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, nomina............