CHAPTER I

SAINT CHOISEUL

It is a pretty village, Saint Choiseul, perched on a hillside whose slopes, undeviatingly smooth and moderate, subside into a flowing land of streams and fields and white roadways. Its narrow streets are decorous with straight lines of prim poplars that have a military stiffness, and while the wind stirs their hedged leaves into audible protest--the flutter of a restrained salutation or a salute simply--it seems hardly able to extort from their braced branches the tribute of an obeisance.

The houses are generally simple things of two and sometimes only one story, built of limestone blocks that have weathered into an undecipherable composition of brown blotches, staring white strips, mossy crevices, little pits of black, and crannies of nutritious decomposition, where tiny grass blades have sprouted. Under favorable skies--and they are almost always favorable at St. Choiseul--their uneven walls become fascinating studies of minor-color harmonies, and rising as they do amid beds of flowers, or just grazed grass, from which they seemed in the broad sunshine to gather subtle tints of gayety, by some evanescent reflexion, they become fascinatingly pretty, and commodious, so to say, to an artist's fancy.

The clustered chimneys in some larger villa formed occasional and well-spaced visual incidents that broke the monotony of the low cottages and added a keenly valued distinction to our pleasant hamlet. It was delightful. You felt its persuasive loveliness the moment you came up the road from far-away Paris--Ah! not so far away that we could not see the Eiffel Tower on fair days, and on all days, or rather nights, note the dull flare of its lights in the sky. The road you came by crossed a stone bridge that threw its moss-covered span over a clear deep brook, running all the way from Briois, with pollarded willows on rushy banks, and drooping wistarias wildly clinging to white birches in the meadow lands of rich farmers, where the brook, loitering, made pools in which the cattle stood for hours in cream and russet dabs over the half glittering rippled water. _Mon Dieu! Comme il était beau!_

Our house was the second in the village on the right hand side of the road, as you came from Paris, just next to Privat Deschat, an old carpet-weaver whose back-yard was as many colored as a flower garden with bright rugs, green, and yellow, and blue, and red, and brown, hung out on lines that webbed the air like a spider's nest, in the spring. And a very pleasant, inviting house ours was with its staid look of reserved happiness, I might say. There it was with its deep-silled windows, filled with geraniums and heart's ease, its wide black door, and big brass knocker, that was a dragon's tongue lolling out of a dragon's scaly jaw, its long slanting shingled roof, with two dormer windows, and its pastiche red bricks peeping in ruddy streaks through the dense ampelopsis that climbed up to the eaves, and then lurked in the dark, to make its way into the house, and lingering there, became pale and white.

There was no veranda or piazza, but just a covered porch with four wooden pillars and two bench seats, where sister Gabrielle and I sat long hours in the evenings in summer time, when we were afraid sometimes to enter the house because--Ah, but I must not tell that now, for just that fear and what it led to, and how it helped us to end the WAR, is the sole reason of my telling this story at all. No, no, that is a long way towards the end, and here I've hardly begun.

Well, as pleasing and welcoming as the house seemed on the outside, it was even more lovely within. I don't wonder the spirits--Ah, _bête encore_--Yes, most lovely. You see there was a wide hall in soft yellow and china-blue tile, with the Privat Deschat's rag-carpet in short strips over it, and a big Holland clock against the wall, and prints in black and white framed in mahogany, and an old narrow carved table with tall porcelain candle-sticks on it, from Dresden, and then some straw-bottomed chairs in gilded frames, and the garden of blooms, seen through the door on the other side, which opened on a walk covered with a vine-trellis, and bordered by smart gillyflowers, and hollyhocks, and sunflowers, and cushions of pansies.

Then there was a good big square room on the right of the hall full of books, and friendly chairs, and pictures, with a big desk-table in the centre, where rose toweringly a superb old bronze French lamp, that even then we burned with whale oil. You wound it up, and the oil was pumped on the wicks and--the light was soft and charming and companionable. The windows were high and low; they reached up to the ceiling, and they left spaces for window seats at the floor, and white tapestry curtains shaded them, and then at night--we did it in the winter mostly--there could be drawn over them soft, thick folds of green baize, and we seemed softly entombed in a delicious seclusion--so delicate, so sure. My sister loved the long evenings that way, of winter, and if it stormed and the snow stung the windows with sharp taps, she would laugh almost, with the happiness of security.

