The Dark Angel Read online

  “All fight gone from him, cursing, whining, begging for mercy—to be allowed to spend the last night beside the body of his poor, dead wife!—they dragged him from the room and down the stairs. I never saw him again—until tonight!”

  The girl smiled sadly, a trace of bitterness on her lips. “Have you ever lain awake at night in a perfectly dark room and tried to keep count of time?” she asked. “If you have, you know how long a minute can seem. Imagine how many centuries I lived through while I lay inside that coffin, sightless, motionless, soundless, but with my sense of hearing abnormally sharpened. For longer years than the vilest sinner must spend in purgatory I lay there thinking—thinking. The rattle of carts in the streets and a slight increase in temperature told me day had come, but the morning brought no hope to me. It meant only that I was that much nearer the Golgotha of my Via Dolorosa.

  “At last they came. ‘Where to?’ a workman asked as rough hands took up my coffin and bore me down the stairs.

  “‘Saint Sébastien,’ the premier ouvrier returned, ‘her husband made arrangements yesterday. They say he was rich. Eh bien; it is likely so; only the wealthy and the poor dare have funerals of the third class.’

  “Over the cobbles of the streets the little, one-horse hearse jolted to the church, and at every revolution of the wheels my panic grew. ‘Surely, surely I shall gain my self-control again,’ I told myself. ‘It can’t be that I’ll lie like this until—’ I dared not finish out the sentence, even in my thoughts.

  “The night before, the waiting had seemed endless. Now it seemed the shambling, half-starved nag which drew the hearse was winged like Pegasus and made the journey to the cemetery more swiftly than the fastest airplane.

  “At last we halted, and they dragged me to the ground, rushed me at breakneck speed across the cemetery and put me down a moment while they did something to the coffin. What was it? Were they making ready to remove the lid? Had the municipal doctor remembered tardily how perfunctory his examination had been, and conscience-smitten, rushed to the cemetery to snatch me from the very jaws of the grave?

  “‘We therefore commit her body to the earth—earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust—’ the priest’s low sing-song came to me, muffled by the coffin-walls. Too late I realized the sound I heard had been only the knotted end of the lowering-rope falling on the coffin top as the workmen drew a loop about the case.

  “The priest’s chant became fainter and fainter. I felt myself sinking as though upon a slowly descending lift, while the ropes sawed and rasped against the square edges of the coffin, making noises like the bellow of a cracked bass viol, and the coffin teetered crazily from side to side and scraped against the raw edges of the grave. At last I came to rest. A jolt, a little thud, a final scraping noise, and the lowering-ropes were jerked free and drawn underneath the coffin and out of the grave. The end had come, there was no more—

  “A terrible report, louder than the bursting of a shell, exploded just above my chest, and the close, confined air inside the coffin shook and trembled like the air in a dugout when hostile flyers lay down an air-barrage. A second shock burst above my face—its impact was so great I knew the coffin lid must surely crack beneath it—then a perfect drum-fire of explosions as clod on roaring clod struck down upon the thin pine which coffined me. My ears were paralyzed with the continuous detonations, I could feel the constantly increasing weight of earth pressing on my chest, my mouth, my nostrils. I made one final effort to rouse myself and scream for help; then a great flare, like the bursting of a star-shell, enveloped me and the last shred of sensation went amid a blaze of flame and roar of thunder.

  “SLOWLY I FOUGHT BACK to consciousness. I shuddered as the memory of my awful dream came back to me. I’d dreamed that I was dead—or, rather, in a trance—that men from the pompes funèbres came and thrust me into a coffin and buried me in Saint Sébastien, and I had heard the clods fall on the coffin lid above me while I lay powerless to raise a hand.

  “How good it was to lie there in my bed and realize that it had only been a dream! There, with the soft, warm mattress under me, I could lie comfortably and rest till time had somewhat softened the terror of that nightmare; then I would rise and make a cup of tea to soothe my frightened nerves; then go again to bed and peaceful sleep.

