In a certain New York drawing-room, in the early spring of the year 1887, I told a story, and propounded a problem in connection therewith, which elicited strangely varied and strangely interesting solutions, with many ethical discussions upon the point involved. So great was the volume of criticism, pro and con, brought forth by my confession, that I have determined to state the case with all possible completeness, and leave it, once and for all, to the judgment of the reader of these pages.
I must take him back with me to the spring of 1877, when in the cheering company of two or three good fellows, all of us war-correspondents, I found myself seated in a compartment of the Orient Express, leaving Paris rapidly behind us on our way to the seat of the war in the Balkan Peninsula, which had then been recently declared.
The experiences of a war-correspondent are always exciting, often perilous, and generally unique. To an even greater degree than the officer or soldier actually engaged in the field, he requires to be in the forefront of the fight, and on the principle that lookers-on see most of the game, he is often afforded opportunities of witnessing events which escape the observation even of the officers commanding, as, besides watching the actual progress of the strife, he is bound to keep an eye on surrounding circumstances, ethnological or otherwise, and is often required to play a part—important or unimportant, as the case may be—in the little personal dramas of life and death, which go to make up the history of a war.
The experience I am about to relate was one of these. I was called upon to act, almost without premeditation, in the last act of a drama which was touching, painful, and full of human interest. Whether I did right or wrong is the problem I am about to propound to you.
We sat together in the train bound eastward, chatting over the casus belli and probable result of the war, whilst the long vista of iron rails terminated in nothingness at the point of sight behind us, and landed us towards evening at the German frontier. As I wandered around amid the confusion of the douane, looking with objectless curiosity at the names inscribed upon the rummaged portmanteaux and other impediments of the European traveler, and wondering which of the harried passengers belonged to which pieces of luggage, I observed a young fellow, scarcely more than a boy, apparently, standing a little apart from the crowd, and evidently unconcerned in the general haymaking that was officially proceeding. What struck me at once about him was the shadow of a great sadness clouding his fine gray-blue eyes. He was short rather than tall, with curly yellow hair, and was dressed in gray corduroy with a quasi-military helmet on his head, a leathern belt about his waist, his legs cased in knee-high soft leather boots. His expression of great sadness attracted whilst it touched me, and, guessing his nationality to be French, I sauntered up to him and addressed some casual remark in that language, à propos of the scene before us. He replied, and we entered into conversation.
“You have got through the infliction of the custom-house,” said I.
“I have nothing but a valise,” replied he.
“Ah!” I rejoined. “You travel light, like a veteran—for your costume seems to indicate a long journey.”
“I am proceeding to the seat of war,” replied he. “I am a special correspondent.”
“Indeed! Welcome, then, camarade,” and I handed him my card in exchange for his, whereon was inscribed, “M. Maxime Durand, Correspondant Spécial du Bulletin Quotidien.”
I made him transfer his valise into our compartment, presented him to his future confrères, and before many leagues had separated us from the frontier, his sadness had apparently worn off to a great degree, and we all became the best friends in the world. Thus we reached Giurgevo, on the Danube, and set off thence in search of the Russian staff to which we were attached. By the end of the campaign, most of the boys talked a funny gibberish which they called Turkish, but at the commencement I was the only “Turk” in the party: so I had it all my own way, so to speak, and corralled the soft places in the arabas, or carts, that took us to the front. It was this, I think combined with the fact that I was the first correspondent to know him as “one of us,” and by divine right of leadership, that attached Maxime Durand especially to me. Altogether, we correspondents in the Russo-Turkish business were a joyful crew, and kept as close together as we could throughout the campaign; but my special comrade, and the pet of the whole crowd, was Maxime Durand.
