“They gave him a military funeral and buried him in a soldier’s grave. His service saved him from the Potter’s Field, but the army escort and I were his only mourners. Konstantin refused to attend the services and forbade my going till I had abased myself and knelt before him, humbly begging for permission to attend my father’s funeral and promising by everything I held sacred that I would be subservient to him in every act and word and thought forever afterward if only he would grant that one poor favor.
“That evening he was drunk again, and most ill-natured. He beat me several times, but offered no endearments, and I was glad of it, for his blows, painful as they were, were far more welcome than his kisses.
“Next morning he abruptly ordered me to rejoin my unit and write him every day, making careful note of the regiments and arms of service to which the wounded men I handled belonged, and reporting to him in detail.
“I served two weeks with my unit, then the Commandant sent for me and told me they were reducing the personnel, and as I was a married woman they deemed it best that I resign at once. ‘And by the bye, Konstantin,’ she added as I saluted and turned to go, ‘you might like to take these with you—as a little souvenir, you know.’ She drew a packet from her drawer and handed it to me. It was a sheaf of fourteen letters, every one I’d written to my husband. When I opened them outside I saw that every item of intelligence they contained had been carefully blocked out with censor’s ink.
“Konstantin was furious. He thrashed me till I thought I’d not have a whole bone left.
“I took it as long as I could; then, bleeding from nose and lips, I tried to crawl from the room.
“The sight of my helplessness and utter defeat seemed to infuriate him still further. With an animal-snarl he fairly leaped on me and bore me down beneath a storm of blows and kicks.
“I felt the first few blows terribly; then they seemed to soften, as if his hands and feet were encased in thick, soft boxing-gloves. Then I sank face-downward on the floor and seemed to go to sleep.
“When I awoke—if you can call it that—I was lying on the bed, and everything seemed quiet as the grave and calm as Paradise. There was no sensation of pain or any feeling of discomfort, and it seemed to me as if my body had grown curiously lighter. The room was in semi-darkness, and I noticed with an odd feeling of detachment that I could see out of only one eye, my left. ‘He must have closed the right one with a blow,’ I told myself, but, queerly, I didn’t feel resentful. Indeed, I scarcely felt at all. I was in a sort of semi-stupor, indifferent to myself and everything else.
“A scuffle of heavily booted feet sounded outside; then the door was pushed open and a beam of light came into the room, but did not reach to me. I could tell several men had entered, and from their heavy breathing and the scraping sounds I heard, I knew they were lugging some piece of heavy furniture.
“‘Has the doctor been here yet?’ one of them asked.
“‘No,’ some one replied, and I recognized the voice of Madame Lespard, an aged widow who occupied the flat above. ‘You must wait, gentlemen, the law—’
“‘À bas the law!’ the man replied. ‘Me, I have worked since five this morning, and I wish to go to bed.’
“‘But gentlemen, for the love of heaven, restrain yourselves!’ Madame Lespard pleaded. ‘La pauvre belle créature may not be—’
“‘No fear,’ the fellow interrupted. ‘I can recognize them at a mile. Look here.’ From somewhere he procured a lamp and brought it to the bed on which I lay. ‘Observe the pupils of the eyes,’ he ordered, ‘see how they are fixed and motionless, even when I hold the light to them.’ He brought the lamp within six inches of my face, flashing its rays directly into my eye; yet, though I felt its luminance, there was no sensation of being dazzled.
“Then suddenly the light went out. At first I thought he had extinguished the lamp, but in a moment I realized what had actually happened was that my eyelid had been lowered. Though I had not felt his finger on the lid, he had drawn it down across my eye as one might draw a curtain!
“‘And now observe again,” I heard him say, and the scratch of a match against a boot-sole was followed by the faint, unpleasant smell of searing flesh.
“Forbear, Monsieur!” old Madame Lespard cried in horror. “Oh, you are callous—inhuman—you gentlemen of the pompes funèbres!”
“Then horrifying realization came to me. A vague, fantasmal thought which had been wafting in my brain, like an unremembered echo of a long-forgotten verse, suddenly crystallized in my mind. These men were from the pompes funèbres—the municipal undertakers of Paris—the heavy object they had lugged in was a coffin—my coffin! They thought me dead!
