E-text prepared by Charles Klingman
THOSE WHO SMILED
PERCEVAL GIBBON
* * * * *
By the Same Author
VERSE: African Items
SHORT STORIES:
Vrouw Grobelaar's Leading Cases, The Adventures of Miss Gregory,
The Second-class Passenger
NOVELS: Souls in Bondage, Salvator, Margaret Harding
* * * * *
THOSE WHO SMILED
And Eleven Other Stories
by
PERCEVAL GIBBON
Gassell and Company, LTD London, New York, Toronto and Melbourne
First Published 1920
To
MY SISTER, MURIEL GIBBON
CONTENTS
1. THOSE WHO SMILED
2. THE DAGO
3. WOOD-LADIES
4. A MAN BEFORE THE MAST
5. THE GIRL
6. THE BREADWINNER
7. "PLAIN GERMAN"
8. ALMS AND THE MAN
9. THE DARKENED PATH
10. MISS PILGRIM'S PROGRESS
11. THE CONNOISSEUR
12. THE DAY OF OMENS
I
THOSE WHO SMILED
From the great villa, marble-white amid its yews and cedars, in which
the invaders had set up their headquarters, the two officers the
stout, formidable German captain and the young Austrian lieutenant
went together through the mulberry orchards, where the parched grass
underfoot was tiger-striped with alternate sun and shadow. The hush
of the afternoon and the benign tyranny of the North Italian sun
subdued them; they scarcely spoke as they came through the ranks of
fruit-laden trees to the low embankment where the last houses of the
village tailed out beside the road.
"So ist's gut!" said Captain Hahn then. "We are on time nicely on
time!" He climbed the grassy bank to the road and paused, his tall
young companion beside him. "Halt here," he directed; "we shall see
everything from here."
He suspired exhaustively in the still, strong heat, and took
possession of the scene with commanding, intolerant eyes. He was a
man in the earliest years of middle life, short, naturally
full-bodied, and already plethoric with undisciplined passions and
appetites. His large sanguine face had anger and impatience for an
habitual expression; he carried a thick bamboo cane, with which he
lashed the air about him in vehement gesticulation as he spoke; all
his appearance and manner were an incarnate ejaculation. Beside him,
and by contrast with the violence of his effect, his companion was
eclipsed and insignificant, no more than a shape of a silent young
man, slender in his close-fitting grey uniform, with a swart,
immobile face intent upon what passed.
It was the hour that should crown recent police activities of Captain
Hahn with the arrest of an absconding forced-laborer, who, having
escaped from his slave-gang behind the firing-line on the Piave, had
been traced to his father's house in the village. An Italian
renegade, a discovery of Captain Hahn's, had served in the affair; a
whole machinery of espionage and secret treachery had been put in
motion; and now Lieutenant Jovannic, of the Austrian Army, was to be
shown how the German method ensured the German success. Even as they
arrived upon the road they saw the carefully careless group of
lounging soldiers, like characters on a stage "discovered" at the
rise of the curtain, break into movement and slouch with elaborate
purposelessness to surround the cottage. Their corporal remained
where he was, leaning against a wall in the shade, eating an onion
and ready to give the signal with his whistle; he did not glance
towards the two watching officers. To Lieutenant Jovannic, the
falsity and unreality of it all were as strident as a brass band; yet
in the long vista of the village street, brimful of sun and silence,
the few people who moved upon their business went indifferently as
shadows upon a wall. An old man trudged in the wake of a laden
donkey; a girl bore water-buckets slung from a yoke; a child was
sweeping up dung. None turned a head.
"Sieh' 'mal!" chuckled Captain Harm joyously. "Here comes my Judas!"
From the door of the cottage opposite them, whose opening showed dead
black against the golden glare without, came the renegade, pausing
upon the threshold to speak a last cheery word to those within. Poor
Jovannic, it was at this moment that, to the fantastic and absurd
character of the whole event, as arranged by Captain Hahn, there was
now added a quality of sheer horror. The man upon the threshold was
not like a man; vastly pot-bellied, so that the dingy white of his
shirt was only narrowly framed by the black of his jacket, swollen in
body to the comic point, collarless, with a staircase of unshaven
chins crushed under his great, jovial, black-mustached face, the
creature yet moved on little feet like a spinning-top on its point,
buoyantly, with the gait of a tethered balloon. He had the gestures,
the attitude upon the threshold, of a jolly companion; when he
turned, his huge, fatuous face was amiable, and creased yet with the
dregs of smiles. From the breast of his jacket he exhumed a white
handkerchief. "Arrivederci!" he called for the last time to the
interior of the house; someone within answered pleasantly; then
deliberately, with a suggestion of ceremonial and significance in the
gesture, he buried the obscenity of his countenance in the
handkerchief and blew his nose as one blows upon a trumpet.
"Tadellos!" applauded Captain Hahn enthusiastically. "He invented
that signal himself; he's the only man in the village who carries a
handkerchief. Und jetzt geht's los!"
And forthwith it went 'los'; the farce quickened to drama. A couple
of idle soldiers, rifle-less and armed only with the bayonets at
their belts, had edged near the door; others had disappeared behind
the house; Judas, mincing on his feet like a soubrette, moved briskly
away; and the corporal, tossing the wreck of his onion from him, blew
a single note on his whistle. The thin squeal of it was barely
audible thirty yards away, yet it seemed to Jovannic as though the
brief jet of sound had screamed the afternoon stillness to rags. The
two slack-bodied soldiers were suddenly swift and violent; drawn
bayonet in hand, they plunged together into the black of the door and
vanished within. Down the long street the old man let the donkey
wander on and turned, bludgeon in hand, to stare; the child and girl
with the buckets were running, and every door and window showed
startled heads. From within the cottage came uproar screams,
stamping, and the crash of furniture overset.
