the _Gouden Kat_--a typical Flemish inn. A dozen little round tables stood outside on the flagstones bordering the Grand’ Place, the supper room within was divided about equally among food, drink, and billiards, and madame sat in state behind a showcase of cigarettes. There were no Germans lodged in the _Gouden Kat_ so I was given the best room, and as I came down the tiny, twisted stair after a good night’s sleep in a high bed with carved posts at either corner, a tester and lacy hangings, under a black crucifix and the faded eyes of a colour print of King Albert, a small gray feather spun slowly down and fell at my feet in the doorway. There was a flutter of wings, and a swallow skimmed over my head, almost touching me, and out through the open door.

A few gloomy citizens, an occasional housewife, small boys and girls in neat cheap clothes and noisy wooden shoes stalked across the open square before the cathedral. A squad of German soldiers tramped by on their way to the Kommandantur in the Stadthuis. Soon mass was over, and a flood of grave, black-clad figures filled the square and melted away into the by-streets. A worn black flag fluttered from a pole on the very top of the church.

“Madame, what is the black flag on your cathedral?” I asked, sipping black coffee.

“It was once white, that flag, monsieur.”

“But, madame! it is coal black.”

“Monsieur, it is the flag which we of Diest hoisted when the Germans came. Aerschot, Louvain, Schaffen--they were destroyed by the Germans. Diest,” she shrugged her shoulders, “Diest is as you see it.”

Across the Grand’ Place, behind the gates of a porte cochère belonging to a rival inn, I found my chauffeur, Alexis, busy with the broken motor.

“Monsieur, this is the cylinder which does not march,” he called loudly, his tricky eyes eager for praise and his mouth smiling blandly behind his curved moustaches. “More oil!” he ordered imperiously from the bent old innkeeper who stood, cap in hand, watching; and while the man shuffled off with a wash-bowl, Alexis loudly continued to explain to me the difficulty. “I am mechanician as well as chauffeur, monsieur,” he declaimed, although I was well aware of the fact. “I will arrange everything. In an hour all is arranged.”

A side glance gave me the clue to Alexis’s authoritative tone. The young wife of the innkeeper, a heavy flaxen-haired Flemish woman, watched smiling from the open door. Alexis’s gestures and mouthings were for her.

In the rafters over the motor-car I heard soft cheeping, and a swallow slid from a mud cup fixed to one of the timbers and stole out into the morning sunshine. There were other earthen cups, lined no doubt with feathers, in the shadow above us: three or four cups brimming with swallow babies. One after another the gray-blue mothers came and went, circling fearlessly over us, engaged in the sensible business of filling the world with swallows.

“In an hour, monsieur, all is arranged,” Alexis repeated, trying to get rid of me. So I determined to stay.

“Madame, a cup of the white beer of Louvain, if you please,” I ordered.

She answered my French with a question in Flemish. “_Wat segt U, mynheer?_”

“_Wittebeer van Leuven, als ’t je belieft, madame._”

“_Een potteke Lovens voor mynheer, Marieke, allez!_” chuckled the bent old innkeeper, coming up with a bowl of oil and shoving her with his shoulder.

“_Goed, goed_,” she answered, and disappeared, still smiling.

Alexis sulked, but worked; the innkeeper watched admiringly; I sat in a tiny chair propped against the inn door and talked with madame, while the swallows circled and cheeped overhead. The motor backfired when it was tested, and the swallows screamed in fright and fled through a cloud of stifling smoke which rose into their nests. But in a moment they were back again at work, filling the world with swallows.

“Like the cannon, is it not?” said madame in sluggish, country-bred Flemish, speaking of the motor’s tricks. “But the swallows return.” She laid her hand on her breast with a curious, passionate gesture.

“He is your husband?” I pointed to the old innkeeper, bent almost double over the motor as he watched Alexis.

“Yes, mynheer.”

“You have children?”

“I shall have one in three months--about All Saints’ Day, mynheer.” She spoke with the simplicity of a peasant, to whom life and death and birth and growth are the simplest things in a complex world.

“Are you glad, madame?”

“Glad? No,” she said after a pause, smiling still.

“Are you sorry?”

“No, mynheer.”

“He is an old man, your husband,” I remarked after a long silence.

“Yes, he is old, mynheer.”

“You love him?”

“Love him? No.”

