Winter's Tales (10 page)

Frederick could see that much. But he was no judge of this kind of warfare; and, although after the first glance she did not once look at the man, while his light, protruding eyes did not for a moment leave her face or figure, he could not have decided whether, in very truth, the offensive lay with him or with her.

The two were alike, and might have been brother and sister. They were obviously afraid of one another. As the interview proceeded the German sweated with dread, and she grew pale, still nothing could have held them apart. Frederick was certain that they met here for the first time; all the same it was an old feud which was about to be settled in the salon of the villa. Was it, he wondered, a hereditary national combat, or would he have to go further back, and deeper down, to discover the root of it?

The young German began by stating that he now hardly found it worth his while to proceed to Paris. He asked her how she had got into her present company, and whether she considered her compeers to be more dangerous than herself? She replied curtly, her chin lifted. Frederick was aware that his own fate, with that of his fellows, now rested with her. He reflected that no human being, and least of all this young soldier, would for long put up with her
look and manner, and still in his heart he applauded the fine display of insolence that she gave them. It was inevitable that in the end the German should come up close to her; as he held a paper up for her inspection he spoke straight into her face. At that, in a gentle movement, she swept back the ample skirt of her dress, so that it should get in no contact with him.

He stopped short in the midst of his speech, and gasped for breath. “I am not, Madame,” he said very slowly, “going to touch your dress. I am going to make you a proposal. I shall write out the passport for you and your friends to get into Luxembourg, which you want from me. You may come and fetch it in half an hour. But you will have to come without that skirt, which you do, rightly, take such trouble to keep away from me. You will, in fact, have to come for your passports dressed like the goddess Venus. That is,” he added after a moment’s breathless silence, “at any rate, a handsome proposition, Madame.” At his own words he suddenly blushed dark crimson.

Frederick’s heart ceased to beat for a moment, with disgust or horror, and with sadness. The sentence was a distortion of his own beautiful fancies about Heloïse. The blasphemy made of the world a place of nauseating baseness, and of him an accomplice.

As to Heloïse herself, the insult changed her as if it had set fire to her. She turned straight upon the insulter, and Frederick had never seen her so abundant in vitality or arrogance; she seemed about to laugh in her adversary’s face. The sordidness of the world, he thought with deep ecstatic gratitude, did not touch her; she was above it all. Only for a moment her hand went up to the collar of her mantilla, as if, choking under the wave of her disdain, she must free herself of it. But again the next moment she stood still; her hand sank down, and with it the blood from her cheeks; she became
very pale. She turned to her fellow-prisoners, and slowly let her gaze run over their white, horrified faces.

The two older officers stirred in their chairs. The young man wafted his paper at them. “Why!” he cried. “He was wounded for our transgressions! For the transgressions of my people we are stricken! With chapter and verse to it! We have a whole gang of spies before us, Sirs, with her—” he pointed a shaking finger at Heloïse, “at the head of them. Why must she come here of all places? Could she not have left us, at any rate, alone?”

He spoke to her again; he could not let go his hold of her. “Are you sure you have understood me?” he screamed. “No, I am not sure,” said she. “The French language will lend itself badly to your proposition. Will you please repeat it in German?” This was difficult for him to do; still he did it. Heloïse took off her hat, so that her golden hair shone in the lamplight. During the rest of the interview she kept it in her hands behind her slim waist, and it gave her a look of having her hands tied upon her back.

“Why do you ask me?” she said. “Ask those who are with me. These are poor people, hard-working, and used to hardships. Here is a French priest,” she went on very slowly, “the consoler of many poor souls; here are two French sisters, who have nursed the sick and dying. The two others have children in France, who will fare ill without them. Their salvation is, to each one of them, more important than mine. Let them decide for themselves if they will buy it at your price. You will be answered, by them, in French.”

