Everyman's Land Part 12

Perhaps he knew what suspicion would dog him through life if he gave this verdict. At all events, he chose to operate. "Bring me the brute,"

he growled: and reluctantly the brute was brought--a very youthful brute, with a face of such angelic charm that even Herter was struck by it. He had steeled himself to get through a hateful job; but for him--like most men of his race--beauty held a strong appeal. Suddenly he wished to save the boy with the fair curly hair and arched dark brows.

Here was a German--a Bavarian--who could have no vileness in him yet!

The surgeon got ready his instruments for the operation, which must be done quickly, if at all. The boy was unconscious, but every moment or two he broke out in convulsive delirium, giving answers to questions like a man talking in sleep. "Hilda! Hilda!" he cried again and again.

"My Hilda, do not ask me that. Thou wouldst not love me if I told thee!

Thou wouldst hate me forever!"

"What have you done that Hilda should hate you?" Paul enquired, as he waited for the anaesthetic. Ether was running short. The wounded had to take their turn that day.

"Luneville! Luneville!" shrieked the Bavarian.

Everyone heard the cry. The two young doctors, knowing Herter's history, turned sick. This was worse than their worst fears! But they could do nothing. To speak, to try to act, would be to insult the surgeon. They saw that he was ghastly pale. "What happened at Luneville?" he went on.

"Here is the ether," a voice spoke in haste. But Paul heard only the Bavarian.

"Oh, G.o.d, the old woman! Her face at the window. I can't forget.

Hilda--she wouldn't come out. It wasn't my fault. The Colonel's orders.

An old man, too. We saw them in the fire. We had to pa.s.s on. Hilda, forgive!"

"Was it a corner house of the Rue Princesse Marie?" asked Herter.

"Yes--yes, a corner house," groaned the boy of the beautiful face.

Herter gave a sign to the man who had brought the ether. A moment more, and the ravings of the Bavarian were silenced. The operation began.

The others had their hands full of their own work, yet with a kind of agonized clairvoyance they were conscious of all that Herter did. The same thought was in the minds of both young doctors. They exchanged impressions afterward. "He'll cut the boy's heart out and tread it underfoot!"

But never had the Jewish surgeon from Metz performed a major operation with more coolness or more perfect skill. Had he chosen to let his wrist tremble at the critical second, revenge would easily have been his. But awaiting the instant between one beat of the heart and another, he seized the shred of shrapnel lodged there, and closed up the throbbing breast. The boy would live. He had not only spared, but saved, the life of one who was perhaps his mother's murderer.

During the whole day he worked on untiringly and--it seemed--unmoved.

Then, at the end of the last operation, he dropped as if he had been shot through the brain.

This was the beginning of a long, peculiar illness which no doctor who attended him could satisfactorily diagnose. He was constantly delirious, repeating the words of the Bavarian: "Hilda--Hilda!--the corner house--Rue Princesse Marie--Luneville!" and it was feared that, if he recovered, he would be insane. After many weeks, however, he came slowly back to himself--a changed self, but a sane self. Always odd in his appearance--very tall and dark and thin--he had wasted to a walking skeleton, and his black hair had turned snow-white. He had lost his self-confidence, and dreaded to take up work again lest he should fail in some delicate operation. Long leave was granted, and he was advised by doctors who were his friends to go south, to suns.h.i.+ne and peace. But Herter insisted that the one hope for ultimate cure was to stay in Lorraine. He took up his quarters in what was left of a house near the ruin of his mother's old home, in Luneville, but he was never there for long at a time. He was provided with a pa.s.s to go and come as he liked, being greatly respected and pitied at headquarters; and wherever there was an air raid, there speedily and mysteriously appeared Paul Herter among the victims.

His artificial foot did not prevent his riding a motor-bicycle, and on this he arrived, no matter at what hour of night or day, at any town within fifty miles of Luneville, when enemy airmen had been at work. He gave his services unpaid to poor and rich alike; and owing to the dearth of doctors not mobilized, the towns concerned welcomed him thankfully.

All the surgeon's serene confidence in himself returned in these emergencies, and he was doing invaluable work. People were grateful, but the man's ways and looks were so strange, his restlessness so tragic, that they dubbed him "le Juif Errant."

Now, Padre, I have come to the right place to bring in my part of this story.