He never lost heart, never complained, though he suffered terribly from cold, poor boy, and we used to chaff him unmercifully for the care with which he would put on his gloves and wax his moustaches before a triangular bit of looking-glass, before going to the front. He was the life and soul of the party; he was a really remarkable cook, and performed culinary prodigies with half a dozen looted eggs, some hedgerow weeds and an antique hen, cut off considerably past her prime by a revolver bullet. In the evenings he would sing, or rather, croon, echoes of the Champs Élysées, or tell us the most “impossible” stories till we were writhing at him. We used to rout him out of his share of our lump of ice in the small hours of the morning, to do the lighter work of the mess, but when it came to his turn to do the heavier work of the community, one of the older men used always to do it for him, assuring him that he would get his hands dirty, or break his eyeglass, or something terrible of that kind, if we suffered him to do his share of the rough work of the camp. In a word, he was our spoilt child, and if ever he happened to be late returning to quarters in the evening, we used to feel positively sick until he appeared, with probably a string of kebabs in his hand, which he had a knack of trading with confiding Turks, against an old decoration pick-up on the field, a dilapidated sword, a bunch of looted but homesick carrots, or a handful of apples, no longer “fragrant with the fire of forgotten suns.” He attributed his triumph in this direction to his eloquence in the vernacular, Maxime’s Turkish consisting of: “Vous isteiram” (“I want this”), “Vir bana bun” (“Give me this”), “Chapuk ol!” (“Look sharp”), “Soush!” (“Shut up!”), “Sheitan yah gidi!” (“Go to the ——”), and “Shekurer Effendim hazretleri!” (“Thank you, Mr. Your Excellency”). I taught him the original Turkish of these practical phrases, and more he refused to learn.
Well! well! you must forgive me for digressing in this manner, like an old man babbling about his darling. He was very dear to me, was our gold-curly headed little friar Maxime, and when he was killed, I saw tough old correspondents weep for him—quorum pars fui.
The war progressed and dwindled to its culminating point (if I may be allowed the paradox)—the Fall of Plevna. For a month we had been encamped with the Muscovite battalions, waiting for Osman Pasha’s superb defense to yield before the omnipotent generals Famine, Frost and Disease, supported by Skobeleff and Todleben.
Since the 3d of November we had been sitting before the walls inactive, waiting in grim, horrible expectancy for the heroism of the besieged to give out, for since Skobeleff’s disastrous storm of September 3d known to history as the Lovtcha attack, in which he had lost fully half of his army without impairing the position of Osman, we had learned to respect our foe and to trust to the sword, famine and disease for the winning of the game. Early on the morning of the 9th of December, however, spies brought us the intelligence that a sortie was imminent and on the 10th, the Turks having deserted the Krishin redoubt, it was occupied by a Russian battalion.
We knew that the besieging force might expect to be shelled from the heights at the dawn of the morrow, and as we were ignorant of Osman’s resources, we none of us knew for certain that we should be alive to mess together on the following evening, and I for my part wrote a letter, which I felt might be my last, to my paper and scribbled some short notes home under cover to my editor. At ten o’clock I took my dispatches to the headquarter lines, and having seen them safely en train de départ, returned to our tent.
As I approached our canvas shelter, I saw, outlined against the dim light within, a cloaked figure in a tarboosh (erroneously called a fez by the occidentals). “A Turk!” thought I as I crept up behind him and gripped him by the throat. As the starlight shone upon the colorless face I exclaimed starting back as I did so:—
“Dieu! Maxime, que fais tu là!”
“Ah! Mon cher,” replied he, “I was waiting for you—I wanted to speak to you.” On the pale drawn features I could see the traces of recent tears, but I rejoined as roughly as I could:
“How dare you rob yourself of your beauty sleep like this? Don’t you know we’ve got to turn out at dawn to-morrow in all probability?”
“Codger!” I replied (he (a perversion of the Turkish “Khodja” [teacher] bestowed upon me by “the boys” in deference to my knowledge of the language), “don’t laugh at me tonight for I’m quite serious—for once. You are my dearest friend out here—are you not?—and I want to talk to you very seriously to-night under these stars which I shall never see again.”
“Come, come, cher ami,” I said, “you mustn’t talk like that. In the first place it’s ridiculous, and in the second it’s unlucky. We knights of the pencil don’t get shot, and, of us all, you at any rate are bound to return and make some fair Graziella happy for life.”
