"One sees," the deep voice began again, "that when I told them goodbye, the mother and Marie my wife, and the _pet.i.te_, who has five years, then I started away, and would not look back, because I could not well bear it, Sister. And suddenly, as I strode to the street from our cottage, down the brick walk, where there are roses and also other flowers, on both sides--suddenly I heard a cry. And it was the voice of little Jeanne, the _pet.i.te_. I turned at that sound, for I could not help it, Sister, and between the flowers the little one came running, and as I bent she threw her arms about my neck and held me so tight, tight that I could not loosen the little hands, not without hurting her.
"I will not let you go--I will not let you go." She cried that again and again. Till my heart was broken. But all the same, one had to go. One was due to join the comrades at the station, and the time was short. So that, immediately, I had a thought. "My most dear," I spoke to her. "If thou wilt let me go, then I promise to send thee a great, beautiful doll, all in white, as a bride, like the cousin Annette at her wedding last week." And then the clinging little hands loosened, and she said, wondering--for she is but a baby--"Wilt thou promise, my father?" And I said, "Yes," and kissed her quickly, and went away. So that now that I am wounded and am to die, that promise which I cannot keep to my _pet.i.te_, that promise hinders me to die."
The deep, sad voice stopped and the honest eyes of the peasant boy looked up at Evelyn, burning with the pain of his body and of his soul.
And as Evelyn looked back, holding his hand and stroking it, it was as if the furnace of the soldier"s pain melted together all the things she had ever cared to do. Yet it was a minute before she spoke.
"Corporal," she said, "your little girl shall have her doll, I will take it to her and tell her that her father sent it. Will you lie very still while I go and get the doll?"
The brown eyes looked up at her astounded, radiant, and the man caught the hem of her white veil and kissed it. "But the Americans--they do magic. You shall see, Sister, if I shall be still. I will not die before the Sister returns. It is a joy unheard of."
The girl ran out of the hospital and away into Paris, and burst upon Madame. Somehow she told the story in a few words, and Madame was crying as she laid "La Marquise" in a box.
"It is Mademoiselle who is an angel of the good G.o.d," she whispered, and kissed Evelyn unexpectedly on both cheeks.
Corporal Duplessis lay, waxen, starry-eyed, as the American Sister came back into the ward. His look was on her as she entered the far-away door, and he saw the box in her arms. The girl knelt and drew out the gorgeous plaything and stood it by the side of the still, bandaged figure. An expression as of amazed radiance came into the fast-dimming eyes--into those large, brown, childlike eyes which had seen so little of the gorgeousness of earth. His hand stirred a very little--enough, for Evelyn quickly moved the gleaming satin train of the doll under the groping fingers. The eyes lifted to Evelyn"s face and the smile in them was that of a prisoner who suddenly sees the gate of his prison opened and the fields of home beyond. It mattered little, one may believe, to the welcoming hosts of heaven that the angel at the gate of release for the child-soul of Corporal Duplessis, the poilu, was only Robina"s doll!
DUNDONALD"S DESTROYER
This is the year 1977. It will be objected that the episode I am going to tell, having happened in 1917, having been witnessed by twenty-odd thousand people, must have been, if true, for sixty years common property and an old tale. But when General Cochrane--who saved England at the end of the great war--told me the Kitchener incident of the story last year, sitting in the rose-garden of the White Hart Inn at Sonning-on-Thames, I had never heard of it.
I wonder why he told me. Probably, as is the case in most things which most people do, from a mixture of impulses. For one thing I am an American girl, with a fresher zest to hear tales of those t.i.tanic days than the people or the children of the people who lived through them.
Also the great war of 1914 has stirred me since I was old enough to know about it, and I have read everything concerning it which I could lay hands on, and talked to everyone who had knowledge of it. Also, General Cochrane and I made friends from the first minute. I was a quite unimportant person of twenty-four years, he a magnificent hero of eighty, one of the proud figures of England; it made me a bit dizzy when I saw that he liked me. One feels, once in a long time, an unmistakable double pull, and knows that oneself and another are friends, and not age, color, race nor previous condition of servitude makes the slightest difference. To have that happen with a celebrity, a celebrity whom it would have been honor enough simply to meet, is quite dizzying. This was the way of it.
