"I'm glad. I was scared you'd think me cheeky. Yet I couldn't resist. I wanted to see whether Jim had given you _the_ ring."

"The ring?" I echoed.

"The ring of our bet, the year before the war: the bet you knew about, that kept you two apart till Jim came over to France this second time."

"Yes--I knew about the bet," I said, "but not the ring. I--I haven't an engagement ring."

"Queer!" Jack Curtis puzzled out aloud. "It was a race between Jim and me which should get that ring at an antique shop, when we both heard of its history. He could afford to bid higher, so he secured it. Not that he was selfish! But he said he wanted the ring in case he met his ideal and got engaged to her. If he'd lost the bet the ring would have been mine. If he didn't give it to you, I wonder what's become of the thing?

Perhaps his mother knows. Did she ever speak to you about Jim bringing home a quaint old ring from France, that time after his fever--a ring supposed to have belonged to the most beautiful woman of her day, the Italian Countess Castiglione, whom Louis Napoleon loved?"

"No," I said. "He can't have given the ring to his mother, or she would have told me about it, I'm sure. She's always talking of him."

"Perhaps it was stolen or lost," Curtis reflected. "Yet I don't feel as if that had happened, somehow! I trust my feelings a good deal--especially since this war, that's made us all a bit psychic--don't you?"

"I have too many feelings to trust half of them!" I tried to laugh.

"Have you ever had one, I wonder, like mine, about Jim? Dare I speak to you of this?"

"Why not?"

"Well--I wouldn't dare to his mother. Or even to the old man."

"You _must_ speak now, please, Mr. Curtis, to me!"

"It's this; have you ever had the feeling that Jim may be alive?"

We were standing. I caught at the back of a chair. Things whirled for an instant. Then I gathered my wits together. "I haven't let myself feel it," I said. "And yet, in a way, I _always_ feel it. I mean, I seem to feel--his thoughts round us. But that's because we speak and think of him almost every moment of the day, his father and mother and I. There can be no doubt--can there?"

"Others have come back from the dead since this war. Why not Jim Beckett?"

"They said they had--found his body."

"Oh, they _said_! Germans say a lot of things. But for the Lord's sake, Miss O'Malley, don't let's upset those poor old people with any such hope. I've only my feeling--and other people's stories of escape--to go upon. I spoke to you, because I guess you've got a strong soul, and can stand shocks. Besides, you told me I must speak. I had to obey."

"Thank you for obeying," I said. And just then someone came into the room.

Now, Padre, I have told you the _great thing_. What does it matter what happens to me, if only Jack Curtis's "feeling" comes true?

CHAPTER XXIII

It is two days since I wrote, Padre; and I have come back to Compiegne from a world of unnatural silence and desolation. Day before yesterday it was Roye and Nesle; the Chateau of Ham; Jussy, Chauny and Prince Eitel Friedrich's pavilion. To-morrow we hope to start for Soissons.

Yesterday we rested, because Mother Beckett had a shocking headache.

(Oh, it was pathetic and funny, too, what she said when we slipped back into Compiegne at night! "Isn't it a comfort, Molly, to see a place again where there are _whole_ houses?") After Soissons we shall return to Compiegne and then go to Amiens with several of the war correspondents, who have their own car. Women aren't allowed, as a rule, to see anything of the British front, but it's just possible that Father Beckett can get permission for his wife to venture within gazing distance. Of course, she can't--or thinks she can't--stir without me!

We took still another road to Noyon (one must pa.s.s through Noyon going toward the front, if one keeps Compiegne for one's headquarters) and the slaughter of trees was the wickedest we'd seen: a long avenue of kind giants murdered, and orchards on both sides of it. The Germans, it seems, had circular saws, worked by motors, on purpose to destroy the large trees in a hurry. They didn't protect their retreat by barring the road with the felled trunks. They left most of the martyrs standing, their trunks so nearly sawed through that a wind would have blown them down. The pursuing armies had to finish the destruction to protect themselves. Farms were exterminated all along the way; and little hamlets--nameless for us--were heaps of blackened brick and stone, mercifully strewn with flowers like old altars to an unforgotten G.o.d.

