The Red Cross Barge Part 3

The Herr Doktor brought his two feet together and bowed. 'Your protest, Monsieur le Maire, duly registered will be,' he said coldly. 'Meanwhile I must ask Monsieur le Cure my instructions to obey.' Motioning the old man to precede him, he walked out of the door, and, shutting it, turned the key in the lock.

Quickly the two men walked through the dark garden, and when they were close to the arch which led into the courtyard of the Tournebride, the priest abruptly broke silence. 'Am I to be allowed to administer these dying men?' he asked.

'That may you do,' replied the Herr Doktor shortly.

'Then, Monsieur, I must ask permission to go round by my house and by the church.'

Now this was not exactly in the bond, yet, rather to his own surprise, the Herr Doktor gave his orderly-driver the command. Why not do this thing graciously and thoroughly while he was about it? Thoroughness has always been one of the great German virtues--so he reminded himself while sitting in the rather airless ambulance, and listening to his high-born patient's fretful remarks.

As the motor ambulance at last drew up on the road opposite to where the barge was moored, there arose a sudden stir in the houses facing the mall. Windows were flung cautiously open, and dark forms leaned out of them.

Curtly instructing the priest to follow him, and requesting his orderlies to await his return, the Herr Doktor preceded the priest down the stone gangway, and on to the deck of the barge. In spite of the stars it was a very dark night, and suddenly he turned on the electric torch strapped to his breast. As he did so his companion uttered a sharp exclamation of surprise. Monsieur le Cure had never seen, he had never even heard of such an invention! It made him realise, as he had not yet done, what terrible, ingenious, irresistible fellows these Germans were.

The big trap-door in the deck had been opened, and the crane for lowering the wounded man was already in position. Mademoiselle Rouannes had been true to her word, everything had been made ready for the new patient, and the Herr Doktor felt suddenly very glad that he had followed his kindly so-truly-German-and-humane impulse about the priest.

Carefully the two went down the stairs now open to the star-powdered sky, and then the one in command knocked at the door of what he already called in his own mind 'Her ward.'

There followed a moment or two of delay--long enough for the Herr Doktor to become rather impatient. Then, slowly, the door opened, and the electric torch flashed for a moment over Mademoiselle Rouannes' head and breast. She no longer wore the Red Cross cap and veil, and her fair hair formed an aureole above her delicately-tinted face and deep blue eyes.

'If you will ask Jacob, he will tell you everything, Monsieur le Medecin. I have told him to put himself entirely at your disposal. I cannot come just now, for I must not leave my wounded. Two of them are even now dying.'

She spoke in a quick whisper and in her own language. But the Herr Doktor answered in English. 'Gracious miss, I have to you the priest brought,' he said eagerly.

'I thank you--oh! how I thank you!' There was a thrill of real, heartfelt grat.i.tude in her voice--and something in the Herr Doktor's heart thrilled in answer, as she opened wide the narrow door to let them both come through.

Most of the men, lying stretched out there, on those narrow pallet beds, were asleep, but only the two now so near to death seemed really at peace. The others moved uneasily, and from their bloodless lips there issued painful mutterings and groans. One very young soldier kept counting over and over again--from one to thirty-seven. When he came to _trente-sept_, he always broke off, and began again. In answer to a mute, questioning glance from the Herr Doktor, the Red Cross nurse whispered, 'The thirty-eighth shot struck him. But he only counts like that when he is asleep.' A lad in the farthest corner, the third man in the danger zone, asked again and again, with a terrible, monotonous reiteration, '_Mais pourquoi? Pourquoi suis-je ici?_'

Again the doctor turned questioningly to Jeanne Rouannes. 'He also always begins asking that question as soon as he falls asleep,' she said sighing; 'when awake he seems quite happy.'

The Herr Doktor was strangely reluctant to leave the mournful scene. He felt an uneasy curiosity as to what was going to take place. Even now the Red Cross nurse was turning a little table, which had been covered with various odd French medicaments, into an altar. But his duty to his own patient called him insistently away, and slowly he backed towards the door. Once there, however, he called out, but in a low voice, 'Miss?

Miss? A word with you.'

She came and stood by him, a lovely vision of health, purity, and strength, in that piteous, pain-bound place.

'When the priest finished has,' he murmured, 'again back him I will take. I have myself responsible for him made.'

'I promise you that he will not be very long!' And then she added softly, 'I thank you again, sir, for having done this good action. The good G.o.d will reward you.'

She opened the door, and after she had closed it again, the Herr Doktor lingered for a moment outside in the little pa.s.sage which was now open to the stars and cool night air.