“I tried to rise, to tell them that I lived, to scream and beg them not to put me in that dreadful box. In vain. Although I struggled till it seemed my lungs and veins must burst with effort, I could not make a sound, could not stir a hand or finger, could not so much as raise the eyelid the undertaker’s man had lowered!
“‘Ah, bon soir, Monsieur le Médicin!’ I heard the leader of the crew exclaim. ‘We feared you might not come tonight, and the poor lady would have to lie un-coffined till tomorrow.’
“The fussy little municipal doctor bustled up to the bed on which I lay, flashed a lamp into my face and mumbled something about being overworked with la grippe killing so many people every day. Then he turned away and I heard the rustle of papers as he filled in the blanks of my certificate of death. If I could have controlled any member of my body I would have wept. As it was, I merely lay there, unable to shed a single tear for the poor unfortunate who was being hustled, living, to the grave.
“Konstantin’s voice mingled with the others’. I heard him tell the doctor how I had fallen head-first down the stairs, how he had rushed wildly after me and borne me up to bed, only to find my neck was broken. The lying wretch actually sobbed as he told his perjured story, and the little doctor made perfunctory, clucking sounds of sympathy as he listened in attentively and wrote the death certificate—the warrant which condemned me to awful death by suffocation in the grave!
“I felt myself lifted from the bed and placed in the pine coffin, heard them lay the lid above me and felt the jar as they drove home nail after nail. At last the task was finished, the entrepreneurs accepted a drink of brandy and went away, leaving me alone with my murderer.
“I heard him take a turn across the room, heard the almost noiseless chuckle which he gave whenever he was greatly pleased, heard him scratch a match to light a cigarette; then, of a sudden, he checked his restless walk and turned toward the door with a short exclamation.
“‘Who comes?’ he called as a measured tramping sounded in the passageway outside.
“‘The military police!’ his hail was answered. ‘Alexis Konstantin, we make you arrested for espionage. Come!’
“He snarled like a trapped beast. There was the click of a pistol-hammer, but the gendarmes were too quick for him. Like hounds upon the boar they leaped on him, and though he fought with savage fury—I had good cause to know how strong he was!—they overwhelmed him, beat him into submission with fists and saber-hilts and snapped steel bracelets on his wrists.
“All fight gone from him, cursing, whining, begging for mercy—to be allowed to spend the last night beside the body of his poor, dead wife!—they dragged him from the room and down the stairs. I never saw him again—until tonight!”
The girl smiled sadly, a trace of bitterness on her lips. “Have you ever lain awake at night in a perfectly dark room and tried to keep count of time?” she asked. “If you have, you know how long a minute can seem. Imagine how many centuries I lived through while I lay inside that coffin, sightless, motionless, soundless, but with my sense of hearing abnormally sharpened. For longer years than the vilest sinner must spend in purgatory I lay there thinking—thinking. The rattle of carts in the streets and a slight increase in temperature told me day had come, but the morning brought no hope to me. It meant only that I was that much n
earer the Golgotha of my Via Dolorosa.
“At last they came. ‘Where to?’ a workman asked as rough hands took up my coffin and bore me down the stairs.
“‘Saint Sébastien,’ the premier ouvrier returned, ‘her husband made arrangements yesterday. They say he was rich. Eh bien; it is likely so; only the wealthy and the poor dare have funerals of the third class.’
“Over the cobbles of the streets the little, one-horse hearse jolted to the church, and at every revolution of the wheels my panic grew. ‘Surely, surely I shall gain my self-control again,’ I told myself. ‘It can’t be that I’ll lie like this until—’ I dared not finish out the sentence, even in my thoughts.
“The night before, the waiting had seemed endless. Now it seemed the shambling, half-starved nag which drew the hearse was winged like Pegasus and made the journey to the cemetery more swiftly than the fastest airplane.