“Do you hate him, then?”

“No, mynheer. Why should I hate him?”

“Alexis, there, is a jolly fellow. What do you think of him?”

“I do not think of him, mynheer.”

I changed the subject. She was only a peasant, yet she knew how to rebuff my levity. “Why did you marry, madame?” I asked, and my tone was serious, befitting the question.

“Why does any one marry, mynheer? I was of the age--sixteen.”

“But why did you choose him?” I gestured again toward the old man, still bent over Alexis as he tugged at the cylinder core.

“I did not choose, mynheer. The swallows,” she pointed to the earthen nests, “do they choose? Other people, do they choose?”

“No,” I admitted, astonished at her. “It is Nature. They do not choose.” I felt a sudden respect for the dully smiling enigma before me. Love? choice? romance? the adventure of living?--what were they after all? The stress of towns has bred these fantastic ideas in men’s brains. This country woman knew she was no different from birds and beasts, and she knew that it did not really matter to anybody--not even to herself. In a few slow words, still smiling, she sketched the dull drama of her life: peasant-born, unbeautiful, bought from her family by the old innkeeper as soon as the Church permitted her to marry, twice a mother, but both her children dead, pregnant again: that was the whole story. She did not know that her recital was sad, or that it could inspire pity. She did not even know that it was interesting. She seemed to tell it instinctively, as a bird cries in the thicket or as a tired dog whines at the door.

“Alexis, is the motor ready?” I called.

“Almost, monsieur,” he answered; then turning to the innkeeper he bawled, “Get me a pan and matches!” He rested his hands on his hips and stared insolently at the woman and me. “Monsieur has seen the flag on the cathedral?” he asked. He continued in Flemish, “The brave men of Diest ran up a white flag while the Germans were still at Liége! Madame says they did well to surrender.”

“I said that to surrender is nothing, myne heeren,” she interrupted slowly, looking at me but addressing us both. “Every thing surrenders.”

“Ha, madame! Foolishness! Talk like a Belgian patriot if you please. We never surrender, we Belgians: we fight, fight, fight!” Alexis swung his arm and waited confidently for my applause.

“Madame,” I turned to her. “You think these things do not matter?”

“They do not matter, mynheer,” she said, smiling.

“The invasion of Belgium?--that does not matter?”

“It does not matter, mynheer.”

“Murder? arson? rape? pillage? millions dead and maimed? millions enslaved? Madame!” I found myself addressing her as if she were a logician instead of a peasant.

“It is nothing, nothing; I know it is nothing. I feel it here.” Again she laid her hand on her breast with the singular passionate gesture I had marked before. “It does not change anything; it does not change the soil of the earth, it does not change the man, it does not change the woman, it does not change the child. Then it is nothing. We of Belgium are like rain falling on a field: they [the Germans] are like rain falling. We do not choose: they do not choose. It is all--nothing.”

Alexis leaped forward, his tricky eyes blazing, his moustaches stiff with anger. These patriotic outbursts were no new thing to me, yet I was astonished at him. He trembled with honest emotion. “Madame! You are no Belgian, you are no Christian, you are no woman!” he shouted. “You have no sense of honour, you have no patriotism, you have no decency. Bah! you would have us handed over to the Boches!” He stopped his tirade abruptly and addressed me in French, “Monsieur, the car is ready in a moment, if you please. This woman--this woman----” He raised his arm as if he would strike her. All this time she had stood watching and listening, still smiling heavily and making no move. “This woman is a peasant, she is not human, she is a beast.... Here!” he called to the innkeeper, who had reappeared, “give me the matches. Hold the basin there.” He jumped back to his place and pressed the self-starter. The motor hummed with curious coughs and gasps from the jury-rigged cylinder. “It will march until we reach home,” called Alexis, his voice still keyed high with anger. “Monsieur is ready?”

I paid the modest reckoning and climbed into the tonneau. The woman stared past me at Alexis; even my “good day” was unheard or at any rate unnoticed. The motor roared and the frightened swallows flew. The innkeeper flung open the double gates, removing his cap and bowing low, and we rolled slowly into the square.

There was a patter of slippers on the cobblestones behind us, a gasp and a choking cry, and madame was hanging to the running-board beside Alexis, pouring forth a torrent of passionate Flemish. The German sentries before the Stadthuis across the square stared anxiously, passersby stopped as if thunder-struck, I looked back and saw the old innkeeper standing open-mouthed and motionless in the doorway.

