Part 10

As she turned away he prayed fervently that, even though the pillaging hordes might, in their fury against the inhabitants, devastate the city, the fact that they claimed the same God as their Savior to whose glory the cathedral had been erected would prove its safeguard and protection. But, even as he prayed, a great bomb blazed a trail through the gray light, and hurled itself on the roof of the sacred edifice. It exploded with concentrated fury, tearing off great pieces of the roof and casting them at his feet.

“They’ve found the range!” excitedly exclaimed a man who stood near the archbishop. “Can it be possible that they intend to destroy the cathedral?”

The archbishop was staring with incredulous eyes at the gaping wound the shot had made.

“No,” he declared firmly, without removing his eyes. “It is not possible. This injury is an unfortunate mistake. Sacred edifices are protected by human and moral laws, and, besides, the Cathedral of Rheims, because of its perfection, belongs to all time and all peoples. No one destroys his own heritage.”

Nevertheless, the remembrance of the destruction of Louvain and the desecration of many churches by the Germans since their treacherous entrance into Belgium, when they cast aside men’s faith in their honor, seared itself across his mind. Their acts had disproved their vaunted belief in God which, had it existed, would have shown itself in a reverent solicitude for His dwelling place.

The words had hardly left his lips when a shower of explosives fell on and about the massive structure, hewing out huge lumps of the masonry, which descended in a deluge of stone on the roofs of the adjacent houses.

A glare of light flared behind the great rose-window, throwing for the last time a blaze of glory into the horror-stricken faces below; then it burst into a thousand fragments that shivered to pieces on the pavement of the Square.

Surrounded by the gleaming bits of imprisoned sunshine, Jean Monneuze gazed with wide, unbelieving eyes at the yawning space in the façade. The thought took shape in his mind that this act of profanation could not be true, that it must be some hideous nightmare at which he would scoff in the morning, and he prayed aloud that the awakening would be soon, that he might be relieved of the torture he was undergoing. A voice at his elbow roused him.

“May God curse the Kaiser, and the rest of his breed, for this sacrilege!”

The old _vitrier_ turned quickly, the fury of a mother for her ravished young in his working face. “Amen!” he exclaimed harshly.

A group of people near him parted, and out of it Jean saw the archbishop slowly advance. The look of intense suffering on his face had driven away the peace that formerly rested there, but his countenance was untinged by venom or desire for revenge. His sunken eyes met the glass-maker’s, and Jean, a sob clutching at his throat, fell on his knees and began gathering up the gems of shattered glass that lay at his feet. He rose as the archbishop reached him, and held out the fragments to him. For a moment they gazed into each other’s eyes without speaking, then a wistful little smile flitted across the archbishop’s face.

“The Lord hath given—the Lord hath taken away.” There was a pause while he waited for the response; but the old _vitrier’s_ chin had sunk on his breast, and his eyes, swimming with tears, were fastened on the gleaming bits of glass. Once more the archbishop’s voice fell on his ears:

“Blessed be the name of the Lord.” There was an accent of surprised reproach in the patient tones, but only pity shone on the gentle countenance as he noted the quivering face of the old man who, turning abruptly away, disappeared into the crowd.

A chorus of voices rose shrilly above the shrieking of the shells:

“The roof is on fire! It’s burning!”

The words galvanized the archbishop into action.

“The wounded!” he exclaimed. “They will perish if they remain where they are!”

“Let ’em!” retorted a thick-set _ouvrier_. He thrust his hands deep into the pockets of his trousers. “They deserve to die, and they’re not fit to live!” He turned brusquely away, and stared with sullen eyes at the smoking roof from which jets of flame were spurting.

A look of anguish crept over the archbishop’s face. Could it be that his flock had caught so little of the spirit of his teaching that, when it was put to the test, it collapsed as the mighty edifice was crumbling under the demolishing shells? If this were so, it explained the destruction of the cathedral as the retribution for the failure of his ministry. His life work, as well as his life trust, was disintegrating before his eyes. Even Jean Monneuze, the spirituality of whose life, in daily contact with the inspiring sanctuary they both adored, had faltered under the supreme test, and if Jean, for whom he would have vouched under all circumstances, would succumb, how could he expect that the others, with so incomparably less sustaining spiritual strength in their lives, would respond to the call. The bitterness of Gethsemane fell on him, and his face, lighted by the glare from the burning structure, was drawn with pain.

