The Enemies of Women Part 59

The Prince's mind wanders from that memory. Other lost friends claim his attention. He evokes finally a more recent vision: his arrival after a long convalescence in a hospital, in Monte Carlo. On getting out of the train, Toledo deeply moved, gazes at his artificial arm, which hides but imperfectly the amputation. He had suffered for several months from the consequences of a stupid, accidental wound, received ingloriously a few days before the armistice.

He ascends the slope to the delightful little home of Don Marcos, which will be his own while he remains here. Down below, projecting into the sea, the promontory of Villa Sirena meets his eye. It now belongs to another man, and he turns his glance away to keep certain memories from welling up. In doing so his eyes chance to meet the eyes of Mado, Toledo's _senora_; eyes which doubtless consider Prince Lubimoff more interesting, with his mustache, his elderly appearance, and his uniform, than when he was the elegant master of her parents. Poor Colonel! And Michael flees the tempting glance, and the full scarlet lips, which seem to challenge him to smile.

After lunch he follows a path which zigzags up the mountain; he sees a stone wall, pa.s.ses through a door, and briefly contemplates a monument surmounted by a huge rooster.

Toledo bares his head. Peace to the heroes! Then he points to the entrance of the funereal structure.

"Poor Martinez is there."

They descend several steps to another part of the cemetery, lying in terraces on the mountain slope. On that level plot the tombs are leveled off even with the soil, with slabs of stone protected by low rectangular fences of chain, or simply bordered with flowers. An aesthetic instinct seems to explain the sparing use of ornaments here. From these mournful esplanades of death one can see a great expanse of green coast, dotted with the white of villas and towns; the rose-colored Alps, the capes of purple rock, the deep intense blue of the Mediterranean, and the soft limpid blue of a cloudless sky. And the graves seem to smile at all this splendor of Nature.

The Colonel searches among them, reading the names.

"Here, Marquis."

He points to a slab with a simple inscription: "Mary Lewis."

"Just like a bird, your Highness. One morning at dawn they found her poor little body dead on the hospital cot. She hadn't cried out, she hadn't complained; she departed as she had lived. The nurses say that the face was smiling. Her body was as light as a feather."

Around the tomb several wreaths were turning black, as though scorched by fire. Toledo seeks among these offerings of the dead woman's companions, until he points to a handful of fresh roses, which are beginning to decay.

"They must be from Lord Lewis," he goes on to say. "When things go badly in the Casino, he comes up to see his niece. Your Highness must know, of course, that with the death of Lady Lewis, he is now a Lord--really a Lord."

The Prince shrugs his shoulders. To think of human vanities in a place like this, which makes all earthly worries seem grotesque!

Don Marcos guesses his impatience, and as they descend two more terraces, he goes on explaining.

"The English woman died before the other; that is why they buried her farther up. So many people have died in the last few months!"

They reach the last terrace of the cemetery, the lowest one, a square field of reddish earth in which there are no slabs, no truncated columns, and no fences of chain. Little mounds of earth taking the form of a coffin indicate the location of the graves. Some of them have wooden crosses. From one of the latter hangs the picture of a young soldier in the center of a wreath laid there by his parents.

Two men show their heads and shoulders above the ground and disappear from sight again after emptying their shovels. They are opening a grave for some one who is soon to come. Michael notices floating up from the vibrant, luminous air, the mournful sound of a bell, tolling in an unseen church below.

The Colonel insists on explaining.

"It is a temporary grave, without any slab, without any name."

On account of the war, it was impossible to send the body to Paris. It will lie here the length of time the law demands, and then the young lady, who is her heir, will have her taken to the vault in the Pa.s.sy Cemetery where her mother is buried. He hesitates somewhat as he examines the mounds, and finally stops in front of one of them, and takes off his hat.

"Here it is."

Lubimoff cannot hide his surprise. "Here?..." He sees a heap of earth, without anything to adorn it, without anything to differentiate it from the rest, and which inspires in him no emotion at all. He looks anxiously at his companion. Hasn't he made a mistake? Are they not standing beside the tomb of some poor soldier who died of his wounds?

The Colonel, somewhat offended by the question, repeats energetically: "Here it is." He remembers that he was the only man present at the funeral. Three nurses, Senorita Valeria, and he, followed the coffin to these heights; there was no one else.