"You see?" There was for an instant a school-masterly touch in
Captain Hahn. "You see? They've got him; not a hitch anywhere.
Organization, method, foresight; I tell you."
From the dark door there spouted forth a tangle of folk to the hot
dust of the road that rose like smoke under their shifting feet. The
soldiers had the fighting, plunging prisoner; between their bodies,
and past those of the men and women who had run out with them, his
young, black-avised face surged and raged in an agony of resistance,
lifting itself in a maniac effort to be free, then dragged and beaten
down. An old woman tottered on the fringes of the struggle, crying
feebly; others, young and old, wept or screamed; a soldier, bitten in
the hand, cried an oath and gave way. The prisoner tore himself all
but loose.
"Verfluchter Schweinhund!" roared Captain Halm suddenly. He had stood
till then intent, steeped in the interest of the thing, but aloof as
an engineer might watch the action of his machine till the moment at
which it fails. Suddenly, a dangerous compact figure of energy, he
dashed across the road, shouting. "You'd resist arrest, would you?"
he was vociferating. His bamboo cane, thick as a stout thumb, rose
and fell twice smashingly; Jovannic saw the second blow go home upon
the hair above the prisoner's forehead. The man was down in an
instant, and the soldiers were over him and upon him. Captain Hahn,
cane in hand, stood like a victorious duelist.
The old woman the prisoner's mother, possibly, had staggered back at
the thrash of the stick, and now, one hand against the wall of the
house and one to her bosom, she uttered a thin, moaning wail. At that
voice of pain Jovannic started; it was then that he realized that the
other voices, those that had screamed and those that had cursed, had
ceased; even the prisoner, dragged to his feet and held, made no
sound. For an instant the disorder of his mind made it appear that
the sun-drowned silence had never really been broken, that all that
had happened had been no more than a flash of nightmare. Then he
perceived.
Captain Hahn, legs astraddle, a-bulge with the sense of achievement,
was giving orders.
"Tie the dog's hands," he commanded. "Tie them behind his back! Cord?
Get a cord somewhere, you fool! Teach the hound to resist, I will!
Hurry now!"
The prisoner's face was clear to see, no longer writhen and crazy.
For all the great bruise that darkened his brow, it was composed to a
calm as strange as the calm of death. He looked directly at Captain
Hahn, seeming to listen and understand; and when that man of wrath
ceased to speak, his rather sullen young face, heavy-browed,
thick-mouthed, relaxed from its quiet. He smiled!
Beyond him, against the yellow front of the cottage, an old man,
bareheaded, with a fleshless skull's face, had passed his arm under
that of the old woman and was supporting her. The lieutenant saw that
bony mask, too, break into a smile. He looked at the others, the
barefoot girls and the women; whatever the understanding was, they
shared it; each oval, sun-tinged face, under its crown of jet hair,
had the same faint light of laughter of tragic, inscrutable mirth, at
once contemptuous and pitiful. Along the street, folk had come forth
from their doors and stood watching in silence.
"That's right, Corporal; tie him up," came Captain Harm's thickish
voice, rich and fruity with the assurance of power. "He won't desert
again when I've done with him and he won't resist either."
It was not for him to see, in those smiles, that the helpless man,
bound for the flogging-posts of the "Dolina of Weeping," where so
many martyrs to that goddess which is Italy had expiated in torment
their crimes of loyalty and courage, had already found a refuge
beyond the reach of his spies and torturers that he opposed even now
to bonds and blows a resistance that no armed force could overcome.
If he saw the smiles at all, he took them for a tribute to his brisk,
decisive action with the cane.
"And now, take him along," he commanded, when the prisoner's wrists
were tied behind him to his satisfaction. "And stand no nonsense! If
he won't walk make him!"
The corporal saluted. "Zu Befehl, Herr Hauptmann," he deferred, and
the prisoner was thrust down the bank. The old mother, her head
averted, moaned softly. The old man, upholding her, smiled yet his
death's-head smile.
The tiger-yellow of the grass between the trees was paler, the black
was blacker, as the two officers returned across the fields; to the
hush of afternoon had succeeded the briskness of evening. Birds were
awake and a breeze rustled in the branches; and Captain Hahn was
strongly moved to speech.
"System," he said explosively. "All war all life comes down to
system. You get your civil labor by system; you keep it by system.
Now, that little arrest."
It was as maddening as the noise of a mouse in a wainscot. Jovannic
wanted not so much to think as to dwell in the presence of his
impressions. Those strange, quiet smiles!
"Did you see them laughing?" he interrupted. "Smiling, I should say.
After you had cut the fellow down they stopped crying out and they
smiled."
"Ha! Enough to make 'em," said Captain Hahn. "I laughed myself. All
that play-acting before his people, and then, with two smacks kaput!
Fellow looked like a fool! It's part of the system, you see."
"That was it, you think?" The explanation explained nothing to
Jovannic, least of all his own sensations when the sudden surrender
and the sad, pitying mirth had succeeded to the struggle and the
violence. He let Captain Hahn preach his German gospel of system on
earth and organization to man, and walked beside him in silence, with
pensive eyes fixed ahead, where the prisoner and his escort moved in
a plodding black group.
