RIGHT HAND AND LEFT LEG
"One rogue less in the world, Little Mother Coralie!" cried Patrice
Belval, after he had led the girl back to the drawing-room and made a
rapid investigation with Ya-Bon. "Remember his name--I found it engraved
on his watch--Mustapha Rovalaïof, the name of a rogue!"
He spoke gaily, with no emotion in his voice, and continued, as he
walked up and down the room:
"You and I, Little Mother Coralie, who have witnessed so many tragedies
and seen so many good fellows die, need not waste tears over the death
of Mustapha Rovalaïof or his murder by his accomplices. Not even a
funeral oration, eh? Ya-Bon has taken him under his arm, waited until
the square was clear and carried him to the Rue Brignoles, with orders
to fling the gentleman over the railings into the garden of the Musée
Galliéra. The railings are high. But Ya-Bon's right hand knows no
obstacles. And so, Little Mother Coralie, the matter is buried. You
won't be talked about; and, this time, I claim a word of thanks."
He stopped to laugh:
"A word of thanks, but no compliments. By Jove, I don't make much of a
warder! It was clever the way those beggars snatched my prisoner. Why
didn't I foresee that your other assailant, the man in the gray-felt
hat, would go and tell the third, who was waiting in his motor, and that
they would both come back together to rescue their companion? And they
came back. And, while you and I were chatting, they must have forced the
servants' entrance, passed through the kitchen, come to the little door
between the pantry and the hall and pushed it open. There, close by
them, lay their man, still unconscious and firmly bound, on his sofa.
What were they to do? It was impossible to get him out of the hall
without alarming Ya-Bon. And yet, if they didn't release him, he would
speak, give away his accomplices and ruin a carefully prepared plan. So
one of the two must have leant forward stealthily, put out his arm,
thrown his string round that throat which Ya-Bon had already handled
pretty roughly, gathered the buckles at the two ends and pulled, pulled,
quietly, until death came. Not a sound. Not a sigh. The whole operation
performed in silence. We come, we kill and we go away. Good-night. The
trick is done and our friend won't talk."
Captain Belval's merriment increased:
"Our friend won't talk," he repeated, "and the police, when they find
his body to-morrow morning inside a railed garden, won't understand a
word of the business. Nor we either, Little Mother Coralie; and we shall
never know why those men tried to kidnap you. It's only too true! I may
not be up to much as a warder, but I'm beneath contempt as a detective!"
He continued to walk up and down the room. The fact that his leg or
rather his calf had been amputated seemed hardly to inconvenience him;
and, as the joints of the knee and thighbone had retained their
mobility, there was at most a certain want of rhythm in the action of
his hips and shoulders. Moreover, his tall figure tended to correct this
lameness, which was reduced to insignificant proportions by the ease of
his movements and the indifference with which he appeared to accept it.
He had an open countenance, rather dark in color, burnt by the sun and
tanned by the weather, with an expression that was frank, cheerful and
often bantering. He must have been between twenty-eight and thirty. His
manner suggested that of the officers of the First Empire, to whom their
life in camp imparted a special air which they subsequently brought into
the ladies' drawing-rooms.
He stopped to look at Coralie, whose shapely profile stood out against
the gleams from the fireplace. Then he came and sat beside her:
"I know nothing about you," he said softly. "At the hospital the doctors
and nurses call you Madame Coralie. Your patients prefer to say Little
Mother. What is your married or your maiden name? Have you a husband or
are you a widow? Where do you live? Nobody knows. You arrive every day
at the same time and you go away by the same street. Sometimes an old
serving-man, with long gray hair and a bristly beard, with a comforter
round his neck and a pair of yellow spectacles on his nose, brings you
or fetches you. Sometimes also he waits for you, always sitting on the
same chair in the covered yard. He has been asked questions, but he
never gives an answer. I know only one thing, therefore, about you,
which is that you are adorably good and kind and that you are also--I
may say it, may I not?--adorably beautiful. And it is perhaps, Little
Mother Coralie, because I know nothing about your life that I imagine it
so mysterious, and, in some way, so sad. You give the impression of
living amid sorrow and anxiety; the feeling that you are all alone.
There is no one who devotes himself to making you happy and taking care
of you. So I thought--I have long thought and waited for an opportunity
of telling you--I thought that you must need a friend, a brother, who
would advise and protect you. Am I not right, Little Mother Coralie?"
As he went on, Coralie seemed to shrink into herself and to place a
greater distance between them, as though she did not wish him to
penetrate those secret regions of which he spoke.
"No," she murmured, "you are mistaken. My life is quite simple. I do not
need to be defended."
"You do not need to be defended!" he cried, with increasing animation.
