Told in a French Garden - Mildred Aldrich (books to read for beginners .txt) 📗

buy it. What would a gentleman do with this?"

"Well," said the Doctor, "I don't really know what a _gentleman would_ do with it," and he added, under his breath, in English, "but I know mighty well what this fellow _could_ do with it, if he could get it," and he lighted a fresh cigarette.

The keen old eyes had watched his face.

"I don't suppose _you_ want to buy it?" she persisted.

"Well," responded the Doctor, "how can a poor man like me say, if you don't care to name your price, and unless that price is within reason?"

After some minutes of hesitation the old woman drew a deep breath. "Well," she said, with the determination of one who expected to be scoffed at, "I won't take a _sou_ less than my brother paid."

"Come on, Mother," said the Doctor, "what _did_ your brother pay? No nonsense, you know."

"Well, if you must know it was FIVE THOUSAND FRANCS, and I can't and won't sell it for less. There, now!"

There was a long silence.

The Doctor and his companion avoided one another's eyes. After a while, he said in an undertone, in English: "By Jove, I'm going to buy it."

"No, no," remonstrated his companion, her eyes gazing down the garden vista to where the wistaria and clematis and flaming trumpet flower flaunted on the old wall. "I am going to have it I thought of it first. I want it."

"So do I," laughed the Doctor. "Never wanted anything more in all my life."

"For how long," she asked, "would a rover like you want this?"

"Rover yourself! And you? Besides what difference does it make how _long_ I want it since I want it _now_? I want to give a party haven't given a party since since Class Day."

The Divorcee sighed. Still gazing down the garden she said quietly: "How well I remember ninety two!"

Then there was another silence before she turned to him suddenly: "See here all this is very irregular so, that being the case why shouldn't we buy it together? We know each other. Neither of us will ever stay here long. One summer apiece will satisfy us, though it is lovely. Be a sport. We'll draw lots as to who is to have the first party."

The Doctor waved the old woman away. Her keen eyes watched too sharply. Then, with their elbows on the table, they had a long and heated argument. Probably there were more things touched on than the garden. Who knows? At the end of it the Divorcee walked away down that garden vista, and the old woman was called and the Doctor took her at her word. And out of that arrangement emerged the scheme which resulted in our finding ourselves, a year later, within the old walls of that French garden.

Of course a year's work had been done on the interior, and Doctor and Divorcee had scoured the department for old furniture. Water had been brought a great distance, a garage had been built with servants' quarters over it there were no servants in the house, but the look of the place, we were assured, had not been changed, and both Doctor and Divorcee declared that they had had the year of their lives. Well, if they had, the place showed it.

But, as Fate would have it, the second night we sat down to dinner in that garden, news had come of the assassination of Franz Ferdinand Charles Louis Joseph Marie d'Autriche Este, whom the tragic death of Prince Rudolphe, almost exactly twenty four years and six months earlier to a day, had made Crown Prince of Austria Hungary and the tone of our gathering was changed. From that day the party threatened to become a little Bedlam, and the garden a rostrum.

In the earlier days it did not make so much difference. The talk was good. We were a travelled group, and what with reminiscences of people and places, and the scandal of courts, it was far from being dull. But as the days went on, and the war clouds began to gather, the overcharged air seemed to get on the nerves of the entire group, and instead of the peaceful summer we had counted upon, every one of us seemed to live in his own particular kind of fever. Every one of us, down to the Youngster, had fixed ideas, deep set theories, and convictions as different as our characters, our lives, our callings, and our faiths. We were all Cosmopolitan Americans, but ready to spread the Eagle, if necessary, and all of us, except the Violinist, of New England extraction, which means really of English blood, and that _will_ show when the screws are put on. We had never thought of the Violinist as not one of us, but he was really of Polish origin. His great grandfather had been a companion of Adam Czartoriski in the uprising of 1830, and had gone to the States when the amnesty was not extended to his chief after that rebellion, Poland's last, had been stamped out.

As well as I can remember it was the night of August 6th that the first serious dispute arose. England had declared war. All our male servants had left us except two American chauffeurs, and a couple of old outside men. Two of our four cars, and all our horses but one had been requisitioned. That did not upset us. We had taken on the wives of some of the men, among them Angele, the pretty wife of one of the French chauffeurs, and her two months old baby into the bargain. We still had two cars, that, at a pinch, would carry the party, and we still had one mount in case of necessity.

