Читать книгу Out of the Ruins and other little novels - Philip Gibbs - Страница 3

It was Yvonne Gilbert who first saw the living image of Bertrand Gavaudan, who was dead.

It was a year after the Armistice, and Yvonne was sitting with her mother and father and her blind brother, Jean (who was knitting one of those woollen vests by which he earned his living now), and her lover, M. Paul Volange, the rich contractor. They were in the new house, which was one of the first to be built in the ruins of Arras.

It was nine o’clock in the evening of an August day, and still light, though the shadows of night were creeping into the stricken city, where so many houses were scarred and slashed by four years of shell-fire, where many others were but skeleton buildings burnt out or blasted out by high explosives, and where heaps of ancient masonry, which had once been shops, mansions, or churches, lay as memorials of that storm of war which had now passed from Arras, and from Europe.

M. Volange was talking about the reconstruction of the city. That word “reconstruction,” the same in French as in English, but with a more rolling and sonorous sound, was like a “word of power” which the old Egyptians used for their magic. It was constantly on his lips, and he dwelt on each syllable as though he adored the sound of it. “Re-con-struc-tion!” And indeed for him that reconstruction of Arras meant everything in life—wealth, power, flattery, love. Yes, even love—or at least the pleasure of his approaching marriage with Yvonne Gilbert, the daughter of a former Mayor of Arras (a man of good family and high political influence) and the most beautiful young woman in the district. This marriage would be the crown of his success. It would cement his social position. It would lift him to the level of all those families who had despised him in the old days before the War, when he was a little builder and odd-job man at Blangy on the outskirts of Arras—before the work of reconstruction, when he had obtained Government contracts against all competitors (the political influence of his future father-in-law had been very useful) and brought up the claims of many poor people in the devastated region which, if properly worked, were worth more than a gold mine. Already he was getting alarmingly rich. Sometimes, with a sense of amusement, he was almost scared at his own profits from the supply of bricks, stone, cement, and timber, and by the ease with which his bought-up claims and his own figures of compensation were being passed and settled by the Government officials in Paris. Well, it was only just and right, he thought, after all the agony and sacrifice of the War. It was true that as a man of forty-five his own war service had been restricted to washing out the yards and offices of a hospital at Lyons, but spiritually he had agonized as much as the men in the trenches. Indeed, he had, he believed, suffered more than the combatants. Now it was his time of reward. He was getting prosperous, powerful, and—alas!—rather too fat.

“In a little while,” he said to his future father-in-law, “the reconstruction of our beloved city will be in full swing. Already I have contracts for four hundred houses, and fifty are completed. I confess the tears come into my eyes—you know how emotional I am!—when I hear the music of trowel and hammer and saw as I walk about the streets. Arras is rising again from its ashes. The wounds of France are being healed. Men like myself are reaping the reward of our service. I shall be the happiest man in the world in a month’s time, when Yvonne comes to share my new home.... Well, it’s a fine house—the Government has been generous in accepting my claims, as I must acknowledge—and Yvonne won’t be the wife of a poor man!”

He put out his plump hand across the table and took hold of Yvonne’s hand, so delicate and thin, and gave it a tender little squeeze.

“Yvonne is a lucky young woman,” said her father, the former Mayor of Arras, who sat smoking a cigarette with a glass of vermouth at his elbow. He stroked his white moustache and beard, and glanced at his daughter with a smile in which there was a hint of anxiety. Yvonne had made rather a fuss about this engagement with Volange. Indeed she had wept until her eyes were red. He had had to be rather stern with her, poor child! A good marriage could not be thrown away because of sickly sentiment about a young man who had been shot in the War, not in the right kind of way. Well, well, the tragedy of war was over. War, peace, and reconstruction. ...

It was a moment after the touch of her hand by M. Volange that Yvonne dropped her needlework on to the tablecloth and went quietly to the window. Her father and mother were arranging the playing cards for a game of bézique. Her future husband, at whose touch she had shuddered, was lighting a pipe which he had learnt to smoke in time of war when he swept out the yards of a French hospital. Only her blind brother was conscious of her quivering sigh and her movement away from the table. He raised his head and turned his sightless eyes towards her as she stood by the window looking out to a garden which had been cleared of its débris of broken masonry and shell-cases. The English had used it for a battery position—one of their big nine-point-twos. The bodies of two English soldiers had been dug out of the ruins when the garden had been cleared out and tidied up by the Belgian workmen employed by Volange. Bodies were still being found—a year after the Armistice—in the cellars and backyards, under fallen stones and timber. Even in the time of reconstruction the city reeked of all that death, first French and then—for three years—British.

Yvonne Gilbert stood at the window with her pale forehead against the window-frame, staring into the garden and beyond to the gaunt ruin of the great cathedral above the broken roofs and skeleton houses. She was a tall, slim girl, typical of the beauty of Arras which had been far-famed before all its inhabitants—or most of them—had fled when German shell-fire first made a hell of the city in the autumn of ’14. Her black hair was looped loosely over her ears. Her dark eyes with long lashes were filled with tragedy, though they had been so merry until a year before the Armistice, in spite of war and all its horrors. Suddenly, standing by the window there, she gave a strange, frightened cry, and turned in a swooning way, holding out her hands as though thrusting back some terrifying vision.

It was Jean, her blind brother, who was first by her side. He put his arm round her and held her.

“Qu’est-ce-qu’il y a?—What’s the matter?” he asked loudly, with fear in his voice.

She did not answer him, though her lips—quite blanched—moved as though she tried to speak.

M. Volange had risen at the sound of her cry and overturned his glass of vermouth, so that the liquid made a pool on the red tablecloth.

“The poor child is unwell!” he said in an agitated way. “It’s the excitement of my conversation, perhaps—all this talk about reconstruction and our future home.”

He came forward with his arms outstretched, his short little arms hardly reaching beyond his tubby body in its tight frock coat.

Yvonne’s father spoke to her sharply.

“Behave yourself, Yvonne! You seem to be losing your self-control.”

Madame Gilbert, holding the playing cards in trembling hands, hushed her husband’s stern words.

“It is one of her headaches. At her age I suffered like that! Before my marriage.”

“Ah,” said the old man. “Marriage will do her all the good in the world. It’s the only thing for women.”

“She is ill,” said her brother Jean.

She seemed ill, but with a desperate effort controlled herself and slipped from her brother’s arms.

“I’m sorry!” she said. “I felt a little unwell. It was a sudden pain ...”

She hesitated, smiled rather pitifully, and then went to her room.

“Girls are like that before marriage,” said her father. “I shall be glad when the wedding day comes, Volange.”