"What about those men who tried to kidnap you? That plot hatched against
you? That plot which your assailants are so afraid to see discovered
that they go to the length of killing the one who allowed himself to be
caught? Is that nothing? Is it mere delusion on my part when I say that
you are surrounded by dangers, that you have enemies who stick at
nothing, that you have to be defended against their attempts and that,
if you decline the offer of my assistance, I . . . Well, I . . . ?"
She persisted in her silence, showed herself more and more distant,
almost hostile. The officer struck the marble mantelpiece with his fist,
and, bending over her, finished his sentence in a determined tone:
"Well, if you decline the offer of my assistance, I shall force it on
you."
She shook her head.
"I shall force it on you," he repeated, firmly. "It is my duty and my
right."
"No," she said, in an undertone.
"My absolute right," said Captain Belval, "for a reason which outweighs
all the others and makes it unnecessary for me even to consult you."
"What do you mean?"
"I love you."
He brought out the words plainly, not like a lover venturing on a timid
declaration, but like a man proud of the sentiment that he feels and
happy to proclaim it.
She lowered her eyes and blushed; and he cried, exultantly:
"You can take it, Little Mother, from me. No impassioned outbursts, no
sighs, no waving of the arms, no clapping of the hands. Just three
little words, which I tell you without going on my knees. And it's the
easier for me because you know it. Yes, Madame Coralie, it's all very
well to look so shy, but you know my love for you and you've known it as
long as I have. We saw it together take birth when your dear little
hands touched my battered head. The others used to torture me. With you,
it was nothing but caresses. So was the pity in your eyes and the tears
that fell because I was in pain. But can any one see you without loving
you? Your seven patients who were here just now are all in love with
you, Little Mother Coralie. Ya-Bon worships the ground you walk on. Only
they are privates. They cannot speak. I am an officer; and I speak
without hesitation or embarrassment, believe me."
Coralie had put her hands to her burning cheeks and sat silent, bending
forward.
"You understand what I mean, don't you," he went on, in a voice that
rang, "when I say that I speak without hesitation or embarrassment? If I
had been before the war what I am now, a maimed man, I should not have
had the same assurance and I should have declared my love for you humbly
and begged your pardon for my boldness. But now! . . . Believe me,
Little Mother Coralie, when I sit here face to face with the woman I
adore, I do not think of my infirmity. Not for a moment do I feel the
impression that I can appear ridiculous or presumptuous in your eyes."
He stopped, as though to take breath, and then, rising, went on:
"And it must needs be so. People will have to understand that those who
have been maimed in this war do not look upon themselves as outcasts,
lame ducks, or lepers, but as absolutely normal men. Yes, normal! One
leg short? What about it? Does that rob a man of his brain or heart?
Then, because the war has deprived me of a leg, or an arm, or even both
legs or both arms, I have no longer the right to love a woman save at
the risk of meeting with a rebuff or imagining that she pities me? Pity!
But we don't want the woman to pity us, nor to make an effort to love
us, nor even to think that she is doing a charity because she treats us
kindly. What we demand, from women and from the world at large, from
those whom we meet in the street and from those who belong to the same
set as ourselves, is absolute equality with the rest, who have been
saved from our fate by their lucky stars or their cowardice."
The captain once more struck the mantelpiece:
"Yes, absolute equality! We all of us, whether we have lost a leg or an
arm, whether blind in one eye or two, whether crippled or deformed,
claim to be just as good, physically and morally, as any one you please;
and perhaps better. What! Shall men who have used their legs to rush
upon the enemy be outdistanced in life, because they no longer have
those legs, by men who have sat and warmed their toes at an office-fire?
What nonsense! We want our place in the sun as well as the others. It is
our due; and we shall know how to get it and keep it. There is no
happiness to which we are not entitled and no work for which we are not
capable with a little exercise and training. Ya-Bon's right hand is
already worth any pair of hands in the wide world; and Captain Belval's
left leg allows him to do his five miles an hour if he pleases."
He began to laugh:
"Right hand and left leg; left hand and right leg: what does it matter
which we have saved, if we know how to use it? In what respect have we
fallen off? Whether it's a question of obtaining a position or
perpetuating our race, are we not as good as we were? And perhaps even
better. I venture to say that the children which we shall give to the
country will be just as well-built as ever, with arms and legs and the
rest . . . not to mention a mighty legacy of pluck and spirit. That's
what we claim, Little Mother Coralie. We refuse to admit that our wooden
legs keep us back or that we cannot stand as upright on our crutches as
on legs of flesh and bone. We do not consider that devotion to us is any
sacrifice or that it's necessary to talk of heroism when a girl has the
honor to marry a blind soldier! Once more, we are not creatures outside
the pale. We have not fallen off in any way whatever; and this is a
truth before which everybody will bow for the next two or three
generations. You can understand that, in a country like France, when
maimed men are to be met by the hundred thousand, the conception of what
makes a perfect man will no longer be as hard and fast as it was. In the
new form of humanity which is preparing, there will be men with two arms
and men with only one, just as there are fair men and dark, bearded men
and clean-shaven. And it will all seem quite natural. And every one will
lead the life he pleases, without needing to be complete in every limb.
