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The King In Yellow

R >> Robert W. Chambers >> The King In Yellow




Sick at heart he wandered up and down under the great Arc, striving to
occupy his mind, peering up at the sculptured cornices to read the names
of the heroes and battles which he knew were engraved there, but always
the ashen face of Hartman followed him, grinning with terror!--or was it
terror?--was it not triumph?--At the thought he leaped like a man who
feels a knife at his throat, but after a savage tramp around the square,
came back again and sat down to battle with his misery.

The air was cold, but his cheeks were burning with angry shame. Shame?
Why? Was it because he had married a girl whom chance had made a mother?
_Did_ he love her? Was this miserable bohemian existence, then, his end
and aim in life? He turned his eyes upon the secrets of his heart, and
read an evil story,--the story of the past, and he covered his face for
shame, while, keeping time to the dull pain throbbing in his head, his
heart beat out the story for the future. Shame and disgrace.

Roused at last from a lethargy which had begun to numb the bitterness of
his thoughts, he raised his head and looked about. A sudden fog had
settled in the streets; the arches of the Arc were choked with it. He
would go home. A great horror of being alone seized him. _But he was not
alone._ The fog was peopled with phantoms. All around him in the mist they
moved, drifting through the arches in lengthening lines, and vanished,
while from the fog others rose up, swept past and were engulfed. He was
not alone, for even at his side they crowded, touched him, swarmed before
him, beside him, behind him, pressed him back, seized, and bore him with
them through the mist. Down a dim avenue, through lanes and alleys white
with fog, they moved, and if they spoke their voices were dull as the
vapour which shrouded them. At last in front, a bank of masonry and earth
cut by a massive iron barred gate towered up in the fog. Slowly and more
slowly they glided, shoulder to shoulder and thigh to thigh. Then all
movement ceased. A sudden breeze stirred the fog. It wavered and eddied.
Objects became more distinct. A pallor crept above the horizon, touching
the edges of the watery clouds, and drew dull sparks from a thousand
bayonets. Bayonets--they were everywhere, cleaving the fog or flowing
beneath it in rivers of steel. High on the wall of masonry and earth a
great gun loomed, and around it figures moved in silhouettes. Below, a
broad torrent of bayonets swept through the iron barred gateway, out into
the shadowy plain. It became lighter. Faces grew more distinct among the
marching masses and he recognized one.

"You, Philippe!"

The figure turned its head.

Trent cried, "Is there room for me?" but the other only waved his arm in a
vague adieu and was gone with the rest. Presently the cavalry began to
pass, squadron on squadron, crowding out into the darkness; then many
cannon, then an ambulance, then again the endless lines of bayonets.
Beside him a cuirassier sat on his steaming horse, and in front, among a
group of mounted officers he saw a general, with the astrakan collar of
his dolman turned up about his bloodless face.

Some women were weeping near him and one was struggling to force a loaf of
black bread into a soldier's haversack. The soldier tried to aid her, but
the sack was fastened, and his rifle bothered him, so Trent held it, while
the woman unbuttoned the sack and forced in the bread, now all wet with
her tears. The rifle was not heavy. Trent found it wonderfully manageable.
Was the bayonet sharp? He tried it. Then a sudden longing, a fierce,
imperative desire took possession of him.

"_Chouette!_" cried a gamin, clinging to the barred gate, "_encore toi mon
vieux_?"

Trent looked up, and the rat-killer laughed in his face. But when the
soldier had taken the rifle again, and thanking him, ran hard to catch his
battalion, he plunged into the throng about the gateway.

"Are you going?" he cried to a marine who sat in the gutter bandaging his
foot.

"Yes."

Then a girl--a mere child--caught him by the hand and led him into the
café which faced the gate. The room was crowded with soldiers, some, white
and silent, sitting on the floor, others groaning on the leather-covered
settees. The air was sour and suffocating.

"Choose!" said the girl with a little gesture of pity; "they can't go!"

In a heap of clothing on the floor he found a capote and képi.

She helped him buckle his knapsack, cartridge-box, and belt, and showed
him how to load the chasse-pot rifle, holding it on her knees.

When he thanked her she started to her feet.

"You are a foreigner!"

"American," he said, moving toward the door, but the child barred his way.

"I am a Bretonne. My father is up there with the cannon of the marine. He
will shoot you if you are a spy."

They faced each other for a moment. Then sighing, he bent over and kissed
the child. "Pray for France, little one," he murmured, and she repeated
with a pale smile: "For France and you, beau Monsieur."