And during the hour he spent in the low-ceilinged, white-washed cabin where Prince Egon now lay comfortably settled in a real bed, the Herr Doktor, though his body was by his patient's side, in his spirit dwelt in the other half of the Red Cross barge--where was taking place the ever august and awe-inspiring transit from life to death of two young, sentient, human beings. So little indeed was he present in mind where his body was, that he experienced a feeling of astonishment, as well as of discomfort, when he suddenly realised that a quick, amicable conversation was going on between the young Prussian officer and Mademoiselle Rouannes' old French man-servant.

'Herr Doktor!' cried Prince Egon joyfully, 'this fellow was once a valet--valet to a Prince de Ligne! I have told him that henceforth he is commandeered by me! He will be _my_ valet. I would far rather be waited on by him than by that tiresome Fritz of yours. This one is a thoroughly intelligent fellow; he knows a house in this town where there is a great store of those _unanstandige_ Parisian comic papers. He will bring them here to-morrow morning--so I now have something pleasant to dream about!'

'That is good,' said the Herr Doktor absently. 'I felt sure your Highness would prefer this place to the Tournebride. I hope you will not be disturbed by the French wounded. There is a pa.s.sage room between.'

'The French wounded will not disturb me!' The young man lifted himself slightly in his bed and smiled. 'It is not as if they were our brave fellows, after all!'

PART II

1

It was half-past five on this, the sixth morning of the Herr Doktor's stay at Valoise.

He leapt out of bed and had a cold plunge bath-a most peculiar, un-German habit he had acquired during the months he had boarded with an English family at Munich.

Then, when he was dressed, not before, he put on his spectacles and went across to the window. On the first morning of his stay there, he had been filled with a queer misgiving that perhaps when he looked out the Red Cross barge would have drifted away-disappeared, fairy-wise, in the night. That he now no longer feared, and on this lovely September morning his eyes rested with a feeling of exultant ownership on the now familiar scene before him. The trim, leafy mall just across the paved road, the slowly flowing river gleaming in the bright morning sun, the line of poplars above the opposite bank--and then in the centre, as it were, of the placid landscape, the Red Cross barge ... they were his, for ever--the harvest of his eyes, of his imagination, of his heart.

The Red Cross barge? The man standing at the window of this humble French wine-shop told himself how good it was that now, to-day, that work of mercy before him was the only reminder in Valoise that France was at war. Till the day before there had been a hundred and five spurred and booted reminders, but yesterday afternoon the Uhlans had ridden off eagerly, exultantly, to join their main victorious army--that army which was now engaged in pursuing the defeated English and the retreating French.

The Herr Doktor, on this peaceful, sunny morning, quite forgot that he himself was a constant reminder of the awful struggle, of the losing fight now going on between those the women of Valoise had sent forth--their husbands, sons, and lovers--and his countrymen.

But it was natural he should make this capital omission, for as he stood there, looking out on a still unawakened world, the people of Valoise, well disposed as he felt towards them, formed but a blurred background to the one figure which now possessed all his waking, aye, and all his dreaming thoughts. Not only did he now know, but he exulted in the knowledge that, with his first vision-like sight of Jeanne Rouannes, had come that 'love-at-once' of which some of his comrades had rhapsodised in the now-so-distant-as-to-be-almost-forgotten pre-war time. Those rhapsodies of long ago had left him unmoved, partly because as a student he had adored, with a selfless, hopeless pa.s.sion, a famous singer far older than himself, and partly because, with the pa.s.sing of years, he had seen the springtide romance of youth almost invariably dulled down into what would have been, to such a man as he knew himself to be, unendurably dull domesticity.

Was this new, and at once rapturous and painful, absorption in another human being the outcome of great, n.o.ble, war-provoked emotions? If so, how amazing that a Frenchwoman should have compelled the flowering of his soul, the awakening of both spirit and senses to what the union of a man and woman may mean! But well content was he that it should be so.

This side of the great war--so futile from the point of view of happy, prosperous France--would soon be at an end. That he had been confidently a.s.sured, some three weeks ago, by a member of General von Kluck's own able staff. Within a very short time of the German occupation of Paris--some even believed within a few hours of the capitulation of the city--peace would be signed with France. There would be bitterness among certain sections of the French people--among the Chauvinists, for instance, who still hankered after Alsace. But the Conquerors had behaved so humanely and so wisely during their triumphant rush through Northern France, that this very natural feeling would soon fade away, while the love he, Max Keller, now bore Jeanne Rouannes was of the eternal, enduring quality which compels its own fulfilment.... Already in his dreams the Herr Doktor saw his house, his childhood's home, at Weimar, beflowered and garlanded to receive a bride.