And there was a big fire-place on the west side of the room--you see this library was on the west side of the house too--but it was the whole width of the house also, and the southern outlook swept over the low land and gazed straight to Paris. That chimney corner was delightful, and the wisps of light from the soft coal lit up the mantel and played grotesquely over the row of Peruvian Inca figures and face-jars that filled it--I brought them from America--so that they seemed to squint and grin, or just look glum and melancholy. Gabrielle said they came to life in the half dark, and she made them talk to me--for she interpreted them in her odd way--the old Inca warriors and the medicine men and the priests, and the little beggar with a stump for a leg, and the squinting big-toothed demon in red and black.

All that in the winter, but in summer and early fall, with the windows all open, the cooling night air came in, and brought with it odors of the ground and perfumes--O! so delicate and ravishing--of the flowers; St. Choiseul loved flowers; there was not a home without them--and so mixed with these, as if sound and smell had run together in a composite, half of each, the murmur of insects, the endless roundelay of the peeping tree toads, a twittering of birds, and the shivering of leaves in the trees. How we loved it!

I am rambling dully, but you see, kind friend, such strange weird things happened in that house afterwards, and such sorrow came to me after all the blessed joy of years, now lost, forever lost, that I cannot stop my thought picturing everything about it, as if I would leap back into the arms of other days, and let them caress and soothe me and banish my grief.

On the east side of the hall-way was our dining room, a simple room with just straw-bottomed chairs, an immense oak side-board, royally set out with glass and blue plates, and on the walls quaint expressionless portraits of our people, including mother and father, a fat uncle with a pipe, and half closed eye, and a great grandfather in the regimentals of the Revolution--very brave looking and handsome--and some very staring aunts, and great aunts in starched finery, that made them look like owls.

Back of the pantry was the kitchen, with old Hortense, as the high priestess and oracle--our own dear Hortense, with such a kind heart, and a ready ear, and a generous hand--Ah! how we children loved her, and how she loved us, and how she packed our napkins for school, or our baskets for picnics--as the Americans say. She used to shake her wise old head slyly at us when we looked in at the kitchen door, with that little hungry grin on our faces:

"_Certainement_, you are veery hungree. Oh I know--it is a great pity and there is nothing, _Vraiment_--nothing--but See! I do so," and her long fingers snapped, and she waved them in an appeal to space, and then she cautiously raised a big bowl and _Voila!_ a nest of crisp, aromatic, yellow buns, or cookies, or _gateaux aux raisins_, so good, so inexpressibly good!

And upstairs were the pleasant bed-rooms, so inviting to repose in their demure neatness, with high posters and pavilions, and their broad bottomed rockers, and their rainbow wallpapers, and rag carpet strips, over the bronzed, aged, and russety black wooden floors.

My own room was over the library; it looked north and west, and I would hang out of its window for half an hour at a time, watching the red sun quench itself behind the golden and flaming horizon, whose secrets I yearned to know, whose untrodden wonders I dreamed to penetrate. Those wistful hours awoke the unconfessed but sleepless passion of my heart to sail out over the Atlantic, a passion too of unrest, linked in my disposition with ecstacies and imaginations.

Sister Gabrielle was in the next room to mine, and in her sweet, tasteful, fresh and white bed-room, rose the chimney from the library fire-place below--so that she had her own chimney corner too, in the second story of the house and THERE--Well, wait, that comes later.

Our parents were nervously alert in nature, intelligent and conscientious. In them a strain of Huguenot puritanism was combined with an intellectual appetite that seemed to create in each a physical activity that made them restless in manner, and weak in health. They watched my sister and myself too suspiciously, and their affection became almost an aggravation of kindness, and solicitude, and curiosity, which made me more eager to escape that protecting roof-tree, and see the world. On my sister, as I shall explain, it exercised the most unfortunate influence, and accentuated that peculiar neurosis whose roots--as I was to learn later--were enlaced in a sub-conscious sensitivity to occult and invisible agencies, which indeed I helped to strengthen.

We were provided with neighbors and friends, and while the village of St. Choiseul was sufficiently democratic to tolerate and encourage friendly intercourse with everyone, as a matter of congeniality and temperamental tastes, we knew intimately but five persons in St. Choiseul. These five composed a contrasted and picturesque group, and when all were assembled in our big library, father and mother seemed to me most attractive, for in converse that was stimulating and personal, they attained a serenity of feeling and manner, that made them really delightful. Let me quickly describe our friends.