“It will be the first wedding after the War, in Arras,” said M. Volange. “I am giving my workmen a half-day’s holiday. It will be a great day in the history of our new Arras—the happy symbol of reconstruction and peace.”

Presently he departed in his fine motor-car—he had three cars for his work of reconstruction—and it was when the door had closed upon him that Yvonne’s blind brother went up to her room. He knew his way about the house and walked upstairs quickly, with that curiously rigid position of the head which one sees in blind men, who have to listen and remember to find their way. He was a handsome young man with a little black moustache, and had been a gay fellow before a shell burst and blinded him. Now he was very sad at times and wept often out of sightless eyes because he had lost his sweetheart as well as his sight. Madeleine Baptiste had not had the courage to marry a blind man. He found his best comradeship with Yvonne, at whose door he now tapped.

She opened it and said, “What do you want, Jean?”

He stepped into her bedroom and felt for the handle of the door, which he closed behind him.

“Why were you frightened downstairs?” he asked. “What did you see in the garden?”

“Nothing,” she answered. “Nothing.” But there was a note of terror in her voice again.

“You saw something,” he said. “I was listening to you. You were quite quiet, and then suddenly gave that scream. It wasn’t pain. It was fear. I know the sound of it, in the trenches....”

For a few moments she was silent and then answered with extraordinary words.

“Jean! I saw Bertrand Gavaudan—in the garden—as plain as I see you.”

Jean Gilbert seemed to stare at his sister with his sightless eyes.

“It was a trick of your mind,” he said quietly. “You were thinking of him—I guessed that—and then you thought you saw him. I often see things like that. I mean I think of things—faces especially—and suddenly they come before my eyes so vividly that I almost believe I have my sight back. It’s subconscious memory. Illusion.”

“No,” said Yvonne. “It wasn’t like that. He was standing there in the garden below the window, looking up. Our eyes met, and he stared into mine. He was not like he was when I saw him last—before—before his death. His face was thin and white, and he had a little beard. He was in rags. When he saw me he moved away, behind the bushes we have planted.”

“It was some workman,” said Jean. “One of those Belgians.”

“It was Bertrand,” said Yvonne. “His ghost.... He has come to warn me.”

“His ghost? To warn you?”

“Against this marriage. This treachery to our love!” said Yvonne, and she fell into a passion of weeping.

Jean Gilbert put his arms round her again, and hushed her as though she were a child, and kissed her wet face.

Presently he spoke, quietly and gravely.

“I don’t think you have seen Bertrand’s ghost. It was your mental vision of him. That’s almost certain. But if the dead come back—and I don’t deny it altogether—they don’t come with the same human passions. Bertrand wouldn’t torment you because you’re marrying a rich man who will try to make you happy.”

“He will never make me happy!” said Yvonne. “I have no love for him. He fills me with horror. And Bertrand has come to claim me. Dead or alive, I belong to him. He died because of his love for me.”

That was true, as Jean Gilbert knew. He could not deny it. Young Bertrand Gavaudan had been his fellow-officer and closest comrade in the second battalion. They had been in the trenches together at Souchez, on the Somme, at Verdun. It was Jean who had introduced him to his family, in Amiens, after their flight from Arras. He had seen at once—he had his eyes then!—that young Bertrand was tremendously enamoured of Yvonne. They had laughed and joked and danced together in those rare times of leave when Bertrand escaped from a world of death and filth to that other world where beauty still dwelt, and women, and love. It was only once that Jean and he had been on leave together. But when Bertrand came back he raved about Yvonne, and Jean was amused and pleased to think that his sister seemed so wonderful, so beautiful, so angelic to his best comrade. Up in the trenches of Verdun below Fort Douaumont, where they were under ceaseless fire, so that the daily casualties were frightful, and the very earth smelt of human corruption, Bertrand cursed the War because he was certain to be killed before he could marry Yvonne. He cried out to God that it was “unfair” that Youth should die before it had enjoyed life. Perhaps his nerve had broken a little because of that ceaseless storm of heavy shells above them. Several times in the last six months he had put in for special leave under a plea of sickness, and if it hadn’t been for his great gallantry in the first three years of war—he had won the Croix de Guerre and had been three times cited before the Army—he would have been suspected of cowardice or malingering. Each time when his request was refused, because of the shortage of men, he was in despair. He even shed tears several times, in the dug-out which he shared with Jean. One night he had spoken mad words.

“It’s nine months since I have seen Yvonne. Nine sacred months! If the Colonel doesn’t grant me leave I shall take it myself. I know a way of getting back. It’s easy. Why, that fellow Bidou spent a month in Paris with his little girl and came back without a word being said! A self-inflicted wound, mon vieux! Not too serious to spoil one’s holiday, but bad enough to pass the doctor.”

Jean had laughed at him—not taken his words seriously.

“You know the punishment for desertion—or self-inflicted wounds?”

Bertrand had shrugged his shoulders.

“Death—if you’re found out—and worth the risk! I’m sure to be killed here anyhow, so what’s the difference?”

“A little matter of honour and dishonour,” Jean had answered lightly.

Bertrand had said “Je m’en fiche,” meaning that he didn’t care a tinker’s curse.

It was impossible to believe him. He had been on fire with patriotism at the beginning of the War. He had risked his life a hundred times even after two wounds. He was a young man of superb courage, until his nerve had begun to fail a little, and this love for Yvonne had weakened him, perhaps.

Jean refused to believe that he could behave with such insane folly. Yet one day in the dug-out he drew his revolver, said, “Look out, mon vieux!” and shot himself in the foot. “A careless accident!” he said before he fainted....

There was no suspicion. Accidents like that happened. Bertrand was sent down to the casualty clearing station and three weeks later Jean heard from his sister that he was in hospital at Amiens. She thanked God that his wound was not serious. In another letter she deplored the fact that his wound was nearly healed and that he would be sent back to the fighting line. “But we have had a wonderful time of happiness,” she wrote; “I have seen him in hospital every day. I love him with my heart and soul.” After that there was a long silence from Yvonne and no news of Bertrand. Jean was profoundly uneasy. That self-inflicted wound had shocked him horribly. Only his long comradeship and loyalties of friendship, sealed with many acts of devotion and valour by Bertrand Gavaudan, prevented him from reporting such a crime against the honour of the battalion. Bertrand had been his hero, his ideal of gallantry and self-sacrifice. It had been Bertrand’s cool nerve, his laughing contempt of death and horror, that had kept Jean steady in hours of terrible ordeal. Now he was love-making after a self-inflicted wound, and had lost his honour....

