CHAPTER XXIII
THEweary weeks passed by with their alternations of hopes and fears. Martin, insignificant speck of blue and red, was in the Argonne. Sergeant Bigourdin of theArmée Territorialewas up in the north. The history of their days is the history of the war which has yet to be written; the story of their personal lives is identical with that of the personal lives of the millions of men who have looked and are looking Death always in the face, cut off as it were from their own souls by the curtain of war.
Things went drearily at the Hôtel des Grottes. But little manhood remained at Brantôme. Women worked in the fields and drove the carts and kept the shops where so few things were sold. Félise busied herself in thefabrique, her staff entirely composed of women. Fortinbras made a pretence of managing the hotel to which for days together no travellers came. No cars of pleasant motorists were unloaded at its door. Now and then an elderly bagman in vain quest of orders sat in the solitarysalle-à-manger, and Fortinbras waited on him with urbane melancholy. Thrown intimately together father and daughter grew nearer to each other. They became companions, walking together on idle afternoons and sitting on mild nights on the terrace, with the town twinkling peacefully below them. They talked of many things. Fortinbras drew from the rich store of his wisdom, Félise from her fund of practical knowledge. There were times when she forgot the harrowing mystery of her mother, and, only conscious of a great and yearning sympathy, unlocked her heart and cried a little in close and comforting propinquity. Together they read the letters from the trenches, all too short, all too elusive in their brave cheeriness. The epistles of Martin and Bigourdin were singularly alike. Each said much the same. They had not the comforts of the Hôtel des Grottes. But what would you have? War was war. They were in splendid health. They had enough to eat. They had had a sharp tussle with theBochesand many of their men were killed. But victory in the end was certain. In the meanwhile they needed some warm underclothes as the nights were growing cold; and would Félise enclose some chocolate and packets of Bastos. Love to everybody andVive la France!
These letters Fortinbras would take to the Café de l’Univers and read to the grey-headed remnant of the coterie, each of whom had a precisely similar letter to read. TheAdjoint du Mairewas the first to come without a letter. He produced a telegram which was passed from hand to hand in silence. He had come dry-eyed and brave, but when the telegram reached him, after completing its round, he broke down.
“C’est stupide!Forgive me, my friends. I am proud to have given my son to my country.Mais enfin, he was my son—my only son. For the first time I am glad that his mother is no longer living.” Then he raised his head valiantly. “Et toi, Viriot—Lucien, how is he doing?”
Then some one heard of the death of Beuzot, the young professor at the Ecole Normale.
At last, after a long interval of silence came disastrous news of Bigourdin, lying seriously, perhaps mortally wounded in a hospital in a little northern town. There followed days of anguish. Telegrams elicited the information that he had been shot through the lung. Félise went about her work with a pinched face.
In course of time a letter came from Madame Clothilde Robineau at Chartres:
My Dear Niece:Although your conduct towards me was ungrateful, I am actuated by the teachings of Christianity in extending to you my forgiveness, now that you are alone and unprotected. I hear from a friend of the Abbé Duloup, a venerable priest who is administering to the wounded the consolations of religion, that your Uncle Gaspard is condemned to death. Christian duty and family sentiment therefore make it essential that I should offer you a home beneath my roof. You left it in a fit of anger because I spoke of your father in terms of reprobation. But if you had watched by the death-bed of your mother, my poor sister, as I did, in the terrible garret in the Rue Maugrabine, you would not judge me so harshly. Believe me, dear child, I have at heart your welfare both material and spiritual. If you desire guidance as to the conduct of the hotel I shall be pleased to aid you with my experience.Your affectionate Aunt,Clothilde Robineau.
My Dear Niece:
Although your conduct towards me was ungrateful, I am actuated by the teachings of Christianity in extending to you my forgiveness, now that you are alone and unprotected. I hear from a friend of the Abbé Duloup, a venerable priest who is administering to the wounded the consolations of religion, that your Uncle Gaspard is condemned to death. Christian duty and family sentiment therefore make it essential that I should offer you a home beneath my roof. You left it in a fit of anger because I spoke of your father in terms of reprobation. But if you had watched by the death-bed of your mother, my poor sister, as I did, in the terrible garret in the Rue Maugrabine, you would not judge me so harshly. Believe me, dear child, I have at heart your welfare both material and spiritual. If you desire guidance as to the conduct of the hotel I shall be pleased to aid you with my experience.
Your affectionate Aunt,
Clothilde Robineau.