There was the rug-maker and carpet weaver, Privat Deschat, an elderly, robust Norman, who worked hard at his tasks in the mornings--and his mornings began very early--read as steadily for three or four hours in the afternoon, napped two hours, ate supper with his housekeeper and hunted up a friend with whom he smoked and chatted, or played Demi Rouge for the remainder of his day, which never extended over midnight, and more customarily closed at ten.

Privat Deschat was unquestionably very good company, quiet, attentive, observant, and spasmodically conversational, when his suppressed gift of speech awoke a momentary admiration. He was a short, strong man, with large cheeks, a massive head, an expressive mouth, made more so by very good teeth, and what might be called reticent eyes, in which his delicate and studious self retreated, under the guise of inexpressiveness. Again these quiet eyes would light up with enthusiasm, or it might be with distrust and defiance. His speech accompanied his roused spirit, and no one dared--no one wished--to interrupt, lest the rebuke might return him to silence. You see, he thoroughly delighted us. He was a bit quaint in his way of saying things.

And there was Capitaine Bleu-Pistache, who had been wounded in the 1870 fight and limped about on a wooden peg, with a stout cane in one hand. He was an amiable old mustachio, with pleasant eyes, under frowning eyebrows, a white whisp of hair on the top of his high brow, and a hooked nose that made him look like a bird of prey. But ah, he was most lovable! In the afternoon his little yard--he lived down the street on the opposite side from us in a small red and yellow brick house, hidden in climbing roses--was filled with children, for the old _sabreur_ told stories well, and the boys and girls loved to hear him, and then in the spring he played marbles with them, so like a big chuckling boy, that it made us laugh to watch him get down on his good knee, and then get helped up again by the biggest boys, after he had taken his shot. It was _tres jolie_! Gabrielle and I thought so, and we played with him and the rest, when we too were, as the Americans say, kiddies. In later years when the aches--_la sciatique abominable_, as he said--settled in his bones, he gave up marbles, and turned to knitting, and it kept him quite happy. He would come in the evenings and enjoy our library, and very often fall asleep and snore ferociously. Father and mother, I think, loved him, but there was a good deal of veneration in their affection; Capitaine Jean Sebastien Bleu-Pistache always wore his medal of honor, won at Gravelotte.

The captain had a daughter who was the apple of his eye and never was there a daughter more sweet and affectionate. Blanchette, he said, was so like her mother--_pauvre Blanche_--dead now and resting among the big weeping willows in the crooked church yard, that ran down the hill at the other end of the village, with the grave-stones like a huddle of white or gray lambs chasing each other down the same slope, to the beech grove, and the purring brooklet, washing the long iris-bloom in summer. Blanchette said very little, but she always watched her father softly out of the corners of her eyes, and clapped her hands together softly too at his old, old stories, just as if she had never heard them before. Well Blanchette was our third friend.

And then the school-master--_maître d'école_--was a good friend, who smoked profusely, drank our red wine profusely too, and munched the sugary cookies mother made, as if he had never tasted anything so nice before. Indeed perhaps he had not, for he lived poorly some miles away, and came to school on a funny old mule that he never hitched up anywhere, but just jumped off its back, and let it wander as it would. Only it wouldn't. It went to sleep on the shady side of the school-house, and when the sun woke it up then it ambled slowly to the other side, for you see Emile Chouteau fed his dear friend so very well, that she was never hungry--whatever along the roadside, coming to school, she fancied, she ate--and always seemed growing fatter and fatter, so that it looked as if Emile would have to walk to school at last, when Sarah--he called her that--grew too fat to move.

How funny--_O! tres drôle_--the two were so different in size and way; the fat, sleepy, moody mule, lounging along, and stopping as if to yawn, while Emile read his book on its back, his head buried in its pages. And the school-master was so meagre, and long, and nervously restless and even excitable, and that perplexed stare with his glasses shoved up on the very top of his bald head! Ah, I see him always when I pass the school-house now. He dressed in tight fitting clothes, and they were just a little too small even for his thin body. Where he got his clothes was a matter of wonder to us. They were a little faded looking when new, and when they were old they became glossy, and then old Emile had the tatters mended by his boarding-house mistress. He looked neat and scrupulous too, in a way, and indeed we liked him greatly, although he lectured somewhat, and was apt to talk overmuch when our red wine lashed his spirits into a fervor of enthusiasm about Virgil, for the whole of reading and literature was summed up in Virgil to Emile Chouteau.

