Leerie Part 18

"What's your idea?"

The girl raised a deprecating hand. "Something so crazy that you'd laugh at it. Let me keep it to myself--and give me Captain Fauchet."

In the end Leerie had her wish. The little room at the end of a ward, used heretofore for supplies, was turned into a private room, and Monsieur Satan was moved in, with Sheila O'Leary as guardian. It was very evident that the patient approved. Once the door was closed behind them, he beckoned the nurse to him with malignant joy.

"They are all Germans out there--I've just discovered it. Sooner or later they will all have to be destroyed. You are an American. I can swear to that, for I saw you on a liner coming from America and your French is so bad, pardonnez-moi, it could not be anything but American. That is why I trust you. You are with me against the Boches, n'est-ce pas?"

Sheila solemnly agreed.

"Eh bien, listen. The world is slowly turning Boche. You pour a little Pinard into water and what do you get? Crimson! Well, you scatter a few Boches over the earth and what have you? A German world colored Prussian blue. Come closer, ma'am'selle." He put out nervous hands and drew her down so he could whisper his words. "And the cure, ma'am'selle, the cure?

Ah, moi, Monsieur Satan, knows it."

They spent the rest of the day in discussing the killing qualities of sh.e.l.ls, grenades, bombs; the stabbing qualities of bayonets, daggers, swords; the exploding properties of dynamite, nitroglycerin, TNT, and others. As they talked Monsieur Satan sucked in his breath exultantly and hissed between his teeth, "_Zigouille, toujours zigouille!_" while his hand stabbed and twisted into the air.

Another day and he had taken Sheila entirely into his confidence. "I have my mind made. You shall hear the cure, ma'am'selle, for you and I will be partners. A Boche world can be cured but the one way--destroyed, completely destroyed," and he laughed uproariously. Then his eyes narrowed; he was all cunning and intensity, a beast of prey crouched for the spring. "Ah, but we must whisper; there are spies everywhere. The men in the wards are all spies pretending they are French wounded; and the doctors are spies. Oh, the Boches are d.a.m.nably clever, but we will be more d.a.m.nable--we will outwit them. We will blow them into a million atoms.

They will make good fertilizer for French vineyards in a hundred years. Eh bien?"

So Sheila became partner in evolving the most colossal crime the world had ever known. Everything played into her hands and gave credence to her deceptions. The great cases that came by night packed with dressings were to Monsieur Satan air-bombs with propellers. They were to be set loose on the day appointed in such millions that the air would be charged with them, the sun blotted out; and they would drop in exploding ma.s.ses over the earth, exterminating humanity.

"They shall be like the hordes of locusts that nearly destroyed Egypt--only these shall destroy. And how every one shall run in terror!

You will see, ma'am'selle. It will be a good sight." And Monsieur Satan rubbed his hands in keen antic.i.p.ation.

The tanks of oxygen placed on motor-trucks, the gasoline-tanks, were nothing else than a deadly gas. The partners had concocted it out of the strangest compounds, unshed-tears, heart-agony, fear-in-the-night, snipers' barks, and moonshine. Monsieur Satan chuckled over the formula and said he would swear not a living soul could withstand a single whiff of it. It was agreed that the makers of the gas--mythological beings Sheila had created--should be killed at once so that their secret should never be discovered; and Sheila herself was despatched to compa.s.s the deed. Before she returned the bell in the church near by was tolling for their parting souls; and Monsieur Satan chuckled as he cast admiring glances at this prompt executioner.

"You are a good pupil, ma'am'selle; you learn quickly. Now the maps." And they fell to diagraming where the piping for this deadly gas should be laid.

Not an inch of the old world was to be left peopled; from east to west and north to south everything was to be destroyed. No, not everything. Even as Monsieur Satan decreed it he hesitated. "There are the children, I think--yes, I think they shall live. Their hearts are pure; the Boches cannot contaminate them. They shall live after us with no memory of evil, so they can build again the beautiful world." He stopped and looked across at the nurse with a haunting, wistful stare. "Tell me, ma'am'selle, was the world ever beautiful?"

"Very beautiful, capitaine."

He pa.s.sed an uncertain hand over his eyes. "I seem to remember that it was; but now I see it always running with red blood boiling from h.e.l.l."