The frigid offer well meant according to the woman’s pale lights, Félise scarcely heeded. Father or no father, uncle or no uncle, protector or no protector, she was capable of conducting a score of hotels. The last thing in the world she needed was the guidance of her Aunt Clothilde. Save for one phrase in the letter she would have written an immediate though respectful refusal and thought nothing further of the matter. But that one phrase flashed through her brain. Her mother had died in the Rue Maugrabine. They had told her she had died in hospital. Things hitherto bafflingly dark to her became clear—on one awful, tragic hypothesis. She shook with the terror of it.
It was the only communication the postman had brought that late afternoon. She stood in the vestibule to read it. Fortinbras engaged in the bureau over some simple accounts looked up by chance and saw her staring at the letter with great open eyes, her lips apart, her bosom heaving. He rose swiftly, and hurrying through the side door came to her side.
“My God! Not bad news?”
She handed him the letter. He read, his mind not grasping at once that which to her was essential.
“The priests are exaggerating. And as for the proposal——”
“The Rue Maugrabine,” said Félise.
He drew the quick breath of sudden realisation, and for a long time they stood silent, looking into each other’s eyes. At last she spoke, deadly white:
“That woman I saw—who opened the door for me—was my mother.”
She had pierced to the truth. No subterfuge he could invent had power to veil it. He made a sad gesture of admission.
“Why did you hide it from me?” she asked.
“You had a beautiful ideal, my child, and it would have been a crime to tear it away.”
She held herself very erect—there was steel in the small body—and advanced a step or so towards him, her dark eyes fearless.
“You know what you gave me to understand when I saw her?”
“Yes, my child,” said Fortinbras.
“You also were an ideal.”
He smiled. “You loved me tenderly, but I was not in your calendar of saints, my dear.”
She mastered herself, swallowing a sob, but the tears rolled down her cheeks.
“You are now,” she said.
He laughed uncertainly. “A poor old sinner of a saint,” he said, and gathered her to him.
And later, in the salon, before the fire, for the autumn was damp and cold, he told her the cheerless story of his life, concealing nothing, putting the facts before her so that she could judge. She sat on the rug, her arm about his knee. She felt very tired, as though some part of her had bled to death. But a new wonder filled her heart. In a way she had been prepared for the discovery. In her talks with her uncle and with Martin she had been keen to mark a strange disingenuousness. She had accused them of conspiracy. They were concealing something; what, she knew not; but a cloud had rested on her mother’s memory. If, on that disastrous evening, the frowsy woman of the Rue Maugrabine had revealed herself as her mother, her soul would have received a shock from which recovery might have been difficult. Now the shock had not only been mitigated by months of torturing doubt, but was compensated by the thrill of her father’s sacrifice.
When he had ended, she turned and wept and knelt before him, crying for forgiveness, calling him all manner of foolish names.
He said, stroking her dark hair: “I am only a poor old bankruptMarchand de Bonheur!”
“You will beMarchand de Bonheurto the end,” she said, and with total want of logical relevance she added: “See what happiness you have brought me to-night.”
“At any rate, my dear,” said he, “we have found each other at last.”
She went to bed and lay awake till dawn looking at a new world of wrong doing, suffering and heroism. Who was she, humble little girl, living her sequestered life, to judge men by the superficialities of their known actions? She had judged her father almost to the catastrophe of love. She had judged Martin bitterly. What did she know of the riot in his soul? Now he was offering his life for a splendid ideal. She felt humble beside her conception of him. And her Uncle Gaspard, great, tender, adored, was lying far, far away in the north, with a bullet through his body. She prayed her valiant little soul out for the two of them. And the next morning she arose and went to her work brave and clear-eyed, with a new hope in God based upon a new faith in man.
A day or two later she received a wild letter from Corinna Hastings. Corinna’s letters were as frequent as blackberries in March. Félise knitted her brows over it for a long time. Then she took it to her father.
“The sense,” she said, “must lie in the scrabble I can’t make out.”
Fortinbras put on his spectacles and when, not without difficulty, he had deciphered it, he took off the spectacles and smiled the benevolent smile of theMarchand de Bonheur.
“Leave it to me, my dear,” said he. “I will answer Corinna.”