He ran across the street and through the gateway. Once outside, he edged
into line and shouldered his way along the road. A corporal passed, looked
at him, repassed, and finally called an officer. "You belong to the 60th,"
growled the corporal looking at the number on his képi.

"We have no use for Franc-tireurs," added the officer, catching sight of
his black trousers.

"I wish to volunteer in place of a comrade," said Trent, and the officer
shrugged his shoulders and passed on.

Nobody paid much attention to him, one or two merely glancing at his
trousers. The road was deep with slush and mud-ploughed and torn by wheels
and hoofs. A soldier in front of him wrenched his foot in an icy rut and
dragged himself to the edge of the embankment groaning. The plain on
either side of them was grey with melting snow. Here and there behind
dismantled hedge-rows stood wagons, bearing white flags with red crosses.
Sometimes the driver was a priest in rusty hat and gown, sometimes a
crippled Mobile. Once they passed a wagon driven by a Sister of Charity.
Silent empty houses with great rents in their walls, and every window
blank, huddled along the road. Further on, within the zone of danger,
nothing of human habitation remained except here and there a pile of
frozen bricks or a blackened cellar choked with snow.

For some time Trent had been annoyed by the man behind him, who kept
treading on his heels. Convinced at last that it was intentional, he
turned to remonstrate and found himself face to face with a fellow-student
from the Beaux Arts. Trent stared.

"I thought you were in the hospital!"

The other shook his head, pointing to his bandaged jaw.

"I see, you can't speak. Can I do anything?"

The wounded man rummaged in his haversack and produced a crust of black
bread.

"He can't eat it, his jaw is smashed, and he wants you to chew it for
him," said the soldier next to him.

Trent took the crust, and grinding it in his teeth morsel by morsel,
passed it back to the starving man.

From time to time mounted orderlies sped to the front, covering them with
slush. It was a chilly, silent march through sodden meadows wreathed in
fog. Along the railroad embankment across the ditch, another column moved
parallel to their own. Trent watched it, a sombre mass, now distinct, now
vague, now blotted out in a puff of fog. Once for half-an-hour he lost it,
but when again it came into view, he noticed a thin line detach itself
from the flank, and, bellying in the middle, swing rapidly to the west. At
the same moment a prolonged crackling broke out in the fog in front. Other
lines began to slough off from the column, swinging east and west, and the
crackling became continuous. A battery passed at full gallop, and he drew
back with his comrades to give it way. It went into action a little to the
right of his battalion, and as the shot from the first rifled piece boomed
through the mist, the cannon from the fortifications opened with a mighty
roar. An officer galloped by shouting something which Trent did not catch,
but he saw the ranks in front suddenly part company with his own, and
disappear in the twilight. More officers rode up and stood beside him
peering into the fog. Away in front the crackling had become one prolonged
crash. It was dreary waiting. Trent chewed some bread for the man behind,
who tried to swallow it, and after a while shook his head, motioning Trent
to eat the rest himself. A corporal offered him a little brandy and he
drank it, but when he turned around to return the flask, the corporal was
lying on the ground. Alarmed, he looked at the soldier next to him, who
shrugged his shoulders and opened his mouth to speak, but something struck
him and he rolled over and over into the ditch below. At that moment the
horse of one of the officers gave a bound and backed into the battalion,
lashing out with his heels. One man was ridden down; another was kicked in
the chest and hurled through the ranks. The officer sank his spurs into
the horse and forced him to the front again, where he stood trembling. The
cannonade seemed to draw nearer. A staff-officer, riding slowly up and
down the battalion suddenly collapsed in his saddle and clung to his
horse's mane. One of his boots dangled, crimsoned and dripping, from the
stirrup. Then out of the mist in front men came running. The roads, the
fields, the ditches were full of them, and many of them fell. For an
instant he imagined he saw horsemen riding about like ghosts in the
vapours beyond, and a man behind him cursed horribly, declaring he too had
seen them, and that they were Uhlans; but the battalion stood inactive,
and the mist fell again over the meadows.

The colonel sat heavily upon his horse, his bullet-shaped head buried in
the astrakan collar of his dolman, his fat legs sticking straight out in
the stirrups.

