He stopped and put his hand on her shoulder.
"There are tears in your eyes, little thing. Let me kiss your eyes....
No! I"ll respect you. I worship you. You"re the nicest little woman I ever saw, and I"m a brute. But let me kiss your eyes."
She held her face seriously, even frowning somewhat. And he kissed her eyes gently, one after the other, and she smelt his contaminated breath.
He was a spare man, with a rather thin, ingenuous, mysterious, romantic, appealing face. It was true that her eyes had moistened. She was touched by his look and his tone as he told her that he had been obliged to lie on the floor of his bedroom in order to sleep. There seemed to be an infinite pathos in that trifle. He was one of the fighters. He had fought. He was come from the horrors of the battle. A man of power. He had killed. And he was probably ten or a dozen years her senior. Nevertheless, she felt herself to be older than he was, wiser, more experienced. She almost wanted to nurse him. And for her he was, too, the protected of the very clement Virgin. Inquiries from Marthe showed that he must have entered the flat at the moment when she was kneeling at the altar and when the Lady of VII Dolours had miraculously granted to her pardon and peace. He was part of the miracle. She had a duty to him, and her duty was to brighten his destiny, to give him joy, not to let him go without a charming memory of her soft womanly acquiescences. At the same time her temperament was aroused by his personality; and she did not forget she had a living to earn; but still her chief concern was his satisfaction, not her own, and her overmastering sentiment one of dutiful, nay religious, surrender. French grat.i.tude of the English fighter, and a mystic, fearful allegiance to the very clement Virgin--these things inspired her.
"Ah!" he sighed. "My throat"s like leather." And seeing that she did not follow, he added: "Thirsty." He stretched his arms. She went to the sideboard and half filled a tumbler with soda water from the siphon.
"Drink!" she said, as if to a child.
"Just a dash! The tiniest dash!" he pleaded in his rich voice, with a glance at the whisky. "You don"t know how it"ll pull me together. You don"t know how I need it."
But she did know, and she humoured him, shaking her head disapprovingly.
He drank and smacked his lips.
"Ah!" he breathed voluptuously, and then said in changed, playful accents: "Your French accent is exquisite. It makes English sound quite beautiful. And you"re the daintiest little thing."
"Daintiest? What is that? I have much to learn in English. But it is something nice--daintiest; it is a compliment." She somehow understood then that, despite appearances, he was not really a devotee of her s.e.x, that he was really a solitary, that he would never die of love, and that her _role_ was a minor _role_ in his existence. And she accepted the fact with humility, with enthusiasm, with ardour, quite ready to please and to be forgotten. In playing the slave to him she had the fierce French illusion of killing Germans.
Suddenly she noticed that he was wearing two wrist-watches, one close to the other, on his left arm, and she remarked on the strange fact.
The officer"s face changed.
"Have you got a wrist-watch?" he demanded.
"No."
Silently he unfastened one of the watches and then said:
"Hold out your beautiful arm."
She did so. He fastened the watch on her arm. She was surprised to see that it was a lady"s watch. The black strap was deeply scratched. She privately reconstructed the history of the watch, and decided that it must be a gift returned after a quarrel--and perhaps the scratches on the strap had something to do with the quarrel.
"I beg you to accept it," he said. "I particularly wish you to accept it."
"It"s really a lovely watch," she exclaimed. "How kind you are!" She rewarded him with a warm kiss. "I have always wanted a wrist-watch.
And now they are so _chic_. In fact, one must have one." Moving her arm about, she admired the watch at different angles.
"It isn"t going. And what"s more, it won"t go," he said.
"Ah!" she politely murmured.
"No! But do you know why I give you that watch?"
"Why?"
"Because it is a mascot."
"True?"
"Absolutely a mascot. It belonged to a friend of mine who is dead."
"Ah! A lady--"
"No! Not a lady. A man. He gave it me a few minutes before he died--and he was wearing it--and he told me to take it off his arm as soon as he was dead. I did so."
Christine was somewhat alarmed.
"But if he was wearing it when he died, how can it be a mascot?"
"That was what made it a mascot. Believe me, I know about these things. I wouldn"t deceive you, and I wouldn"t tell you it was a mascot unless I was quite certain." He spoke with a quiet, initiated authority that rea.s.sured her entirely and gave her the most perfect confidence.
"And why was your friend wearing a lady"s watch?"
"I cannot tell you."
"You do not know?"
"I do not know. But I know that watch is a mascot."
"Was it at the Front--all this?"
The man nodded.
"He was wounded, killed, your friend?"
"No, no, not wounded! He was in my Battery. We were galloping some guns to a new position. He came off his horse--the horse was shot under him--he himself fell in front of a gun. Of course, the drivers dared not stop, and there was no room to swerve. Hence they had to drive right over him ... Later, I came back to him. They had got him as far as the advanced dressing-station. He died in less than an hour...."
Solemnity fell between Christine and her client.
She said softly: "But if it is a mascot--do you not need it, you, at the Front? It is wrong for me to take it."
"I have my own mascot. Nothing can touch me--except my great enemy, and he is not German." With an austere gesture he indicated the gla.s.s.
His deep voice was sad, but very firm. Christine felt that she was in the presence of an adept of mysticism. The Virgin had sent this man to her, and the man had given her the watch. Clearly the heavenly power had her in its holy charge.
"Ah, yes!" said the man in a new tone, as if realising the solemnity and its inappropriateness, and trying to dissipate it. "Ah, yes! Once we had the day of our lives together, he and I. We got a day off to go and see a new trench mortar, and we did have a time."
"Trench mortar--what is that?"
He explained.
"But tell me how it works," she insisted, not because she had the slightest genuine interest in the technical details of war--for she had not--but because she desired to help him to change the mood of the scene.
"Well, it"s not so easy, you know. It was a four and a half pound sh.e.l.l, filled with gun-cotton slabs and shrapnel bullets packed in sawdust. The charge was black powder in a paper bag, and you stuck it at the bottom end of the pipe and put a bit of fuse into the touch-hole--but, of course, you must take care it penetrates the charge. The sh.e.l.l-fuse has a pinner with a detonator with the right length of fuse shoved into it; you wrap some clay round the end of the fuse to stop the flash of the charge from detonating the sh.e.l.l. Well, then you load the sh.e.l.l--"
She comprehended simply nothing, and the man, professionally absorbed, seemed to have no perception that she was comprehending nothing. She scarcely even listened. Her face was set in a courteous, formal smile; but all the time she was thinking that the man, in spite of his qualities, must be lacking in character to give a watch away to a woman to whom he had not been talking for ten minutes. His lack of character was shown also in his unshamed confession concerning his real enemy. Some men would bare their souls to a _cocotte_ in a fashion that was flattering neither to themselves nor to the _cocotte_, and Christine never really respected such men. She did not really respect this man, but respected, and stood in awe of, his mysticism; and, further, her instinct to satisfy him, to make a spoiled boy of him, was not in the least weakened. Then, just as the man was in the middle of his description of the functioning of the trench mortar, the telephone-bell rang, and Christine excused herself.