The old Colonel, who had loved Bertrand like a son, was gloomy because he did not return. Impatient and angry when six weeks had passed and he did not return. One morning he blurted out the news that Bertrand Gavaudan, whom once he had called his “beautiful lieutenant,” had disappeared from hospital in Amiens and had slipped off to Paris.

“A deserter,” he said. “Sacred name of God, the bravest officer in my battalion has become a coward and a traitor! If he doesn’t come back before the next attack I’ll have him shot like a dog.”

Bertrand did not come back before the next attack. He came back after the attack—that very evening—when half the battalion had been wiped out and Jean lay blind and wounded at the end of a trench under a heap of dead bodies—the men who had been his comrades. Jean had known nothing at the time. It was only afterwards, from a fellow-officer, that he had heard the frightful news. Bertrand had come back desperately conscience-stricken, mad with grief because Jean was blind and because so many of his comrades had been killed while he was hiding in Paris and having secret visits from Yvonne. He had made a clean breast of his self-inflicted wound, of his desertion for love’s sake, of his treachery to France. He had wept bitterly, but no tears could wash out that month of madness. The old Colonel had listened grimly, snapped out a few terrible questions, ordered the arrest of Lieutenant Gavaudan, and prepared papers for a court-martial. But there was no time for the formalities of military law. The Germans attacked again, and the remnants of the battalion were hard pressed. By order of the Colonel, Bertrand Gavaudan was shot in the support trenches before the counter-attack. Sergeant Blum, killed later in his dug-out, had been in charge of the firing party.

There was no more fighting for Jean Gilbert. When he came home after six months in a hospital for blind officers he was silent and constrained with his sister. For several days he had hardly spoken to her. He even hated her a little because her love of Bertrand had led to such dishonour and such a shameful death. But he softened to her when she told him something of Bertrand’s mad and flaming love. They had been mad together, in Paris, believing that love—this wonderful love that had come to them—was the only thing that mattered, and that duty, honour, even life itself, were unimportant. They decided to die in each other’s arms. They were all ready for that death one evening in a little room on the fourth floor of the Hôtel Richelieu, when Bertrand suddenly went to the window and listened. Yvonne could hear nothing but the movement of Paris and the barking of motor-horns in the darkened streets below. But Bertrand seemed to hear something. He turned with his face as white as though he were already dead and said, “Do you hear the sound of guns and the groans of wounded men?”

She said, “I only hear the noise of Paris, dear heart.”

“There’s a big battle on,” he told her, and seemed terribly distressed. “The Germans are attacking again at Verdun. I hear the groans of my comrades—my poor comrades whom I have deserted.”

“In a little while we shall hear no more of war,” answered Yvonne. “We shall be together in infinite and eternal love.”

He spoke the words “My comrades” several times in a dazed, pitiful way, and then cursed himself as a traitor.

“I must go back,” he said. “To-night. I’ve been mad. This folly of love——”

She tried to put her arms about his neck, but he thrust her back.

“I must go back,” he said. “They’re attacking the battalion. Jean is there. I’ve been utterly mad. A traitor to France. I’m going back....”

He went back, to be shot in the support trenches, as a deserter and coward.

“It was my love that killed him!” cried Yvonne, when she told Jean her tragic story, and because of her grief, her agony of self-reproach, he had forgiven her.

Now once again in her bedroom, believing that she had seen the ghost of Bertrand, she cried out, “He died because of his love for me.”

It was not the only time that Yvonne believed she saw the ghost of her dead lover. A week after that evening when she had given a scream at the window, she and Jean went to dinner with Madame Gavaudan and her daughter Julie, who had come back to Arras and were living in one of the fifty new houses which Volange had built under Government contract. It was about a hundred yards on the east side of the Hôtel de Ville, which was, of course, no more than a heap of ruins, unrestored, and unrestorable to its former state, when it was one of the glories of France. Jean had warned Yvonne not to say a word about the apparition of Bertrand to the mother and sister. They knew nothing of the manner of his death, which had been reported among the list of killed; and they cherished his memory as one of the heroes of France who had laid down his life on the field of honour. His portrait was on their mantelpiece, draped in the tricolour, and his smiling, handsome, boyish face was as Jean had known it in the first years of the War, when he had been so ardent and so gallant.

At dinner Madame Gavaudan spoke of her son.

“It is my dear Bertrand’s birthday. He would have been thirty to-day. How happy he would have been to come back to Arras, to this new house of ours!”

“I am sure his spirit watches over us,” said Julie, who was a devout Catholic and very spirituelle.

“Our dear dead are very close to us,” answered Madame Gavaudan in a tranquil voice. Like most mothers of France, she was resigned to the loss of that son who had died so that France might live.

Yvonne sat very quiet during these allusions to her lover. Only Jean, who, like all blind men, had an acute sense of hearing, was aware of the quick breath she drew. She was still stubborn in her belief that she had seen the spirit of Bertrand.

They had a little music and Julie sang, while Yvonne played for her. It was eleven o’clock before they left the house. Jean took his sister’s arm and asked how the night looked.

“It is moonlight,” said Yvonne. “The ruins of the Hôtel de Ville are touched with silver, and the new houses look very white.”

“I would like to see it again,” said Jean. “In the trenches I used to look at the ‘Man in the Moon,’ smiling down, as it seemed, upon the world of desolation. The lines of the trenches were clear where the moonlight gleamed on the chalk. We never attacked on nights like that, and there was nothing doing in No Man’s Land. ... Well, I shall never see moonlight again. I don’t even feel it on my face.”

Yvonne pressed his arm tighter. This poor brother of hers would never get reconciled to his blindness.

They had walked only twenty yards before she stopped quite suddenly, and Jean felt her trembling upon his arm. Her body quivered against his.

“What’s the matter?” he asked.

She did not answer. She was staring at a figure standing motionless by the ruins of the Hôtel de Ville where the old entrance used to be. It was partly in a black shadow flung across the pile of stones by the broken wall of a shell-wrecked house, but a ray of moonlight striking through a hole in the wall fell upon a face which was ghostly white. It was the face of a young man with unkempt hair and a little beard about his chin. It was the face of Bertrand Gavaudan, emaciated, dead-looking, with mournful staring eyes as he might have looked when they had shot him on a morning of battle somewhere near Verdun. His eyes were fixed upon Yvonne. But when she stopped, and began to tremble on her brother’s arm, the figure seemed to turn away and disappeared into the blackness of the shadows behind the great pile of masonry.

“It was Bertrand again,” said Yvonne in a whisper. “I saw his ghost in the moonlight.”

