Introduction
DOI: 10.4324/9781003281092-1
‘Semantics’ is something of a dirty word in hermeneutic circles, and not entirely without reason. Beginning with the epoch-making work of Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell, the term has gradually come to function as a shorthand way of referring to a particular approach to the philosophy of language, one that takes the formal, artificial languages devised by mathematical logic as the paradigm for understanding language in general. This approach stands in stark contrast to the focus on concrete, historically situated, and culturally inflected uses of language that characterize the hermeneutic tradition. When Hans-Georg Gadamer uses the term ‘semantics’ (which is not all that often), it is typically in this oppositional sense.1 Semantics is an alternativeto hermeneutics, one that, in his view, rests on a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of language. Taken in this sense, the primary aim of this book—to articulate the semantic dimension of Gadamer’s hermeneutics—must seem like a curious task, if not an outright fool’s errand. However, while ‘semantics’ canfunction as an abbreviation of ‘formal semantics,’ it need not do so. In its most general and basic sense, ‘semantics’ refers simply to the study of meaning, a study whose fundamental question concerns what meaning is.2 Taken in this way, formal semantics represents just one way of undertaking the semantic enterprise, just one possible answer to the basic question that semantics poses. Others are possible. We want to
reclaim this broader sense of ‘semantics’ because we think these other possibilities—and in particular, the one found in Gadamer’s hermeneutics—deserve a hearing.
Understood in this sense, semantics is nothing that hermeneutics needs to oppose. In fact, it is something it cannot avoid. Just as any account of knowledge inevitably presupposes something about the nature of the things to be known, and just as any account of experience must presuppose something about the nature of what is experienced, so too any account of understanding will presuppose something about the nature of that which is understood—that is, something about meaning. Any hermeneutics, in short, will imply a semantics. That is not to say that every thinker who has articulated an account of understanding has also articulated an account of meaning. The semantics implied by a hermeneutics is in many cases just that—implicit. But it is implied nonetheless. Hermeneuts may ignore semantic questions, but they cannot, at the end of the day, avoid them.
The idea that hermeneutics, whether it wants to or not, cannot help weighing in on semantics provided the initial impetus for this book. Our thought was that it would be illuminating to try to reconstruct the account of meaning that underlies Gadamer’s theory of understanding, both for its own sake and because it would allow us to position his views with respect to other, more explicitly semantical, thinkers. This task seemed especially worthwhile given that nobody else had undertaken it in depth. Despite the immense and diverse literature on Gadamer’s thought, there are only a handful of articles that discuss the semantic implications of his
hermeneutics, and no one has attempted to give a systematic account of what a Gadamerian view of meaning might look like.3
What we found as we began looking into this question is that identifying Gadamer’s semantics requires much less reconstruction than we had initially expected. It turns out that Gadamer weighs in quite directly and explicitly on a number of central semantic debates. He presents developed and subtle positions, for instance, on the extent to which meaning is context-dependent, on the relationship between literal and metaphorical speech, and on the relationship of meaning to truth. These topics are common in Gadamer’s work, and he does not treat them as peripheral or secondary concerns; he sees them as central to his overall hermeneutic project. In other words, what we found is that you do not need to read between the lines of Gadamer’s work to find out what he thinks about meaning; you just need to read different lines than the ones commentators usually focus on. Gadamer has been an explicitly semantic thinker all along; his readers have just tended not to notice it.4
This initial realization was accompanied by two others. The first was that attending to the semantic dimension of Gadamer’s project requires thinking differently about the other dimensions that are more frequently discussed. At many points, an appreciation of Gadamer’s semantics serves to augment traditional readings of his hermeneutics. Claims that have often struck Gadamer’s readers (including past selves of the present authors) as unmotivated or ad hoc snap into sharper focus when we see how they grow out of his underlying view of meaning. At other points a recognition of Gadamer’s semantics serves to challenge received interpretations of his work. Because readers have tended to ignore Gadamer’s view of
meaning, they have sometimes unwittingly interpreted his claims about understanding on the basis of semantic assumptions that he rejects, and thus misunderstood them. Attending to Gadamer’s semantics helps correct these misreadings and invites new ways of construing what some of his more well-known ideas and positions amount to. In short, an account of Gadamer’s semantics cannot just be tacked onto a pre-existing picture of his views; it calls for a reevaluation of his hermeneutic project.
Second, when one rethinks Gadamer’s work in light of its semantic dimension, he emerges as a more original, more challenging, and in general more interestingfigure than he is often taken to be. Gadamer has a reputation for being something of an arch-moderate. His philosophy is often seen as the result of synthesizing important insights from earlier thinkers—Plato’s commitment to dialogue, Kant’s emphasis on the limits of human knowledge, Heidegger’s focus on historicity, and so on—while simultaneously rounding off their hard edges and reining in their excesses.5 Now, to be sure, there is no shame in being a moderate; radicality is not a goal to be pursued for its own sake. And there is no doubt that Gadamer’s synoptic understanding of the history of Western philosophy and his willingness to draw inspiration from throughout it are among his greatest intellectual virtues. Attending to Gadamer’s semantics, however, makes it clear that this common narrative tells only half the story. As much as he wants to reawaken the tradition and the important truths it has to teach us, Gadamer is equally concerned to challenge certain deep-seated assumptions that have defined the tradition and that, in his view, block us from understanding the central phenomena of hermeneutics. This is nowhere more true than
in his account of meaning. In place of traditional views, Gadamer offers a new and genuinely radical (in the literal sense of going ‘to the roots’) picture of what meaning amounts to, one that is undoubtedly inspired by earlier thinkers but which cannot plausibly be construed as a mere rehash of their ideas.
In sum, Gadamer has a lot to say not just about how we come to understand meaning but also about what meaning itself is. These two aspects of his thought cannot be understood independently of one another. They comprise a unified whole, one that offers novel and challenging answers to a range of fundamental philosophical questions. Such, in a nutshell, is the thesis of this book. What will emerge from our attempt to articulate it is by no means a completely novel picture of Gadamer’s thought, but it is one painted from a new perspective, one that allows aspects of his thought that typically remain in the background to stand out in more vivid relief.