In the tiny town of Wendlebury, in the noisy bosom of her family, Corinna was eating her heart out. During the latter days of June she had returned to the fold, an impecunious failure. As a matter of theory she had upheld the principles of woman suffrage. As a matter of practice, in the effort to obtain it, she loathed it with bitter hatred. She lacked the inspiration of its overwhelming importance in sublunary affairs. She was willing enough to do ordinary work in its interests, at a living wage, even to the odious extent of wearing an anæmic tricolor and selling newspapers in the streets. But when her duties involved incendiarism, imprisonment and hunger, striking, Corinna revolted. She had neither the conviction nor the courage. Miss Banditch reviled her for a recreant, a snake in the grass and a spineless doll and left the flat, forswearing her acquaintance for ever. Headquarters signified disapproval of her pusillanimity. Driven to desperation she signified her disapproval of Headquarters in unmeasured terms. The end came and prospective starvation drove her home to Wendlebury. When the war broke out, in common with the rest of the young maidenhood of the town, she yearned to do something to help the British Empire. Her sister Clara, to satisfy this laudable craving, promptly married a subaltern, and, when he was ordered to the front, went to live with his people. The next youngest sister, Evelyn, anxious for Red Cross work, found herself subsidised by an aunt notoriously inimical to Corinna. Corinna therefore had to throw in her lot with Margaret and Winnie, chits of fifteen and thirteen—the intervening boys having flown from the nest. What was a penniless and, in practical matters, a feckless young woman to do? She knitted socks and mufflers and went round the town collecting money for Belgian refugees. So did a score of tabbies, objects of Corinna’s scornful raillery who district-visited the poor to exasperation. She demanded work more glorious, more heroic; but lack of funds tied her to detested knitting-needles. As the Vicar’s daughter she was compelled to go to church and listen to her father’s sermons on the war; compared with which infliction, she tartly informed her mother, forcible feeding was a gay amusement.
Once or twice she had a postcard from Martin in the Argonne. She cursed herself, her destiny and her sex. If only she was a man she would at least have gone forth with a gun on her shoulder. But she was a woman; the most helpless thing in women God ever made. Even her mother, whom she had rated low on account of intellectual short-comings, she began to envy. At any rate she had generously performed her woman’s duty. She had brought forth ten children, five men children, two of whom had rushed to take up arms in defence of their country. Martin’s last postcard had told Corinna of Bigourdin being called away to fight. In her enforced isolation from the great events of the great world she became acutely conscious that in all the great world only one individual had ever found a use for her. A flash of such knowledge either scorches or illuminates the soul.
Then early in November she received a misspelt letter laboriously written in hard pencil on thin, glazed paper. It was addressed from a hospital in the North of France.
Mademoiselle Corinna:I have done my best to strike a blow for my beloved country. It was written that I should do so, and it was written perhaps that I should give my life for her. I am dictating these words to my bedside neighbour who is wounded in the knee. For my part, a German bullet has penetrated my lung, and the doctors say I may not live. But while I still can speak, I am anxious to tell you that on the battlefield your image has always been before my eyes and that I always have in my heart a love for you tender and devoted. Should I live, Mademoiselle, I pray you to forget this letter, as I do not wish to cause you pain. But should I die, let me now have the consolation of believing that I shall have a place in your thoughts as one who has died, not unworthily or unwillingly, in a noble cause.Gaspard-Marie Bigourdin.
Mademoiselle Corinna:
I have done my best to strike a blow for my beloved country. It was written that I should do so, and it was written perhaps that I should give my life for her. I am dictating these words to my bedside neighbour who is wounded in the knee. For my part, a German bullet has penetrated my lung, and the doctors say I may not live. But while I still can speak, I am anxious to tell you that on the battlefield your image has always been before my eyes and that I always have in my heart a love for you tender and devoted. Should I live, Mademoiselle, I pray you to forget this letter, as I do not wish to cause you pain. But should I die, let me now have the consolation of believing that I shall have a place in your thoughts as one who has died, not unworthily or unwillingly, in a noble cause.
Gaspard-Marie Bigourdin.
Corinna sat for a long time, frozen to her soul, looking out of her bedroom window at the hopeless autumn drizzle, and the sodden leaves on the paths of the vicarage garden. Then, with quivering lips, she sat down at the rickety little desk that had been hers since childhood and wrote to Bigourdin. She sealed it and went out in the rain and dropped it in the nearest pillar box. When she reached her room again, the realisation of the inadequacy of her words smote her. She threw herself on her bed and sobbed. After which she wrote her wild letter to Félise.
For the next few days a chastened Corinna went about the Vicarage. An unusual gentleness manifested itself in her demeanour, and at last emboldened Mrs. Hastings, good, kind soul, to take the unprecedented step of enquiring into her wayward and sharp-tongued daughter’s private affairs.
“I’m afraid, dearie, that letter you had from France contained bad news.”
“Yes, mother,” said Corinna, with a sigh.
They were alone in the drawing room. Mrs. Hastings laid aside her knitting, rose slowly—she was a portly woman—and went across to Corinna and put her arm about her shoulders.
“Can’t you tell me what it was, dearie?” she whispered.
Corinna melted to the voice. It awakened memories of unutterable comfort of childish years. She surrendered to the embrace.
“Yes, mother. The truest man I have ever known—a Frenchman—is dying over there. He asked me to marry him a year ago. And I was a fool, mother. Oh! an awful fool!”
