A SHORT STORY.

Waikato Times, Volume 98, Issue 16174, 27 December 1924, Page 15 (Supplement)

A SHORT STORY.

TWO GABRIELLEB.

(By Chris Sewell.)

Gabrielle Vautier was dynamic—a very Niagara in aotion, driving all lesser streams before hor.

She had been the same from childhood —apt to dominate the games she played with her small school-fellows, and to march purposefully in long religious processions .when other children wilted and lagged behind. Had she fallen into the right hands she might have made history for Brussels, but her only relative, an aunt, had died fr,om fright during the Occupation, and for several years Gabrielle was handed about among the neighbours like the queen in a child's feame of "Old Maid."

Eventually she had found an unwholesome asylum with a drunken seller of Tombola tickets in the Rue de la Serrure, not far from the Marche aux Pores, and there, like Trilby, she had been dragged up a la grace de Dieu. Just at first she had mourned her aunt with a passion which almost necessitated a double funeral, but Youth is resiliently Youth —even in the neighbourhood of a pig market; and when time had dulled th" of despair she plunged back into life again and marched purposefully as of yore. Now life for Gabrielle Vautier was a grey, boring thing which needed tltillation. During the day she sold wallets for the cartes d'identite in the Rue Neuve, and at night (one must inebriate oneself with something) she roved the streets, trim, felt-slippered, bareheaded, and piercingly beautiful, sampling the perilous lures of adolescence. Presently—like Trilby 'again —she came to grief through trust in a friend of her aunt's, and this made her reckless, so that coming to grief became quite a hobby with her. In her thorough-paced, energetic style she lapped up evil, just as under better conditions she might have lapped up good. It is not safe to prophesy what the end would have been if no brake had arrested her mad glissade. Three brakes, as a matter of fact, applied themselves in quick succession, and our business is merely to record the effect they had. Now the first brake was Adrien B rogueville. She fell in love with him in one' vehement flash —sincerely and pathetically in love. Hitherto she had known as milch of ■ love as a hen in a beet-field. She had served men, it is true, and intrigued with them, but she had despised them in her heart. In a vast, wistful sense she was still virginal. Adrien Brogueville was a commisvoyageur of a humble kind, and they liad made acquaintance when he piloted her —half-fainting —out of a seething crush on the day that the-statue of Gabrielle Petit, the heroine of the Occupation, was dedicated in the Place Saint Jean. Instinctivly— on recovery she did not treat him to the usual flashy follow-me-and-see manner. His eves very nice ones —demanded gold, not tinsel, and he got it. That, apparently he wanted nothing of her save her company and 'an occasional kiss in the shade of the Bois de la Gambre was incredible. That he talked earnestly of marriage, to be enterprised when his augmentation should occur, was more-incredible still. , , Not once in all her mad gamut of experiments had she imagined anything approaching it. . For a few delk'ious weeks she just let herself drift on this new and nattering tide of respectability,. and said no word of other tide's which had swirled and battered her and Had been far from respectable. If Adrien loved her —and indubitably he did—and she loved Adrien, what need of self-revelation? The past was the past, to be taken to one's priest—if, indeed, it were not sufficiently purified by the shining antiseptic present. She would slave for Adrien—live for Adrien —begin all over again most chastely as Adrien's "and Adrien's only. Never should he have reason to discount the gold he had gathered—never should he And in it one speck of dross. '••',, ~ Through to the soles of her slippers she dropped the Rue de la Serrure and her light o' loves, as the speeding hares in a paperchase drop their paper shreds, and took a respectable room for herself in the Rue des Paisans, not far from the Gendarmerie; and if on rare occasions she chanced across an old associate she scared the life out of, him with her baffling, uncompromising, icy aloofness. And always she was eagerly turning over in her mind ways in which she might improve herself. She bought a dictionary; she bought at atlas. She practised writing—furiously. So much for mind. There was also the body. One cannot burn the candle at both ends and a bit in the middle and keep the fresh-as-paint fragrance of eighteen. So, zealous that Adrien's bargain should be in every sense a special one, she presented herself at an adjacent clinique for overhaul and repairs. She had been feling absurdly languid of late, and her throat had bothered her. Both items she' had vaguely put down to debilite de print'e.mps, and she was tragically unprepared for the raw reason of them. The fat little doctor gave it her standing with his hands on his hips, and three' smears of blood like notes of interrogation on his white overall. "I want to get married," she bad told him proudly, and the doctor had shot at her quite distinctly and wilhout evil embellishments precisely what he thought of people who did marry in her condition, p "Pour ne pas tourner autour du pot,' elles sont tout bonnement des meurtrieres," he had said, and, pushing up her lip, he had tapped her gums with a stubby forefinger. "Look at that," he had snapped, "and that!"

But Gabrielle could not look at anything: she had turned to resume her coat and scarf with a face as white as the face of a two-days corpse. Later on the doctor spoke carelessly of a cure which might accomplish itself in two years, and then, again, might not. But how —even if perfect health were assured at the end —was it possible to ask a man to wait for two years? What reason could one give ? Nevertheless —pending the decision which she burked—she began the cure, and it was while waiting at the clinique for her first piqure that she made acquaintance with a tragic-eyed, much-too-slender girl who really was suffering from honest debility, and was trying to force, herself back into some sort or robustness with tonics and good advice. She was a dressmaker —a self-de-preciating, timid soul who would wilt or flourish, one could see, as the Fates were hard or kind.