An additional benefit of highlighting these underappreciated aspects of Gadamer’s work is that it can help make Gadamer accessible to a wider swath of the philosophical community. Accordingly, we hope that this book not only will contribute something of value to the existing literature on Gadamer but that it can also serve as an entrée to Gadamer’s thought for philosophers who are not already familiar with it. This includes readers whose primary training is in the analytic philosophical tradition, some of whom might be keen to hear about what hermeneutics can contribute to semantics. To that end, we have tried, as much as is feasible, to start at the beginning—to spell out what we take the basic aims and concerns of Gadamer’s project to be rather than assume that the reader already knows them. For the same reason,
we have made every effort to avoid the tendency—unfortunately all too common in works of secondary literature—to merely repeat the tropes and terminology of the thinker under discussion rather than clarifying and explaining them. In general, we think that Gadamer’s work has something to offer anyone who cares about the nature of meaning, language, and understanding. We hope that this book can help guide such a reader, whether an expert in Gadamer or a novice, along the path of his thinking.
0.1 Sinn Happens
In one of the few explicit discussions of Gadamer’s view of meaning in the secondary literature, Joel Weinsheimer identifies an apparent tension in Gadamer’s thought. On the one hand, many key ideas in Gadamer’s work suggest that he eschews the notion of meaning altogether—that his hermeneutics is, as Weinsheimer playfully puts it, “meaningless.”6 Weinsheimer notes that the concept of meaning has traditionally been bound up with “the surface/depth distinction.” Philosophers are inclined to think of the text or expression through which something is communicated as a “covering” or “veil” that stands between the message conveyed and the one who aims to understand it. Understanding, accordingly, is taken to be a matter of lifting the veil, of “dis-covering” the meaning that lies beneath it. By contrast, Weinsheimer observes, while Gadamer offers a number of models for conceiving of the nature of understanding—the model of artistic performance, of a “fusion of horizons,” and of dialogue—none of them involves discovering a meaning that exists beneath or behind the text or expression to be understood. Rather, they suggest that understanding is a matter of an interpreter’s direct encounter
with a text or expression, without some further thing, ‘the meaning,’ entering the picture.
On the other hand, however, there are also aspects of Gadamer’s work that point in the opposite direction. Perhaps the most obvious of these is the fact that Gadamer does appeal to meanings, quite clearly and directly, at numerous points. He states, for example, that “the task of hermeneutics is to clarify this miracle of understanding” that consists precisely in the “sharing in a common meaning” (TM, 303/GW1:297, emphasis added), and similarly that “the task of understanding is concerned above all with themeaningof the text itself” (TM, 380/GW1:378, emphasis added). These affirmations are necessary, Weinsheimer notes, because without them it is impossible to explain the normativity of understanding. Without a notion of meaning, there seems to be no way to mark the distinction between understanding a text and misunderstanding it.
Weinsheimer appears to be unsure of how to reconcile these two, seemingly contradictory, aspects of Gadamer’s thought. He settles on the conclusion that “sometimes we need a dualistic hermeneutics” that acknowledges the existence of meanings, and “sometimes we need a monistic hermeneutics” that does not, and that “Gadamer’s hermeneutics acknowledges just this double need.”7 This response, however, serves only to label the tension at hand, not to alleviate it. It is not at all clear how a single, consistent hermeneutic theory could satisfy both sides of this “double need”—both the need to affirm meanings and the need to deny them—and Weinsheimer says nothing to explain how this might be possible.
Despite this disappointing conclusion, however, Weinsheimer has put his finger on something importantly right about Gadamer’s
semantics. Though he does not flag it as such, Weinsheimer’s discussion makes it clear that he is working with a particular conception of what meanings are. His analysis assumes that meanings, if there are any, must be some sort of object, one that is “hidden” in or behind the text and the “finding” of which would be the task of interpretation. He is certainly not alone in this. Nearly everyone in the philosophical tradition thinks of meanings as objects —be they psychological objects (like the “ideas” of Descartes, Locke, and company) or non-psychological abstract objects (like Frege’s Gedanken, Husserl’s ideal species, or Russell’s propositions).8 If we accept this traditional account of what meanings are, then Weinsheimer’s initial hypothesis is absolutely right. Meanings in that sense make no appearance in Gadamer’s thought, and this marks a crucial respect in which Gadamer’s hermeneutics differs from most other accounts of interpretation. Where the hypothesis goes awry is in moving from this to the stronger claim that Gadamer rejects meanings altogether, and so introducing a problematic “double need” into his thinking.
In short, Weinsheimer occludes his important insight by presenting it as the answer to the wrong question. The question is not whether Gadamer acknowledges meanings—it is obvious that he does—but rather whathe takes meanings to be. When we get this question in view, Gadamer’s answer becomes fairly clear: meaning is an event. “Understanding,” Gadamer writes, “must be conceived as a part of the event of meaning [Sinngeschehen], the event in which the meaning of all statements—those of art and all other kinds of tradition—is formed and actualized” (TM, 164/GW1:170, translation modified).9 When we recognize this, the apparent tension that vexes
Weinsheimer disappears. If meanings are events, rather than objects, then affirming them is perfectly compatible with the “monistic” picture of understanding that he rightly identifies in Gadamer’s work. Meaning, on such a view, is not a second thing, beyond the text, that an interpreter must discover—because it is not a thingat all. Meaning, rather, is what happenswhen an interpreter encounters a text in the appropriate way.
An event is something whose mode of being is occurrence. For an event, to be is to happen. But what could it mean to conceive of meaning along these lines? Seeing our way to a coherent answer to this question requires suspending some deeply ingrained semantic prejudices, and as a result it will require a long discussion—one that will unfold over the chapters that follow. Nevertheless, we can get an initial, if incomplete, idea of what Gadamer means by this from his comments on the paradigmatic example of theological hermeneutics. The meaning of Christian scripture, Gadamer writes, cannot be detached from the event of proclamation. Quitethe contrary,beinganeventisacharacteristicbelongingtothe meaningitself. It is like a curse, which obviously cannot be separated from the act of uttering it. What we understand from it is not an abstractable logical sense like that of a statement, but the actual curse that occurs in it.
(TM, 444/GW1:431, emphasis original)
On Gadamer’s view, the gospel, qua gospel, is not a collection of religious doctrines that scripture presents to us; it is “Christ’s redemptive act” itself made present to us through God’s word. In this, Gadamer notes, the word of God is like a curse; more generally,
it is an instance of what J.L. Austin calls a ‘performative.’10 To utter a curse is not to report the fact that you have imprecated someone; it is to perform the imprecation itself, and the meaning of the curse consists precisely in this performance. In the same way, scripture is not a representation of Christ as having redeemed the world; it is a vehicle by which the redemptive act is accomplished. The meaning of scripture, Gadamer contends, is realized only when the redemptive act actually transpires, only when the gospel exercises its saving power in the lives of those who hear it.