And half an hour later, she said tearfully: “I’ve been a fool in so many ways. I’ve misjudged you so, mother. It never occurred to me that you would understand.”
“My dear,” said Mrs. Hastings, stroking her hair, “to bring ten children into the world and keep them going on small means, to say nothing of looking after a husband, isn’t a bad education.”
The next day came a telegram.
“Re letter Félise. If you want to find yourself at last go straight to Bigourdin. Fortinbras.”
The message was a lash. She had not contemplated the possibility of going to France. In the sleepless nights she had ached to be with him. But how? In Tierra del Fuego he would be equally inaccessible.
“Go straight to him.” The words were very simple. Of course she would go. Why had she waited for Fortinbras to point out her duty?
Then came the humiliating knowledge of impotence. She looked in her purse and counted out her fortune of thirteen shillings and sevenpence halfpenny. A very humble Corinna showed letter and telegram to her mother.
“The war seems to have turned everything upside down,” said the latter. “You ought to go, dear. It’s a sacred duty.”
“But how can I? I have no money. I can’t ask father.”
“Come upstairs,” said Mrs. Hastings.
She led the way to her bedroom and from a locked drawer took an old-fashioned japanned despatch-box, which she opened.
“All my married life,” she said, “I have managed to keep something against a rainy day. Take what you want, dear.”
Thus came the overthrowal of all Corinna’s scheme of values. She went to France, a woman with a warm and throbbing heart.
CHAPTER XXIV
ITwas with difficulty that she reached the little French town, and it was with infinitely more difficulty that she overcame military obstacles and penetrated into the poor little whitewashed school that did duty as a hospital. It was a great bare room with a double row of iron bedsteads, a gangway between them. Here and there an ominous screen shut off a bed. A few bandaged men half dressed were sitting up smoking and playing cards. An odour of disinfectant caught her by the throat. A human form lying by the door with but little face visible, was moaning piteously. She shrank on the threshold, aghast at this abode of mangled men. The youngaide-majorescorting her, pointed up the ward.
“You will find him there, Mademoiselle, Number Seventeen.”
“How is he?” she asked.
“The day before yesterday he nearly went,” he snapped his finger and thumb. “A hemorrhage which we stopped. But the old French stock is solid as oak, Mademoiselle. A hole or two doesn’t matter. He is going along pretty well.”
“Thank God!” said Corinna.
A nurse with red-cross badge met them. “Ah, it is the lady for Sergeant Bigourdin. He has been expecting you ever since your letter.”
His eyes were all of him that she recognised at first. His great, hearty face had grown hollow and the lower part was concealed by a thick, black beard. She remembered having heard ofles poilus, the hairy-ones, as the Territorial Troops were affectionately termed in France. But his kind, dark eyes were full of gladness. The nurse set a stool for Corinna by the bedside. On her left lay another black-bearded man who looked at her wistfully. He had been Bigourdin’s amanuensis.
“This angel of tyranny forbids me to move my arms,” whispered Bigourdin apologetically. The little whimsical phrase struck the note of the man’s unconquerable spirit. Corinna smiled through tears. The nurse said: “Talk to him and don’t let him talk to you. You can only have ten minutes.” She retired.
“Cela vous fait beaucoup souffrir, mon pauvre ami?” said Corinna.
He shook his head. “Not now that you are here. It is wonderful of you to come. You have a heart of gold. And it is that little talisman,ce petit cœur d’or, that is going to make me well. You cannot imagine—it is like a fairy tale to see you here.”
Instinctively Corinna put out her hand and touched his lips. She had never done so feminine and tender a thing to a man. She let her fingers remain, while he kissed them. She flushed and smiled.
“You mustn’t talk. It is for me who have sound lungs. I have come because I have been a little imbecile, and only at the eleventh hour I have repented of my folly. If I had been sensible a year ago, this would not have happened.”
He turned happy eyes on her; but he said with his Frenchman’s clear logic:
“All my love and all the happiness that might have been would not have altered the destinies of Europe. I should have been brought here, all the same, with a ridiculous little hole through my great body.”
Corinna admitted the truth of his statement. “But,” said she, “I might have been of some comfort to you.”
His eyebrows expressed the shrug of which his maimed frame was incapable. “It is all for the best. If I had left you at Brantôme, my heart would have been torn in two. I might have been cautious to the detriment of France. As it was, I didn’t care much what happened to me. And now they have awarded me themédaille militaire; and you are here, to make, as Baudelaire says, ‘ma joie et ma santé.’ What more can a man desire?”
Now all this bravery was spoken in a voice so weak that the woman in Corinna was stirred to its depths. She bent over him and whispered—for she knew that the man with the wistful gaze in the next bed was listening:
“C’est vrai que tu m’aimes toujours?”