Poor d.u.c.h.ess de Delille! Toledo is moved on remembering her unexpected death. Lady Lewis had sent her to the front. Having been born in the United States, it was fairly easy for her to be admitted to a hospital unit with the American Divisions that were fighting at Chateau-Thierry.

The Prince, listening to the explanations of Don Marcos, recalls a confession Alicia once made to him. Her hands were clumsy. Her spirit, anxious to do good, weakened at the moment of action through a lack of material training. Doubtless for that reason she had been sent back a few weeks later to the Riviera, to give her services in a quieter hospital than the ambulance stations at the front.

Toledo had not seen her. She was living in the neighborhood of Monte Carlo without his ever suspecting it. The first news he had had of her was that of her death; a death which leaves the Colonel pensive whenever he recalls it. She became infected by a surgical instrument which had just been used in an operation. Perhaps it was because of the clumsiness of her hands; perhaps ... who knows! Don Marcos believes that the d.u.c.h.ess was tired of life.

"A horrible death, Marquis. I did not see her: I am glad I didn't. They tell me she was black and swollen. Besides, for several hours she was in torture, lifting herself on her head and heels, arching above the bed, with the muscles of her body tense with the most atrocious suffering.

Teta.n.u.s! How terrible for a great lady, so beautiful, so elegant to die like that! But in the midst of such pain she found the peace of mind to dictate her last testament. Senorita Valeria has inherited Villa Rosa, and several hundred thousand francs: all that she won that night at the Sporting Club. As for your Highness...."

The Prince interrupts him with a gesture. He has known for a long time, from the letters of Don Marcos, that Alicia remembered him in her last moments, leaving him heir to her silver mines in Mexico, all that she possessed on the other side of the ocean; nothing at the present moment, but in the future perhaps a fortune, almost as great as that which Lubimoff formerly held in Russia.

He remains with his eyes fixed on the grave. On it he sees some fine moss, a miniature forest, opening its branches at the breath of spring, and among the tiny leaves diminutive flowers are stirring. Several greenish black b.u.t.terflies, spotted with red, are fluttering above this murmuring forest of budding life, much as the monstrous prehistoric birds fluttered above the first vegetation of the globe.

Michael sees a relation between these insects and the spirit that dwelt in the organism now disintegrating a few feet under the ground beneath his feet. The varied, clashing colors remind him of the dead woman's soul. In the same way a few minutes before, a white b.u.t.terfly fluttering above the flowers brought by Lewis reminded him of the child-like and sublime soul of Lady Mary.

At present, sitting in the cafe, his emotions are greater than in the cemetery. He can see events through a veil of memory, spiritualized, and free from the sediment of reality.

Poor Alicia! Poor woman, disillusioned of life! The triumphant Venus, the Helen of the "old men on the wall," the beauty who was the center of the Universe, more eager for admiration than for love, is lying in this miserable cemetery, among the bodies of soldiers. Perhaps she voluntarily hastened her exit from a world in which she could not find her place, defeated by her own actions.

Our lives are nothing more than what we will them to be. We create life in our own image; it is useless for us to complain of fate: we are what we want to be. It was impossible for Alicia to end her days save in some extraordinary manner, in harmony with her previous career. He, too, has lived as most men do not live, and he will die a different death from them.

He feels neither grief nor resentment. He is surprised that he could have hated Martinez and desired this woman with such vehemence. At present he feels only melancholy and a deep sadness at the memory of those dreams that no longer exist and which are beginning to die a second death, in being forgotten by those who knew of them. They have no immortality save in the memory of the Prince, a poor memory destined to fade away in turn before many years.

In his imagination he attempts to pierce the ma.s.s of earth that covers the dead body; he makes an effort to penetrate with his vision into the densest of the shadows. Only a few months of decomposition have gone by: her personality has not yet wasted away completely. He sees her as she was in life and at the same time as she is now. Her flesh is disintegrating in little putrid rivulets that run down the folds of her clothes, blackened and eaten away. She is forced to smile at all times in the darkness: she no longer has any lips. Her eyes serve as a refuge for the prolific grave flies which engender millions and millions of destroyers. And this annihilation of something which existed, thought, and loved, is as yet only in its first stages.