Of course, the view of scripture articulated here—one that is heavily indebted to Karl Barth and Rudolf Bultmann—is controversial. But the theological content of this passage is not what interests us at the moment. Instead, what matters for present purposes is what it indicates about Gadamer’s more general thesis that meaning is an event. As the passage suggests, the heart of this thesis is the idea that meaning is something effectedor accomplishedin language, as opposed to an “abstractable sense,” like a proposition, that language expresses. The redemption accomplished by the gospel is just one (possible) instance of this among a nearly infinite variety of others. It is just one form that an event of meaning can take. The language of Hamlet, a State of the Union address, and a discussion of the family budget with your spouse all accomplish quite different things. On Gadamer’s view, however, there is something that they all have in common: in all of them the self-presentationof the world occurs. What makes language truly language, what makes it meaningful, is the fact that “in language the world itself presents itself” (TM, 466/GW1:453). This, for Gadamer, is the essential core of meaning.
Meaning is an event in which the self-presentation of the world is accomplished.
In thinking of meanings as events, Gadamer breaks not only with traditional conceptions of what meaning is but also of how meaning is related to other phenomena: most notably to the world, to understanding, and to language. Meanings are events in which some part or dimension of the world—what Gadamer calls a “subject matter” (Sache)—makes itself intelligibly present tounderstanding in language. Thus, rather than relations of representation or signification, Gadamer thinks of the world, understanding, and language as related to meaning by way of participation. Each element is a participant in the event that meaning is. Each makes, as it were, its own contribution to the event. These contributions are essential; they are all needed if the event is to occur at all. For this reason, events of meaning can just as appropriately be called ‘events of being,’ ‘events of understanding,’ or ‘events of language,’ and, indeed, Gadamer does refer to them in each of these ways.11 To better flesh this out, let’s briefly consider the contributions made by each of these elements in turn.
First, the subject matter participates in an event of meaning by givingitself to understanding, by “offer[ing] itself to be understood” (TM, 491/GW1:479). This might sound mystifying to some ears—as if the subject matter were a kind of quasi-agent who consciously desires and actively solicits human understanding. But nothing of the sort is envisioned here. In speaking this way Gadamer is attempting to steer a course between two opposite and, in his view, equally mistaken pictures of the relationship between reality and our understanding of it. On the one hand, he is rejecting the idea that
the being of things lies forever beyond the grasp of human understanding, the idea of an unknowable thing-in-itself. On Gadamer’s view we can understand reality itself, not just a realityfor-us, and this is precisely what happens in an event of meaning. On the other hand, Gadamer also rejects the idea that the subject matter is, at bottom, an inert substratum onto which we can foist whatever significance we want. The world, for Gadamer, has its own integrity, and as such it is able to ‘push back’ against our interpretations of it. The world, in this sense, “offers itself” to us: it is an offer of genuine understanding, but one that we must accept on its own terms.
Second, what understanding contributes to events of meaning is openness(Offenheit) (TM, 281, 369/GW1:273, 367). Understanding holds itself open to the intelligible presence of the subject matter. Though this contribution is passive in the sense of being a response to the prior activity of the thing, it is not for that reason automatic or effortless. On the contrary, in its openness understanding “has its own rigor: that of uninterrupted listening.” Gadamer explains,
A thing does not present itself to the hermeneutical experience without an effort special to it, namely that of “being negative toward itself.” A person who is trying to understand a text has to keep something at a distance—namely everything that suggests itself, on the basis of his own prejudices, as the meaning expected—as soon as it is rejected by the sense of the text itself.
(TM, 481/GW1:469)
To be open is to allow the event of meaning to be guided by the subject matter that is offered rather than by one’s own preferences, expectations, or preconceptions. This does not mean that openness requires you to efface yourself before the subject matter. To understand is precisely to participate, as yourself, in the event of meaning. It is to allow the subject matter to make itself intelligibly present toyou. To do this is not to eliminate your prejudices but rather to put them “at risk” and allow them to be called into question (TM, 310/GW1:304). It is precisely in this that the world’s self-showing becomes effective. The prejudices understanding puts at risk are what the world pushes back against.
Lastly, language participates in events of meaning by providing the mediumin which the event transpires, the “medium in which I and world meet, or, rather, manifest their original belonging together” (TM, 490/GW1:478). ‘Medium’ (dieMitte) here does not mean ‘intermediary.’ Language is not something that comes between understanding and the world. Rather, ‘medium’ for Gadamer carries the sense of the condition or environment that enables the emergence of something, as when we speak of clay as the medium employed by a sculptor or of the nutrient-rich gel in a petri dish as a ‘growth medium.’ Similarly, language is that in which the intelligibility of a subject matter takes shape. It is not a vehicle through which meaning-objects are conveyed but an environment in which the intelligible presence of the world is realized. It is through our attempts to find the right language to express what the world offers of itself and in our rejection of language that fails to do so—that the self-presentation of the subject matter is accomplished.
On Gadamer’s account, meaning is phenomenologically primaryin the sense that it provides the framework in terms of which its constituent parts are to be understood.12 What this means is that the world, understanding, and language are constituted as the phenomena they are by their participation in events of meaning. When Gadamer, for example, claims that the world “offers itself to be understood,” he is not saying that some entity, ‘the world,’ which can be defined on its own terms (say, as an objective spatiotemporal reality) also happens to offer itself from time to time to understanding. Rather, what the world is cannot be divorced from the way it offers itself in events of meaning. “Being,” Gadamer tells us, “is self-presentation” (TM, 500/GW1:488).
The same is true of understanding. Understanding isthat posture of openness to the world that enables its intelligible selfpresentation. Openness, therefore, is not what marks the difference between responsible and irresponsible understanding or between morally good and bad understanding. It is what marks the difference between understanding and non-understanding. To be closed off to what a text has to say is not to understand it poorly but to engage in something other than understandingit.13 Thus, when Gadamer claims that his account of understanding is descriptive, not prescriptive (TM, xxv–xxvi/GW2:438), he means it. He is not trying to tell us how we ought to go about understanding things but rather what understanding, as a moment of an event of meaning, is.