He loved to tell us:

"_Virgil est un homme du Mond entier. Il presente le principe du cosmopolitanisme. Il est immortel parce qu'il n'appartient pas à aucun pays. Il devient la propriété de tous. La Renaissance était fondue sur Virgil: les meilleurs sont ses disciples._"

Poor Emile Chouteau, he died before I came back from America, though long before that he had been pensioned, and lived with his mule in the same way that he had lived all the long unchanged years of his teaching in the little school house. And Sarah? Sarah seemed to miss something after Emile's funeral--the country side followed Emile's body with candles, for Emile was a devoted Catholic--and not long afterwards she was found in the school-house. She had broken in the door and walked in; was she looking for Emile? The last time I saw Sarah she was ploughing a field in Briois.

Emile's successor was the fifth acquisition we boasted of in our little company of intimates--Lorenzo Sebastien Quintado--a Spaniard.

Lorenzo was not typically Spanish after the fashion of the story-writers. He was not darkly handsome, languorous, taciturn and irritable, nor meagre, tall, with flashing eyes and raven hair. O! quite different and because so different so likeable. For all the world he made me think of the bachelor Sampson Carrasco in _Don Quixote_. Do you recall him--"Though Sampson by name this bachelor was no giant in person, but a little mirth-loving man, with a good understanding, about twenty-four years of age, of a pale complexion, round faced, flat-nosed and wide mouthed; all indicating humour, and a native relish for jocularity?"

Yes that does bring back to my mind the way, the poise even, and the sprightly liveliness, the almost expectant jubilation of Lorenzo. He sang well, and in the long dusks, when the quivering lights of the sunset died out of the sky along the burning west, where black fringes of the thick-set trees seemed dipped in fire, his voice rose richly, in caressing and ear-catching melodies. I almost hear him now, singing so carelessly, with an untaught art, a simple song praising the charms of Spanish girls. His voice was a high barytone.

_Fair are the vineyards of Seville, O! fair beyond compare, But fairer than their fairness still The eyes of ladies there. The orange groves of Moguér Are golden as the sun, But brighter is the golden hair Of girls who in them run._

_The morning skies of Cordova Were tinted as in flame, The cheeks of damsels rosier far As from the hills they came. Long live the darling girls of Spain Untouched by age or time, Forever free from care or pain, Ah! may one yet be mine._

I remember on one of the last evenings I passed at home--that was before I went to America--when the fall had come, and the foliage was deepening into splendid colors, not so splendidly indeed as in America I think, but still gloriously vivid. There was Privat Deschat, and Capitaine Bleu-Pistache, and his daughter--we sat together and our hands often crossed--and dear old Emile--he died soon after--and father and mother. We were sitting in our pleasant garden around a little table, directly under the stone wall that shut in our ground on the south--towards Paris--and everywhere lay the drifted leaves of the one big chestnut, that grew just outside the wall, in the sloping ground towards the big green fields, with islands of woods in them. Emile called the yellow leaves as they dropped silently through the sunlight, and shone like lustres in the sunlight, before they touched the ground, _pans d'or_--gold flakes.

Our red wine was on the table, and that delicious morsel that Hortense made better than anyone, _la galette aux amandes_, and it was the captain who was talking. He was telling about the awful days when the Germans took possession of the land, when the whole village struck for the woods, and camped there in a sorry fright, for the women and the children said to each other, "_Nous savons que Bismarck tue tous les enfants pour qu'il n'y ait plus de Français._"

"Well, well, they are over--_les scelerats ne puissent--ils faire cela encore_--Eh? We are strong now. The army is _fitte_, as the English say, and--Ah I will never shoulder arms again, _mais_, I could, _Oui! Oui! Je puis tirer._"

I leaned over and whispered to Blanchette, "They should never touch you Blanchette--_Pourquoi; parce que je t'aime_," and she pressed my hand ever so lightly and smiled, and I knew that she was pleased, and then--"_Mon Dieu_--I could have stopped _l'escadron d'allemands tout seul_!"

