Part 7

“‘_Mais, mon père,’ j’ai dit_.... The devil! I forget always and speak French. That morning I was very angry, so I slid down the banisters and shrieked with the top of my breath, and there was my father at the foot of the stair, like this!” She made an adorable caricature of the leonine astonishment of her father at sight of the apparition of his daughter, her foot caught in her skirt, kicking vigorously to free herself and spreading tatters of lace petticoat over the Chinese carpet. “‘Come here,’ he roared, as if I were a servant. ‘Come here, cher _Papatje, s’il te plaît_. I have something to say,’ I answer very respectfully, as a Belgian girl must always speak: ‘I will not marry. I will not worship some man like Jules. (Jules is my brother-in-law. He has red hair and a wart on his nose. Ugh!) I will not have babies. I will not be as Elaine. No, no, no, no, no, I will not. I am going to England to be a suf-fer-a-gette. I will burn churches and bite people. I hate men!’”

“But do you hate us, really?” I interrupted.

“Of course!” The light of her eyes was like the light on Swiss glaciers. “I hate all men--you especially.”

I was hurt, and showed it.

“Ha! I do,” she repeated, following up her advantage. “And I hate my father--enough, not much, just a little. ‘_Oufff!_’ he says to me, ‘what for a person is this my daughter! Have I not give you all in the world, miserable one?’ ‘No,’ I answer. ‘Freedom? No.’ ‘Freedom!’ he says. ‘Yes, freedom,’ I answer again. ‘It is the century of the woman. We must have freedom.’ (I got that from an American book, but I did not tell him. He was so troubled already.)

“So next day I went to England, and in England I burned one church and bit two people.”

* * * * *

It was I who named her Doña Quixote. For all her Viking eyes she was a perfect Spanish type, such a type as one occasionally finds nowadays in villages of the Dutch Province of Zeeland or in the Belgian Provinces of East Flanders and Antwerp, almost the sole reminders of the days when the Dons lorded it in the Low Countries. She was not brunette, but a Spanish blonde, with a magnificent complexion burnished on the cheeks, straight, aristocratic nose, and jeweled mouth. The oval of her face was positively Mediterranean, and seeing her glorious hair I knew what the Elizabethan poets meant by singing of “golden wires.” She was adorable, perfect, and cold as frost.

“But, mademoiselle,” I began.

“Madame!” she interrupted. “Always call me madame.”

“Pardon, but why?”

“Never ask me the why of anything. It is because I choose. Isn’t that enough?”

“No,” I burst out angrily. “I’m a reasonable being, I’ll have you to know, and I must be treated reasonably. What the dickens----?”

She laughed suddenly and delightedly. “Ice, ice, I thought you were of ice. I thought all Americans were of ice, Monsieur. Good! You thaw. I shall tell you, because you know how to get angry like a Belgian.”

“Stop teasing me,” I muttered, ashamed, sorry, and indignant.

“At the convent school in Bruges where I went to school the nuns call us ‘madame’. It is a school for the petty nobility, you understand, so we are called ‘madame’ just as the little Princess Marie-Jose is called ‘Madame’ and not ‘Mademoiselle la Princesse.’ I like it.”

“Well, I don’t.”

“That is all one to me,” she responded calmly. “You are to call me ‘madame’.”

“I won’t. Not until you are married, and maybe I won’t even then. Maybe I’ll call you by your first name.”

She examined curiously my flushed face, stubborn, unhappy, disgusted with my own boorishness, but seeing no way out. Her cold gaze took in all that she wanted; noted that I was a fly in her spider-net; and she dimpled and thawed graciously. “Please!” she begged.

“Mademoiselle--er--er----” I stuttered, “do you know Spanish?”

“Not a word. But I have read ‘Don Quixote,’ of course.”

“Doña--that is Spanish for a noble lady. I shall call you Doña--Doña Quixote.”

“Wha-at?”

For the first and, I was about to say, the last time, I caught her off her guard, astonished, wounded, a bit angry. But the one word was all I wanted. It showed me I could bully her. That word had been warm and human, utterly unlike the icy flood which normally came from her lips. “Doña Quixote!” I repeated blandly.

“You shall do nothing of the sort. Don Quixote was a madman.”

“Yes, and you are a madwoman. You won’t listen to the people who love you.”

