SILENCE
Raoul D'Argentaye, Marquis de Saint-Hubertin, had the peculiar trick of spreading a sort of hush about him wherever he went; not a hush of dread, but rather one of uneasy expectancy as if he were waiting for the answer to a silent question— though at times he put it into thin, trembling words which nobody understood except Father Gustave, the old priest who officiated at the Church of Saint-Jacques-de-Grace.
The marquis seemed to look for the answer to his question in the face of every man whom he encountered in his daily wanderings through the narrow, packed streets which converge on the Place de Thionville.
There, in the busiest section of Paris, he had lived for many years, ever since his return from Corsica, in one of those huge apartment barracks of red brick and white stucco, the front pierced with countless and unevenly spaced windows enlivened by birdcages, and flowers in pots, and rags hung out to dry, and—if the weather was warm—by the frowzy heads of housewives greeting each other in the raucous jargon of the neighborhood "Bonjour, la p'tite mère!—et la santé, ça, colic toujours?"and then some Rabelaisian jest as one of the artisans looked up from his basement shop and joined in the conversation of the women.
At first the people of the quartier—the clock-makers and printers and metal-workers whose ancestors had plied their trade here since long before the Revolution—had wondered when the marquis had come among them, with his immaculate clothes, his silk hat with the eight high-lights, and his grave, old-fashioned manners. Some had asked him why he lived here, near the Place de Thionville, in preference to his palace of the Rue de Crenelle—to receive the never-varying reply:
"There are Corsicans here. And perhaps one of them will tell me some day!"
But years had passed, and now they were familiar with the strange habits of the marquis. They knew that every time he met one of those young, dark-haired, hawk-faced Corsicans, who came to the quartier as apprentices to some ancient craft, he would stop him with the flat, trembling question, "Monsieur, did you by any chance recognize the—ah—the gentleman who called on my wife this afternoon?" and then he would walk down the street without waiting for a reply, while the children of the neighborhood, with the instinctive cruelty of the young, would run after him with loud shouts of—"Monsieur le marquis! Monsieur le marquis! You haven't got a wife!"—and gales of laughter which he did not seem to hear.
The story? Oh, yes—the reason for the dumb quest in the marquis s faded old eyes, for the hush which surrounded him, for the strange question with which he approached the hawk-faced young Corsicans—the tale of twenty years before which was known only to Father Gustave, the old priest who officiated at the Church of Saint-Jacques-de-Grâce.
In those days the marquis was young and handsome, the possessor of a princely fortune, and happily married to the young Countess Laetitia Pozzo-Paoli, the last descendant of an ancient impoverished Corsican house that had flourished and fallen in a gaunt castle which frowned above a little village on the west coast of the island.
She was superb and placid like a Raphael with a touch of Titian, and beneath the curly mist of her golden hair the heritage, doubtless, of some Viking ancestor—black eyes looked out with the sort of feminine pathos which meant nothing in particular—except to M. de Saint-Hubertin, who adored her. She was not supremely brilliant, nor had she the sound education which a Frenchwoman of her rank would have had, but she was filled with something that took the place of both; something best described as a deep, luminous vivacity and a quick, trenchant wit which was slightly cruel at times.
After their marriage, when her husband wanted to take her away from the little Corsican village, to Paris, to the palace in the Rue de Crenelle, so that she should take the place in society due her by his name and escutcheon, she laughed with a flash of small, white, even teeth.
She replied that Corsica was her own land, the land which she loved and understood—the land which loved and understood her.
"Paris?" she added, in that dramatic southern manner of hers, "society?—no, no, my friend, I want nothing of it! Paris society is only the home of petty and despicable people, of petty and despicable emotions—a thing which swings half-way between a modiste's shop and the gallows!"
"And what is Corsica?" laughed her husband.
"Don't you feel it?"—she countered—and then, "Why—it is this, this, this!"
And she pointed from the balcony of the crumbling old castle out to the sea, opaque and green and solid like a metal plaque; at the patches of tufted beach grass that turned from gold to silver as the hot south wind twisted them over, at the sky which was of such an intense blue that at times it quivered with black and purple lights.
Again, at night, when she and the marquis strolled through the tortuous, hilly streets of the village, she asked him to feel Corsica—the heart of it—and she pointed at the bold-eyed young girls, brown like Florentine bronzes, who were walking arm in arm, by threes and fours, with rhythmic, feline movements of their supple hips; at the keen-faced men with their staring eyes and the pose of head and body which spoke of love and hatred and pride—which spoke, too, of the racial instinct which was theirs.