“At last we halted, and they dragged me to the ground, rushed me at breakneck speed across the cemetery and put me down a moment while they did something to the coffin. What was it? Were they making ready to remove the lid? Had the municipal doctor remembered tardily how perfunctory his examination had been, and conscience-smitten, rushed to the cemetery to snatch me from the very jaws of the grave?
“‘We therefore commit her body to the earth—earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust—’ the priest’s low sing-song came to me, muffled by the coffin-walls. Too late I realized the sound I heard had been only the knotted end of the lowering-rope falling on the coffin top as the workmen drew a loop about the case.
“The priest’s chant became fainter and fainter. I felt myself sinking as though upon a slowly descending lift, while the ropes sawed and rasped against the square edges of the coffin, making noises like the bellow of a cracked bass viol, and the coffin teetered crazily from side to side and scraped against the raw edges of the grave. At last I came to rest. A jolt, a little thud, a final scraping noise, and the lowering-ropes were jerked free and drawn underneath the coffin and out of the grave. The end had come, there was no more—
“A terrible report, louder than the bursting of a shell, exploded just above my chest, and the close, confined air inside the coffin shook and trembled like the air in a dugout when hostile flyers lay down an air-barrage. A second shock burst above my face—its impact was so great I knew the coffin lid must surely crack beneath it—then a perfect drum-fire of explosions as clod on roaring clod struck down upon the thin pine which coffined me. My ears were paralyzed with the continuous detonations, I could feel the constantly increasing weight of earth pressing on my chest, my mouth, my nostrils. I made one final effort to rouse myself and scream for help; then a great flare, like the bursting of a star-shell, enveloped me and the last shred of sensation went amid a blaze of flame and roar of thunder.
“Slowly I fought back to consciousness. I shuddered as the memory of my awful dream came back to me. I’d dreamed that I was dead—or, rather, in a trance—that men from the pompes funèbres came and thrust me into a coffin and buried me in Saint Sébastien, and I had heard the clods fall on the coffin lid above me while I lay powerless to raise a hand.
“How good it was to lie there in my bed and realize that it had only been a dream! There, with the soft, warm mattress under me, I could lie comfortably and rest till time had somewhat softened the terror of that nightmare; then I would rise and make a cup of tea to soothe my frightened nerves; then go again to bed and peaceful sleep.
“But how dark it was! Never, even in those days of air-raids, when all lights were forbidden, had I seen a darkness so absolute, so unrelieved by any faintest ray of light. I moved my arms restlessly. To right and left were hard, rough wooden walls that pressed my sides and interfered with movement. I tried to rise, but fell back with a cry of pain, for I had struck my brow a violent blow. The air about me was very close and damp; heavy, as though confined under pressure.
“Suddenly I knew. Horror made my scalp sting and prickle and the awful truth ran through me like an icy wave. It was no dream, but dreadful fact. I had emerged from the coma which held me while preparations for my funeral were made; at last I was awake, mistress of my body, conscious and able to move and scream aloud for help—but none would ever hear me. I was coffined, shut up beneath a mound of earth in Saint Sébastien Cemetery—buried alive!
“I called aloud in agony of soul and body. The dreadful reverberation of my voice in that sealed coffin rang back against my ears like thunder-claps tossed back by mountain peaks.
“Then I went mad. Shrieking, cursing the day I was born and the God Who let this awful fate befall me, I writhed and twisted, kicked and struggled in the coffin. The sides pressed in so closely that I could not raise my hands to my head, else I had torn my hair out by the roots and scratched my face to the bone, but I dug my nails into my thighs through the flimsy drapery of my shroud and bit my lips and tongue until my mouth was choked with blood and my raving cries were muted like the gurglings of a drowning man. Again and yet again I struck my brow against the thin pine wood, getting a fierce joy from the pain. I drew up my knees as far as they could go and arched my body in a bow, determined to burst the sepulcher which held me or spend my faint remaining spark of life in one last effort at escape. My forehead crashed against the coffin lid, a wave of nausea swept over me and, faint and sick, I fell back to a merciful unconsciousness.
