Read Ebook: Phantom Wires: A Novel by Stringer Arthur Brown Arthur William Illustrator

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Ebook has 1357 lines and 67106 words, and 28 pages

BELGIAN FAIRY TALES

A STORY FOR A PREFACE

The name which the Belgians give to their country is Belgique. The English form Belgium is that from the Latin of ancient days.

The country is inhabited by two races. Draw a line across the map of Belgium and you divide the kingdom into two regions, inhabited by Flemings and Walloons.

Let the line pass from east and west through Brussels. North of this, as a rule, there are farms, gardens and sea coast. Here the people speak old Dutch, or Flemish, and most of them are fishermen, farmers, seaport men and traders. South of this line are mines, factories, furnaces, or flax fields and their talk is French. They are called Walloons, which is only another way of pronouncing Gaul-loons. When Caesar met and fought with their ancestors, whom he called the Belgii, he declared them "the bravest of all."

We Americans ought to know who the Walloons are; for, in 1624, some of these people--even before the Dutch mothers and fathers, boys and girls came--settled New York and New Jersey. It was they who introduced on our soil the marguerite, or white-and-yellow daisy, and they were the first farmers in the Middle States. Moreover, when New Netherland received a civil government, it was named Nova Belgica, or New Belgium.

The finest part of Walloon Belgium is the hill country of the Ardennes. Here lived, in 1912, a boy named Emile, seventeen years old. His home was in one of those stone houses, which are common in the highlands of southern Belgium. All around him grew pine and birch trees, which made his part of the country look so different from the lowlands around Antwerp, where the tall, stiff poplars and the low branched willows abound. The one tree points its boughs up to the sky and the other down to the ground.

Emile's father was a farmer, but the land of the hill country was not rich, because it was too full of rocks and stones. The soil was quite different from that down on the flax meadows, towards France, and the flower gardens and truck farms of Flanders. Emile's father could make more money by raising horses, for the pasture was rich and splendid horses they were, so big and strong.

The buyers, from the horse markets over in Germany, came every year into the Ardennes forest country, for they liked nothing better than to get these horses for the Kaiser's artillery regiments. For, although the animals of this breed were not as big and heavy as the Flemish cart horses, they were not so slow and clumsy. In fact, there were few places in Europe, where the horses excelled, in their power to gallop while harnessed to heavy loads. They had what jockies call good "wind" and "bottom," that is, staying power, stamina, grit, or what we call, in boys and men, "pep." Emile, with his father, learned to take good care of the mares and kept them in fine condition with brush and curry comb, until their coats were glossy. One day, an unusually fine colt was born, just before Christmas of 1909.

"What shall we name it?" asked the father of his wife; for it was her favorite mare. She drove it to church every Sunday, and when born Emile's mother had named it "Jacqueline," after the famous medieval princess.

Now, it was a day or two after King Leopold had died, ending a long reign of forty-four years, and the present King Albert had become ruler of the Belgic country. Yet he did not call himself "sovereign," or "autocrat," like a Czar, or "emperor," as the German Wilhelm did, but "king of the Belgians." That is, he wished to treat his fellow countrymen not as subjects, but as gentlemen like himself. So, when he issued a proclamation, he addressed them, not as inferiors, but as "Messieurs," that is, gentlemen.

Emile's mother who had, years before, lost one of her baby boys, answered:

"Our dead ruler will have a great monument, but for Baldwin, his son, who was to have been king, instead of Albert, but died early, there will be few to remember him: So let us call our new colt 'Baldwin' and let it be Emile's own--his pet always."

"Good," said the father, and Baldwin it was, or "Baldy," for short; and the pretty young horse was given to Emile for his very own.

"It's yours to play with, and to work for you, all your life," said papa Henri, "but you must care for it, as your mother and I have cared for you."

"That I will, father. You may trust me," answered the boy.

As soon as the new long-legged stranger was able to cease taking refreshments from its mother, Emile fed the colt out of his hand. After Sunday dinner, he would go out into the garden, pluck some tops or leaves of tender plants, such as radishes, peas, or the like, hiding a lump of beet sugar under the greens. Then he would follow the path to the stable to give a treat to both mother and son. Both the old mare and young Baldy seemed to have an almost human look of gratitude, when they cast their eyes on their owners and good friends. Nevertheless, no horse ever yet learned to talk with its tail and say "thank you," like a dog.

When the time came to break Baldy to harness and for farm work, the well fed and kindly animal proved to be one of the strongest and best. It seemed equal to most horses of at least six years of age.