This point is perhaps most important to note with respect to language. Language isthe medium in which intelligibility takes shape, and as a result the scope of the term ‘language’ in Gadamer’s work is in some respects narrower, and in others broader, than we
might expect it to be. As we will discuss in Chapter 1, it is narrower in that some things we are apt to describe as languages—like computer languages or the artificial languages constructed in formal semantics—are not instances of ‘language’ in Gadamer’s sense. They are not media in which being comes to intelligible presence. At best they are capable of re-presenting something that has already become intelligible in another language. On the other hand, as Gadamer acknowledges in a 1996 interview with Jean Grondin, his sense of ‘language’ is in another respect broader than we might expect, because wordsare not the only media in which intelligibility can take shape. “Language in words,” Gadamer explains, “is only a special concretion of linguisticality.”14 Thus, Gadamer is not being sloppy when he speaks of the “language of the work of art”15 or the “language of gesture, facial expression, and movement” (TM, 573/GW2:204). These are languages in just as robust a sense as are English and Cantonese because they are original media in which the world presents itself.
This fact about Gadamer’s use of the term ‘language’ is easy to miss. One reason (for English readers, at least) is that the translators of the English edition of TruthandMethodmade the unfortunate choice to sometimes render sprachlichas ‘linguistic’ and sometimes as ‘verbal.’Another is that, while Gadamer typically uses Spracheand its variants in the phenomenological sense just described, he doesn’t always do so. In fact, he will sometimes use the term in two different senses in consecutive sentences, as when he cites the “language of gesture” (SprachederGesten) as an example of something “pre-linguistic” (vorsprachlich) (TM, 573/GW 2:204, emphasis added).16 As a result, Gadamer’s claims about the
linguisticality (Sprachlichkeit) of human experience have struck some commentators as unmotivated or even self-contradictory.17 Recognizing how Gadamer’s conception of language is framed by its involvement in events of meaning is, in our view, the key to making sense of this central concept.
We will call this conception of the nature of meaning and its relationship to the world, understanding, and language, Gadamer’s eventsemantics, by way of contrast with the object semantics that characterizes much traditional philosophy of language. Our aim in the chapters that follow will be to articulate in more detail what this view consists in, why Gadamer thinks it is true, and what its implications are for his wider project.
0.2 Looking Ahead
The discussion that follows will be divided into seven chapters. Chapters 1 and 2 lay out the core of Gadamer’s event-semantic conception of meaning, focusing respectively on his claims that language is occasionaland that meaning is ideal. The remaining chapters consider implications of this view of meaning for his wider hermeneutics. Chapters 3 and 4 deal with the relationship of meaning to understanding. They show how some central hermeneutic questions—concerning the sort of normativity at play in interpretation and the role of original context in limiting acceptable interpretations—appear in a quite different light when we think of understanding as participation in a meaning-event rather than representation of a meaning-object. Chapters 5 and 6 deal with the relationship of meaning to the world by exploring the ontology implied by Gadamer’s event semantics. This ontology allows him to
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soldier, not a consort. Our friend Von Hügelweiler has an evil tongue, and he has spread cruel slanders about you and the Queen. Evil things win quick credence in Grimland, and the only way to give them the lie is for you and Gloria to see nothing of each other at present."
"That is a little rough on a newly-married man."
"Your marriage is nothing. The Grimlander, who is fickleness personified,—and who would like a change of dynasty once a week,—is never a Republican. He would not tolerate the idea of his sovereign mating with a commoner. The only possible chance of such a step being accepted is for you to do something quite out of the ordinary in this campaign. It will hardly be wise even then—but we might chance it."
"I believe in fate," said Trafford stubbornly.
"Comfort yourself your own way," said Bernhardt. "I, for my part, wish you well. There is a dash of the devil about you that wins my best wishes. But I have no further time to waste discussing your affairs. I am wanted here, there, and everywhere, and the time is one of war, not of love. Only, remember my command, my advice if you prefer it; keep your mind fixed on your military duties, and avoid her gracious Majesty Gloria as you would the plague."
That night they encamped at Schafers-stadt—a quaint old town lying in a sunless valley between precipitous hills. Next day they started early, reaching Wallen, a mountain village within easy striking distance of Weissheim, shortly after sunset. Here accommodation was somehow found for the considerable force under Bernhardt's command. Shelter had to be obtained for all, for to sleep out of doors at such an altitude during the winter months meant awakening in another world. Food had also to be provided on a large scale, for the force was what is called a "flying column"; that is to say, it was proceeding across country in the most direct line to its objective, and not relying on road or railway for a continuance of supplies.
The only transport accompanying the force was of a grimmer nature. A number of pieces of ordnance were being conveyed on flat-bottomed
sleighs, specially constructed for the purpose. And these had to be drawn, with infinite labour, by men on skis, for the way lay over a countryside many feet deep in snow, and horses would have been absolutely useless for such a purpose. Trafford, therefore, was busy on his arrival unearthing cheeses and loaves, wine-casks and other fascinating objects, from the cellars of the more or less hospitable Walleners. Whilst so employed he was, approached by a private of the Guards with a note.
"Come to the big house in the Market Square—the one with the carved escutcheon over the door—at 6.30, and I will give you dinner.—Gloria R."
"I will write an answer," said Trafford.
"There is no answer, Excellency," said the man, and with a salute he was gone.
Trafford rubbed his hand thoughtfully up and down the back of his neck. Bernhardt had been quite definite in his command to him not to see the Queen, and though the order was little to his liking, he approved its prudence. But the letter in his hand was also a command, and it came from a higher source than even Bernhardt's dictum.
Accordingly, at half-past six he presented himself at a big balconied house in the Market Square. A simple meal was spread for two in the dining-room,—a low pitched apartment panelled from floor to ceiling in dark pine, and garnished with a wealth of cumbrous, antique furniture.
He waited alone for a few moments, cheered by a most appetising and savoury odour of cooking, and then Gloria entered, smiling, cordial, eminently composed.
"I am so glad you have come," she began.
He took her outstretched hand and kissed it.
"I am a soldier, and I obey," he said.
"When it pleases you," she laughed. "And I hope it does please you to dine tête-à-tête with me."
"I can conceive no greater felicity."
"None?"
"None," he answered. "I have the excitement of a military campaign, my eyes are continually feasted with magnificent scenery, and my lungs with matchless air. Then, on the top of a day of most exhilarating exercise comes an invitation from the lady who is my wife on paper, and whom I have sworn to make my wife in the sight of all men."