He had not that gift of seeing life and its agents in the barren
white light of his own purposes which so simplified things for
Captain Hahn. He was a son of that mesalliance of nations which was
Austria-Hungary Slavs, their slipping grasp clutching at eternity,
Transylvanians, with pervert Latin ardors troubling their blood, had
blended themselves in him; and he was young. Life for him was a depth
not a surface, as for Captain Hahn; facts were but the skeleton of
truth; glamour clad them and made them vital. He had been transferred
to the Italian front from Russia, where his unripe battalion had lain
in reserve throughout his service; his experiences of the rush over
the Isonzo, of the Italian debacle and the occupation of the province
of Friuli, lay undigested on his mental stomach. It was as though by
a single violent gesture he had translated himself from the quiet
life in his regiment, which had become normal and familiar, to the
hush and mystery of the vast Italian plain, where the crops grew
lavishly as weeds and the trees shut out the distances.
The great villa, whither they were bound, had a juncture of antique
wall, pierced with grilles of beaten iron; its gate, a delicacy of
filigree, let them through to the ordered beauty of the lawns, over
which the mansion presided, a pale, fine presence of a house. Hedges
of yew, like walls of ebony, bounded the principal walks. The
prisoner and the retinue of soldiers that dignified him went ahead;
the two officers, acknowledging the crash of arms of the sentry's
salute at the gate, followed. The improvised prison was in the long
wing of the building that housed the stables. They took the crackling
pebble path that led to it.
"Nu!" Captain Hahn slacked his military gait at one of the formal
openings in the wall of yews that shut them from the lawns before the
great housed serene white front. "The women see?"
But Jovannic had already seen the pair, arms joined, who paced upon
the side-lawn near at hand and had now stopped to look towards them.
It was the old Contessa, who owned the house and still occupied a
part of it, and the Contessina, her daughter. He knew the former as a
disconcerting and never disconcerted specter of an aged lady, with
lips that trembled and eyes that never faltered, and the latter as a
serious, silent, tall girl with the black hair and oval Madonna face
of her country and he knew her, too, as a vague and aching
disturbance in his mind, a presence that troubled his leisure.
"You make your war here as sadly as a funeral," said Captain Hahn. "A
fresh and joyous war--that's what it ought to be! Now, in Flanders,
we'd have had that girl in with us at the mess." He laughed his rich,
throaty laugh that seemed to lay a smear of himself over the subject
of his mirth. "That at the very least!" he added.
Jovannic could only babble protestingly. "She she" he began in a
flustered indignation. Captain Hahn laughed again. He had the
advantage of the single mind over the mind divided against itself.
At the stables the sergeant of the guard received the prisoner. The
redness of the sunset that dyed the world was over and about the
scene. The sergeant, turning out upon the summons of the sentry,
showed himself as an old Hungarian of the regular army, hairy as a
Skye terrier, with the jovial blackguard air of his kind. He turned
slow, estimating eyes on the bound prisoner.
"What is it?" he inquired.
"Deserter that's what it is," replied Captain Hahn sharply; he found
the Austrian soldiers insufficiently respectful. "Lock him up safely,
you understand. He'll go before the military tribunal to-morrow.
Jovannic, just see to signing the papers and all that, will you?"
"At your orders, Herr Hauptmann," deferred Jovannic formally.
"Right," said Captain Hahn. "See you later, then." He swung off
towards the front of the great mansion. Jovannic turned to his
business of consigning the prisoner to safe keeping.
"You can untie his hands now," he said to the men of the escort as
the sergeant moved away to fetch the committal book. The sergeant
turned at his words.
"Plenty of time for that," he said in his hoarse and too familiar
tones. "It's me that's responsible for him, isn't it? Well, then, let
them stay tied up till I've had a look at him. I know these fellows I
do."
"He can't get away from here," began Jovannic impatiently; but the
old sergeant lifted a vast gnarled hand and wagged it at him with a
kind of elderly rebuke.
"They're getting away in dozens every day," he rumbled. He put his
hands on the silent man and turned him where he stood to face the
light. "Yes," he said; "you've been knocking him about, too!"
The man had spoken no word; he showed now to the flush of the evening
a face young and strongly molded, from which all passion, all force,
seemed to have been drawn in and absorbed. It was calm as the face of
a sleeper is calm; only the mark of Captain Hahn's blow, the great
swollen bruise on the brow, touched it with a memory of violence. His
eyes traveled beyond Jovannic and paused, looking. Upon the pebble
path beside the screen of yews a foot sounded; Jovannic turned.
It was the Contessina; she came hurrying towards them. Jovannic
saluted. Only two or three times had he stood as close to her as
then; and never before had he seen her swift in movement, or anything
but grave and measured in gait, gesture and speech. He stared in
surprise at her tall slenderness as it stood in relief against the
rose and bronze of the west.
"It is" she was a little breathless. "It is yes! young Luigi!" The
prisoner, silent till then, stirred and made some little noise of
acquiescence. Behind him, still holding to the cord that bound his
wrists, his two stolid guards stared uncomprehendingly; the old
sergeant, his face one wrinkled mass of bland knowingness, stood with
his thumbs in his belt and his short, fat legs astraddle. She leaned
forward she seemed to sway like a wind-blown stalk and stared at the
prisoner's quiet face. Jovannic saw her lips part in a movement of
pain. Then her face came round to him.
"You, oh!" she gasped at him. "You haven't, you didn't strike him?"
Jovannic stared at her. He understood nothing. Granted that she knew
the man, as no doubt she knew every peasant of the village, he still
didn't understand the touch of agony in her manner and her voice.