And, as my life is wrapped up in you, Little Mother Coralie, and as my
happiness depends on you, I thought I would wait no longer before making
you my little speech. . . . Well! That's finished! I have plenty more to
say on the subject, but it can't all be said in a day, can it? . . ."
He broke off, thrown out of his stride after all by Coralie's silence.
She had not stirred since the first words of love that he uttered. Her
hands had sought her forehead; and her shoulders were shaking slightly.
He stooped and, with infinite gentleness, drawing aside the slender
fingers, uncovered her beautiful face:
"Why are you crying, Little Mother Coralie?"
He was calling her _tu_ now, but she did not mind. Between a man and the
woman who has bent over his wounds relations of a special kind arise;
and Captain Belval in particular had those rather familiar, but still
respectful, ways at which it seems impossible to take offence.
"Have _I_ made you cry?" he asked.
"No," she said, in a low voice, "it's all of you who upset me. It's your
cheerfulness, your pride, your way not of submitting to fate, but
mastering it. The humblest of you raises himself above his nature
without an effort; and I know nothing finer or more touching than that
indifference."
He sat down beside her:
"Then you're not angry with me for saying . . . what I said?"
"Angry with you?" she replied, pretending to mistake his meaning. "Why,
every woman thinks as you do. If women, in bestowing their affection,
had to choose among the men returning from the war, the choice I am sure
would be in favor of those who have suffered most cruelly."
He shook his head:
"You see, I am asking for something more than affection and a more
definite answer to what I said. Shall I remind you of my words?"
"No."
"Then your answer . . . ?"
"My answer, dear friend, is that you must not speak those words again."
He put on a solemn air:
"You forbid me?"
"I do."
"In that case, I swear to say nothing more until I see you again."
"You will not see me again," she murmured.
Captain Belval was greatly amused at this:
"I say, I say! And why sha'n't I see you again, Little Mother Coralie?"
"Because I don't wish it."
"And your reason, please?"
"My reason?"
She turned her eyes to him and said, slowly:
"I am married."
Belval seemed in no way disconcerted by this news. On the contrary, he
said, in the calmest of tones:
"Well, you must marry again! No doubt your husband is an old man and you
do not love him. He will therefore understand that, as you have some one
in love with you . . ."
"Don't jest, please."
He caught hold of her hand, just as she was rising to go:
"You are right, Little Mother Coralie, and I apologize for not adopting
a more serious manner to speak to you of very serious things. It's a
question of our two lives. I am profoundly convinced that they are
moving towards each other and that you are powerless to restrain them.
That is why your answer is beside the point. I ask nothing of you. I
expect everything from fate. It is fate that will bring us together."
"No," she said.
"Yes," he declared, "that is how things will happen."
"It is not. They will not and shall not happen like that. You must give
me your word of honor not to try to see me again nor even to learn my
name. I might have granted more if you had been content to remain
friends. The confession which you have made sets a barrier between us. I
want nobody in my life . . . nobody!"
She made this declaration with a certain vehemence and at the same time
tried to release her arm from his grasp. Patrice Belval resisted her
efforts and said:
"You are wrong. . . . You have no right to expose yourself to danger
like this. . . . Please reflect . . ."
She pushed him away. As she did so, she knocked off the mantelpiece a
little bag which she had placed there. It fell on the carpet and opened.
Two or three things escaped, and she picked them up, while Patrice
Belval knelt down on the floor to help her:
"Here," he said, "you've missed this."
It was a little case in plaited straw, which had also come open; the
beads of a rosary protruded from it.
They both stood up in silence. Captain Belval examined the rosary.
"What a curious coincidence!" he muttered. "These amethyst beads! This
old-fashioned gold filigree setting! . . . It's strange to find the same
materials and the same workmanship. . . ."
He gave a start, and it was so marked that Coralie asked:
"Why, what's the matter?"
He was holding in his fingers a bead larger than most of the others,
forming a link between the string of tens and the shorter prayer-chain.
And this bead was broken half-way across, almost level with the gold
setting which held it.
"The coincidence," he said, "is so inconceivable that I hardly dare
. . . And yet the face can be verified at once. But first, one question:
who gave you this rosary?"
"Nobody gave it to me. I've always had it."
"But it must have belonged to somebody before?"
"To my mother, I suppose."
"Your mother?"
"I expect so, in the same way as the different jewels which she left
me."
"Is your mother dead?"
"Yes, she died when I was four years old. I have only the vaguest
recollection of her. But what has all this to do with a rosary?"
