Swords & Steam Short Stories

by S. T. Joshi

  Why couldn’t they be still? What right had men whose blood had drained away into a black stain beneath them to dance and pirouette to the rhythm of the flares? Damn them – why couldn’t a shell drop down and bury them?

  There was a chateau half a mile up there to the right – at least it had been a chateau. Under it were deep cellars into which one could creep and sleep. He knew that, because ages ago, when first he had come into this part of the line, he had slept a night there.

  It would be like reentering paradise to crawl again into those cellars, out of the pitiless rain; sleep once more with a roof over his head.

  “I will sleep and sleep and sleep – and sleep and sleep and sleep,” he told himself; then stiffened as at the slumber-compelling repetition of the word darkness began to gather before him.

  The star-shells flared and died, flared and died; the staccato of a machine gun reached him. He thought that it was his teeth chattering until his groping consciousness made him realize what it really was – some nervous German riddling the interminable movement of the dead.

  There was a squidging of feet through the chalky mud. No need to look; they were friends, or they could not have passed the sentries at the angle of the traverse. Nevertheless, involuntarily, his eyes swept toward the sounds, took note of three cloaked figures regarding him.

  There were half a dozen of the lights floating overhead now, and by the gleams they cast into the trench he recognized the party.

  One of them was that famous surgeon who had come over from the base hospital at Bethune to see made the wounds he healed; the others were his major and his captain – all of them bound for those cellars, no doubt. Well, some had all the luck! Back went his eyes to the slit.

  “What’s wrong?” It was the voice of the major addressing the visitor.

  “What’s wrong – what’s wrong – what’s wrong?” The words repeated themselves swiftly, insistently, within his brain, over and over again, striving to waken it.

  Well, what was wrong? Nothing was wrong! Wasn’t he, Laveller, there and watching? The tormented brain writhed angrily. Nothing was wrong – why didn’t they go away and let him watch in peace?

  “Nothing.” It was the surgeon – and again the words kept babbling in Laveller’s ears, small, whispering, rapidly repeating themselves over and over; “Nothing – nothing – nothing – nothing.”

  But what was this the surgeon was saying? Fragmentarily, only half understood, the phrases registered:

  “Perfect case of what I’ve been telling you. This lad here – utterly worn, weary – all his consciousness centered upon just one thing – watchfulness …consciousness worn to finest point …behind it all his subconsciousness crowding to escape …consciousness will respond to only one stimulus – movement from without …but the subconsciousness, so close to the surface, held so lightly in leash …what will it do if that little thread is loosed …a perfect case.”

  What were they talking about? Now they were whispering.

  “Then, if I have your permission –” It was the surgeon speaking again. Permission for what? Why didn’t they go away and not bother him? Wasn’t it hard enough just to watch without having to hear? Some thing passed before his eyes. He looked at it blindly, unrecognizing. His sight must be clouded.

  He raised a hand and brushed at his lids. Yes, it must have been his eyes – for it had gone.

  A little circle of light glowed against the parapet near his face. It was cast by a small flash. What were they looking for? A hand appeared in the circle, a hand with long, flexible fingers which held a piece of paper on which there was writing. Did they want him to read, too? Not only watch and hear – but read! He gathered himself together to protest.

  Before he could force his stiffened lips to move he felt the upper button of his greatcoat undone, a hand slipped through the opening and thrust something into his tunic pocket just above the heart.

  Someone whispered “Lucie de Tocquelain.” What did it mean? That was not the password. There was a great singing in his head – as though he were sinking through water. What was that light that dazzled him even through his closed lids? Painfully he opened his eyes.

  Laveller looked straight into the disk of a golden sun slowly setting over a row of noble oaks. Blinded, he dropped his gaze. He was standing ankle-deep in soft, green grass, starred with small clumps of blue flowerets. Bees buzzed about in their chalices. Little yellow-winged butterflies hovered over them. A gentle breeze blew, warm and fragrant.