"No, signorina," he answered stiffly. "I have not touched him. In
fact, I was ordering him to be unbound."
But Her eyes traveled again to the prisoner's bruised and defaced
brow; she was breathing quickly, like a runner. "Who, then? Who has?"
The old sergeant wagged his disreputable head. "German handwriting,
that is, my young lady," he croaked. "That's how our German lords and
masters curse them! write their Gott mit uns! The noble Captain Hahn
I knew as soon as I saw it!"
"Shut up, you!" ordered Jovannic, with the parade-snarl in his voice.
"And now, untie that man!"
He flung out a peremptory hand; in the girl's presence he meant to
have an end of the sergeant's easy manners. But now it was she who
astonished him by intervening.
"No!" she cried. "No!"
She moved a swift step nearer to the bound man, her arms half
outspread as though she would guard him from them; her face, with its
luminous, soft pallor, was suddenly desperate and strange.
"No!" she cried again. "You mustn't, you mustn't untie him now! You,
you don't know. Oh, wait while I speak to him! Luigi!" She turned to
the prisoner and began to speak with a quick, low urgency; her face,
importunate and fearful, was close to the still mask of his. "Luigi,
promise me! If I let them, if they untie your hands, will you promise
not to, not to do it? Luigi will you?"
Jovannic could only stare at them, bewildered. He heard her pleading
"Will you? Will you promise me, Luigi?" passionately, as though she
would woo him to compliance. The peasant answered nothing; his slow
eyes rested with a sort of heavy meditation on the eagerness of her
face. They seemed to be alone in the midst of the soldiers, like men
among statues. Then, beyond them, he caught sight of the old
sergeant, watching with a kind of critical sympathy; he, at any rate,
understood it all.
But Jovannic began in uncertain protest. None heeded him. The
prisoner sighed and moved a shoulder in a half-shrug as of
deprecation. "No, signorina," he said at last.
"Oh!" The sound was like a wail. The girl swayed back from him.
The sergeant clapped the man on the shoulder. "Be a good lad now!" he
said. "Promise the young lady you'll behave and we'll have the cords
off as quick as we can cut them. Promise her, such a nice young lady
and all!"
The prisoner shook his head wearily. The girl, watching him,
shivered.
"All this" Jovannic roused himself. "I don't understand. What's going
on here? Sergeant, what's it all about?"
The old man made a grimace. "She knows," he said, with a nod towards
the girl. "That proves it's spreading. It's got so now that if you
only clout one of 'em on the side of the head he'll go out and kill
himself. Won't let you so much as touch 'em!"
"What!" Jovannic gaped at him. "Kill themselves? You mean if his
hands are untied, that man will?"
"Him?" The sergeant snorted. "Tonight if he can; tomorrow if he
can't. He's dead, he is. I know 'em, Herr Leutnant. Dozens of 'em
already, for a flogging or even for a kick; they call it 'escaping by
the back door.' And now she knows. It's spreading, I tell you."
"Good Lord!" said Jovannic slowly. But suddenly, in a blaze of
revelation, he understood what had lurked in his mind since the scene
in the village; the smiles that mirth of men who triumph by a
stratagem, who see their adversary vainglorious, strong and doomed.
He remembered Captain Hahn's choleric pomp, his own dignity and
aloofness; and it was with a heat of embarrassment that he now
perceived how he must appear to the prisoner.
It did not occur to him to doubt the sergeant; for the truth sprang
at him.
"You, you knew this, signorina?"
The girl had moved half a dozen paces to where the shadow of the
great yews was deepening on the path. There she lingered, a slender
presence, the oval of her face shining pale in the shade.
He heard her sigh. "Yes," she answered; "I knew."
Jovannic hesitated; then, gathering himself, he turned to the
sergeant. "Now, I'm going to have that man's hands untied," he said.
The brisk speech relieved him like an oath in anger. "No!" as the
sergeant began to rumble "If you answer me when I give you an order
I'll put you in irons. He's to be untied and fed; and if anything
happens to him, if you don't deliver him alive in the morning, I'll
send you before the tribunal and I'll ask to have you shot. You
understand that?"
The old sergeant dropped his hands; he saw that he had to deal with
an officer who, for the moment, meant what he said, and he was old in
wisdom. He dragged himself to a parody of "attention."
"I understand, Herr Leutnant," he growled. But the habit of years was
too strong for him, and he slacked his posture. "It means watching
him all night; the men'll get no sleep."
"You can watch yourself, for all I care," snapped Jovannic. "Now
bring me the book."
The signing and so forth were completed; the prisoner, unbound, stood
between two watchful guards, who attitudinised as though ready to
pounce and grapple him upon the least movement. "Now," commanded
Jovannic, "take him in and feed him. And for the rest you have your
orders."
"March him in," directed the sergeant to the men. The prisoner turned
obediently between them and passed towards the open door of the
guardhouse. He did not look round, and his passivity, his quiescence,
suggested to Jovannic, in a thrill of strange vision, that the world,
action, life had ceased for him at the moment when Captain Harm's
blow fell on his brow.
He was passing in at the door, a guard at either elbow, when the girl
spoke in the shadow.
"Arrivederci, Luigi," she called. "Till we meet again, Luigi."
From the doorway came the prisoner's reply: "Addio, adieu,
signorina!" Then the guardhouse received him.
Jovannic turned. The girl was walking away already, going slowly in
the direction of the wing of the great house that was left to her and
her mother. He joined her, and they came together from the night of
the yew-walk to where, upon the open lawn, the air was still aflood
with the last light of the dying sun.