"It's because of this," he said. "Because of this amethyst bead broken
in two."
He undid his jacket and took his watch from his waistcoat-pocket. It had
a number of trinkets fastened to it by a little leather and silver
strap. One of these trinkets consisted of the half of an amethyst bead,
also broken across, also held in a filigree setting. The original size
of the two beads seemed to be identical. The two amethysts were of the
same color and contained in the same filigree.
Coralie and Belval looked at each other anxiously. She stammered:
"It's only an accident, nothing else . . ."
"I agree," he said. "But, supposing these two halves fit each other
exactly . . ."
"It's impossible," she said, herself frightened at the thought of the
simple little act needed for the indisputable proof.
The officer, however, decided upon that act. He brought his right hand,
which held the rosary-bead, and his left, which held the trinket,
together. The hands hesitated, felt about and stopped. The contact was
made.
The projections and indentations of the broken stones corresponded
precisely. Each protruding part found a space to fit it. The two half
amethysts were the two halves of the same amethyst. When joined, they
formed one and the same bead.
There was a long pause, laden with excitement and mystery. Then,
speaking in a low voice:
"I do not know either exactly where this trinket comes from," Captain
Belval said. "Ever since I was a child, I used to see it among other
things of trifling value which I kept in a cardboard box: watch-keys,
old rings, old-fashioned seals. I picked out these trinkets from among
them two or three years ago. Where does this one come from? I don't
know. But what I do know . . ."
He had separated the two pieces and, examining them carefully,
concluded:
"What I do know, beyond a doubt, is that the largest bead in this rosary
came off one day and broke; and that the other, with its setting, went
to form the trinket which I now have. You and I therefore possess the
two halves of a thing which somebody else possessed twenty years ago."
He went up to her and, in the same low and rather serious voice, said:
"You protested just now when I declared my faith in destiny and my
certainty that events were leading us towards each other. Do you still
deny it? For, after all, this is either an accident so extraordinary
that we have no right to admit it or an actual fact which proves that
our two lives have already touched in the past at some mysterious point
and that they will meet again in the future, never to part. And that is
why, without waiting for the perhaps distant future, I offer you to-day,
when danger hangs over you, the support of my friendship. Observe that I
am no longer speaking of love but only of friendship. Do you accept?"
She was nonplussed and so much perturbed by that miracle of the two
broken amethysts, fitting each other exactly, that she appeared not to
hear Belval's voice.
"Do you accept?" he repeated.
After a moment she replied:
"No."
"Then the proof which destiny has given you of its wishes does not
satisfy you?" he said, good-humoredly.
"We must not see each other again," she declared.
"Very well. I will leave it to chance. It will not be for long.
Meanwhile, I promise to make no effort to see you."
"Nor to find out my name?"
"Yes, I promise you."
"Good-by," she said, giving him her hand.
"_Au revoir_," he answered.
She moved away. When she reached the door, she seemed to hesitate. He
was standing motionless by the chimney. Once more she said:
"Good-by."
"_Au revoir_, Little Mother Coralie."
Then she went out.
Only when the street-door had closed behind her did Captain Belval go to
one of the windows. He saw Coralie passing through the trees, looking
quite small in the surrounding darkness. He felt a pang at his heart.
Would he ever see her again?
"Shall I? Rather!" he exclaimed. "Why, to-morrow perhaps. Am I not the
favorite of the gods?"
And, taking his stick, he set off, as he said, with his wooden leg
foremost.
That evening, after dining at the nearest restaurant, Captain Belval
went to Neuilly. The home run in connection with the hospital was a
pleasant villa on the Boulevard Maillot, looking out on the Bois de
Boulogne. Discipline was not too strictly enforced. The captain could
come in at any hour of the night; and the man easily obtained leave from
the matron.
"Is Ya-Bon there?" he asked this lady.
"Yes, he's playing cards with his sweetheart."
"He has the right to love and be loved," he said. "Any letters for me?"
"No, only a parcel."
"From whom?"
"A commissionaire brought it and just said that it was 'for Captain
Belval.' I put it in your room."
The officer went up to his bedroom on the top floor and saw the parcel,
done up in paper and string, on the table. He opened it and discovered a
box. The box contained a key, a large, rusty key, of a shape and
manufacture that were obviously old.
What could it all mean? There was no address on the box and no mark. He
presumed that there was some mistake which would come to light of
itself; and he slipped the key into his pocket.
"Enough riddles for one day," he thought. "Let's go to bed."
But when he went to the window to draw the curtains he saw, across the
trees of the Bois, a cascade of sparks which spread to some distance in
the dense blackness of the night. And he remembered the conversation
which he had overheard in the restaurant and the rain of sparks
mentioned by the men who were plotting to kidnap Little Mother Coralie.
. . .