A shell hurtled through the air, and fell against the portal. Rending from its place the head of the Angel with the Smile, it flung it into the Square. Angry mutterings rose from the crowd as the _ouvrier_ picked up the head and held it aloft for every one to see.

The archbishop stepped up on the base of the pedestal of the statue to the Maid of Orleans. He raised his hand impressively.

“My children,” he began in a voice tremulous with emotion. “The Master admonishes us to love our enemies, to do good to them that hate us, to pray for them that despitefully use us and persecute us. If we do good only to those who love us, how much better are we than the heathen? Did you not see that, despite its destruction, the Angel of Rheims smiled on?” He spread out his arms in an agony of entreaty. “Oh my children,” he pleaded, “do not fail me now!”

The rays of the rising sun shone on his face and illumined it with unearthly radiance. The people stood spellbound before him.

Once more he raised his hand and, pointing to the burning cathedral, cried in a resonant voice that rang like a clarion:

“The wounded! Who helps me rescue them?”

Still that tense silence hung over the motionless throng which the crackling of the flames, and the moaning and singing of death as it whistled through the air, only served to accentuate.

The old _vitrier_ elbowed his way through the crowd and, laying his hand on the base of the statue, said in a clear, loud voice:

“Monseigneur, I will assist.”

In the uncertain light the two old men stood scanning the quivering, upturned faces. Then a sudden change swept over the mass.

“_Au secours_! _Au secours_!” The voice of the crowd rose as from one man in a cry, increasing in volume with each repetition until, in the archbishop’s ears, it sounded like a shout of victory. The men turned, and surged toward the entrance of the cathedral.

The archbishop’s face went white, and he grasped the spurred foot of the Maid for support. He closed his eyes, and his lips moved spasmodically. Then they parted in a smile of such celestial beauty that the old _vitrier_, standing at his feet, averted his eye as though unable to bear the sight.

The large central door of the cathedral swung open, and four men, carrying a litter on which lay a gray, motionless form, emerged. They were followed by others in what seemed an endless procession, gently bearing their burdens through the showers of flying pieces of granite statuary and structure stone which the shells were cleaving from the façade.

The flames that were devouring the roof rose in a dull roar; a great bomb crashed through the hallowed walls, and fell on the palace, where it exploded with terrific force.

The archbishop looked silently at the ruin of his home, then he concentrated his attention on the stream of wounded still flowing from the mutilated pile, and directed and guided the movements of the rescuers. When the last of the sufferers had been removed to a place of safety, he stepped down from the pedestal and, entering a little house on the other side of the Square, mounted the stairs until he reached a small room which faced the east.

He entered and, softly closing the door, walked to the window, from which the glass had fallen. Kneeling down in the chill morning air he gazed out at the blackened, smoking husk, his soul in his eyes, as one kneels by the bedside of all that life holds dear, waiting with bated breath for the final dissolution of soul from body with the dull knowledge that, with the passing of that spirit, the light of the world is extinguished.

Still he watches, noting day by day the destruction by wanton shells of one of man’s most glorious tributes to God, ever with the patient look of suffering on his face, as though the prayer from ceaseless repetition had crystallized on his brain:

“Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do!”

_Emily W. Scott_.

THE TRAWNBEIGHS

The Trawnbeighs were the sort of people who “dressed for dinner” even when, as sometimes happened, they had no dinner in the house to dress for. It is perhaps unnecessary to add that the Trawnbeighs were English. Indeed, on looking back, I often feel that to my first apparently flippant statement it is unnecessary to add anything. For to one who knew Mr. and Mrs. Trawnbeigh, Edwina, Violet, Maud and Cyril, it was the first and last word on them; their alpha and omega, together with all that went between. Not that the statement is flippant, far from it. There is in it a seriousness, a profundity, an immense philosophic import. At times it has almost moved me to lift my hat, very much as one does for reason of state, or religion, or death.