“Mon Dieu, monsieur, she wants to go with me!” muttered Alexis, mechanically stopping the car. The woman flung her arms toward me with a piteous gesture. Her heavy, ugly face streamed tears. All her reserve, her self-control were gone. She had chosen at last, and she had chosen this!

“Wants what, you fool?” I exclaimed, appalled. “Drive on, Alexis. Make her go back. You know the Germans would arrest us at the first sentry-post. Damn you, anyway!” I roared, my anger mounting to outraged brutality to think that a chauffeur’s cheap amour might land us both in a German jail. “What have you done to get us into this mess?”

He thrust his fist into the pleading face. “Go back, go back,” he grunted, apparently without a trace of feeling for her.

“You must go back, madame,” I exclaimed. “You must go back!”

She ignored me and again burst into a storm of entreaty, all aimed at Alexis. “No, no, no, no,” he shouted in answer to her pleas. “Go back to your husband! Go, you--animal!”

At that word she dropped from the car. “Go on, Alexis, quick!” I exclaimed.

Her hand flew to her breast with the old gesture. As the automobile leaped forward, she walked a few steps toward the inn. I turned and watched her: Alexis stared straight in front of him. She wheeled and looked after us, her hand still at her breast, her body swaying from side to side. Then she looked at the inn, and again at the fleeing car. Finally, as we dashed away from the square, I saw her stumbling toward the wretched old man, who still stood in the blazing sunlight which streamed through the open doorway, while the swallows of Diest circled and cried over his hoary head.

XI

PENSIONERS

Wilson belonged emphatically to the genus _Homo sapiens_; species, _Texicana_; habitat, southwestern parts of the United States and Antwerp, Belgium. He was tall and lithe and handsome, and also sentimental. He was the only member of the American Commission for Relief in Belgium who flatly refused to fly the American flag from his automobile; he was the only member who publicly declared that he said his prayers every night, but, as he confided to me once in a moment of great emotion, he had never in his life prayed for the President of the United States. The reason for these startling facts was that Wilson was an unreconstructed rebel and wore pinned in his shirt, just over his heart, a little butternut badge which his grandfather had worn in ’63--a symbol of the dead Confederacy and the Lost Cause.

We used to sing him a gay song which ran:

An unreconstructed rebel, that is what I am. For this fair land of freedom I do not give a damn! I’m glad we fought against them: I’m sorry that they won, And I do not ask your pardon for anything I’ve done.

I fit with Stonewall Jackson: of that there is no doubt; Got wounded in three places a-storming Fort Lookout. I coched the rheumatism campaigning in the snow, But I killed a sight o’ Yankees, and I wisht it had been mo’.

I hates the Yankee nation and everything they do. I hates the Declaration of Independence, too. I hates the Yankee eagle with all his scream and fuss, But a lying, thieving Yankee, I hates him wuss and wuss!

We called him “Johnny Reb,” “Tex,” or “Stonewall Jackson,” just as it happened to strike us.

Wilson was disturbed about something. “The Socialists are right,” he said, thoughtfully, drawing his six feet two from the chair beside my office desk. “There’s only one way to prevent wars--kill the spirit of patriotism. Look at that old fool out there!” he continued, bitterly, pointing toward a gray-bearded Landsturm soldier in shapeless flat service cap, faded gray-green uniform and high hob-nailed boots, who, with gun on shoulder, strode along the pavement of the Graanmarkt on his way to the _Kommandantur_: “That old fellow is probably a toy-maker in Nuremberg or a barber in Munich, and here he is wandering round Belgium ready to die for Kaiser and Vaterland!”

“Mankind’s a failure,” I acknowledged cheerfully. “Go on, Wilson.” I knew these moods.

“The trouble is this,” he drawled. “There are five old Belgians in the outer office who have come to ask about their pension money. It’s the first time I’ve had to do with Yankee pensioners. They were here yesterday,” he went on, impressively, “and for a solid hour I listened to one of ’em making patriotic speeches and telling me how he fought and bled and died for my country--_my country!_--a damned Yankee pensioner.”

I laughed gleefully, and Wilson turned on his heel. “Sit down, you Johnny Reb,” I gasped. “What’s it all about? Are they Belgian citizens who fought in our Civil War?”