Roye was the first big place on our road. It used to be rich, and its 4,000 inhabitants traded in grain and sugar. How the very name brought back our last spring joy in reading news of the recapture! "Important Victory. Roye Retaken." It was grandly impressive in ruin, especially the old church of St. Pierre, whose immense, graceful windows used to be jewelled with ancient gla.s.s that people came from far away to see.

Jim had written his mother about that gla.s.s, consequently she _would_ get out of the car to climb (with my help and her husband's) over a pile of fallen stones like a petrified cataract, which leads painfully up to the desecrated and pillaged high altar. I nearly sprained my ankle in getting to one of the windows, under which my eyes had caught the glint of a small, sparkling thing: but I had my reward, for the sparkling thing was a lovely bit of sapphire-blue gla.s.s from the robe of some saint, and the little lady was grateful for the gift as if it had been a real jewel--indeed, more grateful. "I'll keep it with my souvenirs of Jim," she said, "for his eyes have looked on it: and it's just the colour of yours which he loved. He'd be pleased that you found it for me." (Ah, if she knew! I can't help praying that she never may know, though such prayers from me are almost sacrilege.)

A little farther on--as the motor, not the crow, flies--we came to Nesle, or what once was Nesle. The ghost of the twelfth-century church looms in skeleton form above one more Pompeii among the many forced by the Germans upon France: but save for that towering relic of the past there's little left of this brave town of the Somme, which was historic before the thirteenth century. It gave its name to a famous fighting family of feudal days: and through the last heiress of the line--a beauty and a "catch"--a certain Seigneur de Nesle became Regent of France, in the second Crusade of Louis XII--"Saint Louis." Later ladies of the line became dear friends of another Louis, fifteenth of the name, who was never called saint. Not far from Nesle, Henry V of England crossed the Somme and won the Battle of Agincourt. But now, the greatest dramatic interest is concentrated in the cemetery!

We had heard of it at Compiegne and the wild things that had happened there: so after a look at the ruined church, and the once charming _Place_, we went straight to the town burial-place, and our unofficial guide was the oldest man I ever saw. He had lurked rather than lived, through months of German barbarity at Nesle, guarding a bag of money he'd hidden underground. An officer from Noyon was with us; but he had knowledge of the ancient man--a great character--and bade him tell us the tale of the graveyard. He obeyed with unction and with gestures like lightning as it flashes across a night sky. The looks his old eyes darted forth as he talked might have struck a live German dead.

"The animals! What do you think they did when they were masters here?"

he snarled. "Ah, you do not know the Boches as we learned to know them, so you would never guess. They opened our tombs, the vaults of distinguished families of France. They broke the coffins and stole the rings from skeleton fingers. They left the bones of our ancestors, and of our friends whose living faces we could remember, scattered over the ground, as if to feed the dogs. In our empty coffins they placed their own dead. On the stone or marble of monuments they cut away the names of those whose sacred sleep they had disturbed. Instead, they inscribed the disgusting names of their Boche generals and colonels. Where they could not change the inscriptions they destroyed the tombstones and set up others. You will see them now. But wait--you have not heard all yet. Far from that! When the Tommies came to Nesle--your English Tommies--they did not like what the Boches had done to our cemetery. They said things--strong things! And while they were hot with anger they knocked the hideous new monuments about. They could not bear to see them mark the stolen graves. The little crosses that showed where simple soldiers lay, those they did not touch. It was only the officers' tombs they spoiled. I will show you what they did."

We let him hobble ahead of us into the graveyard. He led us past the long rows of low wooden crosses with German names on them, the crosses with British names--(good, st.u.r.dy British names: "Hardy," "Kemp,"

"Logan," "Wilding," planted among flowers of France)--and paused in the aristocratic corner of the city of the dead. Once, this had been the last earthly resting-place of old French families, or of the rich whose relatives could afford expensive monuments. But the war had changed all that. German names had replaced the ancient French ones on the vaults, as German corpses had replaced French bodies in the coffins. Stone and marble monuments had been recarved, or new ones raised. There were roughly cut figures of German colonels and majors and captains. This rearrangement was what the "Tommies" had "not liked." They liked it so little that they chopped off stone noses and faces; they threw red ink, brighter than blood, over carved German uniforms, and neatly chipped away the counterfeit presentment of iron crosses. In some cases, also, they purified the vaults of German bones and gave back in exchange such French ones as they found scattered. They wrote in large letters on tombstones, "_Boch no bon_," and other illiterate comments unflattering to the dead usurpers; all of which, our old man explained, mightily endeared the Atkinses to the returning inhabitants of Nesle.