She saw her question answered by the quick illumination of his eyes, and she went on quickly: “And I, I love you too, and I will give you all my poor life for what it is worth. Oh!” she cried, “I can’t imagine what you can see in me. Beside you I feel so small, of so little account. I can do nothing—nothing but love you.”
“That’s everything in the world,” said Bigourdin.
They were silent for a moment. Then he said: “I should like to meet theBochewho fired that rifle.”
“So should I,” she cried fiercely. “I should like to tear him limb from limb.”
“I shouldn’t,” said Bigourdin. “I should like to decorate him with a pair of wings and a little bow and arrow. . . .”
The nurse came up. “You must go now, mademoiselle. The patient is becoming too excited. It is not your fault. Nothing but a bolster across their mouths will prevent these Périgordins from talking.”
A tiny bedroom in a house over a grocer’s shop was all the accommodation that she had been able to secure, as the town was full of troops billeted on the inhabitants. As it was, that bedroom had been given up to her by a young officer who took pity on her distress. She felt her presence impertinent in this stern atmosphere of war. After seeing Bigourdin, she wandered for a while about the rainy streets and then retired to her chilly and comfortless room, where she ate her meal of sardines and sausage. The next day she presented herself at the hospital and saw theaide-major.
“Can you give me some work to do?” she asked. “I don’t pretend to be able to nurse. But I could fetch and carry and do odd jobs.”
But it was a French hospital, and therèglementmade no provision for affording prepossessing young Englishwomen romantic employment.
Of course, said theaide-major, if Mademoiselle was bent upon it, she could write an application which would be forwarded to the proper quarter. But it would have to pass through thebureaux—and she, who knew France so well, was aware what the passing through thebureauxmeant. Unless she had the ear of high personages, it would take weeks and perhaps months.
“And in the meantime,” said Corinna, “mygrand ami, Number 17 down there, will have got well and departed from the hospital.”
“Mademoiselle,” said he, “you have already saved the life of one gallant Frenchman. Don’t you think that should give you a sentiment of duty accomplished?”
She blushed. He was kind. For he was young and she was pretty.
“I can let you see yourgros heureuxto-day,” said he. “It is a favour. It is against therèglement. If themajorhears of it, there will be trouble. By the grace of God he has a bilious attack which confines him to his quarters. But,bien entendu, it is for this time only.”
She thanked him and again found herself by Bigourdin’s bedside. The moment of her first sight of him was the happiest in her life. She had wrought a miracle. He was a different man inspired with the supreme will to live. The young doctor had spoken truly. A spasm of joy shook her. At last she had been of some use in the world. . . . She saw too the Bigourdin whom she had known. His great, black beard had vanished. One of thecamarades, with two disposable arms, had hunted through the kits of the patients for a razor and had shaved him.
“They tell me I am getting on magnificently,” said he. “This morning there is no longer any danger. In a few months I shall be as solid as ever I was. It is happiness that has cured me.”
They talked. She told him of her conversation with theaide-major. He reflected for a moment. Then he said:
“Do you wish to please me?”
“What am I here for?” asked Corinna.
“You are here to spoil me. Anyhow—if you wish to please me, go to Brantôme, and await me. To know that you are there,chez-moi, will give me the courage of a thousand lions, and you will be able to console my poor Félise who every night is praying for Martin by the side of her little white bed.”
And so it was arranged. After two days extraordinary travel, advancing from point to point by any train that happened to run, shunted on sidings for interminable periods, in order to allow the unimpeded progress of military trains, waiting weary hours at night in cold, desolate stations, hungry and broken, but her heart aglow with a new and wonderful happiness, she reached Brantôme.
She threw her arms round the neck of an astonished, but ever urbane elderly gentleman in the vestibule of the Hôtel des Grottes and kissed him.
“He’s getting well,” she cried a little hysterically. “He sent me here to wait for him. I’m so happy and I’m just about dead.”
“But yet there’s that spark of life in you, my dear Corinna,” said Fortinbras, “which, according to the saying, distinctly justifies hope. Félise and I will see to it that you live.”
It was winter before Bigourdin was well enough to return. By that time Corinna had settled down to her new life wherein she found the making offoie grasan enticing mystery. Also, in a town where every woman had her man—husband, brother, son or lover—either in hourly peril of death, or dead or wounded, there was infinite scope for help and consolation. And when a woman said: “Hélas! Mon pauvre homme. Il est blessé là-bas,” she could reply with a new, thrilling sympathy and a poignant throb of the heart: “And my man too.” For like all the other women there, she had “son homme.” Her man! Corinna tasted the fierce joy of being elemental.