For a while he did not speak; her mood of tragedy enveloped them both
and hushed him. But never before had he had her thus alone; even to
share her silence was a sort of intimacy, and he groped for more.
"It it is really true, signorina what the sergeant said?" he asked at
length.
She raised her face but did not look towards him. Her profile was a
cameo upon the dusk. "It is true," she answered in a low voice.
"I don't know what to do," said Jovannic. "But you know, signorina,
it was not I that struck him. I had nothing to do with it. I, I hope
you believe that."
Still she gazed straight ahead of her. "I know who struck him," she
said in the same low, level voice.
"Well, then isn't there anything one could do?" pressed Jovannic. "To
stop him from killing himself, I mean. You see, he can't be tied or
watched continually. You know these people. If you could suggest
something, signorina, I'd do what I could."
She seemed to consider. Then "No," she answered; "nothing can be
done." She paused, and he was about to speak when she added: "I was
wrong to try to persuade him."
"Wrong!" exclaimed Jovannic. "Why?"
"It is your punishment," she said. "They have doomed you. You made
them slaves but they make you murderers!" She turned to him at last,
with dark eyes wide and a light as of exaltation in her face. Her
voice, the strong, restrained contralto of the south, broke once as
she went on, but steadied again. "You must not strike an Italian; it
is dangerous. It is more than death, it is damnation! A blow and they
will strike back at your soul and your salvation, and you cannot
escape! Oh, this people and I would have persuaded him to live!"
She shrugged and turned to go on. They had reached the end of the
wing in which she lived. The path went round it, and beyond was the
little irrigation canal one of those small artificial water courses,
deep and full-volumed, which carry the snow water of the Cadore to
the farms of the plain. The dregs of the sunset yet faintly stained
its surface like the lees of wine in water.
"Signorina," began Jovannic. He was not sure f what he wished to say
to her. She paused in her slow walk to hear him. "Signorina," he
began again, "after all, in war, a blow, you know, and I have never
struck one of them never! I don't want you to think of me as, as just
a brute."
"No," she said. "And it is because you ordered Luigi to be untied
that I have warned you of your danger."
"Oh!" Jovannic sighed. "I don't think I really understand yet; but
you have managed to make it all." He made a vague gesture towards the
village and the tree-thronged land. "Well, gruesome! Every man in the
place, apparently."
"And every woman," she put in quickly. "Never forget, Signor Tenente,
it was the women who began it."
"The women began it?"
"Yes," she answered. "The women! You hadn't heard no, it was before
you came of the girl here, in this house of my mother's, who was
among the first? No? Listen, Signor Tenente."
"Yes," he said. It was in his mind that he was about to hear the
stalest story of all, but it was strange that he should hear it from
her.
"I am proud to tell it," she said, as though she answered his
thought. "Proud! A little Friulana of these parts, a housemaid, we
had masses for her till you took our priest away. One of your
officers used to, to persecute her. Oh!" she cried, "why am I afraid
even to name what she had to endure? He was always trying to get into
her bedroom; you understand? And one day he caught hold of her so
that she had to tear herself loose from him. She got free and stood
there and smiled at him. She knew what she had to do then."
"I know, I know," half whispered Jovannic. "In the village today I
saw them smile."
"He did not catch hold of her again; he misread that smile, and said
that he would come that night. 'What hour?' she asked, and he
answered that he would come at midnight. She put her hand to her
bosom and drew out the little crucifix they wear on a string. 'Swear
on this that you will come to me at midnight,' she said, and he took
it in his hand and swore. Then it was evening she came out here, to
where the canal runs under the road. And there she drowned herself."
She paused. "Duilia, her name was," she added quietly.
"Eh?" said Jovannic.
"Duilia, the same as mine."
"But--the officer?" asked Jovannic. "Was he--did he?"
"No," she said. "He did not keep the oath which he swore upon the
crucifix."
From the terrace before the house came the blare of the bugle
sounding the officers' mess call. She turned to go to her door.
"But, signorina!" Jovannic moved towards her. The sense of her, of
the promise and power of her beauty and womanhood, burned in him. And
to the allurement of her youth and her slender grace were added a
glamour of strangeness and the quality of the moment. She paused and
faced him once more.
"It is good night, Signor Tenente," she said.
He watched her pass round the end of the building, unhurried, sad and
unafraid. He stood for some seconds yet after she had disappeared;
then, drawing a deep breath, like one relaxing from a strain, he
turned and walked back to the front of the house.
The burden of the evening lay upon him through the night at mess,
where the grey-clad German and Austrian officers ate and drank below
the mild faces of Pordenone's frescoed saints, and afterwards in his
room, where he dozed and woke and dozed again through the hot,
airless hours. The memory of the girl, the impression of her
attitude, of her pale, unsmiling face, of her low, strong voice,
tormented him; he felt himself alone with her in a hag-ridden land
where all men were murderers or murdered; and she would have none of
him. He arose sour and unrefreshed.
In the great dining-room the splendor of the morning was tainted with
the staleness of last night's cigars, and, for a further flavor,
sitting alone at the table, with his cap on his head and his cane on
the tablecloth beside him, was Captain Hahn. The mess waiter, lurking
near the door, looked scared and worried. He had slept but little.
"Good morning, Herr Hauptmann," said Jovannic, clicking his heels.
Captain Hahn gave him a furious glance and grunted inarticulately. He
made the effect as he sat of emitting fumes, vapors of an overcharged
personality; his naturally violent face was clenched like a fist.