  “But how dark it was! Never, even in those days of air-raids, when all lights were forbidden, had I seen a darkness so absolute, so unrelieved by any faintest ray of light. I moved my arms restlessly. To right and left were hard, rough wooden walls that pressed my sides and interfered with movement. I tried to rise, but fell back with a cry of pain, for I had struck my brow a violent blow. The air about me was very close and damp; heavy, as though confined under pressure.

  “Suddenly I knew. Horror made my scalp sting and prickle and the awful truth ran through me like an icy wave. It was no dream, but dreadful fact. I had emerged from the coma which held me while preparations for my funeral were made; at last I was awake, mistress of my body, conscious and able to move and scream aloud for help—but none would ever hear me. I was coffined, shut up beneath a mound of earth in Saint Sébastien Cemetery—buried alive!

  “I called aloud in agony of soul and body. The dreadful reverberation of my voice in that sealed coffin rang back against my ears like thunder-claps tossed back by mountain peaks.

  “Then I went mad. Shrieking, cursing the day I was born and the God Who let this awful fate befall me, I writhed and twisted, kicked and struggled in the coffin. The sides pressed in so closely that I could not raise my hands to my head, else I had torn my hair out by the roots and scratched my face to the bone, but I dug my nails into my thighs through the flimsy drapery of my shroud and bit my lips and tongue until my mouth was choked with blood and my raving cries were muted like the gurglings of a drowning man. Again and yet again I struck my brow against the thin pine wood, getting a fierce joy from the pain. I drew up my knees as far as they could go and arched my body in a bow, determined to burst the sepulcher which held me or spend my faint remaining spark of life in one last effort at escape. My forehead crashed against the coffin lid, a wave of nausea swept over me and, faint and sick, I fell back to a merciful unconsciousness.

  “The soft, warm sunlight of September streamed through an open window and lay upon the bed on which I lay, and from the table at my side a bowl of yellow roses sent forth a cloud of perfume. ‘I’m surely dead,’ I told myself. ‘I’m released from the grave at last. I’ve died and gone—where? Where was I? If this were heaven or paradise, or even purgatory, it looked suspiciously like earth; yet how could I be living, and if I were truly dead, what business had I still on earth?

  “Listlessly I turned my head. There, in American uniform, a captain’s bars gleaming on his shoulders, stood Donald, my Donald, whom I’d thought lost to me forever. ‘My dear,’ I whispered, but got no farther, for in a moment his arms were round me and his lips were pressed to mine.”

  Sonia paused a moment, a smile of tenderest memory on her lips, the light that never was on sea or land within her eyes. “I didn’t understand at all,” she told us, “and even now I only know it second-hand. Perhaps Donald will tell you his part of the story. He knows the details better than I.”

  3. La Morte Amoureuse

  THE LEAPING FLAMES BEHIND the andirons cast pretty highlights of red and orange on Donald Tanis and his wife as they sat hand in hand in the love seat beside the hearth rug. “I suppose you gentlemen think I was pretty precipitous in love-making, judging from the record Sonia’s given,” the young husband began with a boyish grin, “but you hadn’t watched beside her bed while she hovered between sanity and madness as I had, and hadn’t heard her call on me and say she loved me. Besides, when she looked at me that afternoon and said, ‘My dear!’ I knew she loved me just as well as though she’d taken all day long to tell me.”

  De Grandin and Renouard nodded joint and most emphatic approval. “And so you were married?” de Grandin asked.

  “You bet we
were,” Donald answered. “There’d have been all sorts of red tape to cut if we’d been married as civilians, but I was in the army and Sonia wasn’t a French citizeness; so we went to a friend of mine who was a padre in one of our outfits and had him tie the knot. But I’m telling this like a newspaper story, giving the ending first. To begin at the start:

  “The sawbones in the hospital told me I was a medical freak, for the effect of the bursting ‘coalbox’ on me was more like the bends, or caisson disease, than the usual case of shell-shock. I didn’t go dotty, nor get the horrors; I wasn’t even deafened to any extent, but I did have the most God-awful neuralgic pains with a feeling of almost overwhelming giddiness whenever I tried to stand. I seemed as tall as the Woolworth tower the minute I got on my feet, and seven times out of ten I’d go sprawling on my face two seconds after I got out of bed. They packed me off to a convalescent home at Biarritz and told me to forget I’d ever been mixed up in any such thing as a war.