“You are not to say that word to me again.”

“What word?”

“That word! You know--_that_ word.”

“Doña?”

“The other one: the one that begins with _l_ and has four letters!”

XIII

IN THE STREET OF THE SPY

The Commissaire of the Arrondissement of Metseys beat on the glass front of the limousine and arrested the mad career of the Government automobile in which we were riding. The soldier-chauffeur (a Belgian in the near-British uniform which the Belgian army now wears, with a small round button in his cap marked with the Belgian colours in concentric circles--black, white, red) turned and looked back into the car inquiringly. “We stop here,” the Commissaire announced in pantomime.

Just five minutes before we had rushed directly under a battery of heavy French guns blazing away like furnaces. I did not know they were French guns--although the accent was marked!--until the Commissaire told me; but then he knew every battery, every cantonment, every airdrome, and every hospital in that little bit of Belgium behind the Yser lines which is still free from the invaders. As we passed the battery, a wave of sulphur had engulfed us, the glass of the limousine rattled dangerously, and that mad chauffeur, putting on all power, had rushed us down the winding Flemish road, scattering stray groups of mild-eyed Belgian infantrymen and cavalrymen and grazing the metallic flanks of lumbering British motor lorries, their canvas sides splashed with Flanders mud, on their way down to the lines. He had rushed us over a little canal where two or three soldiers were fishing sleepily, in spite of the noise of the bombardment. He had dashed us alongside a field of over-ripe wheat, through a long avenue of stunted willows, across an acre of barbed-wire entanglements, and into the town of Zandt, its gray walls gleaming in the splashing sunlight which had just followed the customary morning shower, its claret-red roofs burnished like the morocco binding of old books.

We stepped stiffly from the car on to the slippery cobblestones and stared about us.

“The Germans shell Zandt almost every day,” said the Commissaire coolly. “That French battery we just passed will probably wake them up. Put the car in the lee of that wall, Pierre,” he called to the chauffeur. “We shall be back in ten minutes.”

“This, gentlemen,” he said, as we walked down the principal street of Zandt, “is called the Street of the Spy, because, up to this moment, no German shells have fallen in it. The population of Zandt pretend that it is because the Germans have a spy living in this street. Droll, isn’t it?”

We laughed with him. It is true that no shells had fallen in the Street of the Spy, but they had missed it by inches, not yards or rods. If I have ever said that the Germans do not use heavy calibre shells on unfortified villages and towns, I apologize. They use their very heaviest shells on these little defenceless villages of west Flanders just behind the Yser lines; they throw almost daily shells which are as destructive as cyclones into three or four room dwelling-houses. A row of such houses falls like a sand castle when such a shell arrives.

“But the people want to stay here, of course,” explained the Commissaire. “Where can they go? The peasant and the man of the small town has no capital except his farm or his house or his _winkel_--his little shop. He has no bank account. He is primitive. He is simple. All he has in the world is here in Zandt. And so he stays. Yes, we give them gas-masks, for the Germans use asphyxiating gas very often here. But it is hardest on the children and the little babies.

“Those boys we are sending away to-morrow to a safe place in France.” He pointed to two youngsters, nine and seven years old, peering through the broken glass of a near-by window.

“Are you glad to go, _manneken_?” he asked the elder.

“Oh, yes, yes, mynheer.”

“But why?”

“Because one has fear of the bombardment, mynheer,” said the boy, shivering.

* * * * *

“This you must see,” said the Commissaire, ducking his head and leading us into a small passageway between two brick walls. “It is the most interesting person in Zandt. She is eighty-three years old. She lost her only grandson in the war. She has nothing to eat except from her little garden. There, see!”

We had emerged on the edge of a tiny plot of land, perhaps twenty-two feet square. A gray one-story cottage, covered with mossy thatch, bounded it on one side; low walls and an outhouse inclosed it on the others. The little plot was cultivated, densely, compactly, expertly--a mosaic of fruits and green vegetables. Two apricot trees trimmed in the French fashion were trained along the wall, and a low vine, with some sort of pendent fruit, hung from the outhouse.

But strangest of all there were three beds of ornamental flowers. I stared hard at them, and suddenly I saw that they were graves!