"I love it," she murmured, breathing through her teeth in a strangely sensuous manner, and the marquis felt a tearing pang of jealousy—of the flesh, not of the mind—as if this harsh, hot land of Corsica were a man, with a man s feelings.
For love of his wife he remained. For love of her he tried to identify himself with the land.
He took part in local politics, he gave largely to local charities, endowing a hospital, a school for orphans, a public library, building an ornamental fountain in the market-place of the little village—and he felt that though the people spoke thanks, they did not give thanks.
They doffed their caps and bowed; they stepped to one side when they met him in the narrow streets; they said "bonjour, monsieur le marquis" with their metallic southern voices; they brought him fruit and flowers on the days of the great saints.
Yet they made him feel that he was a Frenchman, a foreigner, an intruder, while they were Corsicans, sufficient to themselves, doing and feeling nothing in quite the same way as other people, and placing themselves, perhaps consciously, apart from other people.
He noticed, too, that they never addressed his wife as "madame la marquise," but by her maiden name of Pozzo-Paoli, and when he mentioned it to her, half jesting and half bitter, she replied that they were right.
"Marriage," she said, "is the matter of one life—of two lives, rather—which begins with a priest's mumbled words and which stops at the grave. But my name, my clan, my blood—why, mon pauvre ami, it is like this land—eternal—the result of centuries and centuries and centuries!"
He loved her. In a way, he was happy. But he felt the barrier which was between him and her, and he tried to analyze and dissect it in his sane, logical French way.
At first he ascribed it to the difference in the sex relations which exist north and south—the difference which in the north, in France and England, gives the erotic superiority and aggressiveness to the man, and in the south to the woman, together with a sort of intense and grave adjustment of nervous energy.
But gradually he understood that, in the case of Laetitia, this analysis was wrong. He felt that the invisible barrier was not the result of inherited temperament and atavistic qualities and impulses, but due to the direct influence of the land itself—a land, he said to himself, which had the physical and spiritual attributes of Man; and he brooded on the thought until often, in his dreams, he felt like taking the land by the throat and throttling it as he would a man—a man who had stolen his wife's love.
As he walked through the village he imagined that there was laughter and mocking and enmity in the air—in the rustle of the trees, in the hot swing of the breeze, the dim stir of the dry beach grass, and the tinkling of the goat-bells.
He would have liked to ascribe it to some pathological disturbance, but he knew that he was perfectly sane—and so, early one afternoon in mid-summer, he spoke of it to his wife.
He tried to speak of it jestingly, like a man burdened by a conviction as certain as fate, and burdened, too, by the other conviction that confession and utterance would bring disbelief and stark, gaping ridicule; and so he was shocked—shocked and afraid—when his wife confirmed his subconscious suspicion in a matter-of-fact way.
"Why, yes, my friend," she said, "you are quite right. This land—this village—these rocks are living, living. I've tried to tell you so before. Corsica has a heart—and that heart does not love you—it does not like you—and I—"
"You—you—what about you?" he cried, suddenly furious.
She pulled his long Gallic mustache.
"Raoul," she said in a burst of lean, wiry vivacity, and looking straight at him, "I am a woman—and a Corsican. And this this land of mine—it will lie for me—it will kill for me, and"—she hesitated, then continued—"it will be silent for me!"
And when, quiet once more, but puzzled, he asked her to explain what she meant by her last words, she gave him a rapid little kiss and told him that it was time for his afternoon walk.
For, straight through the hottest months of the year, he had the habit of long, daily afternoon walks, at a time when all the villagers were taking their siesta behind closed shutters, and when nobody was abroad except himself and the little, pale-blue butterflies.
He walked down the length of the main street, past the little white, stone houses asleep in the sun, past the mairie where the pompous mayor was drowsing across from the pompous chief of gendarmes, past the great cast-iron fountain which he had given to the municipality; and again he felt the harsh enmity of the land.
It was hotter than usual—with a sort of hushed, dry, tense heat which sent the blood racing through his veins; and it seemed to him that, beneath his feet, from the heart of the land, he could hear a muffled, staccato breathing which was like the breathing of a huge, amorphous beast—a beast about to rise and stretch—and kill—as though, across the forests and rocks on its breast, the spirit of Corsica called to him—mocking, jeering, cruel, inimical—and currents of subterranean earth life tugged and jerked at his self.