She was terror-stricken.

Jean slipped away from her arm and walked very fast towards the heap of ruins which had been the Hôtel de Ville, and stood on a pile of stones, motionless. Presently he came back to his sister.

“It was no ghost,” he said. “I heard the footsteps of a man. He stumbled over some loose stones, and then stood still because he saw me.”

“It was Bertrand’s ghost,” said Yvonne. “I saw his face white and shining where the moonlight touched it. His eyes stared into mine.”

“Morbid imagination!” answered Jean with a touch of impatience. “It was some workman waiting for a girl. You see Bertrand’s face because you expect to see it. You’re ill.”

Yvonne gave a little cry.

“It was Bertrand. He is haunting me. I will never marry Volange. Bertrand would come between us, always. His dead face would sleep on my pillow.”

“You’re getting daft,” said Jean, angrily this time.

Yet it was Jean himself who was next visited by the apparition of the man who had been his comrade.

Some nights after the dinner at Madame Gavaudan’s he sat alone, rather late, before preparing for bed, after knitting one of those innumerable vests by which he earned a little money and kept his mind from brooding. M. Volange had spent the evening with them again. The day of his wedding with Yvonne was drawing near, and because of his happiness he had become a little fuddled over his vermouth and had been foolishly amorous, so that Yvonne had slipped away early to bed to escape his endearments. There had been a frightful scene earlier in the evening, when she had vowed to her father and mother that she would never marry Volange. Jean had taken her part, thereby making his father furious. The old man had threatened to turn Yvonne out of doors if she did not fulfil her promise to Volange. In any case, he said, it was too late to draw back now. It would make a scandal all over Artois and Picardy. For miles around people were excited by the coming wedding. Presents were already arriving. The Marquis de St. Pol had sent his compliments and a silver tea-tray. Old Madame de Rollencourt had sent an ebony crucifix saved from the ruins of the cathedral. How could Yvonne shame her whole family by ridiculous folly at the eleventh hour? She needed a good whipping, said her father, and only Yvonne’s tears and Jean’s harsh protests prevented this chastisement. It was all very distressing, as Jean now thought, knitting alone in the sitting-room after all the family had gone to bed. His mother had turned out the lamps. They made no difference to her blind son, who sat working in absolute darkness.

Half an hour had passed, when Jean suddenly jerked up his head. Somebody was fumbling at the latch of the long window which opened on to the garden. There was the sound of a knife-blade forcing up the catch, and a moment later Jean felt the cool night air on his face. Someone had opened the window and was already in the room, standing motionless and holding his breath.

Jean Gilbert did not feel afraid, but curiously interested in this quiet visitor. It was certainly a man. The few stealthy footsteps he had made were not those of a woman; and presently his hard breathing revealed him to Jean as a man excited by some deep emotion.

Jean sat very quiet in his chair. His brain and body were alert. It was probably a burglar come to steal Yvonne’s wedding presents—those tragic wedding presents!—or anything else he could lay his hands on. Jean decided to let him get farther into the room before jumping on him.

It seemed a long time before the man moved again, but presently Jean heard him feeling his way along the wall. He stumbled over a footstool, and then stood quiet again, and drew a sharp breath. A moment later Jean heard the rattle of a box of matches, and before the light could be struck leapt out of his chair, stood between the man and the open window, and called out, “Qui va là?” sharply and sternly.

The man did not answer for a moment. He seemed to shrink back behind one of the armchairs.

Jean spoke again.

“I can hear every movement you make. You have no chance of escape. Answer me, or I will go for you.”

A match was struck and the man answered incredible words.

“Jean! ... It is I, Bertrand Gavaudan.... Your old comrade.”

Jean was a brave man. He had faced death year after year in the trenches without losing his nerves or self-control, except once or twice in dreadful hours. But now he felt fear take possession of him. His hair seemed to rise on his scalp. A cold sweat moistened the palms of his hands. The words that were spoken to him were in the voice of the man who had been his comrade and had been shot as a deserter.

Out of the silence that followed Jean asked a question in a kind of whisper.

“Are you a ghost?”

There was no answer, and Jean spoke again.

“Do you come from the dead?”

He heard the figure drop the match on to the polished boards, and yet the sound of that material thing did not relieve him from his sense of fear as of being in the presence of the supernatural.

“I’m not a ghost,” said the voice. “I am Bertrand Gavaudan. I have come back to see Yvonne.”

Jean’s sense of fear abated. And as the cold terror departed from him his mind began to work on reasonable lines. This was no ghost, therefore it could not be Bertrand Gavaudan. Bertrand was dead. This was Bertrand’s voice, amazingly like, but it was the voice of a living man. Therefore it could not be Bertrand. Unanswerable logic!

“Why do you say you are Bertrand Gavaudan?” he asked. “Why this imposture when you come to rob the house?”

“Jean!” said the voice again. “Don’t you know me? Ask me any question, something known only to you and me, and I will prove it to you.”

Jean thought hard and quickly.

“What name did I carve on the door of the dug-out before the attack on Souchez in the first year of the war?”

“Madeleine Baptiste,” said the voice of Bertrand Gavaudan.

Jean drew a quick breath. Yes, it was the name of the girl who had not had the courage to marry a blind man. He had shared that dug-out with Bertrand Gavaudan. He had carved the name on a beam over the doorway while they were waiting to attack at dawn. Bertrand alone would know.

“You broke your penknife,” said the voice.

Jean went forward to the figure, whose breathing he heard between the bookcase and the armchair. He stretched out his hand and touched him. It was no ghost. He put his hand up to the man’s face and passed it lightly over his features. It was the face of Bertrand Gavaudan as he had known it, but thinner and with a little beard on the chin. He took his hand, his right hand, and felt that the third finger was missing. It had been cut off by a German machine-gun bullet that day at Souchez.

“Then there is no death!” he said in a strange strangled voice.

This blind man, standing in the darkness of that room into which only a little moonlight came, fumbling about the face and body of the man who claimed to be his comrade, was utterly bewildered and afraid.

The other man suddenly flung his arms about Jean’s neck and kissed him on both cheeks, and wept, and whimpered out pitiful words.

“Jean! Oh, my dear comrade! My dear brave friend! What a curse that you are blind! What a joy to see you again, to touch you, to hear your voice! There’s only one thing I want more than that. To see Yvonne. They can shoot me if they like. I don’t care a damn about death. I’m dead already. Dead to France, dead to the world, dead to my own people. Living like a rat in a hole. Filthy. Always hiding. But I’ll surrender and get shot—properly this time—if I can take Yvonne once more in my arms. It is for that I’ve been hiding and shirking death. To see her beauty once again, to kiss her dear lips, to feel her body against my breast.”

