“I can’t understand this fear of hers--this desire to leave Lille.”
Dr. Small had taken something off the mantelpiece--a glass tube with
some tablets--which he put in his pocket.
“Hysteria,” he said. “Starvation, war-strain, and--drugs. There’s a
jolly combination for a young lady’s nerves! She’s afraid of herself,
old ghosts, the horrors. Wants to run away from it all, forgetting that
she carries her poor body and brain with her. I know the symptoms--even
in little old New York in time of peace.”
He had his professional manner. I saw the doctor through his soldier’s
uniform. He spoke with the authority of the medical man in a patient’s
bedroom. He ordered me to go round to my mess and bring back some
food, while he boiled up a kettle and got busy. When I returned, after
half-an-hour, the girl was more cheerful. Some of the horrors had
passed from her, in the doctor’s company. She ate some of the food
I had brought in a famished way, but after a few mouthfuls sickened
at it and would eat no more. But a faint colour had come into her
cheeks and gave her face a touch of real beauty. She must have been
extraordinarily attractive before the war--as those photographs showed.
She spoke of Pierre with adoration. He had been all that was good to
her before she left home (she hated her mother!) to sing in cabarets
and café concerts.
“I cannot imagine Pierre as a lieutenant!” she remarked with a queer
little laugh.
Dr. Small said he would get some women in the house to look after her
in the night, but she seemed hostile to that idea.
“The people here are unkind. They are bad women here. If I died they
would not care.”
She promised to stay in the house until we could arrange for Pierre to
meet her and take her away to Paris. But I felt the greatest pity for
the girl when we left her alone in her miserable room. The scared look
had come back to her face. I could see that she was in terror of being
alone again.
When we walked back to our billets the doctor spoke of the
extraordinary chance of meeting the girl like that--the sister of our
liaison officer. The odds were a million to one against such a thing.
“I always feel there’s a direction in these cases,” said Daddy Small.
“Some Hand that guides. Maybe you and I were being led to-night. I’d
like to save that girl, Marthe.”
“Is that her name?”
“Marthe de Méricourt, she calls herself, as a singing-girl. I guess
that’s why Pierre could not hear of her in this town.”
Later on the doctor spoke again.
“That girl is as much a war-victim as if she had been shell-shocked
on the field of battle. The casualty-lists don’t say anything about
civilians, not a darned thing about broken hearts, stricken women,
diseased babies, infant mortality; all the hell of suffering behind the
lines. May God curse all war devils!”
He put his hand on my shoulder and said in a very solemn way:
“After this thing is finished--this grisly business--you and I, and all
men of goodwill, must put our heads together to prevent it happening
again. I dedicate whatever life I have to that.”
He seemed to have a vision of hope.
“There are lots of good fellows in the world. Wickham Brand is one of
’em. Charles Fortune is another. One finds them everywhere on your
side and mine. Surely we can get together when peace comes, and make a
better system, somehow.”
“Not easy, Doctor.”
He laughed at me.
“I hate your pessimism!... We must get a message to Pierre Nesle....
Good night, sonny!”
On the way back to my billet I passed young Clatworthy. He was too
engrossed to see me, having his arm round a girl who was standing with
him under an unlighted lamp-post. She was looking up into his face on
which the moonlight shone--a pretty creature, I thought.
“_Je t’adore!_” she murmured as I passed quite close; and Clatworthy
kissed her.
I knew the boy’s mother and sisters, and wondered what they would think
of him if they saw him now with this little street-walker. To them
Cyril was a white knight _sans peur et sans reproche_. The war had not
improved him. He was no longer the healthy lad who had been captain of
his school, with all his ambition in sport, as I had known him five
years before. Sometimes, in spite of his swagger and gallantry, I saw
something sinister in his face, the look of a soiled soul. Poor kid! He
too would have his excuse for all things:
“_C’est la guerre!_”