The old priest took a step forward. He had been given to long speeches, in the hotel, but here he did not say a word. He only stretched his right arm upwards, and waved it to and fro. The one old nun threw herself back towards the wall, as if already facing the fusillading squad. She lifted both arms and cried: “No!” The other
nun burst into terrible sobs, her legs gave way under her, she fell down upon her knees and repeated: “No. No. No.”

It was the commercial traveller who made a speech. He took a long step towards the young officer, looked up to his great height and said: “You believe that we are afraid of you? Yes, so we are. We are afraid ever to come to look as you do.” Frederick did not speak; he looked the officer in the face, and could not help smiling a little.

The German stared down at the commercial traveller, and then over his head at Heloïse. He cried out: “Then away with you. Let it have an end. Away with you all!” He called on two soldiers from the adjoining room. “Take these people down,” he commanded, “into the courtyard. For further orders.” And once more he cried to the prisoners: “You will have it your own way now. Let me have peace. Let me have peace only.” The last thing that Frederick saw in the room was his face, as Heloïse passed him and looked at him. The whole party was rushed down the stairs, and out of the house.

As they came down in the courtyard the night was clear and the stars began to show in the sky. There was a low wall running along the one side of the court, fencing the garden of the villa; from the other side of it came the smell of stock. One by one the tired refugees, ignorant of their fate, went and took their place by this wall. Heloïse, who stood bareheaded in the court, looked up to the sky, then after a while said to Frederick: “There was a falling star. You might have wished.”

When they had stood in the courtyard for half an hour three soldiers came out of the house; one of them carried a lamp. One of the others, who seemed to be a superintendent, looked round at the prisoners, went up to the old priest and handed him a paper. “This is your permission to go to Luxembourg,” he said. “It is for all of
you. The trains are filled up; you will have to get a carriage in town. You had better leave at once.”

As soon as he had finished, another of the soldiers stepped forward and addressed himself to Heloïse, and they were surprised to see that he was holding a big bouquet of roses, which had been upon the table of the salon. He made a military salute. “The Colonel,” he said, “asks Madame to accept these. With his compliments. To a heroine.” Heloïse took the bouquet from him as if she did not see either him or it.

They managed to get carriages at the hotel. While they were kept waiting for them they had a hurried, spare meal of bread and wine, for none of them had eaten anything since morning. It was no renewal of their gallant supper of last night; it seemed to have no connection with it. Their existence, since then, had been set on another plane. They held one another’s hands, each of them owed his life to each of the others.

Heloïse was still the central figure of their communion, but in a new way, as an object infinitely precious to them all. Her pride, her glory was theirs, since they had been ready to die for it. She was still very pale; she looked like a child amongst the old people, and laughed at what they said to her. As she insisted on taking all her trunks and boxes with her, evidently regarding them as part of herself and not to be left in the hands of the enemy, and as Frederick had to load them up, he and she came to drive together, behind the others, and in a small fiacre, to the frontier.

Frederick all his life remembered this drive, even to the curves of the road. The moon was up, and the stretch of sky between her and the low horizon was as if powdered with gold-dust. When the dew fell, Heloïse drew her shawl over her head; within its dark folds she looked like a village-girl, and still she sat enthroned, like a muse, by his side. He had read in books, before now, of heroics and
heroines; the episode he had lived through and the young woman beside him were like the books, and all the same she was so gently and simply vivid, like no book in the world. Her silent, triumphant happiness was as sweet to him as the smell of the ripe cornfield through which they drove. All of a sudden she took his hand.

It was early when they passed the frontier and came to the small station of Wasserbillig, where they found the rest of their party. While they waited for the train, which was to take them into France, and once more turned their faces to Paris, his French friends, Frederick felt, became like one family, to which he no longer belonged. When the train at last came in, they seemed almost ignorant of his existence.

But at the last moment Heloïse gave him a long, deep, tender glance. It followed him from behind the window of her compartment. Then suddenly she was gone.