Some such words as that he spoke, while he held Jean about the shoulders, and clasped him with strong hands.

“They shot you,” said Jean harshly. “They left you dead in the trench of the broken Calvary.”

“No,” said Bertrand Gavaudan. “They left me wounded. Half the men wouldn’t shoot me and all but one aimed above my head. I was their comrade. I had led them into action, before I went mad. After that the Germans attacked and captured the trench.... I was a prisoner in Germany until the Armistice.... After that a wanderer in Belgium. A labourer.... Now I have come back to France—to see Yvonne—before I give myself up and get shot again.”

Jean listened to those words like a man stunned by heavy blows. He stood there with moisture oozing from his blind eyes, his head bowed, and his arms hanging limp. So Bertrand was not dead after all! Incredible after all that time, a year after the Armistice—and after all their mourning for him, their fixed belief in his shameful and tragic death. It was almost worse to know that he was alive, a hiding and hunted man, hunted by the memory of his desertion, with his life forfeit to France. And within a week of Yvonne’s marriage with Paul Volange. ... There would be more agony—worse tragedy.

He spoke the word “Incredible” several times, and wiped the cold sweat from his forehead and those trickling drops from his blind eyes.

“Incroyable! ... Pas possible! ... Non, je ne peux pas le croire!”

He said he could not believe, and yet, like doubting Thomas, he believed, and cried out in a hoarse voice, “My comrade! My poor comrade!”

“For a month I have been in Arras,” said Bertrand. “Hiding like a rat. Coming out of my hole only at night. Twice I have seen my mother, and yearned to cry to her, maman! She looked so old and sad, and I was dead to her! I saw her through the window of her new house, with the lamps lighted. She was sitting at the table, sewing, as in the old days of my boyhood. My heart gushed blood at the sight of her. Oh Christ!”

Then he spoke the name of Yvonne. Twice also he had seen her. Once when he crept into the garden behind the house. She came to the window and looked out. Once when she walked with Jean by moonlight past the ruin of the Hôtel de Ville, a few nights ago.

He saw her then, or a few moments later. It was Jean’s quick ears which heard her footsteps in soft slippers coming down the passage. He whispered to Bertrand.

“She’s coming. Hide yourself.... She would die of fear——”

Bertrand slipped behind the heavy curtains by the long window, not a second before the door opened. Yvonne stood there in her dressing-gown, holding a lamp. She spoke to her brother while she put the lamp down on the table and glanced round the room.

“Jean, why do you stay up? I thought I heard voices. Were you talking to anyone?”

He lied to her.

“I was talking to myself.”

She did not seem satisfied. There was some look of fear on her brother’s face, and his voice was strange and trembling.

“The long window is open,” she said. “And there are muddy footmarks on the boards. Someone has been in!”

“Not a soul,” said Jean. “Get back to bed. I’ll come with you.”

“Jean!” whispered Yvonne, clutching his arm and beginning to tremble. “There is someone in the room. Behind the curtain.”

She put a hand up to her throat and shrank back.

Jean put his arms about her.

“Yvonne. Be brave. I have something strange to tell you, something wonderful—unbelievable—beyond all words. It is about Bertrand——”

She spoke the words, “His ghost!” in a faint voice of terror.

“No,” said Jean, “it isn’t his ghost. He wasn’t shot that day. The Germans took him prisoner.... He has been in hiding all this time.... He’s in Arras now.... He’s in this room.”

Yvonne stood rigid and silent, and Jean could not see the look on her face, such a look as any human face might have in the presence of some miracle of God.

There was utter silence in that room for longer than Jean could ever tell. It was as if these three people had been stricken motionless and dumb. Presently, perhaps when only a few moments had passed, the curtain by the window moved and Bertrand Gavaudan came forward a few paces, and then stood still again with his hands raised. He was in shabby clothes, torn at the knees, and plastered with a whitish clay, and his hair was matted and his face unwashed. Not like the smart young officer in the sky-blue of the French chasseurs, who had looked so splendid when Yvonne first saw him, but a haggard figure into whose face tragedy had dug its claws. His face was dead white. Only his eyes seemed alive, burning with a bright light.

He spoke the name of the girl for whose love he had been shot as a traitor, though not killed.

“Yvonne!”

She swayed towards him like a girl in a trance.

He cried out to her again with a sob in his throat.

“Yvonne! Oh, my beloved!”

She fell forward into his arms, and he kissed her on the lips and eyes and throat. But she was in a dead swoon.

Jean and Bertrand together carried her to the sofa by the fireplace and laid her there unconscious.

“Crê nom de Dieu!” said Jean, and then he begged Bertrand to go away. The whole house would be roused. Bertrand would be caught and shot.

Bertrand was on his knees by the sofa with his arms about Yvonne, and he was calling to her, and beside himself with grief.

Jean dragged him up, almost with violence.

“Go away!” he whispered. “For God’s sake go!”

“What does it matter?” asked Bertrand. “Let them shoot me now. Without Yvonne life is a curse to me.”

“We will come to you,” said Jean. “Where can we find you? Tell me quick and go, before my father comes down.”

“You will come to me?” asked Bertrand. “You will bring Yvonne? On your sacred word of honour?”

“I will bring her,” said Jean, “if you will leave her now.”

His promise seemed to open up a paradise to Bertrand Gavaudan.

“I’m in the tunnels beyond the caves,” he said. “Where the English bored their way through to the German front line. The best way down is by the old barracks. You follow the caves through, and take the right hand tunnel. A thousand paces, and then ten. There’s a high chamber made by the English. It’s there I’ve been living for a month. If you whistle when you come, I will meet you. On your word of honour, Jean? You will bring Yvonne?”

“We will come,” said Jean.

Bertrand flung his arms about Yvonne again. Kissed her pale forehead and her white lips as she lay unconscious. Then, with a heavy sigh, he grasped Jean’s hand, held it a moment in a terrible grip, and, with a whispered farewell, went out of the long window and through the bushes in the garden, as Jean could hear.

It was an hour before Yvonne was able to go up to her room again, and there was no sleep for her that night, nor for Jean. They stayed together, whispering or thinking in long silences in her room, till dawn. Even now they could hardly believe the thing that had happened. For two years they had thought of Bertrand as dead. He had been buried in their souls. A thousand times, in waking hours and in dreams, they had seen the vision of his body pierced by bullets lying in the ditch by the broken Calvary. Now he was living like a rat in the caves of Arras.