"Those brave Tommies are gone now," he sighed, "but they left their dead in our care. You see those flowers on their graves? It is we who put them there, and the children tend them every day. If you come back next year, it will be the same. We shall not forget."

"A great statesman paid us a visit not long after Nesle was liberated,"

our officer guide took up the story. "He had heard what the Tommies did, and he was not quite sure if they were justified. 'After all, German or not German, a tomb is a tomb, and the dead are dead,' he argued. But when he saw the cemetery of another place not far away, where the bodies of Frenchmen--yes, and women and little babies!--still lay where Germans had thrown them in stealing their graves, the grand old man's blood rushed to his head. He was no longer uncertain if the Tommies were right. He was certain they had done well; and in his red rage he, with his own hands, tore down thirty of the lying tombstones."

Oh, the silence of these dead towns that the Germans have killed with bombs and burning! _You_ know what it is like, Padre, because you have pa.s.sed behind the veil and have knowledge beyond our dreaming: but to me it is a _triste revelation_. I never realized before what the words "dead silence" could mean. It is a silence you _hear_. It cries out as the loudest voice could not cry. It makes you listen--listen for the pleasant, homely sounds you've always a.s.sociated with human habitations: the laughter of girls, the shouts of schoolboys, the friendly barking of dogs. But you listen in vain. You wonder if you are deaf--if other people are hearing what you cannot hear: and then you see on each face the same blank, listening look that must be on your own. I think a night at Chauny, or Jussy, might drive a weak woman mad. But--I haven't come to Chauny or Jussy yet! After Nesle we arrived at Ham, with its ca.n.a.l and its green, surrounding marshes.

Ham has ceased to be silent. There are some houses left, and to those houses people have come back. Shops have reopened, as at Noyon, where the French Government has advanced money to the business men. We drove into the town of Ham (what is left of it!) just as we were hating ourselves for being hungry. It is sordid and dreadful to be hungry in the midst of one's rage and grief and pity--to want to eat in a place like Ham, where one should wish to absorb nothing but history; yet our officer guide, who has helped make a good deal of history since 1914, seemed to think lunching quite as important as sightseeing. In a somewhat battered square, busy with reopening shops (some of them most _quaint_ shops, with false hair as a favourite display!) was a hotel.

The Germans had lived in it for months. They had bullied the very old, very vital landlady who welcomed us. Their boots had worn holes in the stair carpet, going up and down in a goose-step. Their elbows had polished the long table in the dining room, and--oh, horror!--their mouths had drunk beer from gla.s.ses in which the good wine of France was offered to us!

"Ah, but I have scrubbed the goblets since with a fortune's worth of soda," the woman volubly explained. "They are purified. If I could wash away as easily the memories behind my eyes and in my ears! Of them I cannot get rid. Whenever I see an automobile, yes, even the most innocent automobile, I live again through a certain scene! We had here at Ham an invalid woman, whose husband the Boches took out and shot.

When she heard the news, she threw herself under one of their military cars and was killed. If a young girl pa.s.ses my windows (alas, it is seldom! the Germans know why) I see once more a procession of girls lined up to send into slavery. G.o.d knows where they are now, those children! All we know is, that in this country there is not a girl left of an age between twelve and twenty, unless she was hidden or disguised when the Boches took their toll. If I hear a sound of bells, I see our people being herded into church--our old, old church, with its proud monuments!--so their houses might be burned before the Germans had to run. They stayed in the church for days and nights, waiting for the chateau to be blown up. What a suspense! No one knew if the great shock, when it came, might not kill everyone!"

As she exploded reminiscences, the old lady fed us with ham and omelette salted with tears. We had to eat, or hurt her feelings, but it was as if we swallowed the poor creature's emotion with our food, and the effect within was dynamic. I never had such a volcanic meal! Our French officer was the only calm one among us, but--he had been stationed in this liberated region for months. It's an old story for him.

After luncheon we staggered away to see the great sight of Ham, the fortress-chateau which has given it history and fame for centuries. The Germans blew up the citadel out of sheer spite, as the vast pink pile long ago ceased to be of military value. They wished to show their power by ruining the future of the town, which lived on its _monument historique_: but (as often happens with their "frightfulness") that object was just the one they failed in. I can't believe that the castle of Ham was as striking in its untouched magnificence as now in the rose-red splendour of its ruin!