“Good-day, madame,” the Commissaire called, touching his hat. “See, these are American gentlemen come to look at your little garden.”

She came slowly from the cottage, a wisp of lace in her white hair, wearing the ceremonial black frock which a peasant woman puts on for such feast days as the Feast of the Assumption, a white apron, and leather shoes. “You are welcome, gentlemen, you are welcome,” she said, with the grace of a chatelaine.

“But aren’t those graves?” I asked, pointing to the beds of nasturtiums, geraniums, and marigolds which covered three long mounds at the end of the garden, taking up almost half of the room available for vegetables and fruits. “Madame, aren’t those graves?”

“Oh, yes, mynheer,” she said.

“They have not been here long, madame?” I was looking at the transplanted geraniums, well rooted in the mud, but not yet wholly at home, and the raw, muddy rim about the edges of the three mounds.

“Since April, mynheer. I tend them myself,” she added proudly.

I turned to the Commissaire. “None of those is her grandson’s grave?” I asked in a low voice.

“Oh, no,” he muttered. “Her grandson died in Germany. He was taken prisoner at Liége in August, 1914. Madame,” he said to her, “the gentleman asks if he may look at your graves.”

“Oh, yes, mynheeren.” She fluttered down before us, bent rheumatically at the first mound, and pulled at a weed which the rain had freshened.

“‘Pray for the soul of Franz Mueller,’” I read in breathless amazement. “A Boche?”

“A Boche, of course!” said the Commissaire.

“And the other two--they are Boches also? ‘Pray for the soul of Max Edelsheim’ and ‘Pray for the soul of Erich Schneider,’” I read aloud. The neat wooden crosses bore also the regimental numbers of the men and the date of their death.

“Boches, too. It happens that they were killed in this garden on a reconnaissance.”

“But why don’t you remove them? You can put them somewhere else, and then this poor old woman can use all her garden. I should think she could hardly raise enough to eat from all this little plot, let alone from half of it.”

We had spoken in French, and of course the old proprietress had not understood. The Commissaire now turned to her, speaking the rhythmic, metrical Flemish of west Flanders. “Madame, the mynheer says that we should take up these bodies and place them in the churchyard. Do you wish it done so?”

At first she did not seem to understand, and bent inquiringly toward the Commissaire, her little gray eyes screwed up in bewilderment at his words. “What is it, mynheer?” she asked.

“Mynheer says that we should remove the three Germans and let you have your garden.”

“Oh, nay, nay,” she remonstrated, shaking her head emphatically. “Nay, mynheeren. God gave me these three graves instead of the grave of my boy. I could not tend them so well if they were in the churchyard. It is too far from my house. Nay, nay, let the three sleep here.”

“But you have not the room, madame.”

“There is room in my heart and in my garden, mynheer. I shall keep these three graves, and maybe in Germany there is some one who will keep the grave of my boy.”

* * * * *

“Messieurs, there is no use arguing with a Belgian peasant,” said the Commissaire of Metseys, as we walked back through the Street of the Spy to our waiting automobile. “But she has a fine spirit, that old grandmother.”

XIV

THE WHITE ISLAND

A STORY OF THE GALLIPOLI ADVENTURE

The aviation launch rolled slowly in the grip of the grounds well behind one of the desolate islands off Tenedos, southwest of the entrance to the Dardanelles. The afternoon was windless and humid. Warm, dripping fog covered the launch and hid from her the outlines of the rocky, treeless island in the lee of which she lay. Fog had sprinkled the deck as if with baptismal water, and the day was noiseless except for the lazy slapping of waves against the launch’s side.

A hydro-aeroplane alongside dipped and rose rhythmically with the launch’s motion, and the aviator, Lieutenant Douka, of the Royal Flying Corps, muffled in a British airman’s uniform, with thick wadded helmet on his head, goggles, and rubber gauntlets, bent over and tested the bomb-dropping mechanism. Those who had known Douka as a student in America or as an unambitious idler in Paris would hardly have recognized him in his new rôle. He had always been romantic, but he explained this amiable weakness as an inheritance from his Byzantine ancestors. “My grandparents were Greek, you know,” was his offhand explanation to college friends of his glowing fondness for the classics and things Hellenic. His two or three trips to Greece had been marred by the unpleasant contrast between the Greece he had imagined and the Greece of to-day. He could scarcely make himself understood in the modern tongue of Hellas; it irritated him, as modern English would doubtless irritate Chaucer. “A degenerate language and a degenerate people,” he told himself. Yet he had taken up aviation at Pau, not as a sport--although that is what he told his friends--but as one of the gifts he could offer modern Greece when the day of her final fight with the Turk should dawn.