This, let me hasten to explain, is not at all the way I feel when I put on evening clothes myself, which I do at least twice out of my every three hundred and sixty-five opportunities. No born American could feel that way about his own dress coat. He sometimes thinks he does; he often—and isn’t it boresome?—pretends he does. But he really doesn’t. As a matter of unimportant fact, the born American may have “dressed” every evening of his grown up life. But if he found himself on an isolated, played out Mexican coffee and vanilla _finca_, with a wife, four children, a tiled roof that leaked whenever there was a norther, an unveiled _sala_, through the bamboo partitions of which a cold, wet wind howled sometimes for a week at a time, with no money, no capacity for making any, no prospects and no cook—under these depressing circumstances it is impossible to conceive of an American dressing for dinner every night at a quarter before seven in any spirit but one of ghastly humor.

With the Trawnbeighs’ performance of this sacred rite, however, irony and humor had nothing to do. The Trawnbeighs had a robust sense of fun (so, I feel sure, have pumpkins and turnips and the larger varieties of the nutritious potato family), but humor, when they didn’t recognize it, bewildered them, and it always struck them as just a trifle underbred, when they did.

Trawnbeigh had come over to Mexico—“come out from England,” he would have expressed it—as a kind of secretary to his cousin, Sir Somebody Something, who was building a harbor or a railway or a canal (I don’t believe Trawnbeigh himself ever knew just what it was) for a British company down in the hot country.

Mrs. Trawnbeigh, with her young, was to follow on the next steamer a month later; and as she was in mid-ocean when Sir Somebody suddenly died of yellow fever, she did not learn of this inopportune event until it was too late to turn back. Still, I doubt whether she would have turned back if she could. For, as Trawnbeigh once explained to me, at a time when they literally hadn’t enough to eat (a hailstorm had not only destroyed his coffee crop but had frozen the roots of most of his trees, and the price of vanilla had fallen from ten cents a bean to three and a half), leaving England at all had necessitated “burning their bridges behind them.” He did not tell me the nature of their bridges nor whether they had made much of a blaze. In fact, that one, vague, inflammatory allusion was the nearest approach to a personal confidence Trawnbeigh was ever known to make in all his fifteen years of Mexican life.

The situation, when he met Mrs. Trawnbeigh and the children on the dock at Vera Cruz, was extremely dreary, and at the end of a month it had grown much worse, although the Trawnbeighs apparently didn’t think so. They even spoke and wrote as if their affairs were looking up a bit. For, after a few weeks of visiting among kindly compatriots at Vera Cruz and Rebozo, Mrs. Trawnbeigh became cook for some English engineers (there were seven of them) in a sizzling, mosquitoey, feverish mudhole on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec.

The Trawnbeighs didn’t call it cook! Neither did the seven engineers. I don’t believe the engineers even thought of it as cook. What Mrs. Trawnbeigh thought of it will never be known. How could they, when that lady, after feeding the four little Trawnbeighs (or rather the four young Trawnbeighs; they had never been little) a meal I think they called “the nursery tea,” managed every afternoon, within the next two hours, first, to create out of nothing a perfectly edible dinner for nine persons, and, secondly, to receive them all at seven forty-five, in a red-striped, lemon satin ball gown (it looked like poisonous wall paper), eleven silver bangles, a cameo necklace, with an ostrich tip sprouting from the top of her head?

Trawnbeigh, too, was in evening clothes; and they didn’t call it cooking; they spoke of it as “looking after the mess” or “keeping an eye on the young chaps’ livers.” Nevertheless, Mrs. Trawnbeigh, daughter of the late, the Honorable Cyril Cosby Godolphin Dundas and the late Clare Walpurga Emmeline Moate, cooked—and cooked hard—for almost a year; at the end of which time she was stricken with what she was pleased to refer to as “a bad go of fevah.”