  Oddly he felt no sense of strangeness – then – this was a normal home world – a world as it ought to be. But he remembered that he had once been in another world, far, far unlike this; a place of misery and pain, of blood-stained mud and filth, of cold and wet; a world of cruelty, whose nights were tortured hells of glaring lights and fiery, slaying sounds, and tormented men who sought for rest and sleep and found none, and dead who danced. Where was it? Had there ever really been such a world? He was not sleepy now.

  He raised his hands and looked at them. They were grimed and cut and stained. He was wearing a greatcoat, wet, mud-bespattered, filthy. High boots were on his legs. Beside one dirt-incrusted foot lay a cluster of the blue flowerets, half-crushed. He groaned in pity, and bent, striving to raise the broken blossoms.

  “Too many dead now – too many dead,” he whispered; then paused. He had come from that nightmare world! How else in this happy, clean one could he be so unclean?

  Of course he had – but where was it? How had he made his way from it here? Ah, there had been a password – what had it been?

  He had it: “Lucie de Tocquelain!”

  Laveller cried it aloud – still kneeling.

  A soft little hand touched his cheek. A low, sweet-toned voice caressed his ears.

  “I am Lucie de Tocquelain,” it said. “And the flowers will grow again – yet it is dear of you to sorrow for them.”

  He sprang to his feet. Beside him stood a girl, a slender maid of eighteen, whose hair was a dusky cloud upon her proud little head and in whose great, brown eyes, resting upon his, tenderness and a half-amused pity dwelt.

  Peter stood silent, drinking her in – the low, broad, white forehead; the curved, red lips; the rounded, white shoulders, shining through the silken web of her scarf; the whole lithe sweet body of her in the clinging, quaintly fashioned gown, with its high, clasping girdle.

  She was fair enough; but to Peter’s starved eyes she was more than that – she was a spring gushing from the arid desert, the first cool breeze of twilight over a heat-drenched isle, the first glimpse of paradise to a soul fresh risen from centuries of hell. And under the burning worship of his eyes her own dropped; a faint rose stained the white throat, crept to her dark hair.

  “I – I am the Demoiselle de Tocquelain, messire,” she murmured. “And you –”

  He recovered his courtesy with a shock. “Laveller – Peter Laveller – is my name, mademoiselle,” he stammered. “Pardon my rudeness – but how I came here I know not – nor from whence, save that it was – it was a place unlike this. And you – you are so beautiful, mademoiselle!”

  The clear eyes raised themselves for a moment, a touch of roguishness in their depths, then dropped demurely once more – but the blush deepened.

  He watched her, all his awakening heart in his eyes; then perplexity awoke, touched him insistently.

  “Will you tell me what place this is, mademoiselle,” he faltered, “and how I came here, if you –” He stopped. From far, far away, from league upon league of space, a vast weariness was sweeping down upon him. He sensed it coming – closer, closer; it touched him; it lapped about him; he was sinking under it; being lost – falling – falling –

  Two soft, warm hands gripped his. His tired head dropped upon them. Through the little palms that clasped so tightly pulsed rest and strength. The weariness gathered itself, began to withdraw slow
ly, so slowly – and was gone!

  In its wake followed an ineffable, an uncontrollable desire to weep – to weep in relief that the weariness had passed, that the devil world whose shadows still lingered in his mind was behind him, and that he was here with this maid. And his tears fell, bathing the little hands.

  Did he feel her head bent to his, her lips touch his hair? Peace came to him. He rose shamefacedly.

  “I do not know why I wept, mademoiselle –” he began; and then saw that her white fingers were clasped now in his blackened ones. He released them in sudden panic.

  “I am sorry,” he stammered. “I ought not touch you –”

  She reached out swiftly, took his hands again in hers, patted them half savagely.

  Her eyes flashed.