While I was training at "Bart's," I met a doctor named Paul Herter. Some of the girls used to call him the "German Jew" but we all knew that his Germanness was only an accident of fate, through a war before he was born, and that he was pa.s.sionately French at heart. He was clever--a genius--but moody and queer, and striking to look at. He would have been ugly but for a pair of beautiful brown eyes, wistful sometimes as a dog's. One of our nurses was in love with him, but he used to keep out of her way when he could. He was said not to care for women, and I was a little flattered that a man so well thought of "at the top" should take notice of me. When I look back on myself, I seem to have been very young then!

Dr. Herter used to meet me, as if by accident, when I was off duty, and we went for long walks, talking French together; I enjoyed that!

Besides, there was nothing the man didn't know. He was a kind of encyclopaedia of all the great musicians and artists of the world since the Middle Ages; and was so much older than I, that I didn't think about his falling in love. I knew I was pretty, and that beauty of all sorts was a cult with him. I supposed that he liked looking at me--and that his fancy would end there. But it didn't. There came a dreadful day when he accused me of encouraging him purposely, of leading him on to believe that I cared. This was a real shock. I was sorry--sorry! But he said such horrid things that I was hurt and angry, too. I said horrid things in my turn. This scene happened in the street. I asked him to leave me, and he did at once, without looking back. I can see him now, striding off in the twilight! No wonder the tall black silhouette in the Place Stanislas looked familiar. But the man is thinner now, and walks with a slight limp.

The next thing I heard of him after our break was that he'd married Nurse Norman (the one who was in love with him) and that they'd left England. Whether he'd married the girl in a rage against me, or because he was sorry for her (she'd just then fallen into deep disgrace, through giving a patient the wrong medicine), I didn't know. I can't say I didn't care, for I often thought of the man and wondered what had become of him, though I don't remember ever writing about him to you. He was but indirectly concerned with my life, and maybe it was in the back of my mind that I might get a scolding from you if I told you the tale.

The moment the name of "Paul Herter" was mentioned in that pleasant garden at Nancy, the whole episode of those old days at "Bart's" came back, and I guessed why the tall figure had darted away from Dierdre O'Farrell as we came in sight. He must have offered to see the girl safely home, after dressing her wound (probably at some chemist's), and she had told him about her fellow-travellers. Naturally my name sent him flying like a shot from a seventy-five! But I can't help hoping we may meet by accident. There's a halo round the man's head for me since I've heard that tragic story. Before, he was only a queer genius. Now, he's a hero. Will he turn away, I wonder, if I walk up to him and hold out my hand?

I am longing, for a double reason, to see Vitrimont and Gerbeviller and Luneville, since I've learned that at one of those places Paul Herter may appear.

CHAPTER XIV

We were three automobiles strong when we went out of Nancy, along what they call the "Luneville road." That was yesterday, as I write, and already it seems long ago! The third and biggest car belonged to the Prefet; gray and military looking, driven by a soldier in uniform; and this time Dierdre O'Farrell was with us. I was wondering if she went "under orders," or if she wished to see the sights we were to see--among them, perhaps, her elusive doctor!

We turned south, leaving town, and presently pa.s.sed--at Dombasle--astonis.h.i.+ngly huge salt-works, with rubble-heaps tall as minor pyramids. On each apex stood a thing like the form of a giant black woman in a waggling gas-mask and a helmet. I could have found out what these weird engines were, no doubt, but I preferred to remember them as mysterious monsters.

At a great, strange church of St. Nicolas, in the old town of St.

Nicolas-du-Port, we stopped, because the Prefet's daughters had told us of a magic stone in the pavement which gives good fortune to those who set foot on it. Only when several of us were huddled together, with a foot each on the sacred spot, were we told that it meant marriage before the new year. If the spell works, Dierdre O'Farrell, Brian, and I will all be married in less than four months. But St. Nicolas is a false prophet where we are concerned. Brian and I will never marry. Even if poor Brian should fall head over ears in love, he wouldn't ask a girl to share his broken life: he has told me this. As for me, I can never love any man after Jim Beckett. The least penance I owe is to be faithful forever to his memory and my own falsehood!

St. Nicolas is the patron saint of the neighbourhood, so it's right that from his little town and his big church all the country round should open out to the eye, as if to do him homage.