I had taken him by the arm and we had reached, by a pathway trodden in the snow, the summit of a little earthwork thrown up by Todleben’s sappers. He pointed to the distant lights which outlined the fortifications of Plevna and said:
“Behind those walls, old fellow, lies a bullet that will find me in the field in the morning, and I want you to do me a great favor when I’m under the snow in the trenches yonder. Promise me, cher ami, promise me!”
“Well,” I replied seeing that he was bound to relieve his mind, “I promise,—the more readily as I know I shan’t be called upon to perform—what is it?”
“Thank you. I must tell you—by way of introduction—something about myself. I was born in Douai, where I lived until my parents died and I became a traveling correspondent of the Bulletin; and in Douai there lives a child whom I should have married after this campaign had I lived—we have been betrothed for many years. She is Euphrasie, the daughter of old Baptiste Sterelle, one of the most respected citizens of Douai, and we have loved one another ever since we were children—so high. When you spoke to me at the German custom-house on our way out here, you remember that I was almost heart-broken; I will tell you why. I was engaged for the Bulletin at Avrignon when I received a telegram from Paris ordering me to report myself for service at the seat of war, at ten on the following morning in Paris. My first thoughts were naturally of Euphrasie, whom I had not seen for weeks and whom I might never see again, and I left for Douai at once, intending to bid Euphrasie farewell and proceed to Paris by the midnight train. I reached Douai faint with hunger and anxiety, and on my way to Mt. Sterelle’s, I stopped at the restaurant of Père Larrée to take a glass of wine and a crust to strengthen me for my advice. Whilst I ate, there entered a man by name Nicolas Dufoure, who for many years had endeavored to supplant me in Euphrasie’s love, and who hated me with all the hatred of an unsuccessful rival. I did not want to part—even from him—in anger, so I addressed him, and, on his expressing surprise at seeing me, I told him that I was leaving for the war to-night. He could hardly believe it and I took from my pocket my editor’s telegram; as I did so, Euphrasie’s last letter to me fell from my pocket-book—I instantly replaced it, but not before he had seen the writing, for he turned white with anger and rose and left me without a word.
“I finished my little meal and proceeded in the direction of Baptiste Sterelle’s. It was twilight, and, as I mounted the little narrow street behind the Marie, which led to their house, suddenly I received a blow on the head. I remember nothing more. When I came to my senses I was the sole occupant of a third-class carriage on a train whirling I knew not whither. At the first station the guard opened the door and seeing me recovered, exclaimed:
“‘Ah! mon brave, that’s well. We are better now!’
“‘Where am I?’ said I.
“‘You are in the midnight express on your way to Paris.’
“‘And how did I get here?’
“‘You were carried into the station at Douai, and put under my charge, by a tall blonde man, who gave me your ticket, saying that you had to be in Paris early to-morrow, but had been indulging in a little farewell “jollification” with your old friends at Douai. Dieu de dieu! We all know what it is; sleep on, mon ami, we are yet some hours from Paris; you will be all right when we arrive.’ And so he left me.
“What did it mean? Who was the tall blonde man? Certainly not Dufoure, whom I thought of at once, for he is short and dark. A foot-pad no doubt—for I had been robbed of everything, my watch, my money, my pocketbook containing Euphrasie’s letter and my editor’s telegram. It was from the latter, no doubt that the robber had discovered my identity and the need in which I stood of being in Paris to-morrow, and I felt almost grateful to the unknown giant who had been so far considerate to me, though he had robbed me not only of my worldly possessions, but of my last interview with Euphrasie. But besides having been stunned I had also been drugged,—it was only twilight when I left the restaurant of Père Larrée and it was nearly one o’clock in the morning when I received the guard’s explanation at that unknown station on the road to Paris. What was to be done? How communicate with my darling in Douai? Well, I hoped that I should be able to write to her from Paris. But that was not the question, for in Douai, the telegraph operator is general retailer of public and private news.