  “I do not see them as you do, Messire Pierre,” she answered. “And if I did, are not their stains to me as the stains from hearts of her brave sons on the gonfalons of France? Think no more of your stains save as decorations, messire.”

  France – France? Why, that was the name of the world he had left behind; the world where men sought vainly for sleep, and the dead danced.

  The dead danced – what did that mean? He turned wistful eyes to her.

  And with a little cry of pity she clung to him for a moment.

  “You are so tired – and you are so hungry,” she mourned. “And think no more, nor try to remember, messire, till you have eaten and drunk with us and rested for a space.”

  They had turned. And now Laveller saw not far away a chateau. It was pinnacled and stately, serene in its gray stone and lordly with its spires and slender turrets thrust skyward from its crest like plumes flung high from some proud prince’s helm. Hand in hand like children the Demoiselle de Tocquelain and Peter Laveller approached it over the greensward.

  “It is my home, messire,” the girl said. “And there among the roses my mother awaits us. My father is away, and he will be sorrowful that he met you not, but you shall meet him when you return.”

  He was to return, then? That meant he was not to stay. But where was he to go – whence was he to return? His mind groped blindly; cleared again. He was walking among roses; there were roses everywhere, great, fragrant, opened blooms of scarlets and of saffrons, of shell pinks and white; clusters and banks of them, climbing up the terraces, masking the base of the chateau with perfumed tide.

  And as he and the maid, still hand in hand, passed between them, they came to a table dressed with snowy napery and pale porcelains beneath a bower.

  A woman sat there. She was a little past the prime of life, Peter thought. Her hair, he saw, was powdered white, her cheeks as pink and white as a child’s, her eyes the sparkling brown of those of the demoiselle – and gracious – gracious, Peter thought, as some grande dame of old France.

  The demoiselle dropped her a low curtsy.

  “Ma mère,” she said, “I bring you the Sieur Pierre la Vallière, a very brave and gallant gentleman who has come to visit us for a little while.”

  The clear eyes of the older woman scanned him, searched him. Then the stately white head bowed, and over the table a delicate hand was stretched toward him.

  It was meant for him to kiss, he knew – but he hesitated awkwardly, miserably, looking at his begrimed own.

  “The Sieur Pierre will not see himself as we do,” the girl said in half merry reproof; then she laughed, a caressing, golden chiming, “Ma mère, shall he see his hands as we do?”

  The white-haired woman smiled and nodded, her eyes kindly and, Laveller noted, with that same pity in them as had been in those of the demoiselle when first he had turned and beheld her.

  The girl touched Peter’s eyes lightly, held his palms up before him – they were white and fine and clean and in some unfamiliar way beautiful!

  Again the indefinable amaze stifled him, but his breeding told. He conquered the sense of strangeness, bowed from the hips, took the dainty fingers of the stately lady in his, and raised them to his lips.

  She struck a silver bell. Through the roses came two tall men in livery, who took from Laveller his greatcoat. They were followed by four small black boys in gay scarlet slashed with gold. They bore silver platters on which were meat and fine white bread and cakes, fruit, and wine in tall crystal flagons.

  And Laveller remembered how hungry he was. But of that feast he remembered little – up to a certain point. He knows that he sat there filled with a happiness and content that surpassed the sum of happiness of all his twenty-five years.

  The mother spoke little, but the Demoiselle Lucie and Peter Laveller chattered and laughed like children – when they were not silent and drinking each the other in.

  And ever in Laveller’s heart an adoration for this maid, met so perplexingly, grew – grew until it seemed that his heart could not hold his joy. Ever the maid’s eyes as they rested on his were softer, more tender, filled with promise; and the proud face beneath the snowy hair became, as it watched them, the essence of that infinitely gentle sweetness that is the soul of the madonnas.

  At last the Demoiselle de Tocquelain, glancing up and meeting that gaze, blushed, cast down her long lashes, and hung her head; then raised her eyes bravely.

  “Are you content, my mother?” she asked gravely.