But it was not always sugar and young carrot tops, for Baldy! Emile usually gave it salt out of his own hand. Sometimes he loved to play a joke and even to tantalize his pet, though for a minute or two, only. When out at pasture, and its master wanted to throw the halter over its neck, Baldy would give Emile tit for tat and had his horse-fun by cantering off. Then Emile would gather up the heads of white clover and holding these, down deep in the palm of his hand, would entice Baldy near, as if it were salt. Then he would throw the halter over his neck, and Baldy was a prisoner. Emile took care not to play this trick too often, and sometimes gave his pet real salt, even when out in the field. If horses could smile, Baldy would have laughed out loud.

There were other pets in Emile's home, besides the colt; and, first of all, his dog Goldspur, named after the trophies found on the field of Courtrai, when the Flemish weavers, with their pikes, beat the French knights, in 1302. Though he worked hard all day, outdoors on the farm in summer, and tended the cows and horses in winter, he had plenty of time to give to his hares, which were so big and fat, that they took the prize at the local fair. In his loft over the barn, he had a dozen or two carrier pigeons. Some of these had been hatched on his father's farm, but most of them had been brought from Ghent, a city down on the plain, where the two rivers, the Lys and the Scheldt join. Here, where there were plenty of canals, he had a cousin Rogier, a boy of his own age. The two lads often sent messages to each other by their winged letter carriers.

The Walloon folk pronounced the name of this city of Ghent, or Gand, in the French way, which sounds a good deal like "gong"; while the Flemings, who talk Dutch, say it with a hard g, and as if "gent." We Americans put an h in the name; for fear, I suppose, lest we should pronounce it like "gent" in gentleman.

In fact, when you get into Belgium, you find that even the laws and some of the newspapers, as well as names of places, have two forms, French or Walloon, and Dutch or Flemish. The British soldiers usually take no further trouble to pronounce foreign names, except as they are spelled at home, on their island. That is the reason why, for the name of Ypres, around which the war raged during four years, one may hear the sounds--French, eepe, or epray; Flemish, i-per; and, what the English Tommies say, "wipers."

Not long after his nineteenth birthday, Emile sent to his cousin Rogier, at Ghent, a message. It was written on a note sheet, as light as tissue paper. Rolled inside a bit of tin foil, in case of rain, and with black sewing silk from his mother's work basket, it was tied on the pigeon's right leg, between its pink toes and the first joint of the knee. Safely making the journey, the bird fluttered down on Rogier's dove cote, which was set on a post in his garden. Untying the missive very gently, and letting the bird into the cote to rest, Rogier read:

Dear Cousin:

"Crops were poor this year, and father had to sell my pet horse, Baldwin. I took it hard, and almost cried, to see a German horse dealer pay down the money and lead it off. When out in the road, Baldy actually turned round and looked back at us. The very next day, word came from the army headquarters that I must report to camp at Ypres. From next week, Tuesday, I shall be a soldier under the black, yellow and red flag. Hurrah! Sister Yvette has been singing the 'Braban?onne,' when she isn't crying. I have only one sister, you know. I hope they'll put me in the cavalry; or, if not, assign me to the machine-gun battalion. Goodbye! We'll meet, when I get down into Flanders."

All too soon, the looming shadow, cast from the east, shortened and the war-storm broke. On Sunday night, August 2, 1914, Germany sent an ultimatum, demanding passage of her armies through Belgium to France. To the Kaiser, Belgium was no more than a turnpike road to Paris. The hero, King Albert, knowing he had his people behind him, refused to cringe and become a German slave. It was like the boy David defying the giant Philistine. The national flag--black, yellow and red--the ancient colors of Brabant, the central province in the kingdom of the nine that made Belgium a nation--was unfurled everywhere by "men determined to be free." That is what our Anthony Wayne said at Stony Point, in 1779.

There was an eternal menace about it, Durkin concluded. There was something subversive and undermining and unnerving in its very atmosphere. It gave him the impression of being always under glass. It made him ache for the sting and bite of a New England north-easter. It screened and shut off the actualities and perpetuities of life as completely as the drop and wings of a playhouse might. Its sense of casual and careless calm, too, seemed to him only the rest of a spinning top. Its unrelated continuities of appeal, its incessant coquetries of attire, its panoramic beauty of mountain and cape and sea-front, its parade of corporeal and egotistic pleasures, its primordial and undisguised appeal to the carnival spirit, its frank, exotic festivity, its volatile and almost too vital atmosphere, and, above all, its glowing and over-odorous gardens and flowerbeds, its overcrowded and grimly Dionysian Promenade, its murmurous and alluring restaurants on steep little boulevards--it was all a blind, Durkin argued with himself, to drape and smother the cynical misery of the place. Underneath all its flaunting and waving softnesses life ran grim and hard--as grim and hard as the solid rock that lay so close beneath its jonquils and violets and its masking verdure of mimosa and orange and palm.