"Here, you dog!" he exploded. The mess waiter all but leaped into the
air. "Get me another glass of brandy." The man dived through the
door. "And now you, Jovannic!"
"At your orders, Herr Hauptmann?" Jovannic looked up in astonishment.
The other's face was blazing at him across the table.
"Who," Captain Hahn seemed to have a difficulty in compressing his
feelings into words, "who ordered you to untie that prisoner?"
"No one," replied Jovannic. His gaze at the convulsed face opposite
him narrowed. He put a hand on the table as though to spring up from
his seat. "Is he dead, then?" he demanded.
"Damn it; so you knew he'd do it!" roared the captain. "Don't deny
it; you've admitted it. You knew he'd hang himself, and yet."
"But he couldn't," cried Jovannic, as Captain Hahn choked
and sputtered. "I ordered him to be watched. I told the
sergeant"--Captain Hahn broke in with something like a howl. "I
wasn't going to have soldiers kept out of their beds for stuff like
that rotten, sentimental Austrian nonsense! I sent 'em off to get
their sleep; but you, you knew, you."
"Ah!" said Jovannic. "Then the Herr Hauptmann cancelled my
arrangements for the prisoner's safety and substituted his own! I am
glad I am not responsible. So he hanged himself?"
Captain Hahn opened his mouth and bit at the air. His hand was on his
heavy cane. The creeping mess waiter, tray in hand, came quivering to
his elbow; never in his service time or his life was he more welcome
to a German officer. The captain grabbed the glass and drank. Then
with a sweep of his right arm he slashed the man with his cane.
"You slow-footed hound!" he bellowed.
Jovannic looked at him curiously. He had not doubted that what the
girl had told him was true; but many things can be true in the
stillness and tangled shadows of the evening that are false in the
light of the morning. This, then, was a murderer, whom a whole
population, a whole country, believed no, knew to be damned to all
eternity this incontinent, stagnant-souled, kept creature of the
army! Not even eternal damnation could dignify him or make him seem
aught but the absurd and noxious thing that he was; a soul like his
would make itself at home in hell like the old sergeant in the
conquered province.
Later in the forenoon he saw the body; and that, too, he felt, failed
to rise to the quality of its fate. Beyond the orchard of old
derelict fruit trees behind the stable two men dug a grave in the
sun, while from the shade the old sergeant smoked and watched them;
and a little apart lay a stretcher, a tattered and stained blanket
outlining the shape upon it. Jovannic was aware of the old man's
shrewd eye measuring him and his temper as he stopped by the
stretcher.
China-bowled pipe in hand, the sergeant lumbered towards him. "You
see, he did it," he said. "Did it at once and got it over. Just
hitched his belt to the window-bars and swung himself off. You can't
stop 'em nowadays."
"Take the blanket off," ordered Jovannic.
The manner of the man's death had distorted the face that lay in the
trough of the stretcher, but it was pitiful and ugly rather than
terrible or horrifying. The body, its inertness, the still sprawl of
the limbs, were puppet-like, with none of death's pomp and menace.
Jovannic stood gazing; the sergeant, with the blanket over his arm,
stood by smoking.
"Hey!" cried the sergeant suddenly, and flapped loose the blanket,
letting it fall to cover the body again. "See, Herr Leutnant the
young lady!"
"Eh?" Jovannic started and turned to look. She was yet a hundred
yards off, coming through the wind-wrenched old trees of the orchard
towards them. In her hand and lying along the curve of her arm she
bore what seemed to be the green bough of a tree. The grass was to
her knees, so that she appeared to float towards them rather than to
walk, and, for the lieutenant, her approach seemed suddenly to lift
all that in the affair was mean or little to the very altitude of
tragedy.
He stood away from the body and raised his hand to his cap peak in
silence. Very slowly she lowered her head in acknowledgment. At the
foot of the stretcher she paused, with bowed head, and stood awhile
so; if she prayed, it was with lips that did not move. In the grave
the diggers ceased to work, and stood, sunk to their waists, to
watch. The great open space was of a sudden reverend and solemn. Then
she knelt, and, taking in both hands the bough of laurel which she
carried, she bent above the covered shape and laid it upon the
blanket.
She rose. It seemed to Jovannic that for an instant she looked him in
the face with eyes that questioned; but she did not speak. Turning,
she went from them by the way she had come, receding through the
fantastic trees between whose leaves the sunlight fell on her in
drops like rain.
There was much for Jovannic to do in the days that followed, for
Captain Harm's dragnet was out over the villages and every day had
its tale of arrests. Jovannic, as one of his assistants, was out
early and late, on horseback or motoring, till the daily scenes of
violence and pain palled on him like a routine. Once, in the village
near headquarters, he saw the Contessina; she was entering the house
whence the prisoner had been dragged forth, but though he loitered in
the neighborhood for an hour she did not come forth. And twice he saw
her walking by the canal with the old Contessa; always he marked in
her that same supple poise of body, that steady, level carriage of
the head. But it was not for a couple of weeks that chance served to
give him any speech with her.
And then, as before, it was evening. He had been out on the affairs
of Captain Hahn, and was returning on foot along a path through the
maize fields. The ripe crops made a wall to either hand, bronze red
and man-high, gleaming like burnished metal in the shine of the
sunset; and here, at a turning in the way, he met her face to face.
"Good evening, signorina," he said, stopping.
"Good evening, Signor Tenente," she answered, and would have passed
on but that he barred the way as he stood.
There was no fear, no doubt, in the quiet of her face as she stood
before him. Her eyes were great and dark, but untroubled, and upon
the lips, where he had never seen a smile, was no tremor.