The buglers clustered about him with bugles poised, and behind him a
staff-officer in a pale blue jacket smoked a cigarette and chatted with a
captain of hussars. From the road in front came the sound of furious
galloping and an orderly reined up beside the colonel, who motioned him to
the rear without turning his head. Then on the left a confused murmur
arose which ended in a shout. A hussar passed like the wind, followed by
another and another, and then squadron after squadron whirled by them into
the sheeted mists. At that instant the colonel reared in his saddle, the
bugles clanged, and the whole battalion scrambled down the embankment,
over the ditch and started across the soggy meadow. Almost at once Trent
lost his cap. Something snatched it from his head, he thought it was a
tree branch. A good many of his comrades rolled over in the slush and ice,
and he imagined that they had slipped. One pitched right across his path
and he stopped to help him up, but the man screamed when he touched him
and an officer shouted, "Forward! Forward!" so he ran on again. It was a
long jog through the mist, and he was often obliged to shift his rifle.
When at last they lay panting behind the railroad embankment, he looked
about him. He had felt the need of action, of a desperate physical
struggle, of killing and crushing. He had been seized with a desire to
fling himself among masses and tear right and left. He longed to fire, to
use the thin sharp bayonet on his chassepot. He had not expected this. He
wished to become exhausted, to struggle and cut until incapable of lifting
his arm. Then he had intended to go home. He heard a man say that half the
battalion had gone down in the charge, and he saw another examining a
corpse under the embankment. The body, still warm, was clothed in a
strange uniform, but even when he noticed the spiked helmet lying a few
inches further away, he did not realize what had happened.

The colonel sat on his horse a few feet to the left, his eyes sparkling
under the crimson képi. Trent heard him reply to an officer: "I can hold
it, but another charge, and I won't have enough men left to sound a
bugle."

"Were the Prussians here?" Trent asked of a soldier who sat wiping the
blood trickling from his hair.

"Yes. The hussars cleaned them out. We caught their cross fire."

"We are supporting a battery on the embankment," said another.

Then the battalion crawled over the embankment and moved along the lines
of twisted rails. Trent rolled up his trousers and tucked them into his
woollen socks: but they halted again, and some of the men sat down on the
dismantled railroad track. Trent looked for his wounded comrade from the
Beaux Arts. He was standing in his place, very pale. The cannonade had
become terrific. For a moment the mist lifted. He caught a glimpse of the
first battalion motionless on the railroad track in front, of regiments on
either flank, and then, as the fog settled again, the drums beat and the
music of the bugles began away on the extreme left. A restless movement
passed among the troops, the colonel threw up his arm, the drums rolled,
and the battalion moved off through the fog. They were near the front now
for the battalion was firing as it advanced. Ambulances galloped along the
base of the embankment to the rear, and the hussars passed and repassed
like phantoms. They were in the front at last, for all about them was
movement and turmoil, while from the fog, close at hand, came cries and
groans and crashing volleys. Shells fell everywhere, bursting along the
embankment, splashing them with frozen slush. Trent was frightened. He
began to dread the unknown, which lay there crackling and flaming in
obscurity. The shock of the cannon sickened him. He could even see the fog
light up with a dull orange as the thunder shook the earth. It was near,
he felt certain, for the colonel shouted "Forward!" and the first
battalion was hastening into it. He felt its breath, he trembled, but
hurried on. A fearful discharge in front terrified him. Somewhere in the
fog men were cheering, and the colonel's horse, streaming with blood
plunged about in the smoke.

Another blast and shock, right in his face, almost stunned him, and he
faltered. All the men to the right were down. His head swam; the fog and
smoke stupefied him. He put out his hand for a support and caught
something. It was the wheel of a gun-carriage, and a man sprang from
behind it, aiming a blow at his head with a rammer, but stumbled back
shrieking with a bayonet through his neck, and Trent knew that he had
killed. Mechanically he stooped to pick up his rifle, but the bayonet was
still in the man, who lay, beating with red hands against the sod. It
sickened him and he leaned on the cannon. Men were fighting all around him
now, and the air was foul with smoke and sweat. Somebody seized him from
behind and another in front, but others in turn seized them or struck them
solid blows. The click! click! click! of bayonets infuriated him, and he
grasped the rammer and struck out blindly until it was shivered to pieces.

A man threw his arm around his neck and bore him to the ground, but he
throttled him and raised himself on his knees. He saw a comrade seize the
cannon, and fall across it with his skull crushed in; he saw the colonel
tumble clean out of his saddle into the mud; then consciousness fled.