After that the children were always in his mind; as he planned the destruction of the rest of the world he planned their re-creation.

Thereupon Sheila saw to it that the war orphans from the _creche_ came to play in the hospital gardens--under the window of the little room. Soon it became a custom for Monsieur Satan to look for them, to ask their names, and wave gaily to them. And they waved back. And the chief of the surgical staff began to marvel that Monsieur Satan should give no more trouble.

Among them was a little girl, a wan, ethereal little creature who sat apart from the other children and watched their play with far-away, haunting eyes, as if she wondered what in the world they were doing.

Sheila had found toys for her--a ball, a doll, a jumping-jack--and tried to coax her to play. But she only clung to them for their rare value as possessions; as a means to enjoyment they were quite meaningless. From one of the older children Sheila got her story. Her father had been killed, her mother was with the Boches; there was no one else. With an aching heart the nurse wondered how many thousand Madelines France held.

One day she brought the child in to Monsieur Satan and repeated her story.

He listened wisely, patting her on the head, and then whispered to Sheila: "Ah, what did I say! These Boches--they get everything--the mothers, the sweethearts." Then to Madeline: "Listen, ma pauvre; you shall have the sadness no longer. Monsieur Satan will promise you happiness, ah, such happiness in the new beautiful world he is preparing for you. Now go. But 'sh ... sh! You must say nothing."

From this moment Sheila became senior partner. It was she who suggested all the extraordinary horrors Monsieur Satan had overlooked. It was she who speeded up time and plans. "I have the hospitals and streets all mined in case the flying bombs should not come thick enough; and I have the wells poisoned. Isn't that a clever idea?"

The man looked disturbed. "That's as clever as the Boches. But the children--where will they drink? You must take care of the children."

Then Sheila played her trump card and said the thing she had been waiting so long to say. Like Monsieur Satan she hissed the words between her teeth, while her face took on all the diabolical cunning it could muster.

"The children--bah! What do they matter, after all? I have decided--the children shall be destroyed."

Monsieur Satan sprang from his chair. He pinioned her arms behind her, forcing her back so he could look deep into her eyes with all the hate and mercilessness his soul harbored. "Touch Madeline--the children, never!

Let so much as one little hair of their heads be harmed and I--Monsieur Satan--will kill you!"

She left him with a non-committal shrug, left him panting and swearing softly under his breath.

From that moment he watched Sheila suspiciously and followed the children with jealous eyes. For Madeline he called constantly; and she sat on his knee by the hour while he danced the jumping-jack outrageously and taught her to sing to the doll a certain foolish berceuse that Poitou mothers sing to their babies.

Sheila had planned to stage their day of destruction with the craft of a master manager. She had had to take certain officials into her confidence and get the chief to sign such orders as had never been issued in a hospital before. But in the end Fate staged it, and did it infinitely better than the nurse had even conceived it. The hour of doom struck a full half-day too soon--the children were playing in the gardens, under Monsieur Satan's window instead of being in the cellar of the _creche_ as he had decreed; and Sheila was helping another head nurse do dressings in the ward outside.

There were only a few minutes after the siren blew before the first of the great Fokkers appeared over the city. Monsieur Satan's mind went strangely blank; the children stopped their play and gaped stupidly into the sky; Sheila did nothing but listen. Then the bombs began to rain down on the city. The noise was terrific. The children ran aimlessly about, shrieking pitifully. It was this that set Monsieur Satan's mind to working again. He broke out of the little room like the madman he was. He might have been Lucifer himself as he stumbled along on his bandaged foot, his hair erect, his eyes blazing a thousand inextinguishable fires. In the corridor he came upon Sheila, with other nurses and doctors, hurrying to gather in the out-of-door patients. As he overtook them a bomb struck the hospital.

"Sacrebleu!" he shouted. "You bungler! you fool of a destroyer! It was not the hour--and the children--First I go to save them. Afterward I come to kill you, ma'am'selle."

He was out before them all, through the entrance and down the steps, when another bomb struck. The doorway and the pillars were crushed to gravel and Monsieur Satan was hurled headlong across the gardens. In an instant he was up, stumbling frantically toward the children, his arms outstretched in appealing vindication to those small, quivering faces turned to him in their hour of annihilation. "Mes enfants, have no fear. I come--I come."