The marquis dried his face with his handkerchief.
Once more he tried to tell himself that it was all the result of a pathological disturbance, and that what he needed was a trip to Paris, three hundred francs paid into the hands of Dr. Hector Laflique, the alienist, and a brome prescription filled at the nearest drug-store; but even as he tried to force the thought on his subconscious mind, he knew that he was only playing hide-and-seek with his sensations, that he was bluffing himself.
There was no doubt of it. The land was living, living!—just as his wife had said—and, beneath his feet, it bunched with a terrible power that sought to dispel and drive him through space—like something hated and useless which was not wanted, here, in Corsica.
His sense of hearing became tensely acute, and, in the hot, still air, the whisper of the earth grew—it flew up and called to him with a great, broken, rumbling shout.
He trembled, then lurched curiously to one side. The balance and adjustment of his physical frame seemed to shift and alter. Very suddenly a black haze shot with sulfurous-yellow, rose in the west. The ocean bloated and recoiled. The harried sun shivered out of sight. The ground writhed and groaned like a woman in travail. A wind sprang up, red-hot as from a gigantic furnace, and rattled all the million leaves.
Another writhe and groan, of unutterable suffering and unutterable loneliness.
Then he felt a strange, sinking sensation at the pit of his stomach and fell, face foremost.
An immense dark shutter dropped noiselessly, with the speed of lightning, across his mind; and, even at the moment of losing consciousness, he told himself that he had lost and that Corsica had won.
The first thing which he felt when he recovered his senses was that a star was looking at him; then two, then three, and finally he saw that it was night and that the heavens were clear again.
He staggered, rubbed his eyes, and stared. He touched his arms and legs—no—he was not wounded!
But what had happened?
He looked out, to the sea. It stretched, in a sodden, immobile calm; but suddenly it seemed to him that it had changed, that the edge of the horizon was more flat than it had been before.
Then he understood—there had been an earthquake. He turned quickly, toward the village.
It was not there.
There was only a ruined, broken mass, with pink and orange flame-tongues licking over it, while behind the stiff, lanky poplars which edged the mairie a high-blazing, fuliginous whirl of smoke was touching the skies.
He stood quite still. His eyes sought the familiar silhouette of the gaunt old castle and, with a crash in his brain, he realized that that, too, had disappeared.
The land had taken toll—it had wiped out the home which had witnessed his love and his happiness.
And Laetitia—his wife? She must be among the ruins!
With the cry of a wounded animal the marquis stumbled through the battered, crumpled streets. As he passed the mairie the whole side of it gave way and came tumbling down in a mad, twisting, smoking heap. A flaming beam grazed his face. He brushed it aside as he would an insect, and kept on.
This land, he thought incoherently as he ran, this land of Corsica—it had killed his wife; and he shook his fists at the trees and the rocks while great tears blurred his eyes.
But he kept on in the direction of the gaunt, gray blotch where the castle had stood, stepping here and there on shapeless, black things which writhed and moaned as his feet touched them.
The air was torn with the cries of animals, and of men and women and little children.
"Padre!" "Madre!" "O misericordia!" "Au secours!" "Dieu!" "Sangu Cristu!" came the shrill, agonized shouts in a mixture of French and Corsican; and he passed men who were staggering as if they were drunk, their hands stretched out in front of them; there were others who were sitting on the débris of their homes, still, vacant-eyed, as if turned into stone; and one woman had gone mad—she was dancing among the slow-lapping flames, her skirts kilted to her knees, a dead babe in her arms.
He ran on.
Would he arrive in time? Perhaps she was still alive, mercifully imprisoned by some stout stones or beams.
There was a choked, sobbing cry for help from a ruined mass to the left of the church, and he saw, sharp in the moonlight, the naked arm of a woman stretching from between a jagged pile of burning wood. The fingers, covered with rings, groped blindly, like the tentacles of an octopus.
But the marquis did not stop to help. His eyes saw; his brain registered the stark fact of the thing; but there was no meaning to it, nor was there pity in his soul.
There was only the thought of his wife, up there, among the crumbling, choking ruins.
When he reached the hill whence once the castle of the Pozzo-Paolis had frowned on the village, he saw that nothing was left standing except an old carved Gothic wall, and above it, supported by iron corbels which were twisted into the silhouette of some grinning, obscene maw, a balcony swinging crazily from side to side like a gigantic spider-web.