  “I did my best to follow orders, but one phase of the war just wouldn’t be forgotten. That was the plucky girl who’d dragged me in that night the Fritzies tried to blow me into Kingdom Come. She’d been to see me in hospital before they sent me south, and I’d learned her name and unit, so as soon as I was up to it I wrote her. Lord, how happy I was when she answered!

  “You know how those things are. Bit by bit stray phrases of intimacy crept into our notes, and we each got so that the other’s letters were the most important things in life. Then Sonia’s notes became less frequent and more formal; finally they hinted that she thought I was not interested any more. I did my best to disabuse her mind of that thought, but the letters came farther and farther apart. At last I decided I’d better tell her the whole truth, so I proposed by mail. I didn’t like the idea, but there I was, way down in the Pyrénées, unable to get about, except in a wheel-chair, and there she was somewhere on the west front. I couldn’t very well get to her to tell her of my love, and she couldn’t come to me—and I was dreadfully afraid I’d lose her.

  “Then the bottom dropped out of everything. I never got an answer to that letter. I didn’t care a hang what happened to me then; just sat around and moped till the doctors began to think my brain must be affected, after all.

  “I guess about the only thing that snapped me out of it was America’s coming in. With my own country sending troops across, I had a definite object in life once more; to get into American uniform and have a last go at the Jerries. So I concentrated on getting well.

  “It wasn’t till the latter part of July, though, that they let me go, and then they wouldn’t certify me for duty at the front. ‘One more concussion and you’ll go blotto altogether, lad,’ the commandant told me before I left the nursing-home, and he must have put a flea in G.H.Q’s. ear, too, for they turned me down cold as caviar when I asked for combatant service.

  “I’d made a fair record with the Canadians, and had a couple of good friends in the War Department, so I drew a consolation prize in the form of a captaincy of infantry with assignment to liaison duty with the Censure Militaire.

  “The French officers in the bureau were first-rate scouts and we got along famously. One day one of ’em told me of a queer case they’d had passed along by the British M.I. It seemed there was a queer sort of bird, a Russian by the name of Konstantin, who’d been making whoopee for some time, but covering up his tracks so skillfully they’d never been able to put salt on his tail. He’d been posing as an émigré and living in the Russian colony in Paris, always with plenty of money, but no visible employment. After the way the Bolshies had let the Allies down everything Russian was regarded with suspicion, and this bird had been a source of several sleepless nights for the French Intelligence. Finally, it seemed, they’d got deadwood on him.

  “An elderly Russian who’d been billeted in the censor’s bureau and always been above suspicion had been found dead in the streets one morning, a suicide, and the police had hardly got his body to the morgue when a letter from him came to the chief. In it he confessed that he’d been systematically stealing information from censored documents and turning it over to Konstantin, who was really an agent for the Soviets working with the Heinies. Incidentally, the old fellow named several other Russians who’d been corrupted by Konstantin. It seemed his game was to lend them money when they were hard up, which they generally were, then get them to do a little innocuous spying for him in return for the loan. After that it was easy. He had only to threaten to denounce them in order to keep them in his power and make them go on gathering information for him, and of course the poor fish were more and more firmly entangled in the net with each job they did for him.

  “Just why old Captain Malakoff chose to kill himself and denounce Konstantin wasn’t clear, but the Frenchman figured that his conscience had been troubling him for some time and he’d finally gotten to the point where he couldn’t live with it any longer.

  “I’d been sitting back, not paying much attention to Lieutenant Fouchet’s story, but when he mentioned the suicide’s name my interest was roused. Of course, Malakoff isn’t an unusual Russian name, but this man had been an officer in the Imperial army in his younger days, and had been taken in the French service practically as an act of charity. The details seemed to fit my case. ‘I used to know a girl named Malakoff,’ I said. ‘Her father was in the censorship, too, I believe.’

  “Fouchet smiled in that queer way he had, showing all his teeth at once beneath his little black mustache. I always suspected he was proud of the bridge work an American dentist had put in for him. ‘Was the young lady’s name Sonia, by any chance?’ he asked.