“I reached Paris, worn out, in the early morning and put in an appearance at the office at ten o’clock. I was closeted with the editor for an hour, and received instructions to leave Paris, by the Orient Express at midday, barely time in which to make my final preparations. And thus I left la belle France behind me—now you know the cause of my misery when you met me in the German douane.
“I have written two or three times since I have been in the Balkans, but alas, it is such a chance whether private letters get through the lines, and even if they do, it is a still greater chance if they ever arrive, and I have a terrible fear that Euphrasie has never heard anything from me since I left. I had looked forward to telling her all about it on my return, now I shall never see her, or Douai, or France, again. It is only you, dear ami, who can help me now, and you will—won’t you?”
He paused, his utterance choked by a great sob. I felt dangerously near tears myself as I answered, “Yes, yes, mon garçon, come, what is it you want of me?”
“It is this,—I wear round my neck a chain on which I carry her portrait in a locket and a little gold image of la Sainte Vierge that my mother gave me when I was confirmed. When I am killed to-morrow, I implore you to seek my body among the dead. I want you to take these from my neck and carry them back to her, and tell her that I loved her and her alone, to the very end; that Maxime died in harness, with hers, the dream-face, before his eyes; that his last thoughts were of her, and tell her not to think hardly of him when you have told her the story of his last visit to Douai. Promise me, Codger, promise me.”
Of course I promised him, though I repeated my expressions of derision at his “presentiment,” and then, the stars being on the wane, I bade him get what sleep he could before the first bass notes of the orchestra should wake us to the fact that the opera had commenced.
The next morning the 11th of December, before dawn, the stir of the camp woke us, and in less than an hour when the first rays of the sun began to tinge the snow with streaks of transient crimson, that should ere long become permanent, the celebrated sortie of Osman Pasha in the direction of the Sofia road,—the Fall of Plevna—had commenced. I had routed out Maxime Durand, who had slept through the opening chords of the cannon’s music like a child, and we had ridden to the front together.
To compensate for the dangers that a correspondent has to run he has one protective axiom—it is his duty to himself and his journal to keep as much out of harm’s way as possible, and acting in this sense Maxime and I climbed into a couple of trees on a slight eminence commanding a fine view of the fortress and the trenches where the Siberian regiment lay hidden. There we sat for a couple of hours—I with my horse’s reins hooked over my foot so that should the animal take fright and start off, he would jerk me down to his back. Maxime was similarly posted about twenty yards distant. The incidents of that terrible sortie and Osman Pasha’s magnificent dying effort are historic and need no recapitulation; suffice it to say that we must have been discovered by telescope from the walls, or by the advancing columns, for suddenly a bullet lodged in the branch on which I was seated, and was immediately followed by a dozen others that whistled unpleasantly near my sacred person. I dropped into my saddle and riding over to Maxime I called out:
“Come down! they’re firing at us. Let us find some safer place.”
He came down, and seeing me lighting a cigarette he cried: “Ah! Codger, pour l’amour de Dieu et de moi! give me a cigarette, my fingers are frozen and I have not got a match.”
I rolled him a cigarette and handed it to him with my lighting apparatus, an American invention in which a spring revolves an emery wheel against a steel spike and throws a shower of sparks upon a scrap of tinder. Now, in lighting the tinder I always directed the shower straight before me, between my charger’s ears, so that the animal had never seen this miniature firework display, and it was a startling novelty to him when Maxime fired the thing a yard away from his head. He reared, turned and cantered off about thirty yards, and as I returned towards Maxime the keen intelligence of the brute, who was an old campaigner, “perceived”—as somehow or other horses do perceive, long before their riders very often—the approaching flight of a shell, and “crouched” as it were. I threw myself along his flank as circus riders do, shouting to Maxime as I did so:
“Shell!”
“Pas pour moi!” I heard him cry airily as he lit his cigarette. They were his last words,—almost as he spoke the explosion took place covering my horse and myself with snow and earth. I looked towards Maxime. Good God! shall I ever forget the horror of the sight!