It was in the afternoon of the next day that, on some pretext to her mother, Yvonne went to those caves to meet her lover with Jean as her guide. Despite his blindness, he knew his way about Arras and that entrance to the caves in the ruins of the barracks. As a boy he had explored that subterranean world, dug out by the Spaniards when Arras was part of the Netherlands and when Alva’s men, with Flemish labour, had built the city—its Hôtel de Ville, and the splendour of the Grande Place, and many fine mansions—out of the sandstone beneath. Their quarries were like great vaults and had been used as cellars and storehouses by the old merchants, and afterwards as hiding-places for aristocrats when the French Revolution choked the prisons of Arras, while a monster named Joseph le Bon fed the guillotine with the heads of the noblest citizens, with priests and nuns, and poor old ladies. In 1914, when the Germans came to the walls of the city and began a bombardment which never ceased for four years, the French used the old caves as shell-proof shelters, and Jean Gilbert, with Gavaudan as his best comrade, had been quartered there with his battalion. Afterwards, when the British Army took over Arras, they fitted up the vaults with electric light, pierced long tunnels towards the German lines, and filled them with fifty thousand men—English and Scottish troops—in the night before a day in April of 1917 when they attacked beyond Arras, leaping out of the tunnels below the German trenches.... Bertrand had remembered that history and the hiding-place.

“We must be careful when we go down,” said Jean. “If Bertrand is seen in Arras they will search for him here.”

He stood inside the ruined square of the old barracks, listening for any passing footsteps. But no one came that way. No English tourist searching out the ruins. The people of Arras were busy with their reconstruction in other streets. There was that music which Volange loved to hear, because each note was playing up his fortune—the clinking of hammers and trowels and chisels on square blocks of stone from which the new Arras was being built.

It was quite dark when Jean and his sister had left the steps leading into the mouth of the caves and turned into a long gallery, and in that darkness the blind man felt his way more surely than Yvonne. He held her hand and said “Courage!” several times when she stumbled and cried out. Every now and again they had to climb over heavy blocks of stone which had fallen from the roof of these quarries when Arras had been shaken by gun-fire in the days of war. Twice their passage seemed utterly barred until Jean, feeling the walls, discovered a way round into narrower galleries. The walls dripped with an oozy slime. There was a dank, fœtid smell in this underground world. Rats scuttled past them with little squeals and scurrying of feet.

Jean kicked something, which gave a metallic clang, and after bending down and touching it, told its meaning to Yvonne.

“A steel hat. It was here the English advanced in the battle of Arras. The place is littered with the things they left behind.”

“Oh, Jean,” said Yvonne, “I feel afraid. There is the smell of death here.”

“Yes,” he said; “they brought their wounded back this way. Perhaps some of their dead lie here unburied.”

“If it were not for Bertrand——” said Yvonne.

It was only the thought of that lover waiting for her which gave her the courage to go on, that lover who had risen from the dead, as it seemed.

She saw him at last, standing at the entrance of a vault in which a light glimmered. It was the light of candles stuck into bottles on some wooden boxes. He came towards them, and Jean heard his footsteps and gave a low whistle as a signal.

“Is that you, Bertrand?” he called out, and his voice echoed down the tunnel.

“It is I,” answered the voice of his comrade. “Thank God you have come!”

He came forward with a quicker step and took Yvonne’s hands and said, “Oh, my dear, my dear! It’s brave of you to come! For a month I’ve been living in this place alone, with the rats and the dead. It seemed to me like hell. Now it’s paradise because you come to me.”

“Bertrand!” she cried. “Is it you, alive and real?”

“Yes,” he said. “Back from the dead! For a little while, but with my life still forfeit. To-morrow I shall give myself up. This is our last meeting on earth. Let us make the most of it.”

He held her embraced, covering her face with kisses, as he had done the night before when she lay unconscious in his arms. Now she wept on his shoulder and cried out pitiful words.

“You mustn’t give yourself up.... I want your love again.... We will hide here together.... I could be happy here with you, for ever.”

Bertrand gave a tragic laugh.

“They would find us! I have already been seen in Arras.”

“By whom?” asked Jean in a startled voice. “Who saw you, Bertrand?”

“It was Volange,” said Bertrand.

Yvonne gave a little cry.

“You know him? He used to be an odd-job man out at Blangy. Now he looks fat and prosperous. I came up from the caves at midnight, for air, and bumped straight into him at the corner of the rue de la Victoire, as they call it now. It was bright moonlight and he saw me clearly and thought he had seen a ghost. When I said ‘Pardon, m’sieur,’ he started running, and I slipped away into the darkness of the ruins. But he knew my face again ... and perhaps he doesn’t believe in ghosts!”

Jean and Yvonne listened to those words in a stricken silence.

It was Yvonne who told Bertrand the thing which all in Arras knew except himself. She had promised to marry that man Volange. She had been forced into it by her father. But she would never marry him now that Bertrand had come back from the dead. She would rather die than do so.

Bertrand let his arms drop to his side, and his head drooped.

“It is better that you marry him,” he said. “I am a brute to come back and spoil your life again. I am dead to the world. I have no right to your love.”

“My love is yours for ever and ever,” cried Yvonne. “Dead or alive, I belong to you, Bertrand.”

It was what she had said when she believed that his ghost had come to haunt her.

“What do you do for food?” asked Jean. “How do you live in this ghastly place?”

“There’s food enough for a hundred men,” said Bertrand. “The English left a store of rations in this vault. Tins of meat and bottles of soda-water. Even the rats can’t get at them.”

He led Yvonne into the vault which he used as a living-room. He had strewn it with flowers which he had plucked in the gardens of Arras at midnight. He had made a chair for her out of wooden boxes left by the English troops, and covered it with a piece of tapestry which he had found in a ruined house. The candles—from those old British stores—burning above the packing-cases made the white-roofed vault look like a chapelle ardente—a mortuary chapel where a coffined body might lie on its way to the grave.

“I will keep guard outside,” said Jean. “You and Yvonne have much to say.”

He paced up and down the long tunnel, fifty paces one way, fifty back again, touching the damp walls, listening to the rats squeaking and fighting, smelling the dank air in which there was a faint reek of human corruption.

The blind man’s mind was busy with the problem of his comrade who had come back from the dead. Supposing he gave himself up? Would he be shot again as a deserter, a year after the Armistice? Surely there would be mercy and pardon for him? ... But why give himself up? Why not disappear again to some other part of France, or across the Belgian frontier? He had no right to come back and claim Yvonne, on the very eve of her marriage with Volange. It would spoil her life. With a hunted man for her lover, how could she be happy and at peace? ...