Gloria looked him fully in the face and pressed a small hand-bell that reposed on the table at her side.
"Gaspar," she said to the orderly who had entered, "bring in the dinner. You know that our friend Bernhardt has forbidden us to meet," Gloria continued, after a dish of yungfernbraten—roast pork and juniper berries— had been set before them.
"I know," said Trafford, "and he was right."
"Why?"
Trafford hesitated.
"Von Hügelweiler seems to have coupled our names in an unpleasant manner," he said at length.
Gloria flushed.
"Then you should not have come," she said.
"You gave me no option. As your husband I might have refused. As your officer I had to obey."
"You might have exercised your discretion."
"I might if I had any," he replied. "But I am a most indiscreet man. Tomorrow, so I understand, I am going into action. I may win fame or I may be shot through the head. As the latter alternative is not unlikely, I am anxious to spend what may be my last evening on earth with the one woman whom I really——"
A forcible ring from Gloria interrupted the sentence's conclusion.
"Gaspar, fill this gentleman's glass. As you were remarking, Captain, Grimland is a very beautiful country."
"It is a very cold country," Trafford growled, plunging his fork into the steaming viands.
"To-morrow night I shall be sleeping in my ancestral home—the Marienkastel," Gloria pursued, as the orderly withdrew. "It is a fine old place, and Karl forfeited it when my father failed to carry out his projects in 1904."
"That is the place you wish me to win back for you?"
"If you will be so kind?"
"And suppose I am killed in the process, will you think kindly of me?" "Very."
The callousness of the affirmation horrified him.
"I believe you were right when you said you had no heart!" he cried indignantly.
"That is what I want you to believe," she returned calmly.
"And that if I am killed," he went on bitterly, "you will welcome the termination of an impossible situation."
Gloria gave an almost imperceptible shrug.
"You keep harping on death," she protested, "surely you are not afraid?"
He turned fiercely on her, but restrained his voice to a level tone.
"From what you know of me," he asked, "am I the sort of man who is likely to be afraid?"
"No," she admitted readily. "The night of the revolution you were heroism personified. Also I have heard of your exploit in Herr Krantz's wine-shop, and it—it sounded very typical of you."
"Thank you," he said, meeting her gaze; and an instant later, he added: "There is no such thing as fear in the world for me."
"Why?" she asked.
He answered her question with a reckless bang on the table.
"Because I have lived!" he cried. "If a bullet finds its way to my heart it will have warm lodging. I am a happy man, and my happiness stands high above the accidents of life and death. Eternity has no terrors but solitude, and for me there will never be such a thing as solitude again, because I have met my second self."
A hand was stretched out towards the bell, but Trafford intercepted it, and the bell was swept off the table on to the floor.
Gloria rose with flashing eyes.
"I asked you here in a spirit of camaraderie," she said haughtily. "Because I owe much to you and am conscious of the debt, I risked angering Bernhardt and smirching my own fair name. But you abuse my confidence. You know, as I know, that the present is no time for lovemaking. And yet——" She stopped abruptly, for Trafford had risen, and, picking up the bell, he put it on the table before her.
"Ring," he said.
"Can I not trust you?"
"No!" he retorted. "You gave me the right to love you, not by your promise to go through the ceremony of marriage with me, not by the fulfilment of that promise, but by a certain light that shone in your eyes for a few brief seconds in the chapel of the Neptunburg. I am exercising that right to-night."
She drew in her breath sharply.
"You said just now that I was heartless," she said.
"That is the usual lover's lie," he retorted; "the reproach that is only justified by its manifest untruth. But I am a gentleman, as you vaguely surmise, and I will not persist in an attention which is unwelcome to you. I came to make an appeal. You have but to command, and I will leave without another word."
"What is the appeal?"
"Do you wish me to make it?" he countered.
"You have said so much you had best go on."
Trafford drew back the curtain of the mullioned window and gazed at the shining pageantry of the frosty skies. For a full minute he stood gazing, and then he dropped the tapestry and faced his royal hostess.
"I said I was content with things as they are," he began, "and to a point that is so, for they are better than they might have been. But with the eye of faith I see something nobler than this struggle for a kingdom we have no right to possess. Something has made me wise these past few days: something has taught me that the love of excitement can be very cruel, and that the harrying of a brave man is not necessarily a more elevating sport than bull-baiting."
"You wish me to abandon this expedition against Karl?"
"Oh, it is an absurd, impossible demand, I know," he said, "and I don't ask you for a moment to consider it. There are a hundred reasons why we should go on, and there is only one reason why we should not; and that reason does not seem to weigh with you at all. But I am a madman, a visionary, and, like Bernhardt, I see things. And in my hallucinations I see a woman who is Queen, not of Grimland, but of an even more delectable country. And the woman I see has but one subject, and she is content with him alone, because her sway over him is so paramount."
Gloria stood very, very still. Only her fingers moved as they plucked the fur trimming of her dress.
"If I asked you to give up Grimland and fly with me to America, would you do it?" he cried passionately.
"No—but I should like to hear you ask it." A smile, the slowest smile that ever was, bent the extreme corners of the fascinating lips, and ultimately broke in a burst of sunshine illuminating the whole face. Its arrival found him by her side, his hand on her arm, and a look in his eyes that sought for something with an almost pathetic intensity.
"I do ask you to come to America with me," he said. "Will you come— come to New York, the great, bright city, where the people do not do the horrible things they do in Grimland and other out-of-the-way corners of Europe?" He waited a moment, and then added: "Of course, we shall always keep this beautiful country in our hearts—a land of rocky spires and splintered crags, a land of swelling snow-fields and amazingly blue skies; a land where the air is sweet and keen and pine-laden, and the face of Nature stands bold and true, crisp-cut from the chisel of the Master-mason."
There was no answer. His hand trembled on her arm like a vibrant note of interrogation; his eyes strained to catch the light he longed for, the light he had seen, or fancied he had seen, in the gloom of the Chapel Royal.
"Will you come?" he breathed; and for a pregnant second the world of things material rolled back from his consciousness, and left him standing alone in space with his fate. For the strange brain was playing tricks with him,—as big, uncontrolled brains do with impulsive, ill-balanced people.