A third bomb fell. The children were tumbled in a heap like a pile of jackstraws. Monsieur Satan had time enough to see them go down before a fourth followed with the quick precision of an automatic. Yes, he saw; and in that horror-smiting moment believed it all a part of his great scheme of destruction; then the universe went to pieces about him and something crumbled inside his brain. He stood transfixed to the earth, staring helplessly in front of him, as immovable as a graven image.

It is one of the anomalies of war that the things that apparently destroy sometimes re-create. The gigantic impact of exploding ma.s.ses may destroy a man's hearing, his sight, his memory, or his mercy, and leave him thus maimed for all time. But it happens, sometimes, that the first shock is followed by another which restores with the suddenness of a miracle and makes the man whole again. That delicate bit of human mechanism which has been battered out of place is battered in, by the merest chance.

So it was with Monsieur Satan; and when Sheila and the chief found him he was rubbing his eyes as children will who wake and find themselves in strange places. He saw only the chief at first and tried to pull himself together.

"Ah, monsieur, I think some things have happened--but I cannot as yet make the full report. I am Bertrand Fauchet, Cha.s.seur Alpin," and he tried to click his bandaged heel against his shoe. Then he looked beyond and saw Sheila. It was as if he was seeing her for the first time since they had separated at the French quay. "Bon Dieu! It is Ma'am'selle O'Leary." He held out a shaking hand. "We meet in the thick of war--is it not so?"

His eyes left Sheila and traveled apprehensively to the children. They were wriggling themselves free of one another; frightened and bruised, but not hurt, barring one. The smallest of them all lay on the outskirts of the heap, quite motionless.

"If you will permit," Monsieur Satan stumbled on and gently picked up Madeline. He looked all compa.s.sion and bewilderment. "I do not altogether understand, ma'am'selle. But this little girl, I should like to carry her to some hospital and see that all is well with her. I seem to remember that she belongs to me." He smiled apologetically at the two watching him, then stumbled ahead with his burden.

At the base hospital they gave Sheila O'Leary full credit for the curing of Bertrand Fauchet, which, of course, she flatly denied. She laid it entirely to the interference of Fate and a child. But the important thing is that Bertrand Fauchet left the hospital a sound man--and that Madeline went with him, each holding fast to the hand of the other.

"She is mine now," he said, as he took leave of Sheila. "Le bon Dieu saw fit to send me in the place of that other papa. Eh, p't.i.te?" He stroked the hair back from the little face that looked worshipfully up at him.

"It is for us who remember to make these little ones forget. N'est-ce pas, ma'am'selle? And we are going back to the world together, to find somewhere the happiness and the great love for Madeline. Adieu."

Chapter VII

THE LAD WHO OUTSANG THE STARS

In the American Military Hospital No. 10 one could always count on Ward 7-A beginning the day with a genuine fanfare of good spirits--that is to say, ever since that ward had acquired a distinction and personality of its own. On this particular morning the doors of the wards were open, for orderlies were scrubbing floors, and Sheila O'Leary in the operating-room above could catch the words of the third chorus that had rung through the hospital since the ban of silence had been raised.

"Gra-ma-cree ma-cruiskeen, Slainte-geal ma-vour-neen, Gra-ma-cree a-coolin bawn, bawn, bawn, Oh!"

As usual, Larry's crescendo boomed in the lead. How those lads could sing!

In the regular order of things it was time for dressings; but the regular order of things was so often broken at No. 10 that it had nearly become a myth. The operating staff had been steadily at it since eleven the night before. If nothing more came in, they might be through by eleven now and the dressings come only two hours late. That would be rare good luck.

Under the spell of the singing the tired backs of surgeons and nurses straightened unconsciously; cramped muscles seemed to lose some of their kinks; everybody smiled without knowing it--down to the last of the boys who were waiting their turn in the corridor outside. The boys had not been in the hospital long enough to know anything about Ward 7-A, but the challenge to courage and good spirits in that chorus of voices was too dominant to be denied, even among the sorest wounded of them. One after another rallied to it like veterans.

"Gra-ma-cree ma-cruiskeen bawn," boomed Larry's voice to the finish.