For a little while Jean felt angry because Bertrand was alive again. It would have been better if he had been killed in that ditch by the broken Calvary.

Then, as he heard the murmur of those two voices in the vault, pity overwhelmed him. They were happy in their love again, for a little while. He could hear Bertrand’s kisses on Yvonne’s face, her little cries and whimperings. Once he heard her cry out, “Oh, my beloved, mon bien-aimé!” Love, in this vault of death! ... The blind man, so lonely, in eternal darkness, without the love of the woman he had craved—she had abandoned him in his blindness—envied those two in each other’s arms. He leaned against the damp walls and groaned. What a heritage of tragedy had been left by the War in France! That war which had destroyed love. That accursed war which had massacred the youth of the world, taken the joy out of life, put out the eyes of men, made them mad! Bertrand Gavaudan, so gallant, so good a soldier of France, was hiding like a wild beast because the strain of war had weakened him for a week or two. How cruel it was! How unjust! ...

Jean went back to the entrance of the vault.

“We must be going,” he said in a broken voice. “My dear Bertrand, we must leave you in this horrible place. God alone knows what is the best for you to do.”

He heard Yvonne slip from the arms of Bertrand Gavaudan. She spoke in a shrill voice.

“Jean! I am not coming back. I am staying with Bertrand. Nothing but death can take him from me now. There will be no wedding with Paul Volange. God has intervened.”

For a moment or two Jean was silent. Then he cried out harshly.

“That’s a mad idea. Impossible, Yvonne! Come back, I beseech you!”

“Yes,” said Bertrand in a low voice, “you must go back, Yvonne. You cannot stay here in this filthy hole. It’s a place of horror.”

“I am staying with my love,” she said.

No protests nor pleadings, no arguments nor cries to God, not even Jean’s effort to seize her and take her back by force could break her purpose. She slipped from her brother’s grasp, clung to her lover, and like a wild thing at bay, panting, would not be induced to come out of that dreadful vault.... It was an hour before Jean gave up, and stumbled back alone, groping his way along the tunnels, moaning as he went like a wounded man.

That evening Volange called round as usual to play a game of cards with the family of his future wife, to talk of the progress of his “Reconstruction,” to feast his eyes on the desirable beauty of Yvonne. It was three evenings from his wedding day. More presents had arrived. Also the piano which he had bought in Paris had been delivered at his house. Yet he was in low spirits, it seemed. Some uneasy thought or memory seemed to be nagging at him. And he became aware a few moments after his arrival that his future relatives were in the deepest gloom. The old man sat silent and grim. Madame Gilbert had been weeping and was trying to hide her distress. Jean was as pale as death and sat knitting with his head bowed, utterly silent.

“Where is Yvonne?” asked Volange suspiciously, with a quick glance from one face to another.

It was Madame Gilbert who answered with a little white lie.

“She is unwell this evening. She cannot come down to see you, poor child!”

“I will go up to her room,” said Volange, and he rose from his chair.

Did he suspect anything? Was it possible that he had any knowledge of the thing that had happened—the return of Bertrand, the disappearance of Yvonne? Only Jean knew that Volange had seen Bertrand by moonlight and had run away from him in fright as though he had seen a ghost. He had not told that part of the story to his father and mother, who had been dazed and overwhelmed by the news of Bertrand’s return and of Yvonne’s refusal to leave the caves.

Madame Gilbert rose from her chair and put a trembling hand on the arm of the man to whom her daughter was betrothed.

“It would be a pity to disturb her. She might be sleeping.”

Volange looked around angrily and breathed hard.

“What is all the mystery? Why do you all look as though you were hiding a murder from me? I demand to see Yvonne. If she does not come down I will go up to her.... In three days she will be my wife. I have the right——”

“She is not at home this evening,” said Madame Gilbert desperately. “She—she is staying at a friend’s house.”

“What friend?” asked Volange harshly.

Madame Gilbert hesitated. Volange knew everyone in Arras. Whatever name she mentioned he would know. And he would find out that she had lied.

Volange stared at her, waiting for her answer, and then asked a question with a violent emotion which he tried to restrain.

“Has she gone away with Bertrand Gavaudan?”

Madame Gilbert began to weep and tremble. Her husband sat with one hand plucking at his short white beard. Jean jerked his head up and his sightless eyes were fixed on Volange as though he saw that red flushed face and bald forehead wet with the sweat of rage and fear.

“Sacred name of God!” said Volange in a rasping voice. “Why do you lie to me, all of you? How long have you kept this secret from me? Why did you pretend to me that young Gavaudan was dead, when he is skulking here in Arras, afraid to show himself in daylight?”

“You have seen him?” asked Jean quietly.

“I bumped into him last night,” said Volange. “I thought it was a ghost until he spoke. If I had had my wits about me I should have seized him and called the police. He was sentenced to death as a deserter, a traitor to France. Somehow he escaped. Well, he sha’n’t escape a second time. The French law has a long arm, my friends.”

So he knew the secret of Bertrand’s crime! Was there nothing this man did not know about the people of Arras, out of whose ruin he was growing rich and fat?

Jean drew a deep breath. He understood the nature of Volange—greedy, selfish, ruthless. There would be no mercy for Bertrand Gavaudan with this man on his trail.

“He was Yvonne’s lover,” said Jean. “It was his love for her which led him into trouble. Before then he fought nobly for France. If you have any pity for human weakness, any generosity of heart for youth and love——”

“I have no pity for traitors to France,” said Volange harshly, “and I have a right to Yvonne’s love—body and soul. Is she not going to be my wife, in three days’ time? Isn’t the whole of Arras getting ready for our wedding?”

“There will be no wedding,” said Jean coldly. He knew now that he hated this man. “Yvonne will never be your wife. She belongs to Bertrand Gavaudan, dead or alive, and she is with him now, and will never leave him.”

Volange gave a cry like a wounded beast. If Jean had not hated him, he would have felt some pity for him.

He raged and stormed in uncontrollable fury. He demanded to know the whereabouts of Bertrand and Yvonne. With his own hands he would go and kill that traitor who had escaped his death sentence and come back to steal other men’s women.

“Where are they?” he cried. He came over and grasped Jean with his fat little hands and screamed at him.

“Where are they hiding? ... Sacred Name! ... Tell me where I can find them, or I’ll throttle you.”

“They’re well hidden,” said Jean. “You will never find them, Volange. And if you don’t take your greasy hands off me I’ll smash your face.”

“I want my wife!” cried Volange. He burst into tears and babbled about his “reputation,” his “honour,” his good name. He cared nothing, it seemed, for Yvonne’s happiness.