Fortunately they were spared having to pass around the hat, although it would have amounted to that if Trawnbeigh hadn’t, after the pleasant English fashion, “come into some money.” In the United States, people know to a cent what they may expect to inherit; and then they sometimes don’t get it. But in England there seems to be an endless succession of retired and unmarried army officers who die every little while in Jermyn Street and leave two thousand pounds to a distant relative they have never met. Something like this happened to Trawnbeigh, and on the prospect of his legacy he was able to pull out of the Tehuantepec mudhole and restore his wife to her usual state of health in the pure and bracing air of Rebozo.

Various things can be done with two thousand pounds, but just what shall be done ought to depend very largely on whether they happen to be one’s first two thousand or one’s last. Trawnbeigh, however, invested his (“interred” would be a more accurate term) quite as if they never would be missed. The disposition to be a country gentleman was in Trawnbeigh’s blood. Indeed, the first impression one received from the family was that everything they did was in their blood. It never seemed to me that Trawnbeigh had immediately sunk the whole of his little fortune in the old, small, and dilapidated coffee _finca_ so much because he was dazzled by the glittering financial future the shameless owner (another Englishman, by the way) predicted for him, as because to own an estate and live on it was, so to speak, his natural element.

He had tried, while Mrs. Trawnbeigh was cooking on the Isthmus, to get something to do. But there was really nothing in Mexico he could do. He was splendidly strong, and, in the United States, he very cheerfully and with no loss of self-respect or point of view would have temporarily shoveled wheat or coal, or driven a team, or worked on the street force, as many another Englishman of noble lineage has done before and since, but in the tropics an Anglo-Saxon cannot be a day laborer. He can’t because he can’t.

There was in Mexico no clerical position open to Trawnbeigh, because he did not know Spanish. It is significant that after fifteen consecutive years of residence in the country none of the Trawnbeighs knew Spanish. To be, somehow and somewhere, an English country gentleman of a well-known, slightly old-fashioned type was as much Trawnbeigh’s destiny as it is the destiny of, say, a polar bear to be a polar bear, or a camel to be a camel. As soon as he got his two thousand pounds he became one.

When I first met them all he had been one for about ten years. I had recently settled in Trawnbeigh’s neighborhood, which in Mexico means that my ranch was a hard day-and-a-half ride from his, over roads that are not roads but merely ditches full of liquefied mud on the level stretches, and ditches full of assorted bowlders on the ascents. So, although we looked neighborly on a small map, I might not have had the joy of meeting the Trawnbeighs for years if my mule hadn’t gone lame one day when I was making the interminable trip to Rebozo.

Trawnbeigh’s place was seven miles from the main road, and as I happened to be near the parting of the ways when the off hind leg of Catalina began to limp, I decided to leave her with my _mozo_ at an Indian village until a pack train should pass by (there is always some one in a pack train who can remove a bad shoe), while I proceeded on the _mozo’s_ mule to the Trawnbeighs’. My usual stopping place for the night was five miles farther on, and the Indian village was—well, it was an Indian village.

He put me up not only that night, but as my _mozo_ didn’t appear until late the next afternoon, a second night as well. And when I at last rode away, it was with the feeling of having learned from the Trawnbeighs a great lesson.

In the first place they couldn’t have expected me; they couldn’t possibly have expected any one. And it was a hot afternoon. But as it was the hour at which people at “home” dropped in for tea, Mrs. Trawnbeigh and her three plain, heavy looking daughters were perfectly prepared to dispense hospitality to any number of mythical friends.

They had on hideous, but distinctly “dressy” dresses of amazingly stamped materials known, I believe, as “summer silks,” and they were all four tightly laced. Current fashion in Paris, London and New York by no means insisted on small, smooth, round waists, but the Trawnbeigh women had them, because (as it gradually dawned on me) to have had any other kind would have been a concession to anatomy and the weather. To anything so compressible as one’s anatomy, or as vulgarly impartial as the weather, the Trawnbeighs simply did not concede. I never could get over the feeling that they all secretly regarded weather in general as a kind of popular institution, of vital importance only to the middle class.

Cyril, an extremely beautiful young person of twenty-two, who had been playing tennis (by himself) on the _asoleadero_, was in “flannels,” and Trawnbeigh admirably looked the part in gray, middle-aged riding things, although, as I discovered before leaving, their stable at the time consisted of one senile burro with ingrowing hoofs.