She had recently suffered a great shock, she confided to Gabrielle, who because of her own trouble, was extra sympathetic. Her lover had

found a more desirable woman, and had come to her quite frankly to say so (for he was bien honnete), and asked for his release. . . N * t " r 7 ally, she had given it him. What would you? When a man confesses that a sun has risen in his firmament, obscuring all small stars, it is pure folly to try to hold him, hein? ■ Her own attainments were of the simple and domestic order, she deprecated. Nevertheless she believed she could have made him happy. She sighed, and the sigh cut Into Gabrielle's living flesh. Then the little thing drew from her pocket a worn photograph of the beloved in the uniform of the Guides —the regiment in which he had served during the war. And before she had taken it into her hands Gabrielle knew, as surely as she knew there was a roof over her head and a floor beneath her feet, that it woulC be the picture of Adrien Borgueviile.

It was. She gazed long and hungrily at it, and the face in various shades of sepia —smiled at her with its sedate mouth. It was the fa.ee of a man in whose veins ran the blood of clean generations —a man born to begqt sturdy sons and daughters, who would make their premiere Communion in pink-and white innocence. "And if this woman left him alone —went quite away—would he come back to you?" she asked, returning the picture. "Oh, yes, he would come back to me," the little couturiere asserted. "We played together as children. . . . There was never a shadow between us before. Only a woman bien impcrieuse could have taken him. She holds his senses, but I do not think she holds his heart." "Yet he has promised to marry her, you say?" "Yes, he has promised to marry her: but then Adrien is, before all things, bon garcon. . . ." "Only a woman bien imperieuse." Gabrielle's brain played with that phrase throughout an endless night as a cat plays with a mouse, releasing it only to capture it again. Very certainly the little couturiere was right. She, Gabrielle, was bien imperieuse. That powerful, driving Something, which always insisted that the thing undertaken should be finished to its uttermost thread, had urged her to win Adrien in spite of himself. At first she had not guessed all that the winning would entail; but if she had guessed she would have persevered just the same, because she was constitutionally incapable of not persevering.

The next morning she went out as usual, carrying her wallets, but the Rue Neuve with its chattering crowds seemed to cram itself into her head and to lift the crown of it up and down, as boiling water lifts the lid of a saucepan.

She moved on and on with no particular notion of direction, till, responding suddenly to surroundings, she found herself in the Place Saint Jean, not far from the statue of Gabrielle Petit, and almost on the identical paving-stone where she had .first met Adrien. i

The statue, from the moment of its erection,,had exercised for her a passionate fascination. She crossed over to it almost timidly and read for the hundredth time the inscription on its base: "I am to be shot to-morrow. ... I will

show them that a Belgian woman knows how to die." Those words stood out from all the rest.

The young patriot, poised gloriously above her, had written them on the day of her condemnation. In her evening prowls through the city no power had ever been known to drag the Gabrielle of flesh and blood past that inscription. With a peremptory pressure on the arm of the swain-of-the-moment she would chain him to the spot, and generally read it aloud. "Crenoml" she would say.

"A fine thing to. go like that. If they'd only given me the chance; but, instead, I show that a Belgian woman knows how to live—paafl" And she would laugh very bitterly indeed and hurry on.

And now, as she stood clasping the lapel of her neat coat, with her bare head thrown back and .one foot advanced, there was a curious likeness betwen her and the bronze figure above.

Both were about the same age and height, both had the same shaped brow, and about both was an air of defiance peculiar to people who arc up against desperate things. Standing there, Gabrielle Vautier tried to visualise precisely what she was up against. Herself, as usual. Her love for Adrien was a terrible, famishing thing. Would she have strength to walk out of his life—to meet him sometimes with his wife, and to refrain from tearing her limb from limb.? And supposing she did walk out of his life, would Adrien relinquish her, even if she could tell him all. Ho might not. No man had ever been anxious to relinquish her, though she had relinquished many. There was, therefore, no positive safety for Adrien so long as she walked the earth. His peace—his health—the birthright of little Adrlens yet to be—all would be imperilled unless she made some sort of beau geste, and made it at once.

"I will show them that a Belgian woman knows how to die."

She repeated the words just beneath her breath—more as a prayer than as an assertion; and tnon, giving herself no time to falter, she walked off to her respectable room in the Rue des Faisans with the pur poseful air of her religious procession days. But when she got there she shrank from outraging the susceptibilities of that room. Its four walls had sheltered all that was best in her—not a single tainted thought had hovered beneath its ceiling.

So she kissed the counterpane on the little bed and went ■■ out into the streets again. In the end it was the Place Saint Jean which drew her.

In the grisly hour before dawn, when Brussels turns in its sleep to slumber again, she stole out. She had possessed herself of a revolver without the smallest difficulty. Among the company she had been to keep one had only to pull an insignificant string or two to lay one's hands upon any properties of the underworld.

It was at just such a grey, grisly hour that the other Gabrielle had gone.. . . . So she knelt at the feet of that other Gabrielle with whom she had but two things in common—a Christian name and an indomitable will. And it seemed to her in the supreme and tremendous moment, when the muzzle of the revolver steadied itself against her heart, that the other Gabrielle looked down into her eyes—approving.

i An early morning milkman with his dogs and cart and jingling cans found her, and though lie posed as an Atheist among his boon companions in the cabarets, something in the nobility of the dead face touched him to the quick. 1 He crossed himself.