There was much distress in the little town. The municipality did its best. In many cases the wives valiantly carried on the husband’s business. But in the row of cave dwellings where the quarrymen lived no muscular arms hewed the week’s wages from the rocks. Boucabeille, Martin’s Bacchanalian friend, had purged all his offences in heroic battle, and was lying in an unknown grave. Corinna, learning how Martin had carried the child home on his shoulders, brought her to the hotel and cared for her, and obtained work for the mother in thefabrique.
Never before had Corinna had days so full; never before had she awakened in the morning with love in her heart. Félise, grown gentler and happier since the canonisation of her father, gave her unstinted affection.
And then Bigourdin arrived, nominally on sick-leave, but with private intimation that his active services would be required no longer. This gave a touch of sadness to his otherwise joyous home-coming.
“I have not killed half enough Boches,” said he.
A few days after his return came a letter from Martin. And it was written from a hospital.
My Dearest Félise:I am well and sound and in perfect health. But a bullet got me in the left arm while we were attacking a German trench, and a spent bit of shrapnel caught me on the head and stunned me. When I recovered I was midway between the trenches in the zone of fire and I had to lie still between the dead bodies of two of our brave soldiers. I thought much, my dear, while I was lying there expecting every minute a bullet to finish me. And some of what I thought I will tell you, when I see you, for I shall see you very soon. After some thirty-six hours I was collected and brought to the field hospital, where I was patched up, and in the course of a day or so sent on to the base. I lay on straw during the journey in a row of other wounded. France has the defects of her qualities. Her soil is so fertile that her stalks of straw are like young oak saplings. When I arrived I had such a temperature and was so silly with pain that I don’t very well remember what happened. When I got sensible they told me that gangrene had set in and that they had chopped off my arm above the elbow. I always thought I was an incomplete human being, dear, but I have never been so idiotically incomplete as I am now. Although I am getting along splendidly I want to do all sorts of things with the fingers that aren’t there. I turn to pick up something and there’s nothing to pick it up with. A week before I was wounded, I had a finger nail torn off, and it still hurts me, somewhere in space, about a foot away from what isme. You would laugh if you knew what a nuisance it is. . . . I make no excuses for asking you to receive me at Brantôme; all that is dear to me in the world is there—and what other spot in the wide universe have I to fly to?
My Dearest Félise:
I am well and sound and in perfect health. But a bullet got me in the left arm while we were attacking a German trench, and a spent bit of shrapnel caught me on the head and stunned me. When I recovered I was midway between the trenches in the zone of fire and I had to lie still between the dead bodies of two of our brave soldiers. I thought much, my dear, while I was lying there expecting every minute a bullet to finish me. And some of what I thought I will tell you, when I see you, for I shall see you very soon. After some thirty-six hours I was collected and brought to the field hospital, where I was patched up, and in the course of a day or so sent on to the base. I lay on straw during the journey in a row of other wounded. France has the defects of her qualities. Her soil is so fertile that her stalks of straw are like young oak saplings. When I arrived I had such a temperature and was so silly with pain that I don’t very well remember what happened. When I got sensible they told me that gangrene had set in and that they had chopped off my arm above the elbow. I always thought I was an incomplete human being, dear, but I have never been so idiotically incomplete as I am now. Although I am getting along splendidly I want to do all sorts of things with the fingers that aren’t there. I turn to pick up something and there’s nothing to pick it up with. A week before I was wounded, I had a finger nail torn off, and it still hurts me, somewhere in space, about a foot away from what isme. You would laugh if you knew what a nuisance it is. . . . I make no excuses for asking you to receive me at Brantôme; all that is dear to me in the world is there—and what other spot in the wide universe have I to fly to?
“Butsacré nom d’une pipe!” cried Bigourdin—for Félise, after private and tearful perusal of the letter, was reading such parts of it aloud as were essential for family information—“What is the imbecile talking of? Where else, indeed, should he go?”
Félise continued. Martin as yet unaware of Bigourdin’s return, sent him messages.
“When you write, will you tell him I have given to France as much of myself as I’ve been allowed to? Half an arm isn’t much.Mais c’est déjà quelque chose.”
“Quelque chose!” cried Bigourdin. “But it is a sacred sacrifice. If I could get hold of that little bit of courageous arm I would give it to Monsieur le Curé and bid him nail it up as an object venerable and heroic in his parish church.Ah! le pauvre garçon, le pauvre garçon,” said he. “Mais voyez-vous, it is the English character that comes out in his letter. I have seen many English up there in the North. No longer can we Frenchmen talk ofle phlègme britannique. The astounding revelation is the unconquerable English gaiety.Jamais de longs visages.If a decapitated English head could speak, it would launch you a whimsical smile and say: “What annoys me is that I can’t inhale a cigarette.” And here our good Martin makes a joke about the straw in the ambulance-train.Mon Dieu!I know what it is, but it has never occurred to me to jest about it.”