"Signorina!" he burst forth. "I, I have wanted to speak to you ever
since that evening. I cannot bear that you should think of me as you
do."
"I do not think of you," she answered, with the resonance of
bell-music thrilling through the low tones of her voice.
He took a step nearer to her; she did not shrink nor fall back.
"But," he said, "I think of you always!" Her face did not change; its
even quiet was a challenge and an exasperation. "Signorina, what can
I do? This accursed war if it were not for that you would let me
speak and at least you would listen. But now."
He broke off with a gesture of helpless anger. She did not alter the
grave character of her regard.
"What is it that you wish to say to me?" she asked. "You see that I
am listening."
Her very calm, the slender erectness of her body, her fearless and
serious gaze, were a goad to him.
"Listening!" he cried. He choked down an impulse to be noisy. "Well
then, listen! Signorina signorina, I, I am not one of those. That man
who hanged himself, I would have prevented him and saved him. You
heard me give the orders that he was to be watched and fed; fed,
signorina! It was another who took the guards away and left him to
himself."
"That," she said, "I knew."
"Ah!" He came yet closer. "You knew. Then."
He tried to take her hand. The impulse to touch her was irresistible;
it was a famine in his being. Without stepping back, without, a
movement of retreat or a change of countenance, she put her hands
behind her back.
"Signorina!" He was close to her now; the heat of his face beat upon
the ice of hers. "Oh! This I can't! Give me at least your hand.
Signorina."
Her voice was as level, as calm, as quiet, and yet as loud with
allurement as ever.
"Signor Tenente, no!"
His was the pervert blood, the virtues and the sins born of the
promiscuity of races. Hers rigid, empty of invitation were the ripe
Italian lips, pure, with the fastidious purity of her high birth and
the childlike sweetness of her youth.
"Signorina!" He had meant to plead, but the force of her presence
overwhelmed him. He felt himself sucked down in a whirlpool of
impulse; doom was ahead; but the current of desire was too strong. A
movement and his arms were about her!
"Love!" he gasped. His lips were upon hers, Kissing, kissing! He
slaked himself on that dead and unresponsive mouth violently; he felt
her frail and slender in the crush of his arms. All her virginal and
girlish loveliness was his for a mad moment; then--. He released her.
They stood apart. He passed a hand over his brow to clear the fog
from his eyes.
"I, I" he stammered. He could see her now. She stood opposite him
still, her back to the tall wall of maize that bounded the path. Her
Hand was to her bosom; she breathed hard, and presently, while he
stared, words misshaping themselves upon his abashed lips she smiled!
Her sad, ripe mouth relaxed; all her grave face softened; pity the
profound pity of a martyr who prays for "those who know not what they
do" was alight in her face; the terrible mild mirth of those who are
assured of victory these showed themselves like an ensign. She
smiled!
He saw that smile, and at first vision he did not know it.
"Signorina," he began again hopefully; then he stopped short. He saw
again what he had seen in the village when Captain Hahn had struck
his memorable, self-revealing blow. The smile the smile of those who
choose death for the better part.
"Signorina!" His hands before his eyes hid her and her smile from
him. "Please I beg--." There was no answer. He lowered his hands, and
lifted timidly, repentantly, his face to seek pardon. But upon the
path was no one. She had parted the stout stalks of maize and
disappeared.
"God!" said Jovannic.
An energy possessed him. He charged along the narrow path between the
high palisades of the metal-hued maize. Upon the next corner he
encountered Captain Hahn, swollen and pompous and perfect.
"Well?" said Captain Hahn, exhaling his words as a pricked bladder
exhales air. "Well, you searched those villages, did you?"
Jovannic saluted mechanically. Life his own life clogged his feet; to
act was like wading in treacle. He had an impulse of utter wild
rebellion, of ferocious self-assertion. Then:
"Zu Befehl, Herr Hauptmann!" he said, and saluted.
II
THE DAGO
Eight bells had sounded, and in the little triangular fo'c'sle of the
Anna Maria the men of the port watch were waiting for their dinner.
The daylight which entered by the open hatch overhead spread a carpet
of light at the foot of the ladder, which slid upon the deck to the
heave and fall of the old barque's blunt bows, and left in shadow the
double row of bunks and the chests on which the men sat. From his
seat nearest the ladder, Bill, the ship's inevitable Cockney, raised
his flat voice in complaint.
"That bloomin' Dago takes 'is time over fetchin' the hash," he said.
"'E wants wakin' up a bit that's wot 'e wants."
Sprawling on the edge of his bunk forward, Dan, the oldest man in the
ship, took his pipe from his lips in the deliberate way in which he
did everything. Short in stature and huge in frame, the mass of him,
even in that half-darkness of the fo'c'sle, showed somehow majestic
and powerful.
"The mate came after 'im about somethin' or other," he said in his
deep, slow tones.
"That's right," said another seaman. "It was about spillin' some tar
on the deck, an' now the Dago's got to stop up this arternoon an'
holystone it clean in his watch below."
"Bloomin' fool," growled the Cockney. But it was the wrong word, and
the others were silent.
A man in trouble with an officer, though he be no seaman and a Dago,
may always count on the sympathy of the fo'c'sle.
"'E ain't fit to paddle a bumboat," the Cockney went on. "Can't go
aloft, can't stand 'is wheel, can't even fetch the hash to time."
"Yes!" Dan shifted slowly, and the younger man stopped short. "You
better slip along to the galley, Bill, an' see about that grub."