A fragment of the shell had struck him full in the breast and the poor golden-haired boy was literally smashed to pieces. I draw the veil of silence over the horror of my task, and suffice it to say I found the gold chain, the locket and the image, and hung them round my own neck, where they remained till the termination of the campaign. We were a saddened and silent group in the correspondents’ mess that night. Plevna had surrendered soon after mid-day—what a day of carnage it had been—I have been in many such scenes since, but seldom have seen anything approaching it.
The war drew to a close and ended with the treaty of San Stefano. Most of us had mothers, sisters, sweethearts, wives waiting for us at home—I had none of these, I am alone in the world—so I went straight to Paris, and thence to Douai, where I arrived in the blaze of a warm spring noon. As I made my way from the station, I saw inscribed over the window of a cabaret in the main street, Larrée—Restaurateur.
“Here,” thought I, “is where the boy passed his last conscious hours in Douai!”
I went in, and seating myself before a modest déjeuner, soon succeeded in drawing mine host into conversation.
“I have just come from the war in the East,” said I by the way of introduction.
“Ah! Monsieur is from the war!” replied the garrulous Frank, rising at once to the bait, “then perhaps he has met M. Durand, the correspondent of the Bulletin Quotidien.”
“Durand?” said I reflectively—”oh yes I remember. Did you know him?”
“Do I know him! Mais oui, le scélérat! He came to Douai, and I saw him the night before he went to the war. He has stayed out there in the East has he not?”
“Yes,—he has stayed out there.”
“Ah the wretch! He was betrothed to one of the sweetest young girls in this city, but he didn’t appreciate her and has stayed out there, no doubt living like a true Turque with its immoralities and horrors.”
“How do you mean?” queried I.
“Why, the night before he left, he came to Douai and dined at the very table at which you are sitting, monsieur. And then, instead of going to say ‘good-by’ to his loved one, he got into some drunken brawl in the lower parts of the town, and had it not been for the goodness of a friend, who also loved Mlle. Sterelle, he would never have reached Paris in time to follow his duty. This friend happened to know that he had to leave, and saw him off to Paris, terribly intoxicated, and naturally the good people of Douai were very indignant.”
“And where does Mlle. Sterelle live now?”
“Ah, monsieur! Her father died suddenly, soon after Maxime departed, and left her alone in the world; and then, as she had never heard from Maxime, and heard, moreover, that he had decided to remain out there amid the horrible luxury of the East, she married M. Nicolas Dufoure—the bon bourgeois who had loved her long.”
“And did she love this M. Dufoure?”
“Not as she loved Maxime, of course, but— que voulez vous?—she was alone, deserted, with a business on her hands which she could not manage by herself, and she respected her present husband,—which is, no doubt, far better than loving him,—and she will be happier with him than she would have been with Maxime, who has turned out to be a drunkard and a sensualist.”
“Ah! and where does Mme. Dufoure live now?”
“At the top of the street, behind the Mairie, monsieur, where she and her husband carry on the business left behind him by Baptiste Sterelle.”
I thanked mine host, and, having finished my déjeuner, turned my feet in the direction of the Mairie. I found the narrow street Maxime had described to me, and climbing its treacherous cobble-stones, saw at its head a well-to-do-looking haberdasher’s shop, over the window of which was inscribed “Nicolas Dufoure, successor to Baptiste Sterelle.” I entered, ostensibly in quest of some cravats, to be served by a comely young woman, who advanced from behind the comptoir at the end of the shop. We were alone. Indeed, Douai seemed to be fast asleep in its entirety, and I had no difficulty in getting into conversation with “Madame,” whom I learnt at once to be Mme. Dufoure, née Euphrasie Sterelle.
I opened the conversation, as I had done in the case of Père Larrée, with the statement of my recent return from the theater of war, and, like the worthy restaurateur, Mme. Dufoure immediately asked me if I had known Maxime, and on my replying in the affirmative, added the question: “Why did he stay in the East, monsieur?”