His five senses were in abeyance, or warped beyond all present usefulness. He saw a pair of eyes as points of light in a world of darkness, but all sense of reality had utterly deserted him. He was as he had been in the Chapel Royal when his bride had made her hesitating avowal of a half-passion. A sheet of flame seemed to be passing through his body, a roseate glow suffused his vision; he never realised that he was uttering a beloved name in a voice of thunder and grasping a beloved object with no little strength. But ecstatic entrancements, however subliminal, yield ultimately to rude physical shocks, and dimly and slowly the world of dreams vanished and he became conscious that someone was hitting him violently on the back. Turning round with half-dazed eyes, he found himself confronted with the stern lineaments of Father Bernhardt. The ex-priest, clad in a military overcoat and high leggings, and powdered with still unmelted snow, carried mingled wrath and astonishment in his countenance.
"Sunde und Siechheit!" he cried. "Are you, too, an absintheur, Captain Trafford?"
For the moment Trafford had not the vaguest idea what an absintheur might be, but he replied vaguely in the negative.
Bernhardt uttered an oath.
"I called you three times by name," he said, "and I struck you three times on the back before you would condescend to pay me any attention."
"I apologise," said Trafford; "I was thinking of other things."
"You were in a delirium," retorted Bernhardt. "The fiend of Tobit——"
"Oh, hang the fiend of Tobit!" interrupted Trafford hotly. "I may be a lunatic, Bernhardt, but I'm a healthy-minded lunatic, if there is such a thing. I was making love, and we'll leave it at that, if you please, and drop all talk of delirium and fiends."
"I was finding an excuse for you."
"I don't need one, thank you." Trafford, as is the way with interrupted lovers, was in an irritable mood, and being so did not notice that Bernhardt was really angry.
"Indeed you do!" retorted the ex-priest. "I forbade you expressly to see the Queen, and I find you dining alone with her, and making violent love to her in addition."
"I received a command to dine."
"And a command to make love?" sneered Bernhardt.
"That is my affair."
Bernhardt turned from the irate American to the confused Gloria, and there was little deference in his regard.
"Your Majesty does not value your reputation too highly," he said. "As long as you play at being a maid it is as well to act like a maid."
"My reputation can look after itself," she retorted with dignity.
"We are five thousand feet above sea level," put in Trafford, "and at least two thousand above the level of perpetual convention. What was a wise precaution at Weidenbruck becomes sheer timidity at Wallen. But if you still think my presence is infectious to the Queen's honour, I will withdraw. The question I came to ask has been answered, and answered well."
Bernhardt turned a pair of piercing eyes on the intrepid American. Trafford met the look without flinching.
"You are a very strange person, Herr Trafford," said the ex-priest slowly; "you are not afraid of me. I believe you and Saunders are the only two men in Grimland who are capable of standing up to me in my wrath. But tell me before you go, what was this question you put and what was its answer."
"I asked her Majesty if she wished to continue this expedition against Karl, and she answered, 'No.'"
"She answered 'No!'" Bernhardt gasped.
"If you do not believe me, ask her yourself."
Again Bernhardt turned to the young Queen.
"Is it true?" he demanded.
Gloria passed her hand across her forehead, as if she was just recovering from a condition of unconsciousness. When she spoke it was in jerky, consequent sentences.
"Karl is a brave man; he is not a bad man. It is cruel to harry people— loyal, brave people. He is the lawful sovereign of Grimland. I don't wish to cause suffering. I——"
"There speaks a Schattenberg!" interrupted Bernhardt with a mocking laugh. "The man who killed your father is entrenched within two leagues of you. Your house, the historic Marienkastel, home of the Schattenbergs for centuries, is his appanage. You have six thousand men at your back to win you back your heritage; but the old, heroic fire is burning low, the fierce old blood is running thin—the Schattenbergs are bred out!"
The man's calculated scorn, his splendid insolence, filled Trafford with admiration; and it was plain that his caustic speech was not without its effect on the sensitive Gloria. She seemed to be emerging from a stupor which still drugged her senses.
"I would like the Marienkastel," she conceded; "it is the home of my childhood; its walls are very dear to me. It should be mine by right."
"Say rather by might," retorted Bernhardt. "You like the Marienkastel, but you do not like the withering fire that decimates the storming party. Its walls are dear to you, but the forlorn hope, the scaling ladders, and the
petard are abhorrent to your soul. You wish to possess, but the strong man armed is too forbidding a person to be ousted."
"If the expedition were against the Marienkastel——"
"It is against the Marienkastel," interrupted Bernhardt. "The Marienkastel is the key to the whole town. If we can hold it for half an hour we can dictate what terms we like."
"Dictate what terms we like!" Gloria repeated the last words of his sentence with eyes aflame. She was a Schattenberg again, ardent, ambitious, reckless. All trace of weakness had left her.
"And can we take it—can we hold it?" she went on in tones of eager inquiry.
Bernhardt stretched out his hand towards Trafford.
"There is the answer to your question," he said.
"You will capture the Marienkastel for me?" she asked, turning to her silent lover.
Trafford looked at the girl before him long and searchingly before answering.
"The Marienkastel is the key to Weissheim," he said at length; "it is also, it appears, the key to your heart. I thought there was a nearer way,—a better way. Yes," he went on, "I will capture the Marienkastel, or do all that a man can do to capture it, and then I will claim my reward."
"You shall have it," said Bernhardt; "I swear it."
"And I promise..." breathed Gloria.
Trafford nodded to himself.
"I am content," he said.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
THE OPENING BARS
Mr. and Mrs. Saunders were having breakfast together in the pretty stone villa they had built for themselves at Weissheim, overlooking the Nonnensee. The view of the mountains beyond the lake, the exquisite expanse of snow, growing into sparkling life under the touch of the rising sun, furnished a prospect of sufficiently absorbing grandeur. But Saunders' eyes wandered only from an omelette aux fines herbes to a belated copy of the Morning Post. English newspapers had been scarce since the cutting of the railway, and the present specimen had reached its destination by a roundabout way through Vienna, and had cost exactly tenpence.
"What is the Government doing?" asked Mrs. Saunders, who took an interest in home politics.
"I don't know. When I am in this delightfully disorganised country the mild animosities of English party strife fill me with contempt. I was reading the 'Births, deaths, and marriages' just to prove to myself that there are natural tragedies and romances, even in the decently regulated areas of Bayswater and Mayfair."
"Is anyone we know mentioned?"
"By Jove!" ejaculated Saunders after a pause.
"Well?"
"By Jove!"