In the course of time Martin returned to Brantôme. The railway system of the country had been fairly adjusted in the parts of France that were distant from scenes of military operations. Bigourdin borrowed Monsieur le Maire’s big limousine which had not been commandeered—for the Mayor was on many committees in the Department and had to fly about from place to place and with Corinna and Félise and Fortinbras he met Martin’s train at Périgueux. As it steamed in a hand waved from a window below a familiar face. They rushed to the carriage steps and in a moment he was among them—in a woollen Kepi and incredibly torn blue-grey greatcoat and ragged red trousers, the unfilled arm of the coat dangling down idly. But it was a bronzed, clear-eyed man who met them, for all his war battering.
Bigourdin welcomed him first, in his exuberant way, called himmon brave, mon petit héros, and hugged him. Fortinbras gripped his hand, after the English manner. Corinna, happy and smiling through glistening eyes, he kissed without more ado. And then he was free to greet Félise, who had remained a pace or two in the background. Her great, dark eyes were fixed upon him questioningly. She put out a hand and touched the empty sleeve. She read in his face what she had never read before. His one poor arm, stretched in an instinctive curve—with a little sobbing cry she threw herself blindly into his embrace.
The tremendous issues of existence with which for five months he had been grappling had wiped out from his consciousness, almost from his memory, the first enthralling kiss of another woman. Caked with mud, deafened by the roar of shells, sleeping in the earth of his trench, an intimate of blood and death day after day, he had learned that Lucilla had been but anignis fatuusleading him astray from the essential meaning of his life. He knew, as he lay wounded beneath the hell of machine-gun fire between the trenches that there was only one sweet, steadfast soul in the world who called him to the accomplishment of his being.
When, in the abandonment of her joy and grief his lips met the soft, quivering mouth of Félise, care, like a garment, fell from him. He whispered: “You have a great heart. I’ve not deserved this. But you’re the only thing that matters to me in the world.”
Félise was content. She knew that the war had swept his soul clean of false gods. Out of that furnace nothing but Truth could come.
And so Martin returned for ever to the land of his adoption, which on the morrow was to take him after its generous and expansive way as a hero to its bosom. The Englishman who had given a limb for Périgord was to be held in high honour for the rest of his days.
He was a man now who had passed through most human experiences. A man of fine honour, of courage tested in a thousand ways, of stiffened will, of high ideals. The life that lay before him was far dearer than any other he could have chosen. For it matters not so much the life one leads as the knowledge of the perfect way to live it. And that knowledge, based on wisdom, had Martin achieved. He knew that if the glittering prizes of the earth are locked away behind golden bars opening but to golden keys, there are others far more precious lying to the hand of him who will but seek them in the folds of the familiar hills.
The five sat down to dinner that evening in the emptysalle-à-manger; for not a guest, even the most decrepit commercial traveller, was staying at the hotel. Yet never had they met at a happier meal. Félise cut up Martin’s food as though it had been blessed bread. In the middle of it Fortinbras poured out half a glass of wine.
“My children,” said he, “I am going to break through the habit of years. This old wine of Burgundy is too generous to betray me on an occasion so beautiful and so solemn. I drink to your happiness.”
“But to whom do Martin and I owe our happiness?” cried Corinna, with a flush on her cheek, and a glistening in her blue eyes. “It is to you—from the first to last to you,Marchand de Bonheur!”
“My God! Yes,” said Martin, extending his one arm to Fortinbras.
The ex-Dealer in Happiness regarded them both benevolently. “For the first time in my life,” said he, “I think I have reason to be proud of my late profession. Like the artist who has toiled and struggled, I can, without immodesty, recognise my masterpiece. It was my original conception that Martin and Corinna, crude but honest souls, should find an incentive to the working out of their destiny by falling in love. Therefore I sent them out together. That they should have an honourable asylum, I sent them to my own kin. When I found they wouldn’t fall in love at all, I imagined the present felicitous combination. I have been aided by the little accident of a European war. But what matter? The Gods willed it, the Gods were on my side. Out of evil there inscrutably and divinely cometh good. My children, my heart is very full of the consolation that, at the end of many years that the locust hath eaten, I have perhaps justified my existence.”
“Mon père,” cried Félise, “all my life long your existence has had the justification of heroic sacrifice.”