From the hill of Leomont we could see to the south the far-off, famous Forest of Parroy; away to the north, the blue heights of La Grande Couronne, where the fate of Nancy was decided in 1914; to the west, a purple haze like a mourning wreath of violets hung over the valley of the Meurthe, and the tragic little tributary river Mortagne; beyond, we could picture with our mind's eyes the Moselle and the Meuse.

But Leomont was not a place where one could stand coldly thinking of horizons. It drew all thoughts to itself, and to the drama played out upon its miniature mountain. There was fought one of the fiercest and most heroic single battles of the war.

We had to desert the cars, and walk up a rough track to the ruined farmhouse which crowned the hill; a n.o.ble, fortified farmhouse that must have had the dignity of a chateau before the great fight which shattered its ancient walls. Now it has the dignity of a mausoleum. Long ago, in Roman days when Diana, G.o.ddess of the Moon, was patron of Luneville and the country round, a temple of stone and marble in her honour and a soaring fountain crowned the high summit of Leomont, for all the world to see. Her influence is said to reign over the whole of Lorraine, from that day to this, St. Nicholas being her sole rival: and a prophecy has come down through the centuries that no evil may befall Diana's citadels, save in the "dark o' the moon," when the protectress is absent. Luneville was overrun in the "dark o' the moon"; and it was then also that the battle of Leomont was fought, ending in the vast cellars, where no man was left alive.

In these days of ours, it's a wonderful and romantic mountain, sacred as a monument forever, to the glory of the French soldiers who did not die in vain. The scarred face of the ruined house--its stones pitted by shrapnel as if by smallpox--gazes over Lorraine as the Sphinx gazes over the desert: calm, majestic, sad, yet triumphant. And under the shattered walls, among fallen b.u.t.tresses and blackened stumps of oaks, are the graves of Leomont's heroes; graves everywhere, over the hillside; graves in the open; graves in sheltered corners where wild flowers have begun to grow; their tricolour c.o.c.kades and wooden crosses mirrored in the blue of water-filled sh.e.l.l-holes; graves in the historic cellars, covered with a pall of darkness; graves along the slope of the hill, where old trenches have left ruts in the rank gra.s.s.

An unseen choir of bird-voices was singing the sweetest requiem ever sung for the dead; yet Leomont in its majestic loneliness saddened us, even the irrepressible Puck. We were sad and rather silent all the way to Vitrimont; and Vitrimont, at first glance, was a sight to make us sadder than any we had seen. There had been a Vitrimont, a happy little place, built of gray and rose-red stones; now, of those stones hardly one lies upon another, except in rubble heaps. And yet, Vitrimont isn't sad as others of the ruined towns are sad. It even cheered us, after Leomont, because a star of hope s.h.i.+nes over the field of desolation--a star that has come out of the west. Some wonderful women of San Francisco decided to "adopt" Vitrimont, as one of the little places of France which had suffered most in the war. Two of them, Miss Polk and Miss Crocker--girls rather than women--gave themselves as well as their money to the work. In what remains of Vitrimont--what they are making of Vitrimont--they live like two fresh roses that have taken root in a pile of ashes. With a few books, a few bowls of flowers, pictures, and bits of bright chintz they have given charm to their poor rooms in the half-ruined house of a peasant. This has been their home for many months, from the time when they were the only creatures who shared Vitrimont with its ghosts: but now other homes are growing under their eyes and through their charity; thanks to them, the people of the destroyed village are trooping back, happy and hopeful. The church has been repaired (that was done first, "because it is G.o.d's house") with warm-coloured pink walls and neat decoration; and plans for the restoring of the whole village are being carried out, while the waiting inhabitants camp in a village of toy-like bungalows given by the French Government. I never saw such looks of wors.h.i.+pping love cast upon human beings as those of the people of Vitrimont for these two American girls.

I'm sure they believe that Miss Crocker and Miss Polk are saints incarnated for their sakes by "_la Sainte Vierge_." One old man said as much!

He was so old that it seemed as if he could never have been young, yet he was whistling a toothless but patriotic whistle, over some bit of amateur-carpenter work, in front of a one-room bungalow. Inside, visible through the open door, was the paralyzed wife he had lately wheeled "home" to Vitrimont, in some kind of a cart. "Oh, yes, we are happy!" he stopped whistling to say. "We are fortunate, too. We think we have found the place where our _street_ used to be, and these Angels--we do not call them Demoiselles, but Angels--from America are going to build us a new home in it. We have seen the plan. It is more beautiful than the old!"