  “That brought me up standing. ‘Yes,’ I answered.

  “‘Ah? It is doubtless the daughter of our estimable suicide, in that case,’ he replied. ‘Attend me: Two weeks ago she married with this Konstantin while she was on furlough from her unit at the front. Almost immediately after her marriage she rejoined her unit, and each day she has written her husband a letter detailing minutely the regiments and arms of service to which the wounded men she carried have belonged. These letters have, of course, been held for us by the British, and voilà, our case is complete. We are prepared to spring our trap. Captain Malakoff we buried with full military honors; no one suspects he has confessed. Tonight or tomorrow we all arrest this Konstantin and his accomplices.’ He paused and smiled unpleasantly; then: ‘It is dull work for the troops stationed here in Paris,’ he added. ‘They will appreciate a little target practice.’

  “‘But—but what of Sonia—Madame Konstantin?’ I asked.

  “‘I think that we can let the lady go,’ he said. ‘Doubtless she was but a tool in her husband’s hands; the same influence which drove her father from his loyalty may have been exerted on her; he is a very devil with the women, this Konstantin. Besides, several of his aides have confessed, so we have ample evidence on which to send him to the firing-party without the so pitiful little spy-letters his wife wrote to him. She must be dismissed from the service, of course, and never may she serve in any capacity, either with the civil or military governments, but at least she will be spared a court-martial and public disgrace. Am I not kind, my friend?’

  “A few days later he came to me with a serious face. ‘The man Konstantin has been arrested,’ he said, ‘but his wife, hélas, she is no more. The night before last she died in their apartment—fell down the stairs and broke her lovely neck, I’m told—and yesterday they buried her in Saint Sébastien. Courage, my friend!’ he added as he saw my face. ‘These incidents are most regrettable, but—there is much sorrow in the world today—c’est la guerre.’

  “He looked at me a moment; then: ‘You loved her?’ he asked softly.

  “‘Better than my life,’ I answered. ‘It was only the thought of her that brought me through—she dragged me in and saved my life one night out by Lens when the Jerries knocked me over with an air-bomb.’

  “‘Mon pauvre garçon!’ he sympathized. Then: ‘Consider me, my friend, th
ere is a rumor—oh, a very unsubstantiated rumor, but still a rumor, that poor Madame Konstantin did not die an entirely natural death. An aged widow-neighbor of hers has related stories of a woman’s cries for mercy, as though she were most brutally beaten, coming from the Konstantin apartment. One does not know this is a fact. The old talk much, and frequently without good reason, but—’

  “‘The dog!’ I interrupted. ‘The cowardly dog, if he hit Sonia I’ll—’

  “Fouchet broke in. ‘I shall attend the execution tomorrow,’ he informed me. ‘Would not you like to do the same?’

  “Why I said yes I’ve no idea, but something, some force outside me, seemed to urge me to accept the invitation, and so it was arranged that I should go.

  “A few hooded street lamps were battling ineffectually with the foggy darkness when we arrived at the Santé Prison a little after three next morning. Several motor cars were parked in the quadrangle and a sergeant assigned us seats in one of them. After what seemed an interminable wait, we saw a little knot of people come from one of the narrow doors leading into the courtyard—several officers in blue and black uniforms, a civilian handcuffed to two gendarmes, and a priest—and enter a car toward the head of the procession. In a moment we were under way, and I caught myself comparing our motorcade to a funeral procession on its way to the cemetery.

  “A pale streak of dawn was showing in the east, bringing the gabled roofs and towers out in faint silhouette as we swung into the Place de la Nation. The military chauffeurs put on speed and we were soon in the Cours de Vincennes, the historic old fortification looming gloomy and forbidding against the sky as we dashed noiselessly on to the champ d’execution, where two companies of infantry in horizon blue were drawn up facing each other, leaving a narrow lane between. At the farther end of this aisle a stake of two-by-four had been driven into the turf, and behind and a little to the left stood a two-horse black-curtained van, from the rear of which could be seen protruding the butt of a deal coffin, rough and unfinished as a hardware merchant’s packing-case. A trio of unshaven workmen in black smocks lounged beside the wagon, a fourth stood at the horses’ heads.