"Please go on, Robert," said Mrs. Saunders with pardonable impatience.
"Angela Knox, that American girl, is——"
"Well?"
"Is going to marry a grouse moor."
"Pray be explicit."
"Glengourlie—a little man in the Scots Guards. Eldest son of the Marquis of Stratheerie; ten thousand a year and the best half of Invernessshire."
Mrs. Saunders received this startling information with composure.
"She'll make a handsome peeress," was her comment.
"What about George Trafford?" asked her husband.
"Grimland is a country of short memories and swift changes," said Mrs. Saunders. "It converted you from a blasé bachelor to a happy husband; and it has converted George Trafford from a broken-hearted desperado to a lover of an usurping queen."
"Do you believe Von Hügelweiler's tale?" asked Saunders in surprise.
"Yes, and no; I believe George has undoubtedly been fascinated by Gloria. With her beauty, high spirit, and fearless temperament, she was bound to attract him. Fresh from a recent disappointment—and lacking as he is at all times in all sense of proportion—he is quite capable of demanding her hand in marriage. But Gloria,—though she would like him well enough as a friend,—would not dream of stultifying herself by marrying a plain American; still less would she stoop to the depths Von Hügelweiler hinted at."
"I am sorry about it all," said Saunders. "Nervy, with all his faults, is a lovable sort of scoundrel, and he had a pretty severe knock over l'affaire Angela. If Gloria is fooling him for her own purposes—as seems more than certain—it will leave him, spiritually and mentally, in a condition of pulp."
"You mean——"
"Oh, not exactly; for one thing, he's mad already. He's like a man on a free-wheel bicycle without a brake—all right on the level, but in the deuce of a fix if he begins to go downhill."
Mrs. Saunders looked thoughtful.
"There is a possibility that he may never live to be disillusioned," she said. "He is said to be accompanying this force against us, and he is not the sort of person to cultivate the art of taking cover. However, things will be settled one way or the other soon."
"Very soon," Saunders agreed. "Meyer's scouts report that the enemy encamped last night at Wallen; and they don't waste time there. Six thousand able-bodied men in a bracing climate eat a good deal—and Wallen is a small place with a limited supply of hams and maize. They will be here to-day or to-morrow."
Mrs. Saunders devoted her attention to the omelette which furnished their morning meal. She was a lady who had made a point of hiding her emotions, and the near prospect of her husband being in danger necessitated a strong effort of control. It was some minutes before she spoke again.
"What are you going to do this morning?" she asked at length. "I should 'curl,' if I were you. You haven't 'sent down' a 'stone' for weeks, and I think a respite from your military preoccupations would do you good."
Saunders sighed regretfully, and stretched himself.
"There is a competition to-day," he replied; "Major Flannel's Cup, and I am not in for it. I may watch for a bit, but things are too critical now to admit of much leisure. You see, I've been told off to hold the Marienkastel, and our good friends the enemy may send us their visiting-cards at any minute."
"And can you hold the Marienkastel?" asked Mrs. Saunders.
Saunders smiled.
"I can hold it for a couple of hours," he replied, "which is all that Meyer requires of me. We are to put as many of the enemy out of action as we can, and then yield possession with a bad grace. After that we have a little surprise for them: a couple of concealed mortars, which will blow the historic old fabric and those inside it into several thousand fragments."
Mrs. Saunders suppressed a shudder.
"And are they sure to attack the Marienkastel?" she asked.
"Absolutely certain," he replied, "if they know the rudiments of military science. Besides, there are sentimental reasons for their doing so, for the old Schloss is the ancestral home of the Schattenbergs."
Mrs. Saunders was silent for a moment; then she spoke, hesitatingly, but with a forced calm.
"And will your position—be a very dangerous one?" she asked.
"Fairly so," he replied lightly. "You see, we shall have to bear the brunt of the main attack, and we shall hang on as long as we can. But it is in the evacuation that we shall probably lose most heavily."
Mrs. Saunders nodded sagely.
"And it is in the subsequent bombardment that the enemy will suffer most severely?" she inquired.
"Precisely. It will mean turning the fine old place into a shambles, but we must strike hard or not at all; and Karl's blood is up, as it was in 1904."
A deep, vibrant "boom" broke on their ears, and died with long-drawn echoes amid the encircling mountains.
"The enemy have sent their visiting-card!" said Mrs. Saunders.
Saunders rose, and stepped hurriedly out of the long window on to the balcony, his wife following. The former produced a pair of field-glasses, and critically regarded a puff of smoke that hung motionless in the still morning air to the extreme left of the panorama.
"Four-inch Creusot," he said laconically; "that means that redoubt A has found something to practise at—a feint attack, probably. I must go to my post in the Marienkastel. They'll have worked round there in a couple of hours, and then the serious business will begin."
Another sounding roar came pealing along the hillsides, and then a veritable concert, as the other iron mouths took up the harsh music and shook the thin air with their stern melody.
From where they stood the actual operations of the attack were invisible by reason of the pine woods that clothed the plain in that direction. But there was much to see from the commanding site occupied by the Saunders' villa. The town itself,—with its circle of improvised forts,—lay considerably below them to the left. Companies of soldiers were plainly discernible defiling to the various points of defence assigned to them, and the blare of bugles rang shrilly through the strident chorus of the distant cannon. It was plain that the greatest activity prevailed, but an activity wellordered, thought-out, and purposeful.
Meyer,—with all his unsoldierly distaste for personal danger,—was almost perfect as the general of a threatened city. Every detail had been thought out, every unit of the defence was ready at a moment's notice to take his appointed place.
Saunders turned his sweeping gaze to the right, and it lighted upon the private curling-rink belonging to Major Flannel's villa. He smiled, for the contest for the Flannel Cup had already begun, and was going on heedless of the stern symphony that was making the valleys echo with bursts of shattering sound.
A curling competition demands a whole-hearted absorption from its votaries, and takes little heed of battle, murder, and sudden death, provided the ice is keen and in good order.
"What are you smiling at?" demanded Mrs. Saunders.
"British sense of proportion," he replied, and as he spoke a man on skis approached from the street below and called on him by name.
"Orders from the General, Excellency!"
Saunders took the note. It was a hurried scrawl in Meyer's handwriting:
"Proceed instantly on receipt of this to the Marienkastel. Hang on till they get within a hundred yards, then bolt for the abatis in the new cemetery!" Saunders read it aloud, and then turned to his wife.