Frederick stood on the platform and watched the train disappear in a dim morning landscape. He felt that the curtain had gone down upon a great event in his life. His heart was aching both with happiness and with woe. The lately born artist within him, Venusti’s friend, received the adventure in a humble, ecstatic spirit, and
“Domine, non sum dignus”
was his response to it. But when he was once more alone, the searcher and inquirer, his old self of the universities of England took hold, craved for more than that, and demanded to be enlightened, to know and understand. There was, within the phenomena of the heroic mind, still something left uncomprehended, an unexplored, a mysterious area.

It would be, he reflected, this moment of incompleted investigation and unobtained insight, which now caused him to stand at the station of Wasserbillig with an almost choking feeling of loss or privation, as if a cup had been withdrawn from his lips before his thirst was quenched.

The true seeker is sometimes helped to his end by the hand of fate. So was Frederick in his research on the heroic mind. He only had to wait for a while.

In England he went back to his books. He finished his treatise on the doctrine of atonement, and later on wrote another book. With time he strolled from the area of religious philosophy to that of history of religion in general. He was holding a good position amongst the young men of letters of his generation, and was engaged to a girl, whom he had known from the time when they were both children, when, five or six years after his adventure at Saarburg, he had to go to Paris to attend a course of lectures by a great French historian.

He looked up an old friend there, a brother of the boy who, in Berlin, had first given him news of the war. This young man’s name was Arthur, and he was still, as then, in the same office at the Embassy. Arthur was at a loss to know how to entertain a student of theology in Paris. He invited Frederick out to dine at a select restaurant, and, while they were dining, asked him how he liked Paris, and what he had been seeing there. Frederick answered that he had seen a multitude of beautiful things, and had been to the museums of the Louvre and Luxembourg. They talked for some time of classic and modern art. Then suddenly Arthur exclaimed: “If you like to look at beautiful things I know what we will do. We will go and see Heloïse.” “Heloïse?” said Frederick. “Not a word more,” said Arthur. “It cannot be described; it shall be seen.”

He took Frederick to a small, select and exquisite music hall. “We are just in time,” he said. Then he laughed and added: “Although you really ought to have seen her at the time of the Empire. Some people have it that she is as stupid as a goose, but you cannot believe it when you look at her legs.
La jambe c’est
la femme!
They also tell me that her private life is quite respectable. I do not know.”

The show which they were to see was called
Diana’s Revenge
and affected the classic style, but was elegantly modern in its details. A great number of lovely young dancers danced and posed, as nymphs in a forest, and were all very scantily dressed. But the climax of the whole performance was the appearance of the goddess Diana herself, with nothing on at all.

As she stepped forward bending her golden bow, a noise like a long sigh went through the house. The beauty of her body came as a surprise and an ecstasy even to those who had seen her before; they hardly believed their eyes.

Arthur regarded her in his opera-glasses, then generously handed them on to Frederick. But he noticed that Frederick did not make use of them, and, after a moment, that he had become very still. He wondered if he was shocked.
“C’est une chose incroyable,”
he said, “
que la beauté de cette femme
. What do you say?”

“Yes,” said Frederick. “But I know her. I have seen her before now.” “But not in this thing?” said Arthur. “No. Not in that,” said Frederick. After a little while he added: “Perhaps she will remember me. I shall send up my card.” Arthur smiled. The page who had taken up Frederick’s card came back with a small letter for him. “Is that from her?” Arthur asked. “Yes,” said Frederick. “She remembers me. She will come and see us when the performance is over.” “Heloïse?” exclaimed Arthur. “Well, you English professors of religious philosophy! When did you meet her? Was it when you were writing upon the mysteries of the Egyptian Adonis?” “No, I was writing on another theme then,” said Frederick. Arthur ordered a table and wine and a big bouquet of roses.

Heloïse came into the theatre, and made all heads turn towards her, like a bed of sunflowers towards the sun. She was in black, with a long train and long gloves, ostrich feathers and pearls. “All
that black,” sighed the house in its heart, “to cover up all that white!”