  “My daughter, I am well content,” came the smiling answer.

  Swiftly followed the incredible, the terrible – in that scene of beauty and peace it was, said Laveller, like the flashing forth of a gorilla’s paw upon a virgin’s breast, a wail from deepest hell lancing through the song of angels.

  At his right, among the roses, a light began to gleam – a fitful, flaring light that glared and died, glared and died. In it were two shapes. One had an arm clasped about the neck of the other; they leaned embracing in the light, and as it waxed and waned they seemed to pirouette, to try to break from it, to dash forward, to return – to dance!

  The dead who danced!

  A world where men sought rest and sleep, and could find neither, and where even the dead could find no rest, but must dance to the rhythm of the star-shells!

  He groaned; sprang to his feet; watched, quivering in every nerve. Girl and woman followed his rigid gaze; turned to him again with tear-filled, pitiful eyes.

  “It is nothing!” said the maid. “It is nothing! See – there is nothing there!”

  Once more she touched his lids; and the light and the swaying forms were gone. But now Laveller knew. Back into his consciousness rushed the full tide of memory – memory of the mud and the filth, the stenches, and the fiery, slaying sounds, the cruelty, the misery and the hatreds; memory of torn men and tormented dead; memory of whence he had come, the trenches.

  The trenches! He had fallen asleep, and all this was but a dream! He was sleeping at his post, while his comrades were trusting him to watch over them. And those two ghastly shapes among the roses – they were the two Scots on the wires summoning him back to his duty; beckoning, beckoning him to return. He must waken! He must waken!

  Desperately he strove to drive himself from his garden of illusion; to force himself back to that devil world which during this hour of enchantment had been to his mind only as a fog bank on a far horizon. And as he struggled, the brown-eyed maid and the snowy-tressed woman watched – with ineffable pity, tears falling.

  “The trenches!” gasped Laveller. “O God, wake me up! I must get back! O God, make me wake.”

  “Am I only a dream, then, ma mie?”

  It was the Demoiselle Lucie’s voice – a bit piteous, the golden tones shaken.

  “I must get back,” he groaned – although at her question his heart seemed to die within him. “Let me wake!”

  “Am I a dream?” Now the voice was angry; the demoiselle drew close. “Am I not real?”

  A little foot stamped furiously on his, a little hand darted out, pinched him viciously close above
his elbow. He felt the sting of the pain and rubbed it, gazing at her stupidly.

  “Am I a dream, think you?” she murmured, and, raising her palms, set them on his temples, bringing down his head until his eyes looked straight into hers.

  Laveller gazed – gazed down, down deep into their depths, lost himself in them, felt his heart rise like the spring from what he saw there. Her warm, sweet breath fanned his cheek; whatever this was, wherever he was – she was no dream!

  “But I must return – get back to my trench!” The soldier in him clung to the necessity.

  “My son” – it was the mother speaking now – “my son, you are in your trench.”

  Laveller gazed at her, bewildered. His eyes swept the lovely scene about him. When he turned to her again it was with the look of a sorely perplexed child. She smiled.

  “Have no fear,” she said. “Everything is well. You are in your trench – but your trench centuries ago; yes, twice a hundred years ago, counting time as you do – and as once we did.”

  A chill ran through him. Were they mad? Was he mad? His arm slipped down over a soft shoulder; the touch steadied him.

  “And you?” he forced himself to ask. He caught a swift glance between the two, and in answer to some unspoken question the mother nodded. The Demoiselle Lucie pressed soft hands against Peter’s face, looked again into his eyes.

  “Ma mie,” she said gently, “we have been” – she hesitated – “what you call – dead – to your world these two hundred years!”

  But before she had spoken the words Laveller, I think, had sensed what was coming. And if for a fleeting instant he had felt a touch of ice in every vein, it vanished beneath the exaltation that raced through him, vanished as frost beneath a mist-scattering sun. For if this were true – why, then there was no such thing as death! And it was true!