He ran in every direction, during the first moment of terror, and then hurled himself against the first of the three doors and tried to break it down. It did not move. It might have been an immovable block.
Then, once again, they looked at each other with eyes of fear; and the same terrible thought came over them both. The thing that had happened before was being repeated! The tragedy was being played a second time. After the mother and the father, it was the turn of the daughter and the son. Like the lovers of yesteryear, those of today were prisoners. The enemy held them in his powerful grip; and they would doubtless soon know how their parents had died by seeing how they themselves would die. … 14 April, 1895. … 14 April, 1915. …
XII
In the Abyss
“No, no, no!” cried Patrice. “I won’t stand this!”
He flung himself against the windows and doors, took up an iron dog from the fender and banged it against the wooden doors and the stone walls. Barren efforts! They were the same which his father had made before him; and they could only result in the same mockery of impotent scratches on the wood and the stone.
“Oh, Coralie, Coralie!” he cried in his despair. “It’s I who have brought you to this! What an abyss I’ve dragged you into! It was madness to try to fight this out by myself! I ought to have called in those who understand, who are accustomed to it! … No, I was going to be so clever! … Forgive me, Coralie.”
She had sunk into a chair. He, almost on his knees beside her, threw his arms around her, imploring her pardon.
She smiled, to calm him:
“Come, dear,” she said, gently, “don’t lose courage. Perhaps we are mistaken. … After all, there’s nothing to show that it is not all an accident.”
“The date!” he said. “The date of this year, of this day, written in another hand! It was your mother and my father who wrote the first … but this one, Coralie, this one proves premeditation, and an implacable determination to do away with us.”
She shuddered. Still she persisted in trying to comfort him:
“It may be. But yet it is not so bad as all that. We have enemies, but we have friends also. They will look for us.”
“They will look for us, but how can they ever find us, Coralie? We took steps to prevent them from guessing where we were going; and not one of them knows this house.”
“Old Siméon does.”
“Siméon came and placed his wreath, but someone else came with him, someone who rules him and who has perhaps already got rid of him, now that Siméon has played his part.”
“And what then, Patrice?”
He felt that she was overcome and began to be ashamed of his own weakness:
“Well,” he said, mastering himself, “we must just wait. After all, the attack may not materialize. The fact of our being locked in does not mean that we are lost. And, even so, we shall make a fight for it, shall we not? You need not think that I am at the end of my strength or my resources. Let us wait, Coralie, and act.”
The main thing was to find out whether there was any entrance to the house which could allow of an unforeseen attack. After an hour’s search they took up the carpet and found tiles which showed nothing unusual. There was certainly nothing except the door, and, as they could not prevent this from being opened, since it opened outwards, they heaped up most of the furniture in front of it, thus forming a barricade which would protect them against a surprise.
Then Patrice cocked his two revolvers and placed them beside him, in full sight.
“This will make us easy in our minds,” he said. “Any enemy who appears is a dead man.”
But the memory of the past bore down upon them with all its awful weight. All their words and all their actions others before them had spoken and performed, under similar conditions, with the same thoughts and the same forebodings. Patrice’s father must have prepared his weapons. Coralie’s mother must have folded her hands and prayed. Together they had barricaded the door and together sounded the walls and taken up the carpet. What an anguish was this, doubled as it was by a like anguish!
To dispel the horror of the idea, they turned the pages of the books, works of fiction and others, which their parents had read. On certain pages, at the end of a chapter or volume, were lines constituting notes which Patrice’s father and Coralie’s mother used to write each other.
“Darling Patrice,
“I ran in this morning to recreate our life of yesterday and to dream of our life this afternoon. As you will arrive before me, you will read these lines. You will read that I love you. …”
And, in another book:
“My own Coralie,
“You have this minute gone; I shall not see you until tomorrow and I do not want to leave this haven where our love has tasted such delights without once more telling you …”
They looked through most of the books in this way, finding, however, instead of the clues for which they hoped, nothing but expressions of love and affection. And they spent more than two hours waiting and dreading what might happen.
“There will be nothing,” said Patrice. “And perhaps that is the most awful part of it, for, if nothing occurs, it will mean that we are doomed not to leave this room. And, in that case …”
Patrice did not finish the sentence. Coralie understood. And together they received a vision of the death by starvation that seemed to threaten them. But Patrice exclaimed:
“No, no, we have not that to fear. No. For people of our age to die of hunger takes several days, three or four days or more. And we shall be