"_Tu quoque littoribus nostris, Aeniea nutrix, Aeternam moriens famam, Caieta, dedisti: Et nunc servat honos sedem tuus._"

It was Emile, of course, talking his indispensable Virgil, though surely the captain was not dead yet. "Yes, captain, France will never forget your service. I know those were hard days. I was sick then at the village of Louvry, not so far you know from the preserve and forests of Villers-Cotterets, and I can tell you that the Huns came to us for champagne, and my people told them there was none in the house, and they swore--_terriblement_--and said they had seen the bottles empty, and they would show them to us, and they went into the cellar and they--_Helas, il était tres drôle_--pointed to bottles of _eau de Seidlitz_ which--_vous savez_--look like champagne bottles a little--a little--_n'est ce pas?_--and they took them away, and soon they had them empty too--_ce sont buveurs monstrueuses_--but--splendid, the retribution of the Gods--

_Di tibi, si qua pios respectant numina, si quid Usquam justitia est_--;

they were all shockingly sick; you see, _la purgative totale_--"

There was some laughing, though Blanchette blushed a good deal, and I could have boxed the careless mouth of Monsieur, _le Maître d'École_.

"Listen _mes amis_," now it was the curious treble of Privat Deschat, "I am not sure but the skies will blacken again, and the _buse_ (eagle) will shut out the sunlight with its swarming hosts. It is not all over yet. Be watchful. You remember the thunder-storm last week when the _chevreuil_ came into the back-yards, the stags were seen in the roadways, and the wild boars ran into Briois roaring. I was up that night late, for I had a package of rugs to send to Paris, and it struck one in the morning when I put out the light, and said my prayers--_ils n'étaient pas beaucoup_--there came a crack, like the last call of judgment, and then the wind and rain grew mad with ambitions to outdo each other. It was then I guess that the blow knocked over the tower on the ruins at Bienne and filled the moat of the chateau, and swelled the brooks with rain, so that the land to Mareuil became a lake and the chicken coops swam all the way to La Ferté. Well about an hour after that the storm vanished. I was still up fearful and watching.

"I can see a long way over the farms, and suddenly the moon broke through with a wonderful light--it was full moon--and the wind shifted, piling the clouds up in swirling masses, black as ink, and still, at moments flashing with lightning, and crashing with thunder. I could see the lands far off towards Bienne shining with great lakes of water, the dark walls of forest, and in the fields huddled cattle, in droves. Then it seemed to me as if the light grew stronger in the sky--it was about two in the morning then--so strong it grew, that I felt there must be some fires about, perhaps towards Briois. I went outside in the road. It was ankle deep with mud, but I ploughed through it to the edge of the slope of the road, from Paris, and looked towards the east, for the clear spaces of the sky were there. Then came the vision."

The speaker stood up among his now fascinated hearers; they were all leaning toward him, as if drawn by a magnet, and while I closed my hand more tightly around the warm fingers of Blanchette I too, with her, strained my ears to hear Deschat's words which were less loud.

"I could see no fire anywhere, and yet the light was raining down around me like an electric glow. I was half frightened; it seemed so marvelous! Well slowly from out of the rolled up thunder and rain clouds came a curious thing. It was a galloping squadron of horses, manes flowing, tails stiff behind them, and on them riders and on the heads of the riders the _pickelhaube_ of the Germans. They flew over the open sky, and the moonlight seemed to pierce them through and through, and they shone with white lines within the dark bodies; the WHITE LINES of SKELETONS. What did it mean? I thought they would never end. On and on in hosts. Of course they were only mists, clouds, but so true to form, so real, like gigantic ghosts! I trembled before the apparition--_vue spirituel_--and then the light died away, and the figures became blurred, and the moon went out, behind the clouds, and I came back to the house. It was half past three.

"I may be wrong friends, but--I take it that vision was prophecy. The HUN comes again. Get ready. He comes again--_encore_!"

We were all silent for a minute or so, and then--it was the scolding squeak of Emile--"_Eh bien_--What of it? We will be ready. _Rumpe moras omnes; et turbata arripe castra._"

"_Mes amis_--" it was my father now who rose, and addressed the little group, turning to this side and to that, almost as if he were before an assembly; "Deschat is right--_il y a raison_--the hour of trial comes once more, the pride of race, the sense of justification demands the restoration of Alsace and Lorraine. We all know that. Our conquerors know that, for the poets of both nations have sung it, and the poets are the prophets, for they feel the vibrations of the pulse of the peoples; their ears are sharp, they hear the _timbre_ of the distant gun, before the common eye can see its smoke."