He hated it, he told himself in his tragic and newborn austerity of spirit, as any right-minded and clean-living man should hate paper roses or painted faces. Every foot of it, that night, seemed a muffled and mediate insult to intelligence. The too open and illicit invitation of its confectionery-like halls, the insipidly emphatic pretentiousness of the Casino itself--Durkin could never quite decide whether it reminded him of a hurriedly finished exposition building or of a child's birthday cake duly iced and bedecked--the tinsel glory, the hackneyed magnificence, of its legitimatized and ever-orderly gaming dens, the eternal claws of greed beneath the voluptuous velvet of indolence--it all combined to fill his soul with a sense of hot revolt, as had so often before happened during the past long and lonely days, when he had looked up at the soft green of olive and eucalyptus and then down at the intense turquoise curve of the harbor fringed with white foam.

Always, at such times, he had marveled that man could turn one of earth's most beautiful gardens into one of crime's most crowded haunts. The ironic injustice of it embittered him; it left him floundering in a sea of moral indecision at a time when he most needed some forlorn belief in the beneficence of natural law. It outraged his incongruously persistent demand for fair play, just as the sight of the jauntily clad gunners shooting down pigeons on that tranquil and Edenic little grass-plot at the foot of the Promontory had done.

For underneath all the natural beauty of Monaco Durkin had been continuously haunted by the sense of something unclean and leprous and corroding. Under its rouge and roses, at every turn, he found the insidious taint.

And more than ever, tonight, he had a sense of witnessing Destiny stalking through those soft gardens, of Tragedy skulking about its regal stairways.

"That play got on your nerves, didn't it?" suddenly asked the lazy, half-careless voice at his side. Durkin and the young Chicagoan were in the musky-smelling Promenade by this time, and up past the stands at the sea-front the breath of the Mediterranean blew in their faces, fresh, salty, virile.

"This whole place gets on my nerves!" said Durkin testily. Yes, he told himself, he was sick of it, sick of the monotony, of the idleness, of the sullen malevolence of it all. It was gay only to the eyes; and to him it would never seem gay again.

"Oh, that comes of not speaking the language, you know!" maintained the other stoutly, and, at the same time, comprehensively.

He was still very young, Durkin remembered. He had toyed with art for two winters in Paris, so scene by scene he had been able to translate the little drama that had appeared so farcical and Frenchy to his older countryman in exile.

Durkin's lip curled a little.

"Why," he continued argumentatively, "everything that happened in that play might happen here, tonight, to you or me!"

"No, of course not," answered Durkin absently. Life, at that moment, was confronting him so grimly, so flat and sterile and uncompromising in its secret exactions, that he had no heart to theorize about it.

"If it doesn't hit too hard!" qualified the older man.

"For instance," maintained the young Chicagoan, once more proffering his cigarette-case to Durkin, "for instance, take that big Mercedes touring-car with the canopy top, coming down through the crowd there. You'll agree, at first sight, that such things mean good-bye to the mounted knight, to chivalry, and all that romantic old horseman business."

"I suppose so."

"But, don't you see, the horse and armor was only a frame, an accidental setting, for the romance itself! It's up to date and practical and sordid and commonplace, you'd say, that puffing thing with a gasoline engine hidden away in its bowels. It's what we call machinery. But, supposing, now, instead of holding Monsieur le Duc Somebody, or Milord So-and-So, or Signor Comte Somebody-Else, with his wife or his mistress--I say, supposing it held--well, my young sister Alice, whom I left so sedately contented at Brighton! Supposing it held my young sister, running away with an Indian rajah!"

"And you would call that romance?"

"Exactly!"

Durkin turned and looked at the approaching car.

"While, as a matter of fact," he continued, with his exasperatingly smooth smile, "it seems to be holding a very much overdressed young lady, presumably from the Folies-Berg?re or the Olympia."

The younger man, looking back from his place beside him, turned to listen, confronted by the sudden excited comments of a middle-aged woman, obviously Parisian, on the arm of a lean and solemn man with dyed and waxed mustachios.

"You're quite wrong," cried the young Chicagoan, excitedly. "It's young Lady Boxspur--the new English beauty. See, they're crowding out to get a glimpse of her!"

"Who's Lady Boxspur?" asked Durkin, hanging stolidly back. He had seen quite enough of Riviera beauty on parade.

Durkin stood indifferently, under the white glare of the electric lamp, watching the younger man push through to the centre of the roadway. The slowly-moving touring-car, hemmed in by the languid midnight movement of the street, came to a full stop almost before where he stood. It shuddered and panted there, leviathan-like, and Durkin saw the sea breeze sway back the canopy drapery.

He followed the direction of the excited young Chicagoan's gaze, smilingly, now, and with a singularly disengaged mind.

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