Motion Picture Magazine (Nov 1916-Jan 1917)

JOAN OF ARC 103 a thousand thousand times ; God, being God, did not interfere, save, perhaps, a score of times. Once was in Bethlehem, beneath a blazing crimson star; another time in hillside Domremy, when the small, silver leaves of the Fairy Tree shivered in the east wind and whispered together of strange happenings in the garden of a humble shepherd home. Among the tall lilies and the small, pink roses of Lorraine, Joan D'Arc, a child who would soon be a woman, stood listening intently, one brown, hard little hand on her heaving breast. Strange ! She was sure she had heard it — that voice calling across, the meadow, where she and the rest were playing : "Joan ! Joan !" — yet it was not her mother who had summoned her. She lifted her face to the serene heavens. "Who called me ?" she cried softly. "I am here." ''God called thee, Joan." She clasped her hands, rough from the distaff and the shepherd crook, upon her heart. She took a forward step and trembled, yet not with fear. The radiant Beings in celestial armor, with the light of another world upon their benignant faces, were strangely familiar— it was as tho she had waited for their coming all the years of her life. "Be good, Joan ; pray much," the voice said in the ears of her soul. "God hath chosen thee to deliver France from her enemies." "But I am so young," faltered the girl — -"so frail. What can I do ?" "Wait and pray," said the vision; "the time is not yet come." And suddenly the glory of the shining armor blinded her. When she looked again, there were only the lime-trees and the white, vestal lilies and the roses steeped in the sun. She stood very still, and to her memory came the echo of other words that a wandering friar had spoken before the hearth, one wild, winter night four months agone. He had been speaking of the ruin of France, with swaggering enemies bragging in her proud cities, with starvelings for an army, and a hunted, uncrowned fugitive for a king. "Yet they say she shall not perish," the friar had said fiercely ; "as she was betrayed bv a woman, she shall be ransomed by a Maid." Suppose she were the Maid? The girl's heart leapt — to restore the ancient glory of her country ; to place his crown upon her king! Yet slow tears, the patient tears of a woman, filled her eyes, as she looked about at the gentle pastures and hillsides, the small home cottage, and the village church beyond the orchard. It would be hard to leave them all. And to fight — she who had never harmed a squirrel, who shrank from the sight of suffering! "I will pray," she thought — "I will pray to the good God to show me the way." And from that day Joan walked apart from her playmates and her family, tho she wore garlands, and scoured her copper pans, and watched her herds upon the hillside as before. And so she grew to womanhood, with the flame that burned in her heart shining in her wide, grave eyes. ' Her visions came again, like a great pillar of light in the woodland shadows, like the g»ld of a thousand daffodils across the meadow floor. And those beautiful, sad seer-eyes of hers glanced once into other eyes, bold and beseeching and lover-like, and the brave heart nearly faltered ere she could look away. Human love was not for her, nor the touch of her child's groping fingers on her breast, nor the homely, humble joys of home. "I cannot love you," she told her lover quietly; "I shall never wed any man." Her mother wept at her perversity, but her heavy-brained father scowled and swore. He had watched the girl's eagerness when a band of soldiers had marched thru the town, and he suspected a fragment of her plans. "What ails thee, wench?" he asked her one afternoon, as he came upon her in the woodland, a slim, straight figure among her sheep, staring at unseen things with rapt eyes. "Art thou fey? What is it thou seest?" "I was listening to my voices," said Joan, calmly. "Father, they tell me to go away from Domremy to fight for Charles — my king, and France — my country." "A pest on thy voices," raged the