But these dreams were far more living and tangible to his imagination during those waking hours when they two were apart, than when the Herr Doktor was faced with the reality of his and Mademoiselle Rouannes'

necessarily formal relationship. More than once he had tried to engage her in talk on 'safe' subjects--such subjects, for instance, as that of the Great Revolution--but she had quietly eluded him, and he sometimes had to face the fact that the only common ground on which they met each day was that on which lay the wounded Frenchmen to whom she gave so much anxious care. It was a ground on which the Herr Doktor spent all the time he could. But unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, it was ground which was being rapidly cleared, for thanks to his skill, to her care, and no doubt to nature too, 'our wounded,' as he had once ventured to call them to her, were now in full convalescence, almost fit, in fact, to be taken off as prisoners to Germany. When that thought, that knowledge, rose to the Herr Doktor's mind he always thrust it hurriedly away. The despatch of prisoners is purely a military duty, and would in this case be performed by whatever officer on whom it devolved; if no one better offered, then on the Herr Lieutenant, Prince Egon von Witgenstein.

Prince Egon? On this fine September morning, the Herr Doktor suddenly found himself wondering whether it would not be advisable to move his patient into the now empty Tournebride. The knowledge that the Prince would soon be well enough to sit up on deck was not as agreeable to the Herr Doktor as it ought to have been to a conscientious medical attendant. True, Mademoiselle Rouannes never even asked him how his n.o.ble patient was progressing, and once, when old Jacob had alluded to the Uhlan officer, the Herr Doktor had overheard her exclaim, with a strange touch of pa.s.sion in her voice, 'I forbid you--I forbid you, Jacob, to speak of that Prussian to me!' But Prince Egon did not share her indifference, still less her--was it hatred? He was frankly interested in his fair enemy, and very eager to make her acquaintance.

But the Herr Doktor was determined that this so uncalled-for and undesirable-from-every-point-of-view desire of the Prince should not be gratified.

There came a knock at the door; it was his _pet.i.t dejeuner_, and the woman who brought it in smiled quite pleasantly. It was only the second time she had smiled at her unbidden guest. It was curious how the departure of those burly, good-natured Uhlans had affected the people of Valoise! Within an hour of their going, windows had been unshuttered, doors unbarred, and a stream of women, of children, and of old men the Herr Doktor had not suspected of being in Valoise at all, had flowed into the streets of the town....

He drank his coffee and ate his rolls with an excellent appet.i.te, and then he glanced at his chronometer. It was three minutes to six--time he went across to the barge. For when six struck by the church tower (which, according to his Baedeker, had been built by the English in the now utterly departed days of their valour and military prowess, that is in the thirteenth century) the Herr Doktor invariably met Mademoiselle Rouannes by accident, either in the road, or, what was pleasanter still, under the trees in the mall. When he saw her coming, gravely he would stop and bow, and she would bend her head in greeting. It would have been natural, and agreeable too, for them to linger a few moments; but that he had soon found she would never do. Singularly reserved always was she in her manner, and in vain did he persist in his attempts to persuade her to engage in general beneficial-to-the-intellect and pleasantly-agreeable-to-the-cultured-mind conversation.

Two cases, as we know, had been beyond human help when he had first undertaken the care of the French wounded, but the third case, greatly owing to his skill and untiring efforts, seemed likely to pull through.

Still, even so, the Herr Doktor and Mademoiselle Rouannes were very anxious about this case, a boy of nineteen, a clever, well-mannered, gentle boy of the peasant cla.s.s, who had been shot through the lung.

What had touched the German surgeon's heart, what had made him especially interested in this young soldier, were a few words which had been uttered by the Red Cross nurse very early in their joint work of mercy. '_Il est le seul soutien de sa vieille grand'mere._' Now, curiously enough, he, Max Keller, was also 'the sole support of his old grandmother,' a grand old woman of seventy-nine, now eating her heart out in placid, cultured Weimar, while thanking G.o.d her boy was not in the firing line.

The Herr Doktor went across the road to the grateful shade of the lime trees. There he waited, his heart beating, his pulse throbbing, for what seemed a long, long time. Every moment he hoped, nay, he expected confidently, to see her hastening towards him, clad in the white dress and wearing the medieval-looking cap, with its red cross in the centre, which now seemed the most becoming head-dress in the world. Hastening towards him? Nay, nay,--hastening towards the Red Cross barge.

But the minutes went slowly by, and Mademoiselle Rouannes did not come.

Suddenly it occurred to him that perhaps she was already on the barge.

If so, he had indeed wasted precious moments....

As he hurried along the stone jetty he saw the stout figure of old Therese on deck. That meant that her young mistress was below, in the ward.