Part 16 (1/2)
”I have done my best. I have given him food and drink. I have even starved him. But nothing seemed to do any good.”
”No,” said the stranger; ”it is his mind. He has made up his mind that.... You can do nothing with a man when....”
Fernet closed his eyes.
”A man! They think I am a man. What stupidity! Can they not see that I am a bird?... They have gone out. He is locking the door again.... I can hear the keys jingle.... Well, let him lock the door if it gives him any pleasure. The window is open and to-night....”
The footsteps of the departing visitors died away. A chuckling sound came to Andre Fernet and the thump of ecstatic fists brought down upon a bare table-top. The voice of Flavio Minetti was quivering triumphantly like the hot whisper of a desert wind through the room:
”Without any weapon save the mind! Ha! ha! ha!”
Fernet turned his face toward the wall. ”He is laughing at _me_ now.
Well, let him laugh while he may.... Is not the window open? To-morrow I shall be free ... and he?... No, _he_ cannot fly-he has a broken wing.... The window is open, Andre Fernet!”
BLIND VISION
_By_ MARY MITCh.e.l.l FREEDLEY From _The Century Magazine_ _Copyright, 1918, by The Century Company._ _Copyright, 1919, by Mary Mitch.e.l.l Freedley._
Four months of pleasant meetings led to the superficial intimacy that war makes possible, so that I regretted the moving of the hospital and the need of a rest which took me to Paris.
It was there, one dreary evening in late November, that Marston's name was brought to my dim little apartment, with the request that, if possible, I receive him at once. I was about to sit down to a lonely dinner, and the prospect of his company delighted me. Then he came into the room.
I had last seen him with his friend Esme as they stood together waving me good-by, the rich, heavy summer suns.h.i.+ne all about them, though something more than a trick of golden light flooded their faces. They were both vitally alive in widely different ways; and yet they strangely seemed to be merely parts of each other. Esme was an erratic dreamer and seer of visions, and lacked always, even in the unimportant aspects of living, any sense of the personal, the concrete; Marston, in curious contrast, was at all times practical, level-headed, full of the l.u.s.ter of life.
The man who stood hesitatingly just inside my door was not Marston, but some stone-sculptured image of the gay, glad boy I had known.
The cry I could not choke broke through his terrible immobility, and he spoke, the words sounding unreal, as though he had memorized them for a lesson and rehea.r.s.ed their very intonation.
”I had to come. I had to tell some one. Then I will go away. I don't know where; just away. You knew him, knew I loved him. Will you let me tell you? Then I will go away.”
It flashed across my mind in the second before I found words that I had half wondered why Esme was not with him. It seemed impossible that even their bodies could be separated.
I tried to lead him to the fire and remove his overcoat, but he pushed me from him.
”No, no; don't touch me. You don't know, don't understand. I've hunted two weeks trying to find some one-you, any one who knew us to whom I could tell it.” He hesitated, and I waited. His voice took on a curious quality of childlike appeal as he went on: ”You know I loved him, know I'd given my life for his, don't you?” Such phrasing was utterly unlike Marston, but I had seen their friends.h.i.+p in all the glory of its intensity, and I knew no sacrifice would have been too great. I a.s.sured him of this, and, remembering my nursing, insisted that he eat, promising to listen to anything he wanted to tell me.
We sat facing each other across the spread table, but neither of us thought of the food after the first few mouthfuls. Twice in the early part of his story I filled his gla.s.s with claret, but I cannot recollect his drinking any.
”You must think this strange of me, but I'm not really mad, not now. You see, I've lived with the horror ever since they gave me leave-just afterward, trying to find some one I could talk to, some one who would help me go on and finish the things we'd-
”I want to make it all as clear as possible, but I've got to tell it my own way, and that isn't clear.
”Do you remember Brander? We brought him over once or twice. He was a mighty decent sort of fellow. Somehow, though, I hated his being such friends with Esme, I'd been his only one for so long, you see. Brander was born in India, and somehow Esme found it out; from hearing him curse in a dialect, I think. They used to talk some unheard-of jargon to each other and enjoyed it.
”Well, one day Brander got smashed in a fight up the lines, along the British front, and was dying. He kept asking for Esme, calling his name, and when Esme got word of it, of course he started at once. He took one of the baby Nieuports; they're fast, and not much of a target from below. He knew the Germans had a masked battery which he'd have to cross.
”I thought I'd like to see him across the enemy country, so I let him get a good start, and then I went up. I lost sight of him in a cloud-bank, and must have flown beyond him, for when I cleared it, he was behind and below me, and coming toward him a big German fighting-plane.
”Esme's wasn't a fighting-machine, and he should have tried to get away; but he must have seen the German a second after I did and judged it too late. He fired his revolver once, then suddenly seemed to lose control of his machine, and dropped to the level of the other. He must have thought he was done for and made his decision on the instant, counting it better to try to ram the German plane and go down to death together than to take the millionth chance of landing and let the enemy escape.
He went head on at the other, and they fell, woven as one machine, just inside the German lines.