From the first, it all seemed too flawless to be true. I had never visited in England, but I doubt if there is another country whose literature gives one as definite and lasting an impression of its home life. Perhaps this is because the life of families of the class to which the Trawnbeighs belonged proceeds in England by such a series of definite and traditional episodes.

In a household like theirs, the unexpected must have a devil of a time in finding a chance to happen. For, during my visit, absolutely nothing happened that I hadn’t long since chuckled over when making the acquaintance of Jane Austen, Thackeray, George Eliot and Anthony Trollope; not to mention Ouida (it was Cyril, of course, who from time to time struck the Ouida note), and the more laborious performances of Mrs. Humphry Ward. They all of them did at every tick of the clock precisely what they ought to have done. They were a page, the least bit crumpled, torn from “Half Hours With the Best Authors,” and cast, dear Heaven! upon a hillside in darkest Mexico.

Of course we had tea in the garden. There wasn’t any garden, but we nevertheless had tea in it. The house would have been cooler, less glaring, and free from the venomous little _rodadoras_ that stung the backs of my hands full of microscopic polka dots; but we all strolled out to a spot some fifty yards away where a bench, half a dozen shaky, home made chairs and a rustic table were most imperfectly shaded by three tattered banana trees.

“We love to drink tea in the dingle-dangle,” Mrs. Trawnbeigh explained. How the tea tray itself got to the dingle-dangle I have only a general suspicion, for when we arrived it was already there, equipped with caddy, cozy, a plate of buttered toast, a pot of strawberry jam and all the rest of it. But, try as I might, I simply could not rid myself of the feeling that at least two footmen had arranged it all and then discreetly retired; a feeling that also sought to account for the tray’s subsequent removal, which took place while Trawnbeigh, Cyril, Edwina and I walked over to inspect the _asoleadero_ and washing tanks. I wanted to look back; but something (the fear, perhaps, of being turned into a pillar of salt) restrained me.

With most English speaking persons in that part of the world, conversation has to do with coffee, coffee and—coffee. The Trawnbeighs, however, scarcely touched on the insistent topic. While we sat on the low wall of the dilapidated little _asoleadero_, we discussed pheasant shooting, and the best places for haberdashery and “Gladstone Bags.” Cyril, as if it were but a matter of inclination, said he thought he might go over for the shooting that year; a cousin had asked him “to make a seventh.” I never found out what this meant, and didn’t have the nerve to ask.

“Bertie shoots the twelfth, doesn’t he?” Edwina here inquired.

To which her brother replied, as if she had shown a distressing ignorance of some fundamental date in history, like 1066 or 1215: “Bertie always shoots the twelfth.”

The best place for haberdashery, in Mr. Trawnbeigh’s opinion, was “the Stores.” But Cyril preferred a small shop in Bond Street, maintaining firmly, but with good humor, that it was not merely, as “the pater” insisted, because the fellow charged more, but because one didn’t “run the risk of seeing some beastly bounder in a cravat uncommonly like one’s own.” Trawnbeigh, as a sedate parent bordering on middle age, felt obliged to stand up for the more economical “Stores,” but it was evident that he really admired Cyril’s exclusive principles and approved of them. Edwina cut short the argument with an abrupt question.

“I say,” she inquired anxiously, “has the dressing bell gone yet?” The dressing bell hadn’t gone, but it soon went, for Mr. Trawnbeigh, after looking at his watch, bustled off to the house and rang it himself. Then we withdrew to our respective apartments to dress for dinner.

“I’ve put you in the north wing, old man; there’s always a breeze in the wing,” my host declared as he ushered me into a bamboo shed they used apparently for storing corn and iron implements of an agricultural nature. But there was also in the room a recently made up cot with real sheets, a tin bath tub, hot and cold water in two earthenware jars, and an empty packing case upholstered in oilcloth. When Trawnbeigh spoke of this last as a “wash-hand-stand,” I knew I had indeed strayed from life into the realms of mid-Victorian romance.