To be sure, the guardians can never again show precisely where Joan of Arc was imprisoned, or the rooms where Louis Napoleon lived through his six years of captivity, or the little garden he used to cultivate, or the way he pa.s.sed to escape over the drawbridge, dressed as a mason, with a plank on his shoulder. But the glorious old tower or donjon still stands, one hundred feet high and one hundred feet wide. German gunpowder was too weak to bring it down, and so perhaps the prophecy of the Comte de St. Pol, builder of the fortress, may be fulfilled--that while France stands, the tower of Ham's citadel will stand. Thousands more pilgrims will come in a year, after the war, to see what the Germans did and what they failed to do, than ever came in the mild, prosperous days before 1914, when Ham's best history was old. They will come and gaze at the ma.s.sive bulk--red always as if reflecting sunset light--looming against the blue; they will peer down into dusky dungeons underground: and the new guardian (a mutilated soldier he'll be, perhaps, decorated with the _croix de guerre_) will tell them about the girl of Ham who lured a German officer to a death-trap in a secret _oubliette_, "where 'tis said his body lies to-day." Then they will stand under the celebrated old tree in the courtyard, unhurt by the explosion, and take photographs of the chateau the Germans have unwittingly made more beautiful than before.

"_Mon mieux_" was the motto St. Pol carved over the gateway; "Our worst"

is the taunt the Germans have flung. But the combination of that best and worst is glorious to the eye.

From Ham we spun on to Jussy, along the new white road which is so amazing when one thinks that every yard of it had to be created out of chaos a few months ago. (They say that some sort of surface was given for the army to pa.s.s over in three days' work!) At Jussy we came close to the _real_ front--closer than we've been yet, except when we went to the American trenches. The first line was only three miles away, and the place is under bombardment, but this was what our guide called a "quiet day," so there was only an occasional mumble and boom. The town was destroyed, wiped almost out of existence, save for heaps of rubble which might have been houses or hills. But there were things to be seen which would have made Jussy worth a long journey. It had been a prosperous place, with one of the biggest sugar refineries in France, and the wrecked _usine_ was as terrible and thrilling as the moon seen through the biggest telescope in the world.

Not that it looked like the moon. It looked more like a futurist sketch, in red and brown, of the heart of a cyclone; or of the inside of a submarine that has rammed a skeleton ship on the stocks. But the sight gave me the same kind of icy shock I had when I first saw the moon's ravaged face through a huge telescope. _You_ took me, Padre, so you'll remember.

If you came to Jussy, and didn't know about the war, you'd think you had stumbled into h.e.l.l--or else that you were having a nightmare and couldn't wake up. I shall never forget a brobdingnagian boiler as big as a battle tank, that had reared itself on its hind-legs to peer through a _cheval de frise_ of writhing girders--tortured girders like a vast wilderness of immense thorn bushes in a hopeless tangle, or a pit of bloodstained snakes. The walls of the _usine_ have simply melted, and it's hard to realize that it as a building, put up by human hands for human uses, ever existed. There is a new Jussy, though, created since the German retreat; and seeing it, you couldn't _help_ knowing that there was a war! The whole landscape is full of cannon, big and little and middle-sized. Queer mushroom buildings have sprung up, for officers'

and soldiers' barracks and canteens. Narrow plank walks built high above mud-level--"duck boards," I think they're called--lead to the corrugated iron, tin, and wooden huts. There are aerodromes and aerodromes like a vast circus encampment, where there are not cannon; and the greenish canvas roofs give the only bit of colour, as far as the eye can see--unless one counts the soldiers' uniforms. All the rest is gray as the desert before a dust-storm. Even the sky, which had been blue and bright, was gray over Jussy, and the grayest of gray things were the immense "_saucisses_"--three or four of them--hanging low under the clouds like advertis.e.m.e.nts of t.i.tanic potatoes, haughtiest of war-time vegetables.

Dierdre O'Farrell inadvertently called the big bulks "_saucissons_,"

which amused our officer guide so much that he laughed to tears. The rest of us were able to raise only a faint smile, and we felt his disappointment at our lack of humour.