The question arose as to whether we should break up and make for the nearest port while we could, or "stick it out." It had been finally agreed not to evacuate _yet_. One does not often get such a chance to see a country at war, and we were all ardent spectators, and all unattached. I imagine not one of us had at that time any idea of being useful the stupendousness of it all had not dawned on any of us unless it was the Doctor.

But after the decision of "stick" had been passed unanimously, the Critic, who was a bit of a sentimentalist, and if he were anything else was a Norman Angel lite, stuck his hands in his pockets, and remarked: "After all, it is perfectly safe to stay, especially now that England is coming in."

"You think so?" said the Doctor.

"Sure," smiled the Critic. "The Germans will never cross the French frontier this time. This is not 1870."

"Won't they, and isn't it?" replied the Doctor sharply.

"They never can get by Verdun and Belfort."

"Never said they could," remarked the Doctor, with a tone as near to a sneer as a good natured host can allow himself. "But they'll invade fast enough. I know what I am talking about."

"You don't mean to tell me," said the Critic, "that a nation like Germany I'm talking now about the people, the country that has been the hot bed of Socialism, will stand for a war of invasion?"

That started the Doctor off. He flayed the theorists, the people who reasoned with their emotions and not their brains, the mob that looked at externals, and never saw the fires beneath, the throng that was unable to understand anything outside its own horizon, the mass that pretended to read the history of the world, and because it changed its clothes imagined that it had changed its spirit.

"Why, I've lived in Germany," he cried. "I was educated there. I know them. I have the misfortune to understand them. They'll stick together and Socialism go hang as long as there is a hope of victory. The Confederation was cemented in the blood of victory. It can only be dissolved in the blood of defeat. They are a great, a well disciplined, and an obedient people."

"One would think you admired them and their military system," remarked the Critic, a bit crest fallen at the attack.

"I may not, but I'll tell you one sure thing if you want a good circus you've got to train your animals. The Kaiser has been a corking ringmaster."

Of course this got a laugh, and though both Critic and Journalist tried to strike fire again with words like "democracy" and "civilization," the Doctor had cooled down, and nothing could stir him again that night.

Still the discord had been sown. I suppose the dinner table talk was only a sample of what was going on, in that month, all over the world. It did not help matters that as the days went on we all realized that the Doctor had been right that France was to be invaded, not across her own proper frontier, but across unprotected Belgium. This seemed so atrocious to most of us that indignation could only express itself in abuse. There was not a night that the dinner table talk was not bitter. You see the Doctor did not expect the world ever to be perfect did not know that he wanted it to be believed in the struggle. On the other hand the Critic, and in a certain sense the Journalist, in spite of their experiences, were more or less Utopian, and the Sculptor and the Violinist purely spectators.

No need to go into the details of the heated arguments. They were only the echo of what all the world, that had cradled itself into the belief that a great war among the great nations had become, for economic as well as humanitarian reasons, impossible, were, I imagine, at this time saying.

As nearly as I can remember it was on August 20th that the climax came. Liege had fallen. The English Expedition had landed, and was marching on Belgium. A victorious German army had goose stepped into defenseless Brussels, and was sweeping out toward the French frontier. The French advance into Alsace had been a blunder.

The Doctor remarked that "the English had landed twelve days too late," and the Journalist drew a graphic, and purely imaginary, picture of the pathos of the Belgians straining their eyes in vain to the West for the coming of the men in khaki, and unfortunately he let himself expatiate a bit on German methods.

The spark touched the Doctor off.

"By Jove," he said, "all you sentimentalists read the History of the World with your intellects in your breeches pockets. War is not a game for babies. It is war it is not sport. You chaps think war can be prevented. All I ask you is why hasn't it been prevented? In every generation that we know anything about there have been some pretty fine men who have been of your opinion Erasmus for one, and how many others? But since the generations have contented themselves with talking, and not talked war out of the problem, why, I can't see, for my part, that Germany's way is not as good as any. She is in to win, and so are all the rest of them. Schools of War are like the Schools of Art you chaps talk so much about it does not make much difference what school one belongs to the only important thing is making good."

"One would think," said the Journalist, "that you _liked_ such a