Then Jean heard his father speak and the old man’s words made him turn pale.

“Our loyalty is to you, Volange. That’s plain enough. Yvonne is pledged to you. That lover of hers has forfeited his right to her love, as well as his life to France. In my mind he is dead. I don’t acknowledge him among living men. In any case he’ll be shot when he’s caught. I will tell you where to find him.”

“Father!” cried Jean. “I implore you! By these blind eyes of mine I beseech you. For Yvonne’s sake——”

“Silence!” said the old man sternly. “I am tired of all this nonsense, Yvonne’s folly—her undutiful conduct, her ingratitude. I have promised her to Volange. That is enough. Is it right, anyhow, to allow a young girl to spend the night in the caves of Arras——”

Volange repeated those last words as though a light had burst upon him.

“The caves of Arras! ... So that is it! ... I might have guessed.”

He crossed the room and took up his hat and stick and then spoke with a harsh gravity.

“For Yvonne’s sake I advise you to keep this thing quiet. I shall have the man arrested by the military police. The Commandant is a good friend of mine. I can rely on his discretion.”

Jean made one more plea to him, but he waved it aside and left the house.

And that night through the streets of Arras in the darkness there was the quick march of four soldiers and a sergeant and one young man, their prisoner, with whitish clay upon his ragged clothes, and unkempt hair, and a little beard. There were no people in the ruined streets to see the face of a man whom some had known as a gallant young officer, now walking, handcuffed, with a haggard face, dead white, and agony in his eyes. Nor did anyone see a motor-car in which Yvonne sat weeping by the side of a French officer, who had had to use force to tear her from her lover’s arms in a flower-strewn vault, but now was pitiful.

Jean did not see his sister that night; though he heard her weeping in her room.

Early next morning some peasant woman helped him into a second-class carriage of the train to Paris, where he sat staring out of the window as though he saw the fields of France and the poppies in the tall growing wheat, and the poplars down the long straight roads.

In Paris he was nearly run over by a taxi-cab driver, not seeing he was blind, shouted at him as a sacré imbécile.

But again some women, with pity in their eyes, helped him to cross the road and get into another taxi. “What address, monsieur?” they asked.

He drove to the War Office on the left bank of the river, and was saluted by the sentries and led up the steps by an old Colonel who happened to be passing.

“You want to see someone?” he asked, looking at this young blind man with kindly eyes.

“I want to see the Chief of Staff,” said Jean. “He used to be my General of Division. It’s a matter of life and death.”

The old Colonel whistled.

“As bad as that? In time of peace!”

“It’s one of the tragedies of war. Not my own, but worse than mine.”

“The War has left many tragedies,” said the Colonel gravely.

He told Jean to wait in a room at the end of a long corridor.

“I will speak a little word to the Chief of Staff. He’s an old comrade of mine. Otherwise—without an appointment——”

He laughed, thinking of the red tape which strangled everyone in this “sacred” War Office.

Even with his “little word” Jean had to wait for two hours, and sat in a whitewashed room, dejected, with impatience nagging at his nerves.

Then at last the door opened, an orderly summoned him, and led the way down the stone-flagged corridor, which echoed with their footsteps.

“The Chief of Staff,” he said, opening a green baize door.

Jean stepped inside the room on to a soft carpet, and stood listening, at attention. He could hear a rustle of papers and then the shifting of a chair. A man said, “Bien, mon général,” and left the room by another door. Then Jean heard a heavy tread across the carpet and two hands took him by the shoulders, and drew him close to a broad chest. He was being embraced by the Chief of Staff, who had been his General of Division in the first year of the War—that great hero of France, so ruthless and yet so gentle, so terrible in attack, and yet so careful of the comforts of his troops, so regardless of men’s lives, and yet so generous in praise of valour. They had cursed him, feared him, and adored him.

“What can I do for you, mon vieux? It’s a long time since you led that raid at Souchez, hein? Well, well, I’ve not forgotten. Nor all your other service in great and dreadful days.”

“Mon général!” stammered Jean. “I have come here to ask your favour for a comrade of mine, your bravest lieutenant in the early years of the War. At Souchez. On the Somme. Before Verdun. He went a little mad. He deserted for a time. He was shot by order of the Colonel. Now he is alive again.”

The Chief of Staff gave a searching glance at the tragic face of the young blind man.

“Alive again? That seems rather unusual!”

Jean stammered out the whole pitiful story, how Bertrand had escaped, how he had been taken by the Germans from that ditch by the broken Calvary, how he had come back from Belgium and hidden in the caves of Arras, and come up like a ghost at night, and seen Yvonne again. And then that scene in the cave....

The Chief of Staff was much moved. He remembered young Bertrand Gavaudan and his years of valour. And the love story of Yvonne and that young man touched some chord of pity in his heart.

He spoke wonderful words.

“My dear young man,” he said after a long silence, when Jean’s narrative had ended with a plea for mercy, “in time of war I should have had no mercy for any man who deserted France in her hour of need, even for love’s sake, even for a day. Otherwise, the whole army would have fallen to pieces. French soldiers are great lovers! ... But now in peace time it is different. We have had enough bloodshed for a generation, and France needs children. I shall be glad if the man you call Bertrand Gavaudan marries your beautiful sister.”

Jean sprang to his feet with a wonderful happiness in his face.

“Then he is pardoned, mon général? He is a free man?”

The French Chief of Staff gave a queer little laugh.

“There is some mistake,” he said. “That man arrested in the caves of Arras cannot be Bertrand Gavaudan. A man who has been shot as a deserter cannot be alive again. Such a thing is not recognized in the War Office. It’s against the best traditions of red tape and military boards. I will telephone to the Commandant at Arras to set his prisoner at liberty. I am glad you enabled me to prevent a grave error of justice.”

He came across the room again and patted Jean on the shoulder.

“You understand? It’s best for that young man to remain dead—officially. It saves a lot of trouble. Unofficially I rejoice that you have found your comrade, and your sister her lover. By the time you get back to Arras they will be holding hands again.... Now I have a thousand papers to sign!”

He touched a bell and cut short the thanks which Jean Gilbert stammered out to him, with the tears streaming from his blind eyes.

The end of the story was in a paragraph at the bottom of a page in Le Matin.

“M. Paul Volange, builder and contractor of Arras, was arrested yesterday for corrupt claims and illegal charges against the Government, in the reconstruction of the devastated regions. It was on the eve of his marriage with the beautiful daughter of the ex-Mayor of Arras, where his arrest has caused a painful sensation.”