” Parce que c’était plus fort que lui,” I replied, ambiguously.
“And when he left, he was fiancé to me,” exclaimed the little woman, indignantly.
“But you also, madame, have married elsewhere,” I ventured to suggest.
“And had I not the right—did I not owe it to myself, to do so?” she returned. “Maxime and I were betrothed to one another when we were only ‘so high,’ and though I had many an offer from some of the best matches in Douai, I remained faithful to my promise to him, for—I loved him. Well, m’sieur, when this war broke out, he came to Douai to see me?—not at all—to join in some drunken orgy in the lowest parts of the town, I know not where. But, unfortunately, M. Dufoure, who was there for business purposes, saw him and heard him read aloud to his vile companions, my last letter to him. Oh! I know that it was so, for M. Dufoure remembered whole passages from it, which I recognized as having written. He was naturally indignant, for he had loved me almost as long as Maxime, but he sincerely hoped that Maxime would clear himself by letter, even going morning after morning himself to the post-office to see whether he had written. But no, he kept a silence as cold as that of the grave, and when my father died and I had no one in the world, I married M. Dufoure, who offered himself at once as my protector. And now he tells me that Maxime has remained in the East to live a life Orientale. Bah! it is all that he was fit for. I do not regret him.” She paused, more to gain breath, I think than anything else, and then added: “When did you see him last, Monsieur, and where.”
“It was in the month of December, and at the Fall of Plevna, madame,” replied I, slowly, and was about to add, “he was shot down within a few yards of me,” when a great wave of thought and commiseration surged up within my soul. Thought for the details of the horrible story of treachery and lies that unfolded itself before my mental vision, and commiseration for the little woman before me, and for her lover, our poor dead Maxime.
Obviously it was this self-same Dufoure who had stunned Maxime in the dark on his last visit to Douai, and who had stolen the letter he had seen fall from the boy’s pocket—that letter which he had evidently committed to memory and declared he had heard Maxime read aloud. Obviously it was he who had suppressed Maxime’s letters if they ever reached Douai, and on this basis of trickery, treachery, and lies, had supplanted the poor golden-heady boy whom I had seen shattered by a shell.
A problem requiring almost instantaneous solution propounded itself to me as I stood in the little shop at Douai on that spring afternoon. It was this: Here was Euphrasie, married, bound irrevocably and for life to this man who had won her by fraud, but for whom she felt a calm, permanent respect, if not a love like that she had given to Maxime; on the other hand, Maxime was dead, and it could do no good, but on the contrary must do a terrible harm, to fill her young life with a ghastly passionate regret.
To fulfill my promise to Maxime and shatter the woman’s trust in the living out of a sentimental respect for the dead, or not to do so, and by the breach of trust let her continue in the path of her duty as the wife of Nicolas Dufoure, untainted by the knowledge of his crime, for crime it was—that was the question. Whilst I stood deliberating as rapidly as I could upon the problem, a short, sour-faced man entered the shop, and, curtly saluting me, spoke to Euphrasie:
“Madame Dufoure! would it not be better to attend to your business instead of chattering with strangers?”—and the little woman, courteously to me, retired with a half-suppressed sigh to her comptoir.
So this was the husband of Euphrasie Sterelle. God help her, poor child! My mind was immediately made up—better, thought I, to let her make the best of her life, such as it is, than to mar the whole of it from now henceforward with the knowledge of her husband’s baseness. Douai is a queer, primitive little place, and, not much from the outer world disturbs the placidity of its provincial existence; the chances were that the story of Maxime’s death would never reach the ears of Euphrasie Dufoure.
My mind was made up. I came away without executing my mission, and returned to Paris, where I sought Maxime’s only living relation—a sister, the wife of a jeweler in the Palais Royal. To her I confided the whole story, and the souvenirs of Maxime, which I had religiously worn ever since I took them from his mangled body.
And Maxime’s sister approved of my breach of trust.