I was staying with my cousin Mildred Ward, an Atlanta girl who married Sir Cecil Ward, an English baronet of Oxfordshire. I reached Martin-Goring on a day in July just in time to dress for dinner. When I came down, a bit early, Milly looked me over and p.r.o.nounced favorably.
"You"re not so hard to look at," she p.r.o.nounced. "It takes an American really to wear French clothes. I"m glad you"re looking well tonight, because one of your heroes--Oh!"
She had floated inconsequently against a bookcase in a voyage along the big room, and a spray of wild roses from a vase on the shelf caught in her pretty gold hair.
"Oh--why does Middleton stick those catchy things up there?" she complained, separating the flowers from her hair, and I followed her eyes above the shelf.
"Why, that"s a portrait of Kitchener--the old great Kitchener, isn"t it?" I asked. "Did he belong to Cecil"s people?"
"No," answered Milly, "only Cecil"s grandfather and General Cochrane--or something--" her voice trailed. And then, "I"ve got somebody you"ll be crazy about tonight, General Cochrane."
"General Cochrane?"
"Oh! You pretend to know about the great war and don"t know General Cochrane, who saved England when the fleet was wrecked. Don"t know him!"
"Oh!" I said again. "Know him? Know him! I know every breath, he drew.
Only I couldn"t believe my ears. The boy Donald Cochrane? It isn"t true is it? How did you ever, ever--?"
"He lives five miles from us," said Milly, unconcernedly. "We see a lot of him. His wife was Cecil"s great-aunt. She"s dead now. His daughter is my best friend. "The boy Donald Cochrane"!" She smiled a little. "He"s no boy now. He"s old. Even heroes do that--get old."
And with that the footman at the door announced "General Cochrane."
I stared away up at a very tall, soldierly old man with a jagged scar across his forehead. His wide-open, black-lashed gray eyes flashed a glance like a menace, like a sword, and then suddenly smiled as if the sun had jumped from a bank of storm-clouds. And I looked into those wonderful eyes and we were friends. As fast as that. Most people would think it nonsense, but it happened so. A few people will understand. He took me out to dinner, and it was as if no one else was at the table. I was aware only of the one heroic personality. At first I dared not speak of his history, and then, without planning or intention, my own voice astonished my own ears. I announced to him:
"You have been my hero since I was ten years old."
It was a marvelous thing he did, the lad of twenty, even considering that the secret was there at his hand, ready for him to use. The histories say that--that no matter if he did not invent the device, it was his ready wit which remembered it, and his persistence which forced the war department to use it. Yes, and his heroism which led the ship and all but gave his life. And when he had fulfilled his mission he stepped back into the place of a subaltern; he was modest, even embarra.s.sed, at the great people who thronged to him. England was saved; that was all his affair; nothing, so the books say, could prod him into prominence--though he rose to be a General later--after that, after being the first man in England for those days. It was this personage with whom I had gone out to dinner, and to whom I dared make that sudden speech: "You have been my hero, General Cochrane, since I was ten years old."
He slued about with the menacing, shrapnel look, and it seemed that there might be an explosion of sharp-pointed small bullets over the dinner-table.
"Don"t!" I begged. The sun came out; the artillery attack was over; he looked at me with boyish shyness.
"D"you know, when people say things like that I feel as if I were stealing," he told me confidentially. "Anybody else could have done all I did. In fact, it wasn"t I at all," he finished.
"Not you? Who then? Weren"t you the boy Donald Cochrane?"
"Yes," he said, and stopped as if he were considering it. "Yes," he said quietly in the clean-cut, terse English manner of speaking, "I suppose I was the boy Donald Cochrane." He gazed across the white lilacs and pink roses on the table as if dreaming a bit. Then he turned with a long breath. "My child," he said, "there is something about you which gives me back my youth, and--the freshness of a great experience. I thank you."
