Пользователь - WORLD'S END

IV

There came a letter from Sophie, Baroness de la Tourette. That very lively lady had been having an adventure, and wrote about it in detail - being shut up in a room in a fourth-class hotel in Paris, much bored with nothing to do. She had gone to spend the month of August with friends at a country place on the river Maas, which flows through the heart of Belgium. Sophie was a nonpolitical person, entirely devoted to having a good time; she rarely looked at newspapers, and when she heard people talking about war threats, she paid no attention, being unable to take seriously the idea that anybody would disturb the comfort of a person of her social posi Ttion.

The ladies she was visiting shared her attitude. News traveled slowly in the country; and when at last they heard that the Germans had crossed the frontier, they did not worry; the army would be going to France, and it might be interesting to watch it pass. Only when they heard the sound of heavy guns did they realize that they might be in danger, and then it was too late; a troop of Uhlans with long lances came galloping up the driveway, and the automobiles and horses on the place were seized. Soon afterward arrived several limousines, and elegant officers descended, and with bowing and heel-clicking informed the ladies of the regrettable need to take the chвteau for a temporary staff headquarters. They all had wasp waists, and wore monocles, long gray coats, gold bracelets, and shiny belts and boots; their manners were impeccable, and they spoke excellent English, and seemed to be well pleased with a lady who was introduced as Miss Sophie Timmons from the far-off state of Ohio.

Her friends had suddenly realized that under the law, being married to a Frenchman, she was French and might be interned for the period of the war. That night she sent her maid to the village and succeeded in hiring a cart and an elderly bony white horse; taking only a suitcase, she and the maid and a peasant driver had set out toward Brussels. There was fighting everywhere to the south and east of them, and the roads were crowded with refugees driving dogcarts, trundling handcarts, or carrying their belongings on their backs. More than once they had had to sit for long periods by the roadside to let the German armies pass, and the woman's letter was full of amazed horror at the perfection of the Kaiser's war machine. For a solid hour she watched motorized artillery rolling by: heavy siege guns, light field-pieces, wicked-looking rapid-firers; caissons, trucks loaded with shells, and baggage trains, pontoon trains, field kitchens. "My dear, they have been getting ready for this all our lifetime!" wrote the Baroness de la Tourette.

She watched the marching men in their dull field-gray uniforms, so much more sensible than the conspicuous blue and red of the French. The Germans tramped in close, almost solid ranks, forever and ever and ever - in one village they told Sophie of an unbroken procиssion for more than thirty hours. "And so many with cigars in their mouths!" she wrote. "I wondered, had they been pillaging the shops."

The fugitives slept in their cart for fear it might be stolen; and after two days and nights they reached Brussels, which the Germans had not yet taken. From there they got to Ostend, where the British were landing troops, and then by boat to Boulogne, and to Paris by train. "You should see this city!" wrote Sophie. "Everybody has gone that can get away. The government has taken all the horses and trucks. Maybe the taxicabs have been hired by refugees - I'm hoping that a few will come back. All the big hotels are closed - the men employees are in the army. The Place de la Concorde is full of soldiers sleeping upon straw. The strangest thing is that gold and silver coins have disappeared entirely; they say people are hoarding them, and you can't get any change because there's only paper money. I am waiting for a chance to come south without having to walk. I hope the Germans do not get here first. It would be embarrassing to meet those officers again!"

V

When Marcel departed to join the army, he had brought the keys of his cottage to the servants at Bienvenu and left them for Madame Budd. The servants being French, the occasion had not been casual; they had wept and called upon God to protect him, which in turn had brought tears to the eyes of Monsieur. He had said that it was pour la patrie, and that they should take care of the precious Madame, if and when she returned; after those wicked Germans had been driven from the soil of France, they would all live happy forever after, as in the fairy tales.

Leese and Rosine of course knew all about the love affair. To them it was romance, delight, the wine and perfume of life; they lived upon it as women in the United States were learning to live upon the romances, real and imaginary, of the movie stars of Hollywood. Beauty's servants talked about it, not merely among themselves, but with all the other servants of the neighborhood; everybody watched, everybody shared the tenderness, the delight; everybody said, what a shame the young painter was so poor!

Now Beauty received a card from Marcel, saying that, if anything should happen to him, he wanted her to have his paintings. "I don't know if they will ever be worth anything," he wrote; "but you have been kind to them, while to my relatives they mean nothing. Perhaps it might be well to move them to your house, where they would be safer. Do what you please about this."

Beauty, watching for every hint in his messages, clasped her hand to her heart. "Lanny, do you suppose that means he's going to some post of danger?"

"I don't know why it should," said the boy. "We have our own paintings insured, and certainly we ought to take care of his."

Beauty had been going to the little house and sitting there, remembering the times when she had been so happy, and reproaching herself because she had not appreciated her blessings. Now she went with Lanny to carry out Marcel's commission. There were more than a hundred canvases, each tacked upon a wooden frame, and stacked in a sort of shed-room at the rear of the house. One by one Lanny brought them out and studied them - all those aspects of Mediterranean sea and shore which he knew better than anything else. He exclaimed over the loveliness of them; he was ready to set himself up as an art critic against all the world. Beauty wiped the tears from her eyes and exclaimed over the wickedness of a war that had taken such a lover, and stopped such work, and even made it impossible for Sophie to come to the Riviera unless she walked! There was a group of paintings from the trip to Norway. Lanny had never seen these or heard of them, for it had been before he was told about Marcel. The boy had heard so much about this cold and shining country, and here it was by the magic of art. Here was more than fiords and mountains and saeters and ancient farmhouses with openings in the roofs instead of chimneys; here was the soul of these things, old, yet forever new, so long as men loved beauty and marveled at its self-renewal. Here, also, was Greece with its memories, and Africa with its grim desert men, muffled and silent. The Bluebird was being made over into a hospital ship right now; but its two cruises with the soap king would live - "well, as long as I do," said Lanny.

VI

The whereabouts of Marcel was supposed to be a secret, upon the preserving of which the safety of la patrie depended. But when you take thousands of young men from a neighborhood and put them into encampments not more than a hundred miles away, it soon becomes what the French call un secret de Polichinelle, something which everybody knows. The truck drivers talked when they came to the towns for supplies, and pretty soon Leese and Rosine were able to inform the family that the painter's regiment was on guard duty in the Alpes Maritimes.