The war came. He went hopefully to Athens. There came a day when King Constantine overrode his people, Venizelos retired, constitutional government in Greece ceased to be, and Douka went to London and volunteered in time for the Dardanelles expedition.

But he gave no sign of all this as he tested and retested the bomb-dropping mechanism hanging between the pontoons which supported the machine, and pushed and pulled the controls. He thrust his feet against the pedals and examined the petrol and oil throttles. “Right, lieutenant?” called the skipper of the launch. “Right, sir,” he answered. “Belay there! Lively!” the skipper shouted to two sailors who held the machine. A mechanician spun the propeller and dropped from sight; the motor churned nervously; Lieutenant Douka lifted his hand and signalled that all was satisfactory. The launch shot sidewise, and the ’plane skated swiftly forward, leaving a foaming wake. She tilted and shot forward faster, then up from the water and heavily into the mist. Douka swung her back and around the launch. Along the deck beneath him the sailors stood at attention, but a gust of gray smoke showed him that his escort was already in motion, off for the mother-ship and the flock of aeroplanes at Imbros, and he was alone, sailing away to bomb the _Sultan Omar_, the flagship of the Turkish fleet.

He looked at the clock--it read 3:17; then at the oil gauge--it was working properly. He climbed to fifteen hundred feet. Under him the mist lay like an Arctic snow-field, broken by pools of rotten ice through which the gray sea stared. The sea abruptly changed to gray land, and he mounted higher. He was flying at a height of four thousand feet over Asia, the ancestral enemy of his race and his continent. Somewhere down in the haze beneath lay Troy. Douka smiled bitterly as he thought again of the ten years’ warfare, and of how the Greeks had blotted her from the earth. The sullen roar of his motor seemed to stimulate his imagination. The mist thinned slightly, and he saw far away the narrow blue ribbon of the Dardanelles--the blood-thickened boundary between free Europe and the despotic East. Haughty Xerxes once sat on those cliffs and watched his Asiatic worms crossing to conquer the West. Twenty-eight centuries had battled on that blue line. Always it had been the same, age after age, century after century, always the Greek against the Asiatic, the Greek against the barbarian, and for five hundred years the disinherited Christian Greek against the Moslem Turk. Muffled in his helmet as he was, he began to sing an old Byzantine war song--a song his grandmother had taught him. His hate rose like a bird in a gale; his clutched hands bit into the rubber sheathing of the levers; he drove ahead at top speed, but his wrath seemed to leap out before him like a racer distancing the thing behind. To kill, to destroy, to blot out, utterly obsessed him.

High over the Sea of Marmora he flew toward Constantinople. Battles without end had been fought on the watery plains below. There the vast Greek Empire had struggled to the death with the hordes of Asia. The mist which had half hidden the land thinned and disappeared. The choppy air became cleaner and easier to fly through. He climbed to eight thousand feet. Far away he caught sight of the Golden Horn, the royal city of Constantine the Great, like a Grecian jewel set in Oriental gold, or like a Grecian body pierced by the bright spears of Turkish minarets. For five centuries she had been the spoil of the East. He cursed her conquerors and laughed to himself. What if he should bomb the mosque of Omar or the Sultan’s palace?... He shook his fist at Scutari as if the city were a person. Little flowers of dirty-white smoke bloomed in the air beside him and above him; once he seemed to fly through a shower where before all had been clear, and he felt small pieces of steel drumming like rain on the wings of his ’plane. It was a burst of shrapnel. He laughed and flew on.

Up the Bosphorus he drove, searching the sea with his eyes. The British Secret Service had reported the _Sultan Omar_ at Bojukdere. He strained for a sight of her.

Then suddenly, like a mirage, he saw the half-moon of a harbour and black ships at anchorage. He drew rapidly near. A violent puff of smoke rose from the funnels of the largest ship. She had seen him, or she had been warned, and was endeavouring to escape. He recognized her with a cry of delight. She was the _Sultan Omar_.