“The soft, warm sunlight of September streamed through an open window and lay upon the bed on which I lay, and from the table at my side a bowl of yellow roses sent forth a cloud of perfume. ‘I’m surely dead,’ I told myself. ‘I’m released from the grave at last. I’ve died and gone—where? Where was I? If this were heaven or paradise, or even purgatory, it looked suspiciously like earth; yet how could I be living, and if I were truly dead, what business had I still on earth?
“Listlessly I turned my head. There, in American uniform, a captain’s bars gleaming on his shoulders, stood Donald, my Donald, whom I’d thought lost to me forever. ‘My dear,’ I whispered, but got no farther, for in a moment his arms were round me and his lips were pressed to mine.”
Sonia paused a moment, a smile of tenderest memory on her lips, the light that never was on sea or land within her eyes. “I didn’t understand at all,” she told us, “and even now I only know it second-hand. Perhaps Donald will tell you his part of the story. He knows the details better than I.”
3. La Morte Amoureuse
The leaping flames behind the andirons cast pretty highlights of red and orange on Donald Tanis and his wife as they sat hand in hand in the love seat beside the hearth rug. “I suppose you gentlemen think I was pretty precipitous in love-making, judging from the record Sonia’s given,” the young husband began with a boyish grin, “but you hadn’t watched beside her bed while she hovered between sanity and madness as I had, and hadn’t heard her call on me and say she loved me. Besides, when she looked at me that afternoon and said, ‘My dear!’ I knew she loved me just as well as though she’d taken all day long to tell me.”
De Grandin and Renouard nodded joint and most emphatic approval. “And so you were married?” de Grandin asked.
“You bet we were,” Donald answered. “There’d have been all sorts of red tape to cut if we’d been married as civilians, but I was in the army and Sonia wasn’t a French citizeness; so we went to a friend of mine who was a padre in one of our outfits and had him tie the knot. But I’m telling this like a newspaper story, giving the ending first. To begin at the start:
“The sawbones in the hospital told me I was a medical freak, for the effect of the bursting ‘coalbox’ on me was more like the bends, or caisson disease, than the usual case of shell-shock. I didn’t go dotty, nor get the horrors; I wasn’t even deafened to any extent, but I did have the most God-awful neuralgic pains with a feeling of almost overwhelming giddiness whenever I tried to stand. I seemed as tall as the Woolworth tower the minute I got on my feet, and seven times out of ten I’d go sprawling on my face two second
s after I got out of bed. They packed me off to a convalescent home at Biarritz and told me to forget I’d ever been mixed up in any such thing as a war.
“I did my best to follow orders, but one phase of the war just wouldn’t be forgotten. That was the plucky girl who’d dragged me in that night the Fritzies tried to blow me into Kingdom Come. She’d been to see me in hospital before they sent me south, and I’d learned her name and unit, so as soon as I was up to it I wrote her. Lord, how happy I was when she answered!
“You know how those things are. Bit by bit stray phrases of intimacy crept into our notes, and we each got so that the other’s letters were the most important things in life. Then Sonia’s notes became less frequent and more formal; finally they hinted that she thought I was not interested any more. I did my best to disabuse her mind of that thought, but the letters came farther and farther apart. At last I decided I’d better tell her the whole truth, so I proposed by mail. I didn’t like the idea, but there I was, way down in the Pyrénées, unable to get about, except in a wheel-chair, and there she was somewhere on the west front. I couldn’t very well get to her to tell her of my love, and she couldn’t come to me—and I was dreadfully afraid I’d lose her.
“Then the bottom dropped out of everything. I never got an answer to that letter. I didn’t care a hang what happened to me then; just sat around and moped till the doctors began to think my brain must be affected, after all.
“I guess about the only thing that snapped me out of it was America’s coming in. With my own country sending troops across, I had a definite object in life once more; to get into American uniform and have a last go at the Jerries. So I concentrated on getting well.
“It wasn’t till the latter part of July, though, that they let me go, and then they wouldn’t certify me for duty at the front. ‘One more concussion and you’ll go blotto altogether, lad,’ the commandant told me before I left the nursing-home, and he must have put a flea in G.H.Q’s. ear, too, for they turned me down cold as caviar when I asked for combatant service.
The Best of Jules de Grandin Page 32
