The End: How the Great War Was Stopped: A Novelistic Vagary
Louis Pope Gratacap
9781465656964
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
It is a pretty village, Saint Choiseul, perched on a hillside whose slopes, undeviatingly smooth and moderate, subside into a flowing land of streams and fields and white roadways. Its narrow streets are decorous with straight lines of prim poplars that have a military stiffness, and while the wind stirs their hedged leaves into audible protest—the flutter of a restrained salutation or a salute simply—it seems hardly able to extort from their braced branches the tribute of an obeisance. The houses are generally simple things of two and sometimes only one story, built of limestone blocks that have weathered into an undecipherable composition of brown blotches, staring white strips, mossy crevices, little pits of black, and crannies of nutritious decomposition, where tiny grass blades have sprouted. Under favorable skies—and they are almost always favorable at St. Choiseul—their uneven walls become fascinating studies of minor-color harmonies, and rising as they do amid beds of flowers, or just grazed grass, from which they seemed in the broad sunshine to gather subtle tints of gayety, by some evanescent reflexion, they become fascinatingly pretty, and commodious, so to say, to an artist's fancy. The clustered chimneys in some larger villa formed occasional and well-spaced visual incidents that broke the monotony of the low cottages and added a keenly valued distinction to our pleasant hamlet. It was delightful. You felt its persuasive loveliness the moment you came up the road from far-away Paris—Ah! not so far away that we could not see the Eiffel Tower on fair days, and on all days, or rather nights, note the dull flare of its lights in the sky. The road you came by crossed a stone bridge that threw its moss-covered span over a clear deep brook, running all the way from Briois, with pollarded willows on rushy banks, and drooping wistarias wildly clinging to white birches in the meadow lands of rich farmers, where the brook, loitering, made pools in which the cattle stood for hours in cream and russet dabs over the half glittering rippled water. Mon Dieu! Comme il était beau! Our house was the second in the village on the right hand side of the road, as you came from Paris, just next to Privat Deschat, an old carpet-weaver whose back-yard was as many colored as a flower garden with bright rugs, green, and yellow, and blue, and red, and brown, hung out on lines that webbed the air like a spider's nest, in the spring. And a very pleasant, inviting house ours was with its staid look of reserved happiness, I might say. There it was with its deep-silled windows, filled with geraniums and heart's ease, its wide black door, and big brass knocker, that was a dragon's tongue lolling out of a dragon's scaly jaw, its long slanting shingled roof, with two dormer windows, and its pastiche red bricks peeping in ruddy streaks through the dense ampelopsis that climbed up to the eaves, and then lurked in the dark, to make its way into the house, and lingering there, became pale and white.