When he came to himself, he was lying on the embankment among the twisted
rails. On every side huddled men who cried out and cursed and fled away
into the fog, and he staggered to his feet and followed them. Once he
stopped to help a comrade with a bandaged jaw, who could not speak but
clung to his arm for a time and then fell dead in the freezing mire; and
again he aided another, who groaned: "Trent, c'est moi--Philippe," until a
sudden volley in the midst relieved him of his charge.

An icy wind swept down from the heights, cutting the fog into shreds. For
an instant, with an evil leer the sun peered through the naked woods of
Vincennes, sank like a blood-clot in the battery smoke, lower, lower, into
the blood-soaked plain.




IV

When midnight sounded from the belfry of St. Sulpice the gates of Paris
were still choked with fragments of what had once been an army.

They entered with the night, a sullen horde, spattered with slime, faint
with hunger and exhaustion. There was little disorder at first, and the
throng at the gates parted silently as the troops tramped along the
freezing streets. Confusion came as the hours passed. Swiftly and more
swiftly, crowding squadron after squadron and battery on battery, horses
plunging and caissons jolting, the remnants from the front surged through
the gates, a chaos of cavalry and artillery struggling for the right of
way. Close upon them stumbled the infantry; here a skeleton of a regiment
marching with a desperate attempt at order, there a riotous mob of Mobiles
crushing their way to the streets, then a turmoil of horsemen, cannon,
troops without, officers, officers without men, then again a line of
ambulances, the wheels groaning under their heavy loads.

Dumb with misery the crowd looked on.

All through the day the ambulances had been arriving, and all day long the
ragged throng whimpered and shivered by the barriers. At noon the crowd
was increased ten-fold, filling the squares about the gates, and swarming
over the inner fortifications.

At four o'clock in the afternoon the German batteries suddenly wreathed
themselves in smoke, and the shells fell fast on Montparnasse. At twenty
minutes after four two projectiles struck a house in the rue de Bac, and a
moment later the first shell fell in the Latin Quarter.

Braith was painting in bed when West came in very much scared.

"I wish you would come down; our house has been knocked into a cocked hat,
and I'm afraid that some of the pillagers may take it into their heads to
pay us a visit to-night."

Braith jumped out of bed and bundled himself into a garment which had once
been an overcoat.

"Anybody hurt?" he inquired, struggling with a sleeve full of dilapidated
lining.

"No. Colette is barricaded in the cellar, and the concierge ran away to
the fortifications. There will be a rough gang there if the bombardment
keeps up. You might help us--"

"Of course," said Braith; but it was not until they had reached the rue
Serpente and had turned in the passage which led to West's cellar, that
the latter cried: "Have you seen Jack Trent, to-day?"

"No," replied Braith, looking troubled, "he was not at Ambulance
Headquarters."

"He stayed to take care of Sylvia, I suppose."

A bomb came crashing through the roof of a house at the end of the alley
and burst in the basement, showering the street with slate and plaster. A
second struck a chimney and plunged into the garden, followed by an
avalanche of bricks, and another exploded with a deafening report in the
next street.

They hurried along the passage to the steps which led to the cellar. Here
again Braith stopped.

"Don't you think I had better run up to see if Jack and Sylvia are well
entrenched? I can get back before dark."

"No. Go in and find Colette, and I'll go."

"No, no, let me go, there's no danger."

"I know it," replied West calmly; and, dragging Braith into the alley,
pointed to the cellar steps. The iron door was barred.

"Colette! Colette!" he called. The door swung inward, and the girl sprang
up the stairs to meet them. At that instant, Braith, glancing behind him,
gave a startled cry, and pushing the two before him into the cellar,
jumped down after them and slammed the iron door. A few seconds later a
heavy jar from the outside shook the hinges.

"They are here," muttered West, very pale.

"That door," observed Colette calmly, "will hold for ever."

Braith examined the low iron structure, now trembling with the blows
rained on it from without. West glanced anxiously at Colette, who
displayed no agitation, and this comforted him.

"I don't believe they will spend much time here," said Braith; "they only
rummage in cellars for spirits, I imagine."

"Unless they hear that valuables are buried there."

"But surely nothing is buried here?" exclaimed Braith uneasily.

"Unfortunately there is," growled West. "That miserly landlord of mine--"

A crash from the outside, followed by a yell, cut him short; then blow
after blow shook the doors, until there came a sharp snap, a clinking of
metal and a triangular bit of iron fell inwards, leaving a hole through
which struggled a ray of light.

Instantly West knelt, and shoving his revolver through the aperture fired
every cartridge. For a moment the alley resounded with the racket of the
revolver, then absolute silence followed.