“My dear,” said he, “if I hadn’t met adversity with a brave face, I should not have been a man—still less a philosopher. And now that my duty here is over, if I don’t go back to Paris and find some means of helping in the great conflict, I shall be unworthy of the name of Englishman. So as soon as I see you safely and exquisitely married, I shall leave you. I shall, however, come and visit you from time to time. But when I die”—he paused and fishing out a stump of pencil scribbled on the back of the menu card—“when I die, bury me in Paris on the south side of the Seine and put this inscription on my tombstone. One little vanity is accorded by the gods to every human being.”
He threw the card on the table. On it was written:
“Ci-gîtFortinbrasMarchand de Bonheur.”
“Ci-gîtFortinbrasMarchand de Bonheur.”
“Ci-gîtFortinbrasMarchand de Bonheur.”
“Ci-gît
Fortinbras
Marchand de Bonheur.”
When the meal was over they went up to the prim and plushily furnished salon, where a wood fire was burning gaily. Bigourdin brought up a cobwebbed bottle of the Old Brandy of the Brigadier and uncorked it reverently.
“We are going to drink to France,” said he.
He produced from the cupboard whose doors were veiled with green-pleated silk, half a dozen of the great glass goblets and into each he poured a little of the golden liquid, which, as he had once said, contained the soul of theGrande Armée.
“Stop a bit,” said Martin. “You’re making a mistake. There are only five of us.”
“I am making no mistake at all,” said Bigourdin. “The sixth glass is for the shade of the brave old Brigadier. If he is not here now among us to honour the toast, I am no Christian man.”
THE END
THEWILLIAM J. LOCKEYEAR-BOOK*Abon-motfor each day inevery year, selected fromthis popular author’s works.*Decorated Cloth.$1.00 net
THEWILLIAM J. LOCKEYEAR-BOOK*Abon-motfor each day inevery year, selected fromthis popular author’s works.*Decorated Cloth.$1.00 net
THE
WILLIAM J. LOCKE
YEAR-BOOK
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NOVELS BY F. E. MILLS YOUNGThe Great Unrest12mo. Cloth. $1.30 net“As a study in the age-old question of heredity versus environment, this novel is illuminating.”—Baltimore Sun.Valley of a Thousand Hills12mo. Cloth. $1.30 net“A fascinating romance with a heroine of unusual charm.”—Boston Evening Transcript.The Purple Mists12mo. Cloth. $1.30 net“It combines the atmosphere of the African veldts with a singularly good love story.”—Chicago Post.Myles Calthorpe, I. D. B.12mo. Cloth. $1.25 net“Well written and thoroughly interesting.”—New York Herald.Grit Lawless12mo. Cloth. $1.25 net“There is in Miss Young’s work a richness of expression, a sincerity of feeling and knowledge of the human heart that are profound and convincing.”—Philadelphia Public Ledger.Sam’s Kid12mo. Cloth. $1.25 net“Her characterization of Sam is exquisitely sympathetic. It is a powerful book.”—Philadelphia Public Ledger.Chip12mo. Cloth. $1.25 net“Powerful in purpose and gripping in theme.”—Philadelphia Record.Atonement12mo. Cloth. $1.25 net“A well-told and always interesting story. Miss Young suggests the doctrine of Emerson.”—New York Herald.A Mistaken Marriage12mo. Cloth. $1.25 netA love story dealing with Society life in South Africa.JOHN LANE COMPANYNew York
NOVELS BY F. E. MILLS YOUNG
The Great Unrest12mo. Cloth. $1.30 net
“As a study in the age-old question of heredity versus environment, this novel is illuminating.”
—Baltimore Sun.
Valley of a Thousand Hills12mo. Cloth. $1.30 net
“A fascinating romance with a heroine of unusual charm.”
—Boston Evening Transcript.
The Purple Mists12mo. Cloth. $1.30 net
“It combines the atmosphere of the African veldts with a singularly good love story.”
—Chicago Post.
Myles Calthorpe, I. D. B.12mo. Cloth. $1.25 net
“Well written and thoroughly interesting.”
—New York Herald.
Grit Lawless12mo. Cloth. $1.25 net
“There is in Miss Young’s work a richness of expression, a sincerity of feeling and knowledge of the human heart that are profound and convincing.”
—Philadelphia Public Ledger.
Sam’s Kid12mo. Cloth. $1.25 net
“Her characterization of Sam is exquisitely sympathetic. It is a powerful book.”
—Philadelphia Public Ledger.
Chip12mo. Cloth. $1.25 net
“Powerful in purpose and gripping in theme.”
—Philadelphia Record.
Atonement12mo. Cloth. $1.25 net
“A well-told and always interesting story. Miss Young suggests the doctrine of Emerson.”
—New York Herald.
A Mistaken Marriage12mo. Cloth. $1.25 net
A love story dealing with Society life in South Africa.
JOHN LANE COMPANYNew York