I gazed into those compelling eyes, gasping like a fish with too much oxygen, I felt myself, Virginia Fox, meshed in the fringes of historic days, stirred by the rushing mighty wind of that Great Experience. I was awestruck into silence. Just then Milly got up, and eight women flocked into the library.
I was good for nothing there, simply good for nothing at all. I tried to talk to the nice, sensible English women, and I could not. I knew Milly was displeased with me for not keeping up my end, but I was sodden with thrills. I had sat through a dinner next to General Cochrane, the Donald Cochrane who was the most dramatic figure of the world war of sixty years ago. It has always moved me to meet persons who even existed at that time. I look at them and think what intense living it must have meant to pick up a paper and read--as the news of the day, mind you--that Germany had entered Belgium, that King Albert was fighting in the trenches, that Von Kluck was within seventeen miles of Paris, that Von Kluck was retreating--think of the rapture of that--Paris saved!--that the Germans had taken Antwerp; that the _Lusitania_ was sunk; that Kitchener was drowned at sea! I wonder if the people who lived and went about their business in America in those days realized that they were having a stage-box for the greatest drama of history? I wonder. Terror and heroism and cruelty find self-sacrifice on a scale which had never been dreamed, which will never, G.o.d grant, need to be dreamed on this poor little racked planet again. Of course, there are plenty of those people alive yet, and I"ve talked to many and they remember it, all of them remember well, even those who were quite small.
And it has stirred me simply to look into the eyes of such an one and consider that those eyes read such things as morning news. The great war has had a hold on me since I first heard of it, and I distinctly remember the day, from my father, at the age of seven.
"Can you remember when it happened, father?" I asked him. And then: "Can you remember when they drove old people out of their houses--and killed them?"
"Yes," said my father. And I burst into tears. And when I was not much older he told me about Donald Cochrane, the boy who saved England.
It was not strange to my own mind that I could not talk commonplaces now, when I had just spent an hour tailing to the man who had been that historic boy--the very Donald Cochrane. I could not talk commonplaces.
Milly"s leisurely voice broke my meditation. "I"m sorry that my cousin, Virginia Fox, should have such bad manners, Lady Andover," she was drawling. "She was brought up to speak when spoken to, but I think it"s the General who has hypnotized her. Virginia, did you know that Lady Andover asked you--" And I came to life.
"It was Miss Fox who hypnotized the General, I fancy," said Lady Andover most graciously, considering I had overlooked her existence a second before. "He had a word for no one else during dinner." I felt myself go scarlet; it had pleased the Marvelous Person, then, to like me a little, perhaps for the youth and enthusiasm in me.
With that the men straggled into the room and the tall grizzled head of my hero, his lined face conspicuous for the jagged, glorious scar, towered over the rest. I saw the vivid eyes flash about, and they met mine; I was staring at him, as I must, and my heart all but jumped out of me when he came straight to where I stood, my back against the bookcase.
"I was looking for you," he said simply.
Then he glanced over my head and his hand shot up in a manner of salute; I turned to see why. I was in front of the portrait of Lord Kitchener.
"Did you know him, General Cochrane?" I asked.
"Know him?" he demanded, and the gray glance plunged out at me from under the thick lashes.
"Don"t do it," I pleaded, putting my hands over my eyes. "When you look at me so it"s--bombs and bullets." The look softened, but the lean, wrinkled face did not smile.
"You asked if I knew Kitchener," he stated.
I spoke haltingly. "I didn"t know. Ought I to have known?"
General Cochrane gazed down, all at once dreamy, as if he looked through me at something miles and aeons away.
"No," he said. "There"s no reason why you should. You have an uncommon knowledge of events of that time, an astonishing knowledge for a young thing, so that I forget you can"t know--all of it." He stopped, as if considering. "It is because I am old that I have fancies," he went on slowly. "And you have understanding eyes. I have had a fancy this evening that you and I were meant to be friends; that a similarity of interests, a--a likeness--oh, hang it all!" burst out the General like a college boy. "I never could talk except straight and hot. I mean I"ve a feeling of a bond between us--you"ll think me most presuming--"