The Tin Soldier Part 78

The man propped up beside her murmured, "My Captain liked that--he used to sing it--"

"Yes?" She was listening with only half an ear. There were so many Captains.

"He was engaged to an American."

She listened now. "Your Captain--?"

"Captain Hewes."

She guided the car steadily. "Dawson Hewes?"

"Yes. Do you know him?"

"I--I am the girl he is going to marry--"

He froze into silence. She bent towards him. "What made you say--_was_--?"

"He's--gone West--"

"Dead?"

"Yes."

"When?" She still drove steadily through the dark.

"To-day."

She looked up at the stars. So--he would never come blowing in with the sweet spring winds.

"I'd rather have been--shot--than to have told you that--" the man beside her was saying, "but, you see, I didn't know you were the girl--"

"Of course you couldn't. You mustn't blame yourself."

She delivered her precious charge at the hospital and put up her car for the night. Standing alone under the stars she wondered what she should do next. There was no one to tell--the women who had worked with her in the town which had since been recaptured by the Germans had gone to other towns. But she had stayed as near the front as possible, and she had never felt lonely because at any moment her lover might come--there had always been the thought that he might come--.

And now he would never come!

She had a room in the house of an old woman, all of whose sons were in the war. So far two of them had escaped death. But the old woman said often, fatalistically, "They will not always escape--but it will be for France."

The old woman had soup on the fire for Drusilla's supper. The room was faintly lighted. "What is it?" she asked, as the girl dropped down on the doorstep.

"My Captain is dead--"

The old woman rose and stood over her. "It comes to all."

"I know."

"Will you eat your soup? When the heart fails, the body must have strength."

Drusilla covered her face with her bands. The room was very still.

The old woman went back to her chair by the fire and waited. At last she rose and filled a small bowl with the soup--she broke into it a small allowance of bread. Then she came and sat on the step beside the girl.

"Eat, Mademoiselle," she said, with something like authority, and Drusilla obeyed. And when she gave back the bowl, the old woman set it on the floor, and drew the girl's head to her breast.

And Drusilla lay there, crying softly, a lonely American mothered by this indomitable old woman of France.

Days pa.s.sed, days in which men came and men went and Drusilla sang to them. And now new faces were seen among the tired and war-worn ones.

Eager young Americans, pressing forward towards the front, found a countrywoman in the little town; and they wrote home about her. "She's a beauty, by jinks, and when she sings it pulls the heart out of you.

She's the kind you want to say your prayers to."

So her fame went forth and took on gradually something of the supernatural--her tall, straight slenderness, her steady eyes, her halo of red hair grew to have a sort of sacred significance, like that of some militant young saint.

Then came a day when Derry's regiment marched through the town to the trenches, spent an interval, and came back, awed by what it had seen, but undaunted.

Drusilla, sitting on the doorstep of the stone house, saw a tall figure striding down the street. He stopped to speak to an old woman and doffed his hat, showing a clipped silver-blond head.

Drusilla went flying through the dusk. "Derry, Derry!"

He stared and stared again. "Is it you?" he asked. Nothing was vivid now about Drusilla except her hair.

"Yes."

He took her hands in his. "My dear girl." It was hard for either of them to speak.

"Did Bruce McKenzie tell you that my Captain has--gone West?"

"I had a letter. I haven't seen him. His hospital isn't far from here, I understand."

"Just outside. He--he has been a great help--to me, Derry."

She took him back to her doorstep and they sat down.

"Tell me about Jean."

He tried to tell her, wavered a little and spoke the truth. "The hardest thing was leaving her. I don't mind the fighting. I don't mind anything but the fact that she's over there and I'm over here.

But it had to be--of course."

"Yes, everything had to be, Derry. I am believing that more and more.

When my Captain went--I found how much I cared. I hadn't always been sure. But I am sure now, and I am sure, too, that he knows--"

"Love--in these times, Derry--isn't building a nest--and singing songs in the tree tops on a May morning; it goes beyond just the man and the woman; it even goes beyond the child. It goes as far as the future of mankind. What the future of the world will be depends not so much on how much you love Jean or she loves you, or on how much I loved and was loved, but on how much that love will mean to the world. If we can't give up our own for the sake of the world's ideal then love hasn't meant what it should to you and to me, Derry--"

She rose as a group of men approached. "They want me to sing for them.

You won't mind?"

"My dear girl, I have heard of you everywhere. I believe that some of the fellows say their prayers to you at night--"

She stood up and sang. Her hair caught the light from the room back of her. She gave them a popular air or two, a hymn, "The Ma.r.s.eillaise--"