The Cockney swore, but rose from his seat. Dan was not to be
disobeyed in the fo'c'sle. But at that moment the hatch above was
darkened.
"'Ere's the Dago," cried Bill. "Where you bin, you bloomin' fool?"
A bare foot came over the combing, feeling vaguely for the steps of
the ladder. Dan sat up and laid by his pipe; two seamen went to
assist in the safe delivery of their dinner.
"Carn't yer never learn to bring the grub down the ladder backwards?"
Bill was demanding of the new-comer. "Want to capsize it all again,
like yer done before?"
"Ah, no!"
The Dago stood in the light of the hatch and answered the Cockney
with a shrug and a timid, conciliatory smile. He was a little swarthy
man, lean and anxious, with quick, apprehensive eyes which flitted
now nervously from one to the other of the big sailors whose comrade
and servant he was. There was upon him none of that character of the
sea which shaped their every gesture and attitude. As the Cockney
snarled at him he moved his hands in deprecating gesticulation; a
touch of the florid appeared in him, of that easy vivacity which is
native to races ripened in the sun.
"Keepin' men waitin' like this," mouthed Bill. "Bloomin' flat-footed,
greasy 'anded."
Dan's deliberate voice struck in strongly. "Ain't you goin' to have
no dinner, Dago?" he demanded. "Come on an' sit down to it, man!"
The Dago made one final shrug at Bill.
"De mate," he said, smiling with raised eyebrows, as though in
pitying reference to that officer's infirmities of temper, "'e call
me. So I cannot go to de galley for fetch de dinner more quick.
Please escuse."
Bill snarled. "Come on with ye," called Dan again.
"Ah, yais!" And now his smile and his start to obey apologized to Dan
for not having come at the first summons.
Dan pushed the "kid" of food towards him. "Dig in," he bade him.
"You've had better grub than this in yer time, but it's all there is.
So go at it."
"Better dan dis!" The Dago paused to answer in the act of helping
himself. "Ah, mooch, mooch better, yais. I tell you." He began to
gesticulate as he talked, trying to make these callous, careless men
see with him the images that his words called up.
"Joost before de hot of de day I sit-a down in a balcao, where it is
shade, yais, an' look at-a de water an' de trees, an' hear de bells,
all slow an' gentle, in de church. An' when it is time dey bring me
de leetle fish like-a de gold, all fresh, an' de leetle bread-cakes,
yais, an' de wine."
"That's the style," approved a seaman. Though they did not cease to
eat, they were all listening.
Tales of food and drink are always sure of a hearing in the fo'c'sle.
"On a table of de black wood, shining, an' a leetle cloth like snow,"
the Dago went on; "an' de black woman dat brings it smiles wiz big
white teeth."
He paused, seeing it all the tropic languor and sweetness of the life
he had conjured up, so remote, so utterly different from the
rough-hewn realities that surrounded him.
"Shove that beef-kid down this way, will yer?" called Bill.
"You wait," answered Dan. He jogged the Dago with his elbow. "Now,
lad," he said, "that's talk enough. Get yer grub."
The Dago, recalled from his visions, smiled and sighed and leaned
forward to take his food. From his seat by the ladder, Bill the
Cockney watched with mean, angry eyes to measure the size of his
helping.
It was at Sourabaya, in Java, that he had been shipped to fill, as
far as he could, the place of a man lost overboard. The port had been
bare of seamen; the choice was between the Dago and nobody; and so
one evening he had come alongside in a sampan and joined the crew of
the Anna Maria. He brought with him as his kit a bundle of broken
clothes and a flat paper parcel containing a single suit of clean
white duck, which he cherished under the straw mattress of his bunk
and never wore. He made no pretence of being a seaman. He could
neither steer nor go aloft, and there fell to him, naturally, all the
work of the ship that was ignominious or unpleasant or merely menial.
It was the Dago, with his shrug and his feeble, complaisant smile,
who scraped the boards of the pigsty and hoisted coal for the cook,
and swept out the fo'c'sle while the other men lay and smoked.
"What made ye ship, anyway?" men would ask him angrily, when some
instance of his incompetence had added to the work of the others. To
this, if they would hear him, he had always an answer. He was a
Portuguese, it seemed, of some little town on the coast of East
Africa, where a land-locked bay drowsed below the windows of the
houses under the day-long sun. When he spoke of it, if no one cut him
short, his voice would sink to a hushed tone and he would seem to be
describing a scene he saw. His jerking, graphic hands would fall
still as he talked of the little streets where no one made a noise,
and the sailors stared curiously at his face with the glamour of
dreams on it.
From a life tuned to that murmur of basking waters a mishap had
dragged him forth. It took the shape of a cruise in a fishing boat,
in which he and three companions "t'ree senhores, t'ree gentilmen"
had run into weather and been blown out to sea, there to be rescued,
after four days of hunger and terror, by a steamship which had
carried them to Aden and put them ashore there penniless. It was here
that his tale grew vague. For something like three years he had
wandered, working on ships and ashore, always hoping that sooner or
later a chance would serve him to return to his home. Twice already
he had got to Mozambique, but that was still nearly a thousand miles
from his goal, and on each occasion his ship had carried him
inexorably back. The Anna Maria was bound for Mozambique, and he had
offered himself, with new hopes for his third attempt.
"D'ye reckon you'll do it this passage?" the seamen used to ask him
over their pipes.
He would shrug and spread his hands. "Ah, who can tell? But some
time, yais."
"An' what did ye say the name o' that place o' yours was?"
He would tell them, speaking, its syllables with soft pleasure in
their mere sound.