He stopped, out of breath, shivering in spite of the heat which fanned up from the burning village, undecided what to do and how to do it.
Of course she was down there, somewhere among the jagged stones and the charred timbers.
But where should he begin his search? He knew that he must find her even if she was dead—that he could not leave her dead body crushed and buried by Corsican soil, a trophy to the lust of this sinister, man-killing land; and so, very gently, with infinite precautions, clutching a broken beam here and a twisted, bent end of metal there, he swung himself up to the ruins of the castle as if he were afraid to hurt the loved body through the heavy layer of stone and masonry which covered it.
So he worked with superhuman strength, tearing off wood and metal like so much paper, lifting massive blocks of smooth marble and coarse grained granite, and tossing them over his shoulder as if they were pebbles, attacking with his bare hands beams studded with rusty nails and other beams still smoldering and hot.
Hour after hour he worked, stopping now and then to call "Laetitia! Laetitia!"
And when the young sun boomed up in the west he was still there, tearing, jerking, lifting, clawing, pushing—with his naked, frenzied hands, while the pulverized plaster ran through his fingers like water, and while occasionally a stone which he had braced up with terrible effort tumbled back into place—crushing him, wounding him.
Quite suddenly there was a shifting and heaving among the ruins. He saw that his labors had displaced a large mass of stones and masonry which slid to one side with a protesting rumble.
A hole, black, mysterious, yawned at his feet and, sticking out of it was a bit of rose-and-silver brocade—the wall-covering of his wife's bedroom.
The marquis stooped and reached down into the hole. Then he gave a cry.
He had touched bare flesh—flesh which was soft and clay-cold.
Again he groped. His fingers strayed up. They encountered a tangled mass of curly hair.
He withdrew his fingers and, without as much as a groan, the marquis recommenced his work.
She was in there—perhaps she was still alive.
"Mary, Mother of God!"—the prayer surged in his heart; and with kicks and jerks, pushing and clawing, frantically, desperately, he bent to the task, and it seemed to him that he was ripping away the very intestines of this harsh land which had imprisoned his best beloved in an avalanche of senseless, cruel ruin.
Finally he summoned all his strength, all his love, and all his despair into a gigantic effort
There was a crunching, protesting noise—a sudden recoil which sent the marquis spinning backward—broken stones fell with a whistling noise like musketry fire, and the hole gaped far apart.
The marquis stepped down into it. A haggard sun-ray danced in, as if to show him the way; and there, stretched on a divan, dressed in a foamy, lacy negligée, was his wife.
He looked at her. He knew at once that she was dead; and he bent down to kiss her cold lips.
"Oh, Laetitia, my love, my wife!" he cried in a voice that was a barely audible croak. "Oh, my love—"
Then, suddenly, he drew himself up again. He stood quite still.
For, bending down, he had seen another body—the body of a man—a few feet away.
He looked again at the face of his wife. An ecstatic smile was playing about the cold lips—a smile of love—of desire—
And over there was the body of a man—not a servant come in to warn his mistress when the first rumbling of the earth had shaken the towers of the ancient castle—but a well-dressed man, a gentleman—and between his cramped fingers there was a spray of stephanotis, the sweet-smelling exotic which was his wife's favorite flower—
The marquis was quite calm, quite silent. He accepted his fate.
Here, before his eyes, was the fact that his wife had deceived him, and there was no challenging it.
It did not even allow of jealousy; for jealousy is bred by doubt—and not by knowledge
But, somehow, it seemed vital to him that he should know the name of this dead man.
So he stooped down and looked; and then he gave a cry; one of those long-drawn, quivering cries in which the soul tries to burst the bonds of the tortured mind and to find refuge in the madness of forgetting.
His wife had been right. She had said that Corsica would lie for her and kill for her and be silent for her.
Here was the proof.
For the soil of Corsica had crushed the face of his wife s lover into unrecognizable pulp.
Yes—Corsica had won—in life it had stolen the love of his wife, and in death it still shielded the dishonoring secret; and slowly, like a man in a dream, the marquis walked away from the ruin, back through the streets of the crumbling village.
He stopped every man with the same, flat, trembling question:
"Monsieur, did you by any chance recognize the—ah the gentleman who called on my wife this afternoon?"
But nobody replied, though everybody knew; and so, finally, he came to Father Gustave, the old priest who for years had officiated at the village church—the old priest who afterwards followed him to Paris and remained close to him, for the love of Christ and because of the pity in his soul.