The King in Yellow, Robert W. Chambers [best short novels .TXT] 📗

from behind it, aiming a blow at his head with a rammer, but stumbled back shrieking with a bayonet through his neck, and Trent knew that he had killed. Mechanically he stooped to pick up his rifle, but the bayonet was still in the man, who lay, beating with red hands against the sod. It sickened him and he leaned on the cannon. Men were fighting all around him now, and the air was foul with smoke and sweat. Somebody seized him from behind and another in front, but others in turn seized them or struck them solid blows. The click! click! click! of bayonets infuriated him, and he grasped the rammer and struck out blindly until it was shivered to pieces.

A man threw his arm around his neck and bore him to the ground, but he throttled him and raised himself on his knees. He saw a comrade seize the cannon, and fall across it with his skull crushed in; he saw the colonel tumble clean out of his saddle into the mud; then consciousness fled.

When he came to himself, he was lying on the embankment among the twisted rails. On every side huddled men who cried out and cursed and fled away into the fog, and he staggered to his feet and followed them. Once he stopped to help a comrade with a bandaged jaw, who could not speak but clung to his arm for a time and then fell dead in the freezing mire; and again he aided another, who groaned: “Trent, c’est moi⁠—Philippe,” until a sudden volley in the midst relieved him of his charge.

An icy wind swept down from the heights, cutting the fog into shreds. For an instant, with an evil leer the sun peered through the naked woods of Vincennes, sank like a blood-clot in the battery smoke, lower, lower, into the blood-soaked plain.

IV

When midnight sounded from the belfry of St. Sulpice the gates of Paris were still choked with fragments of what had once been an army.

They entered with the night, a sullen horde, spattered with slime, faint with hunger and exhaustion. There was little disorder at first, and the throng at the gates parted silently as the troops tramped along the freezing streets. Confusion came as the hours passed. Swiftly and more swiftly, crowding squadron after squadron and battery on battery, horses plunging and caissons jolting, the remnants from the front surged through the gates, a chaos of cavalry and artillery struggling for the right of way. Close upon them stumbled the infantry; here a skeleton of a regiment marching with a desperate attempt at order, there a riotous mob of Mobiles crushing their way to the streets, then a turmoil of horsemen, cannon, troops without officers, officers without men, then again a line of ambulances, the wheels groaning under their heavy loads.

Dumb with misery the crowd looked on.

All through the day the ambulances had been arriving, and all day long the ragged throng whimpered and shivered by the barriers. At noon the crowd was increased tenfold, filling the squares about the gates, and swarming over the inner fortifications.

At four o’clock in the afternoon the German batteries suddenly wreathed themselves in smoke, and the shells fell fast on Montparnasse. At twenty minutes after four two projectiles struck a house in the Rue de Bac, and a moment later the first shell fell in the Latin Quarter.

Braith was painting in bed when West came in very much scared.

“I wish you would come down; our house has been knocked into a cocked hat, and I’m afraid that some of the pillagers may take it into their heads to pay us a visit tonight.”

Braith jumped out of bed and bundled himself into a garment which had once been an overcoat.

“Anybody hurt?” he inquired, struggling with a sleeve full of dilapidated lining.

“No. Colette is barricaded in the cellar, and the concierge ran away to the fortifications. There will be a rough gang there if the bombardment keeps up. You might help us⁠—”

“Of course,” said Braith; but it was not until they had reached the Rue Serpente and had turned in the passage which led to West’s cellar, that the latter cried: “Have you seen Jack Trent, today?”

“No,” replied Braith, looking troubled, “he was not at Ambulance Headquarters.”

“He stayed to take care of Sylvia, I suppose.”

A bomb came crashing through the roof of a house at the end of the alley and burst in the basement, showering the street with slate and plaster. A second struck a chimney and plunged into the garden, followed by an avalanche of bricks, and another exploded with a deafening report in the next street.

They hurried along the passage to the steps which led to the cellar. Here again Braith stopped.

“Don’t you think I had better run up to see if Jack and Sylvia are well entrenched? I can get back before dark.”

“No. Go in and find Colette, and I’ll go.”

“No, no, let me go, there’s no danger.”

“I know it,” replied West calmly; and, dragging Braith into the alley, pointed to the cellar steps. The iron door was barred.

“Colette! Colette!” he called. The door swung inward, and the girl sprang up the stairs to meet them. At that instant, Braith, glancing behind him, gave a startled cry, and pushing the two before him into the cellar, jumped down after them and slammed the iron door. A few seconds later a heavy jar from the outside shook the hinges.

“They are here,” muttered West, very pale.

“That door,” observed Colette calmly, “will hold forever.”

Braith examined the low iron structure, now trembling with the blows rained on it from without. West glanced anxiously at Colette, who displayed no agitation, and this comforted him.

“I don’t believe they will spend much time here,” said Braith; “they only rummage in cellars for spirits, I imagine.”

“Unless they hear that valuables are buried there.”

“But surely nothing is buried here?” exclaimed Braith uneasily.

“Unfortunately there is,” growled West. “That miserly landlord of mine⁠—”

A crash from the outside,