CHAPTER XXIV

 IT was 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 young aide-major escorting 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 of les 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 c?ur 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 Brant?me, 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 the médaille 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 the Boche who 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 the aide-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 the règlement made no provision for affording prepossessing young Englishwomen romantic employment. Of course, said the aide-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 the bureaux—and she, who knew France so well, was aware what the passing through the bureaux meant. Unless she had the ear of high personages, it would take weeks and perhaps months. “And in the meantime,” said Corinna, “my grand 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 your gros heureux to-day,” said he. “It is a favour. It is against the règlement. If the major hears 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 the camarades, 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 the aide-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 Brant?me, 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 Brant?me. She threw her arms round the neck of an astonished, but ever urbane elderly gentleman in the vestibule of the H?tel 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 of foie gras an 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 the fabrique. 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 is me. You would laugh if you knew what a nuisance it is. . . . I make no excuses for asking you to receive me at Brant?me; all that is dear to me in the world is there—and what other spot in the wide universe have I to fly to? “But sacré 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 gar?on, le pauvre gar?on,” 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 of le 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 Brant?me. 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 him mon 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 an ignis fatuus leading 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 empty salle-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-g?t ??????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 the Grande 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