Wherever we pa.s.sed a house on the road to Luneville, and in town itself, as we came in, we saw notices--printed and written--to remind us that we were in the war-zone, if we forgot for an instant. "_Logement militaire_," or "_Cave voutee, 200 places--400 places_." Those hospitable cellars advertising their existence in air raids and bombardments must be a comforting sight for pa.s.sers-by, now and then; but no siren wailed us a warning. We drove on in peace; and I--disappointed at Vitrimont--quietly kept watch for a tall, thin figure of a man with a slight limp. At any moment, I thought, I might see him, for at Luneville he lives--if he lives anywhere!

I was so eager and excited that I could hardly turn my mind to other things; but Brian, not knowing why I should be absent-minded, constantly asked questions about what we pa.s.sed. Julian O'Farrell had exchanged his sister for Mr. and Mrs. Beckett, whom he had persuaded to take the short trip in his ramshackle taxi. His excuse was that Mother Beckett would deal out more wisely than Dierdre his Red Cross supplies to the returned refugees; so we had the girl with us; and I caught reproachful glances if I was slow in answering my blind brother. She herself suspects him as a _poseur_, yet she judges me careless of his needs--which I should find funny, if it didn't make me furious! Just to see what Dierdre would do, and perhaps to provoke her, sometimes I didn't answer at all, but left her to explain our surroundings to Brian. I hardly thought she would respond to the silent challenge, but almost ostentatiously she did.

She cried, "There's a castle!" when we came to the fine and rather staid chateau which Duke Stanislas loved, and where he died. She even tried to describe it for Brian, with faltering self-consciousness, and the old streets which once had been "brilliant as Versailles, full of Queen Marie's beautiful ladies." Now, they are gray and sad, even those streets which show no scars from the three weeks' martyrdom of German rule. Soldiers pa.s.s, on foot and in motors, yet it's hard to realize that before the war Luneville was one of the gayest, grandest garrison towns of France, rich and industrious, under Diana's special protection.

Just because she was away in her moon-chariot, one dark and dreadful night, all has changed since then. But she'll come back, and bless her ancient place of Lunae Villa, in good time!

It was here, Brian reminded me, that they drew up the treaty which gave the Rhine frontier to France, after Napoleon won the Battle of Marengo.

I wonder if the Germans remembered this in 1914 when they came?

We lunched at an hotel, in a restaurant crowded with French officers; and not a civilian there except ourselves. I was hoping that Paul Herter might come in, for the tragic Rue Princesse Marie is not far away--and even a Wandering Jew must eat! He did not come; but I almost forgot my new disappointment in hearing the French officers talk about Lorraine.

They were in the midst of a discussion when we came in, and when they had all bowed politely to us, they took up its thread where it had broken off. A colonel--a Lorrainer--was saying that out of the wealth of Lorraine (stolen wealth, he called it!) Germany had built up her fortune as a united nation, in a few years far exceeding the indemnity received in 1871. Germany had known that there were vast stores of iron; but the amazing riches in phosphorus ores had come to her as a surprise. If she had guessed, never would she have agreed to leave more than half the deposit on the French side of the frontier! Well enough for Prussian boasters to say that Germany's success was due to her own industry and supervirtue, or that her tariff schemes had worked wonders. But take away the provinces she tore from France, and she will be a Samson shorn!

Take away Lorraine and the world will be rid once and for all of the German menace!

When we left Luneville there was still hope from Gerbeviller. Herter is often there, it seems. Besides, Gerbeviller was the princ.i.p.al end and aim of our day's excursion. Once no more than a pleasant town of quiet beauty on a pretty river, now it is a _monument historique_, the Pompeii of Lorraine.

As we arrived the sun clouded over suddenly, and the effect was almost theatrical. From gold the light had dimmed to silver. In the midst of the afternoon, we saw Gerbeviller as if by moonlight in the still silence of night. On the outskirts we forsook our three cars, and walked slowly through the dead town, awestruck and deeply thoughtful as if in a church where the body of some great man lay in state.

There was not a sound except, as at Leomont, the unseen choir of bird-voices; but their song emphasized the silence. In the pale light the sh.e.l.ls of wrecked houses glimmered white, like things seen deep down under clear water. They were mysterious as daytime ghosts; and already a heartbreaking picturesqueness had taken possession of the streets, as an artist-decorator comes into an ugly room and mellows all its crudeness with his loving touch.