Presently a single questioning blow fell upon the door, and a moment later
another and another, and then a sudden crack zigzagged across the iron
plate.

"Here," said West, seizing Colette by the wrist, "you follow me, Braith!"
and he ran swiftly toward a circular spot of light at the further end of
the cellar. The spot of light came from a barred man-hole above. West
motioned Braith to mount on his shoulders.

"Push it over. You _must_!"

With little effort Braith lifted the barred cover, scrambled out on his
stomach, and easily raised Colette from West's shoulders.

"Quick, old chap!" cried the latter.

Braith twisted his legs around a fence-chain and leaned down again. The
cellar was flooded with a yellow light, and the air reeked with the stench
of petroleum torches. The iron door still held, but a whole plate of metal
was gone, and now as they looked a figure came creeping through, holding a
torch.

"Quick!" whispered Braith. "Jump!" and West hung dangling until Colette
grasped him by the collar, and he was dragged out. Then her nerves gave
way and she wept hysterically, but West threw his arm around her and led
her across the gardens into the next street, where Braith, after replacing
the man-hole cover and piling some stone slabs from the wall over it,
rejoined them. It was almost dark. They hurried through the street, now
only lighted by burning buildings, or the swift glare of the shells. They
gave wide berth to the fires, but at a distance saw the flitting forms of
pillagers among the _débris_. Sometimes they passed a female fury crazed
with drink shrieking anathemas upon the world, or some slouching lout
whose blackened face and hands betrayed his share in the work of
destruction. At last they reached the Seine and passed the bridge, and
then Braith said: "I must go back. I am not sure of Jack and Sylvia." As
he spoke, he made way for a crowd which came trampling across the bridge,
and along the river wall by the d'Orsay barracks. In the midst of it West
caught the measured tread of a platoon. A lantern passed, a file of
bayonets, then another lantern which glimmered on a deathly face behind,
and Colette gasped, "Hartman!" and he was gone. They peered fearfully
across the embankment, holding their breath. There was a shuffle of feet
on the quay, and the gate of the barracks slammed. A lantern shone for a
moment at the postern, the crowd pressed to the grille, then came the
clang of the volley from the stone parade.

One by one the petroleum torches flared up along the embankment, and now
the whole square was in motion. Down from the Champs Elysées and across
the Place de la Concorde straggled the fragments of the battle, a company
here, and a mob there. They poured in from every street followed by women
and children, and a great murmur, borne on the icy wind, swept through the
Arc de Triomphe and down the dark avenue,--"Perdus! perdus!"

A ragged end of a battalion was pressing past, the spectre of
annihilation. West groaned. Then a figure sprang from the shadowy ranks
and called West's name, and when he saw it was Trent he cried out. Trent
seized him, white with terror.

"Sylvia?"

West stared speechless, but Colette moaned, "Oh, Sylvia! Sylvia!--and they
are shelling the Quarter!"

"Trent!" shouted Braith; but he was gone, and they could not overtake
them.

The bombardment ceased as Trent crossed the Boulevard St. Germain, but the
entrance to the rue de Seine was blocked by a heap of smoking bricks.
Everywhere the shells had torn great holes in the pavement. The café was a
wreck of splinters and glass, the book-store tottered, ripped from roof to
basement, and the little bakery, long since closed, bulged outward above a
mass of slate and tin.

He climbed over the steaming bricks and hurried into the rue de Tournon.
On the corner a fire blazed, lighting up his own street, and on the bank
wall, beneath a shattered gas lamp, a child was writing with a bit of
cinder.

"HERE FELL THE FIRST SHELL."

The letters stared him in the face. The rat-killer finished and stepped
back to view his work, but catching sight of Trent's bayonet, screamed and
fled, and as Trent staggered across the shattered street, from holes and
crannies in the ruins fierce women fled from their work of pillage,
cursing him.

At first he could not find his house, for the tears blinded him, but he
felt along the wall and reached the door. A lantern burned in the
concierge's lodge and the old man lay dead beside it. Faint with fright he
leaned a moment on his rifle, then, snatching the lantern, sprang up the
stairs. He tried to call, but his tongue hardly moved. On the second floor
he saw plaster on the stairway, and on the third the floor was torn and
the concierge lay in a pool of blood across the landing. The next floor
was his, _theirs_. The door hung from its hinges, the walls gaped. He
crept in and sank down by the bed, and there two arms were flung around
his neck, and a tear-stained face sought his own.

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