“‘Civil War’!” he quoted. “There you go again! Haven’t I explained to you that you mustn’t call it the ‘Civil War?’ It’s the ‘War between the States.’”

A timid, eminently respectful knock interrupted us, and Peeters, the clerk, thrust his head through the half-open door, bowing to each of us in turn. “The men have come,” he announced.

“What men, Peeters?”

“The men who saw Mr. Wilson yesterday.” He coughed apologetically. “The men for the pensions. They want to see you, sir.”

I looked at Wilson, who was still meditating flight and cursing under his breath. “Send them right in, Peeters. Mr. Wilson and I are delighted to see them.”

“Delighted, are we?” my victim snarled; then his voice changed to honeyed sweetness--the sweetness underlying all Southern courtesy and hospitality, which is the sweetest in the world. “_Aah, goeden dag, myneheeren, quel plaisir de vous revoir! Mynheer van der Aa, Mynheer de Vos, Mynheer Dekkers, Mynheer van Oolen, Mynheer Anderson._” He introduced them with a flourish--a little file of old men, dressed in dingy Sunday best, with heavy leather shoes in place of the customary slippers or wooden _blokken_, each holding his cap in his hand, each bearded and bewhiskered, each with thick weather-worn skin and little eyes folded deep in wrinkled cheeks. These were the pensioners.

The first of them was scarcely five feet high. Little black eyes snapped out from beneath his bushy brows, and he wore a sweeping white moustache and an imperial. The second was tall and had once been blond; now he was bald as a prophet, and his great white beard swung from his heavy head like a broad pendulum ticking off the minutes. The third was blind; his graceful, narrow head tilted forward, a flickering smile played about his mouth, and I noticed that when his attention was strongly attracted his eyes occasionally turned up with a strange abortive movement, as if he might take the darkness by surprise and change it into light. The fourth man stood straight and soldierly, his knees tight together, his great feet splayed out from his ankles, and his arms hanging perpendicularly. He had an ox-like head, and his wide shoulders were heavy and stooped with age. The fifth man was an aged negro, and feeble-minded.

Peeters handed me a little paper which I read aloud: “Jan van der Aa, Pieter de Vos, Georges Dekkers, Willem van Oolen, David Anderson. Is that right?”

“_Ja, ja, mynheer_”--“_Parfaitement, monsieur_”--“Yes, sair,” the voices quavered.

“Don’t you all speak English?” I demanded. “You’re entitled to American pension money, yet you don’t speak our language? _Vous ne parlez pas_----”

The little man with the imperial burst into volcanic speech. “Sir,” he ejaculated, “they have forgotten the Eengleesh, but I--I speak it pairfectly.”

Wilson sighed. “Yes, hang it, he does!” he whispered to me. “He’s the damnedest, convincingest, Fourth-of-July orator you ever listened to. Now he’s off! You can’t stop him!”

“You are Jan van der Aa?” I interrupted, after the first sentence.

“Jan van der Aa, sir,” he acknowledged, bowing, and continued impressively: “Sirs, you see beforre you five men who fought in the Grrand Arrmy of the Rrepublic, in the grrandest arrmy of the grreatest rrepublic of the earth.” He rolled the rr’s like thunder down the valleys of his speech. “It was not for nothing that we fought. Liberrty and Union are not little things. They are eterrnal. They are the same in everry country and in everry time. We five were at Gettysburrg and Cold Harrbourr, de Vos was at Antietam, Dekkars was wounded at Atlanta, I was at Chickamauga underr Thomas, Anderson was at Peterrsburrg”--the strange, foreign accent turned the familiar battle names into mighty voices, voices to conjure dead men from the grave and dead deeds from the old books where they lie buried; the man before us was a born orator, he was winsome, sweet, powerful, pathetic, by turns--“Forrt Fisherr, Culpeperr Courrt-House, Vicksburrg, Shiloh, Champion’s Hill, Cairro, Chattanooga.” The tremendous words rolled forth; the file of old men stirred; they awoke and threw up their heads as he trumpeted forth these names, and I seemed to see them young again and soldiers of the Republic.

