Part 16 (2/2)

Tchernoff thought of his neighbors, the husband and wife who occupied the other interior apartment behind the studio. She was no longer playing the piano. The Russian had overheard disputes, the banging of doors locked with violence, and the footsteps of a man in the middle of the night, fleeing from a woman's cries. There had begun to develop on the other side of the wall a regulation drama--a repet.i.tion of hundreds of others, all taking place at the same time.

”She is a German,” volunteered the Russian. ”Our concierge has ferreted out her nationality. He must have gone by this time to join his regiment. Last night I could hardly sleep. I heard the lamentations through the thin wall part.i.tion, the steady, desperate weeping of an abandoned child, and the voice of a man who was vainly trying to quiet her! ... Ah, what a rain of sorrows is now falling upon the world!”

That same evening, on leaving the house, he had met her by her door.

She appeared like another woman, with an old look as though in these agonizing hours she had been suffering for fifteen years. In vain the kindly Tchernoff had tried to cheer her up, urging her to accept quietly her husband's absence so as not to harm the little one who was coming.

”For the unhappy creature is going to be a mother,” he said sadly. ”She hides her condition with a certain modesty, but from my window, I have often seen her making the dainty layette.”

The woman had listened to him as though she did not understand. Words were useless before her desperation. She could only sob as though talking to herself, ”I am a German... . He has gone; he has to go away... . Alone! ... Alone forever!” ...

”She is thinking all the time of her nationality which is separating her from her husband; she is thinking of the concentration camp to which they will take her with her compatriots. She is fearful of being abandoned in the enemy's country obliged to defend itself against the attack of her own country... . And all this when she is about to become a mother. What miseries! What agonies!”

The three reached the rue de la Pompe and on entering the house, Tchernoff began to take leave of his companions in order to climb the service stairs; but Desnoyers wished to prolong the conversation. He dreaded being alone with his friend, still chagrined over the evening's events. The conversation with the Russian interested him, so they all went up in the elevator together. Argensola suggested that this would be a good opportunity to uncork one of the many bottles which he was keeping in the kitchen. Tchernoff could go home through the studio door that opened on the stairway.

The great window had its gla.s.s doors wide open; the transoms on the patio side were also open; a breeze kept the curtains swaying, moving, too, the old lanterns, moth-eaten flags and other adornments of the romantic studio. They seated themselves around the table, near a window some distance from the light which was illuminating the other end of the big room. They were in the shadow, with their backs to the interior court. Opposite them were tiled roofs and an enormous rectangle of blue shadow, perforated by the sharp-pointed stars. The city lights were coloring the shadowy s.p.a.ce with a b.l.o.o.d.y reflection.

Tchernoff drank two gla.s.ses, testifying to the excellence of the liquid by smacking his lips. The three were silent with the wondering and thoughtful silence which the grandeur of the night imposes. Their eyes were glancing from star to star, grouping them in fanciful lines, forming them into triangles or squares of varying irregularity. At times, the twinkling radiance of a heavenly body appeared to broaden the rays of light, almost hypnotizing them.

The Russian, without coming out of his revery, availed himself of another gla.s.s. Then he smiled with cruel irony, his bearded face taking on the semblance of a tragic mask peeping between the curtains of the night.

”I wonder what those men up there are thinking!” he muttered. ”I wonder if any star knows that Bismarck ever existed! ... I wonder if the planets are aware of the divine mission of the German nation!”

And he continued laughing.

Some far-away and uncertain noise disturbed the stillness of the night, slipping through some of the c.h.i.n.ks that cut the immense plain of roofs.

The three turned their heads so as to hear better... . The sound of voices cut through the thick silence of night--a masculine chorus chanting a hymn, simple, monotonous and solemn. They guessed at what it must be, although they could not hear very well. Various single notes floating with greater intensity on the night wind, enabled Argensola to piece together the short song, ending in a melodious, triumphant yell--a true war song:

C'est l'Alsace et la Lorraine, C'est l'Alsace qu'il nous faut, Oh, oh, oh, oh.

A new band of men was going away through the streets below, toward the railway station, the gateway of the war. They must be from the outlying districts, perhaps from the country, and pa.s.sing through silence-wrapped Paris, they felt like singing of the great national hope, that those who were watching behind the dark facades might feel comforted, knowing that they were not alone.

”Just as it is in the opera,” said Julio listening to the last notes of the invisible chorus dying away into the night.

Tchernoff continued drinking, but with a distracted air, his eyes fixed on the red cloud that floated over the roofs.

The two friends conjectured his mental labor from his concentrated look, and the low exclamations which were escaping him like the echoes of an interior monologue. Suddenly he leaped from thought to word without any forewarning, continuing aloud the course of his reasoning.

”And when the sun arises in a few hours, the world will see coursing through its fields the four hors.e.m.e.n, enemies of mankind... . Already their wild steeds are pawing the ground with impatience; already the ill-omened riders have come together and are exchanging the last words before leaping into the saddle.”

”What hors.e.m.e.n are these?” asked Argensola.

”Those which go before the Beast.”

The two friends thought this reply as unintelligible as the preceding words. Desnoyers again said mentally, ”He is drunk,” but his curiosity forced him to ask, ”What beast is that?”

”That of the Apocalypse.”

There was a brief silence, but the Russian's terseness of speech did not last long. He felt the necessity of expressing his enthusiasm for the dreamer on the island rock of Patmos. The poet of great and mystic vision was exerting, across two thousand years, his influence over this mysterious revolutionary, tucked away on the top floor of a house in Paris. John had foreseen it all. His visions, unintelligible to the ma.s.ses, nevertheless held within them the mystery of great human events.

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