Hidden forts on the green hills about the harbour burst into life. Smoke, flame, and the dull thud of cannon rose to him, for he was flying lower and lower. A shrapnel shell flashed just in front of him and showered steel splinters against his windshield. He screamed with laughter. It seemed to him ridiculously funny that they should think they could kill him or escape him.

He volplaned; from seven thousand feet he sank to one thousand, then to eight hundred--to seven hundred--to six hundred--to five hundred. A curving white wake showed him that his victim was in motion. He was almost over her. Rifles cracked as the crew endeavoured to reach him with their bullets. He did not hear them. His right arm swung deliberately back to the bomb-thrower. He was near. He was over. He jerked madly, and the pent volcano fell straight on the warship.

The air rocked and heaved. His ’plane almost turned a somersault, and he fought to restore its balance in an atmosphere reeling like a typhoon. Solid waves of air beat and buffeted him. He jerked the levers and fought furiously. Then, like a bronco, the machine found her feet, prancing and shuddering in the choppy air, and up he climbed. A glance over his shoulder was enough, even if the boiling air had not told him of his success. The blue sea was black with wreckage; men like insects floated in the water, but the _Sultan Omar_ had disappeared.

The air still cracked and roared as the Turks shelled him. The whole land seemed to wake, and the setting sun shone through a curtain of dirty smoke. A Turkish aeroplane slid up in long spirals behind him to cut off his retreat; petrol dripped slowly from a leak in his reservoir caused by shrapnel or a rifle bullet. It was the price of his success; a glance told him that he could not stop the leak. He had often thought of that moment. Should he go back and risk capture by the Turks? No; he would fly straight out into the Black Sea and die alone in its waters. He would fly out into the sea where his ancestors had sailed centuries before the Moslems had taken Constantinople; the sea of the Golden Fleece, of Medea, of Xenophon and the Ten Thousand, of the long campaigns against the Persians. He would die there.

The sun set swiftly. In the twilight his mind seemed to slip its leash and play high jinks with him. His palms grew into the handles of the controls and became part of the mechanism; his fingers lengthened into levers, his legs into rods upholding the aeroplane, and he flew, screaming, laughing, and cursing, until night fell like a plummet from the dusky sky.

* * * * *

Suddenly his machine struck the level surface of the sea and buckled forward. Douka awoke, as if from sleep, tore the harness from his aching head, and slumped forward against the straps, waiting for the end. The wreckage of his machine still floated on the long, slow waves, and rocked easily to and fro, but one of the pontoons was crushed and another was leaking.

He felt no wind against his face, and the sea was calm. “Lucky,” he thought listlessly, knowing that at a touch of wind or wave the ’plane would go under. It might float for hours, or only for minutes; he did not care. Death was certain.

But there seemed to be a sound of voices in the air, a distant singing and a splash of oars. “Delirium,” he said calmly. “But how beautifully they sing! What is it? It is Greek! Why, it is the old Greek: ‘To thee, Zeus, blessings upon our timid flocks.’” His wondering lips formed the words which he had learned in school.

Then out of the darkness swam a boat, and in the boat were a steersman and four men at the oars, and the men were singing a hymn to Zeus, the Father of all and the King of all. To Lieutenant Douka nothing now seemed strange. To his shaken mind it seemed good to hear them, good to see them, good to find them loosing the straps which held him to the wrecked machine, and lifting him, in silence, into their boat.

Half an hour they rowed, when Douka caught across the level sea a hot breath of wind and the odour breathed from rye-fields in midsummer. “Land! It is land!” he exclaimed. “It is land--the White Island,” they answered gently. Both he and they had spoken in the classic Greek, the Greek of the old heroic days--not the bastard modern speech, larded with cruel words from the Turks and the rough idioms of northern barbarians. His tired eyes strained forward. Like night mist advancing upon them came the land, white like foam and very fair; and he heard cicadas chanting in the olive trees, and the warm breath of the night brought murmurs of song and the sibilant lapping of waves along a sandy shore.

All the island was white. A crescent moon stole out of cloudbanks and stared down on white sands, white balustrades, the white walls of palaces, white hills swelling against the darkness, silvery white olive groves, and slowly moving figures, clad all in white, pacing along the stairs.