But Van der Aa stopped abruptly. He turned half apologetically to the others, speaking a most vulgar and harsh Flemish: “’_k Heb ’t verget_--I’d forgotten what we came for--our moneys,” he said. “Sirs”--he addressed Wilson and me once more--“our pension moneys are overdue. We have received nothing since Antwerp was captured. The American Consul-General writes, but we receive nothing. Will you tell Washington of us? The Government have forgotten; we are far away, and so they have forgotten us.”

I turned inquiringly to Wilson.

“Oh, tell them you’ll get their money for them. Tell them anything,” he whispered, harshly, fumbling his handkerchief. “Stop that devil of a Van der Aa! You don’t understand; that man can talk you to tears!”

“Mr. Wilson knows all about the case,” I said. “He will cable to Washington the first time he goes to Rotterdam. We shall do everything in the world to get your money.”

Van der Aa thanked me with a gesture and a low bow, and repeated my words in Flemish to the others. They thanked us slowly. “And now, sirs----” he began again.

“Stop him, for God’s sake!” groaned Wilson.

“Mynheer van der Aa----”

“----the only things men gladly die for, freedom and union. Freedom and union, one and inseparable, now and forever.”

The spell came over us like a ghost--the ghost of something high and splendid--and the voice of America spoke in conquered Belgium. Not through American lips, but through the lips of an alien; and not the voice of America to-day, divided, disunited, enslaved in a thousand ways to fear and base interests; not the America, I suppose, of the sixties, blatantly provincial, cursed with over-confidence, torn with civil war; but the voice of the ideal America--that America of the spirit which Lincoln must have seen as Moses saw the Holy Land from Mount Nebo, the America which may be, which must be; the mighty nation like a city set upon a hill, with the glory of heaven shining upon her, and young men and women singing in her streets.

I mopped my eyes; Wilson coughed and blew his nose. The five old men stood imperturbable, and Van der Aa spoke on and on. He was pitiless and glorious. As he talked I saw a flag borne to the tops of tall mountains, flung over precipices, whipped through morasses and dismal swamps, flung up from the sea and set firm in rocky earth; and that flag was the American flag--the flag of Wilson’s country and my country. These men had followed that flag--these five aliens. I saw freedom and union like simple things, things to be held in the hand as well as in the heart; necessary, elemental, homely things. And I saw the world-wide war which is waged in every land against freedom and union--the fight of caste against caste, of class against class, of masters with slaves, of the state against its citizens, of the thousand and one Frankenstein monsters of commerce and industry and politics and religion, fighting against the human beings who have created them. Everywhere I gazed there was war.

“Liberty and union, one and inseparable, now and forever,” concluded Van der Aa, his right arm outstretched to emphasize his last period, the eyes of the blind man straining up to catch the vanished sun.

* * * * *

Next morning Wilson’s motor car arrived an hour late at the office, and I noticed that from a staff wired to the wind-shield there floated a little American flag.

“Yes,” he said, defiantly, “I say kill patriotism and you kill war. I’m taking the first step. I used to be for the South against the world, now I’m for America against the world, and maybe some day I’ll be for all the world against the world.

“I’ll see you late to-night,” he added, very seriously. “I’ve got to go to Rotterdam to cable Washington about those old pensioners.”

XII

DOÑA QUIXOTE

Her parents had always regarded her as a sort of stepchild. There was Elaine, her elder sister, docile, petite, with fair looks and a proper dot, married at eighteen and mother of two babies; but Virginie was twenty and unwed. Although I did not know her until 1914, I can fancy the picture in the ancient moated castle of Drie Toren two years before when Virginie faced the old Baron, her father, and declared her independence of parental restraints of all sorts. The old Baron, bearded like a Numidian lion, had a special vocabulary for matters which concerned his unmarried daughter. “_Incroyable! pénible! triste! terrible! effrayante! bête!_”--I heard them dozens of times a day--and the shy, wilted floweret of a Baroness, her mother, sat with hands placidly folded, waiting for the final catastrophe which was sure to overwhelm her “_pauvre Virginie_.”

La Baronne Virginie was delighted to tell me of the famous interview with her father. She told it with shrieks and giggles, between puffs from one of my strongest cigarettes, her cold, gray-blue eyes--inherited from some merciless Viking ancestor who had once harried the coasts of Flanders--dancing with delight, and her bright golden hair waving as she tossed her head to give point to the jest.

“_‘Mais, ma chérie,’ il m’a dit._