After the devourers of the soft parts will come the irresistible artisans of the bones. Myriads of micro-scopical workers will plow the skeleton, cleaning away the last impurities clinging to the framework, undoing the marvelous articulations, sc.r.a.ping away the cement which holds the vertebrae together. Some day the lower jaw will loosen, falling toward the abdominal cavity, leaving the upper jaw bone, the teeth of which knew the splendor of smiles and the caress of kisses. Some other day, the skull, as the pivot on which it rests comes apart, will fall in turn and mingle with the dust of the ribs and the little bones of the feet which mark the rhythm of an undulating walk. Within a few centuries revolutions and wars will perhaps bring this skull to the surface. Why not? Lubimoff has just seen at the front numerous cemeteries swept away by gunfire, with the dead emerging from the earth, raised thus by the bursting sh.e.l.ls. And when some one, in the future, with the eternal curiosity of the Shakespearean Prince takes Alicia's skull in his hand, he will not be able to tell whether it belonged to a lady or a servant, whether it belonged to a beauty or to a drab.

Michael recalls with ironical sadness all the illusions, all the desires, he had in the past, concentrated on this nothingness. He begins to feel the need of forgetting the corpse. His eyes, looking within, see the diminutive foliage, the gaudy b.u.t.terfly, and all that nature has placed on a nameless tomb. This is what a life which considered itself superior to all others has left as the only trace of its existence.

Perhaps in the corolla of one of the little flowers there is something of Alicia's soul, the b.u.t.terflies sip it, and continue in an intoxicated flight above the tombs.

Springtime! The Prince lifts his thoughts above the sorrows of individuals. He recalls what he has seen in a corner of the world ruined by man's b.e.s.t.i.a.lity: cities in ruins; villages that raise their walls only a yard above the soil, like towns which have been excavated after a cataclysm; barns set on fire; endless fields made sterile, torn apart and turned topsy turvy by five years of bombardment; many graves--thousands of graves--millions of graves. Women, dressed in black, stagger along the roads through the ruins and the funnel-shaped chasms opened by the monstrous projectiles. They have lost their children, they have seen their husbands executed, and now they are exploring the soil in search of their homes that were....

But the Winter-time of war is over; and now the Spring of Peace is here.

The same hand, touching all things with green, puts little flowers and b.u.t.terflies on the nameless graves, hangs fragrant garlands on the fire-blackened walls, spreads a velvet carpet of emerald on the sides of the sh.e.l.l holes, makes the birds warble and the insects stir above the tombs, and guides the curling creepers over the black wood of the crosses, as though trying to change them into thyrsi.

Alas! The earth knows nothing of our sorrows.

The Prince comes out of his abstraction, and sees the Colonel greeting him from a distance.

Don Marcos is already back, and with him is _Madame_ Toledo, whose head scarcely reaches his shoulder. On the way she looks back several times, with the hope of finding herself followed by the American soldier.

On recognizing the Prince in the cafe, however, she forgets the other man, and seems to be entreating him with her eyes to leave his seat and to go out with her to the terraces.

The Colonel and his minx disappear in the direction of the terraces, and again Michael plunges into meditation. He recalls his talk with Don Marcos, shortly before, as they were descending from the cemetery.

Toledo seems inconsolable. According to him the war has not ended properly. He appears scandalized at the absurd manner of its conclusion!

What terrible times these are! The fugitive of Amerongen disconcerts and irritates him.

"And imagine me doing him the honor of comparing him to a Lieutenant! I considered him man enough at least to blow his brains out!

"For thirty years he has been frightening the world with the rattle of his saber, and with his boastful mustache; for thirty years he has been calling himself war lord, making whole races tremble at his frown, his heroic att.i.tudinizing, and his melodramatic speeches; for thirty years he has been preparing millions of men for slaughter, obliging peoples of the world to live under arms in the midst of peace. And now, when misfortune seeks him for her own, when he considers his life in danger, he shamefully flees to a foreign country and deserts his supporters, like a merchant going into a fraudulent bankruptcy."

"It is the greatest lie humanity has ever known," the Colonel shouts indignantly. "The greatest swindle in history."