Part 12 (2/2)

'The Herr Doktor?' She flushed a little. Then it was one of the German surgeons who had been injured? She had thought the man in question to be one of the orderlies.

'He had a great liking for the barge. More than once he expressed to me the opinion that it was the ideal place for wounded men. Could not room be found there for him?'

And then, at last, Jeanne Rouannes understood. 'Is it--is it _he_ who has been hurt?' she asked. And now there was no lack of concern or distress in her voice.

'Yes, it is the Herr Doktor Max Keller--he who was in Valoise before we arrived here,' he answered gravely. 'And the thought of my good colleague dying in this disturbed and noisy place is painful to me.'

'He shall immediately be taken to the barge. I will come and see to everything. There is a small cabin where he will be quite comfortable, and very, very quiet.'

'And I have your promise to tend him till a French surgeon can take charge of him?'

'But certainly,' she answered. He noticed that she spoke a little breathlessly. 'I promise not to leave him till then.'

Again the Herr Stabsarzt looked at her curiously. Did her troubled face express only the natural sympathy of a sensitive, soft-hearted woman--or something more?

'I will myself accompany you to the barge. We will walk behind the stretcher. It is not very far. Do you wish to tell the women here where you will be?'

'No, Monsieur le Medecin,' and this time a wave of colour flooded her face. 'If I do that, they will constantly be sending for me. Everything is in order. There is nothing I could do, that they cannot do.'

She spoke with the decision, the simple directness, which the Herr Stabsarzt admired. What would he not give, in times of peace of course he meant, to have such a capable young woman as this French girl had proved herself to be, in charge of the nurses in his beloved clinik!

2

Jeanne Rouannes tended the Herr Doktor all that long, still, cloudless day, as together they had tended so many wounded men during those days and nights which had seemed, to her at least, to contain an eternity of painful effort and strain, of dull despair, of agonising sights.

But here, in this clean, water-lapped little cabin-room, there reigned a delicious quietude, only broken by the drowsy murmur of the river which flowed swiftly just outside, past the wooden walls of the barge. From far off, making the stillness the more intense, came the deep booming of great guns, but with the falling of night that also ceased.

She had been prodigal with the morphia the German surgeon had left with her, and still more with that strange, suggestively-named drug, heroine.

For she was dully, but none the less firmly, determined that this man should not suffer as some of the men she had tended during the last few days had suffered. He, at least, had earned immunity from that h.e.l.lish pain by all the pain he had spared others.

He lay so rigidly unmoving that had he not sometimes breathed out a long, tired sigh, and now and again, not often, moved his bandaged head an inch to the right or an inch to the left, she might have doubted if he still lived.

At last an immense, limitless la.s.situde seemed to fall on Jeanne Rouannes. Soul, as well as body, cried out and hungered for rest.

Slipping down on to the floor, to the left side of the bed, she propped her head against the hard back of a wooden chair and dozed.

She woke--was it moments or hours later?--to hear a little, stuffless sound--that of the Herr Doktor's hand moving feebly across the sheet.

Turning slightly round, and lifting up her right arm, she clasped the poor, limp, nerveless hand in hers....

How many hands, hard, dirty, tortured hands, she had in pity clasped during the last few weeks!--the honest, valiant hands of her young, wounded, fellow-countrymen, in those peaceful, early days of war that now seemed to her so unutterably long ago. Lately, the hands she had held in hers, often in a useless, pitiful attempt to make them understand words of kindness or of hope, had been the huge hands of wounded Germans, those big men-children who had seemed to her so much less stoical in the braving of pain than the more highly-strung French soldiers.

The hand she now held was small and delicate, the hand of a surgeon and a student. How kindly that poor hand, now lying limply clasped in hers, had tended her father! At this thought, this recollection, she pressed it more closely, and as she did so, Max Keller, unknowing where he was, though aware of her nearness, came back to semi-consciousness.

Before his sightless eyes there suddenly gleamed the lights of the Schloss at Weimar, reflected in the waters of the Ulm. Then with extraordinary vividness he saw the Schloss gates--those gates which he had pa.s.sed such myriads of times in his thirty-four years of life.... A moment later, he was gazing, with the same sense of vivid reality, at the bronze fountain, let into an old wall, of which the subject--found by Goethe in a church in Spain--is that of two beautiful youths, brothers who died young. One youth, who holds a torch reversed, has his arm round the other's neck. Beneath their feet the clear water has gushed forth since the day when Goethe's eyes first rested on the finished work, and now, lying there in the little cabin-room of a French Red Cross barge, Weimar's dying son seemed to hear the delicious bubbling of the spring.

There, too, he saw the door through which so often walked the one woman whom Goethe had supremely loved.

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