"Farewell, dearest," he said simply. "When I have gone make your way to the Pariserhof. You will be perfectly safe there."
Mrs. Saunders hung speechless a moment in her husband's embrace. When she spoke it was apologetically, as one demanding a difficult favour.
"Robert," she pleaded, "should I be a great nuisance in the Marienkastel? I could tend the wounded—I might even——"
"To-day is a day of obedience and discipline," he interrupted with firm kindness. "I am ordered to the Marienkastel, you to the Pariserhof. Yours is the post of anxiety, mine of excitement. Man is selfish and woman patient —and so the latter always has to bear the crueller burden."
She bit her lip and nodded, and released herself from his embrace. Strong arms handed him his rifle, and cool, steady hands fastened the cartridge-belt around his waist.
"You know Karl entreated you not to take part in this stupid war," she said with the suspicion of a break in her voice. "Was it kind to me to refuse him?"
"It was infernally cruel," he replied. "Necessity generally is."
Again she nodded thoughtfully. He was right; he was bound to help Karl, but it needed a brave woman to admit the necessity. But Mrs.
Saunders was no ordinary woman, and for a minute her hazel eyes fought hard and not unsuccessfully against the hot, pent stream that battled for an exit. For a moment she fought the unequal fight; then nature gained the day.
The tears won through, and the strong, supple form became a clinging thing of naked grief.
Saunders pressed the bowed head tenderly against his bosom, and intertwined his fingers lovingly in her hair.
"Good-bye, best beloved," he said. "And whatever comes, defeat or victory, the thrill of triumph or the darkness that is death, there will only be one vision before me—the cool, grey eyes that looked into my soul and found something there not wholly unworthy of a woman's love."
"God who gave you to me, protect you," she sobbed, "and teach me to live through to-day."
And as Saunders strode through the snow to the Marienkastel there was no fear in his heart; merely a great longing for the reunion which must come to loyal hearts—here or hereafter.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
THE PARLEY
The Pariserhof, whither Mrs. Saunders betook herself at her husband's desire, was sufficiently safe, both from its situation and character, to form a rallying point for non-combatants of both sexes and diverse nationalities. From its upper stories an excellent view of the hostilities could be obtained, and in its cellars there was not only efficient shelter from chance missiles, but a considerable mitigation of the thunder of artillery. The latter apartments, therefore, were crowded with old ladies and young children,
with a sprinkling of sensitive males who had come to Weissheim to recover nerve-tone rather than to listen to gun-fire. On the flat roof over the great dining-hall Mrs. Saunders was standing, field-glasses in hand, surveying the operations with a steady and critical gaze. Most often her glasses were directed towards the Marienkastel, against which the forces of the invading party were being gradually focussed; but no sound passed her lips, neither did the fine, white fingers that held the field-glasses twitch or tremble in the least degree. Hers was the curious, irrational pride that prefers to hide its suffering, though the suffering be doubled by the effort of concealment.
A few adventurous spirits had sallied forth to other points of vantage, where they could get a better, though less secure, view of the rare spectacle afforded by the fateful day. But for once the curling-rink and skating-rink belonging to the hotel were deserted; for once the surface of the ice-runs was unscarred by the iron runners of innumerable toboggans. Only on Major Flannel's private rink,—not far from the Marienkastel itself,—the contest for the Flannel Cup was proceeding as though the day was a day of sport and not of war. The keenest curlers in Weissheim were there: "Skipper" Fraser, the sandy Scot, whose perky humour lent such spice and piquancy to the most tragic moments of the game; Major Flannel himself, roaring out his commands, reproaches, and encouragements in a voice which easily made itself heard through the growing din of battle; Strudwick, the gigantic American, who could always be relied on when a "knock-out" shot was required; little Hobbs, the Englishman, who sent down his stones in an unorthodox manner, but always within an inch of where his "skipper" wanted them, so that a particularly brilliant shot came to be known, not as a "beauty" or a "daisy," but as a "Jimmy Hobbs."
But all the while Bernhardt had been developing his plans with the deliberate skill of a born general. He had forced the enemy to unmask the batteries that guarded the lower part of the town. These he could have forced at a price, had he willed, for, though cunningly constructed, snow ramparts are not an effective protection even against rifle fire. But to have done this would have meant long hours of heavy loss, with the grim prospect of stern street fighting when the last redoubt yielded to his superior forces. Could he capture the Marienkastel and establish the few pieces of artillery he had brought so laboriously with him, the town would be at his
mercy, and he could make,—as he had said,—any terms he wished. By eleven o'clock the movement against the old Schloss commenced in earnest. Bernhardt might have brought his guns to bear on the ancient masonry, but there were sentimental reasons for not reducing the historic pile to a heap of rubble; nor was he the man to waste time in an artillery duel if the place could possibly be taken by a coup de main. The Marienkastel must be restored intact to its rightful owner and peace dictated to the dethroned monarch before the sun sank to rest behind the western mountains.
So Saunders,—watching the course of operations from a lofty tower,— perceived imposing bodies of Infantry approaching against him on three sides. On they came on their skis over the soft snow—Guides in extended order to the right, Sharpshooters cresting a low bluff to the left, and throwing up a hasty entrenchment of snow with the evident intention of holding the hill against any retaliatory turning movement on the part of the garrison; and in the centre,—clinging to the wooded ground,—came a powerful force of Guards in their winter fighting garb of white. In the extreme rear was Gloria with the reserve, guarding the ammunition sleighs and a battery of field guns.
Between the invaders and the Schloss lay the bob-sleigh run, and Saunders,—expecting a bombardment of the Marienkastel,—had filled the track with a strong advance guard of his men. The bob-run made an excellent trench, and fortunately at this point had but a very slight declivity, so that the men found no difficulty in retaining their position on its glassy surface. The track indeed started high up by the Marienkastel, just above Major Flannel's curling-rink, and began with a tremendously steep S-shaped curve, known as "The Castle Leap"; then it went straight for a bit and almost level, then wound round again with gradually increasing steepness, and so on in a succession of curves and bends till it joined the main road some thousand feet below, near the hamlet of Riefinsdorf.
But before a shot was fired against the castle a small party was seen approaching under a white flag. Through his field-glasses Saunders detected the form of his friend Trafford accompanied by a couple of officers, all on skis. Instantly Saunders sent out a corresponding party, also under the white flag. Trafford, having expressed a desire to see the officer commanding the
