2
Jeanne Rouannès tended the Herr Doktor all that long, still, cloudless day, as together they had tended so many wounded men during those days and nights which had seemed, to her at least, to contain an eternity of painful effort and strain, of dull despair, of agonising sights.
But here, in this clean, water-lapped little cabin-room, there reigned a delicious quietude, only broken by the drowsy murmur of the river which flowed swiftly just outside, past the wooden walls of the barge. From far off, making the stillness the more intense, came the deep booming of great guns, but with the falling of night that also ceased.
She had been prodigal with the morphia the German surgeon had left with her, and still more with that strange, suggestively-named drug, heroine. For she was dully, but none the less firmly, determined that this man should not suffer as some of the men she had tended during the last few days had suffered. He, at least, had earned immunity from that hellish pain by all the pain he had spared others.
He lay so rigidly unmoving that had he not sometimes breathed out a long, tired sigh, and now and again, not often, moved his bandaged head an inch to the right or an inch to the left, she might have doubted if he still lived.
At last an immense, limitless lassitude seemed to fall on Jeanne Rouannès. Soul, as well as body, cried out and hungered for rest. Slipping down on to the floor, to the left side of the bed, she propped her head against the hard back of a wooden chair and dozed.
She woke—was it moments or hours later?—to hear a little, stuffless sound—that of the Herr Doktor's hand moving feebly across the sheet.
Turning slightly round, and lifting up her right arm, she clasped the poor, limp, nerveless hand in hers....
How many hands, hard, dirty, tortured hands, she had in pity clasped during the last few weeks!—the honest, valiant hands of her young, wounded, fellow-countrymen, in those peaceful, early days of war that now seemed to her so unutterably long ago. Lately, the hands she had held in hers, often in a useless, pitiful attempt to make them understand words of kindness or of hope, had been the huge hands of wounded Germans, those big men-children who had seemed to her so much less stoical in the braving of pain than the more highly-strung French soldiers.
The hand she now held was small and delicate, the hand of a surgeon and a student. How kindly that poor hand, now lying limply clasped in hers, had tended her father! At this thought, this recollection, she pressed it more closely, and as she did so, Max Keller, unknowing where he was, though aware of her nearness, came back to semi-consciousness.
Before his sightless eyes there suddenly gleamed the lights of the Schloss at Weimar, reflected in the waters of the Ulm. Then with extraordinary vividness he saw the Schloss gates—those gates which he had passed such myriads of times in his thirty-four years of life.... A moment later, he was gazing, with the same sense of vivid reality, at the bronze fountain, let into an old wall, of which the subject—found by Goethe in a church in Spain—is that of two beautiful youths, brothers who died young. One youth, who holds a torch reversed, has his arm round the other's neck. Beneath their feet the clear water has gushed forth since the day when Goethe's eyes first rested on the finished work, and now, lying there in the little cabin-room of a French Red Cross barge, Weimar's dying son seemed to hear the delicious bubbling of the spring.
There, too, he saw the door through which so often walked the one woman whom Goethe had supremely loved.
Thousands of times had the happy Goethe walked through that low door on his way to the beloved....
At last, vaguely, obscurely, there came to the Herr Doktor the knowledge of where he was, and who was with him there. But the knowledge brought confusion, and distress of mind. His associations with this little cabin-room were all of the mother-spoilt, given-to-base-pleasures princeling, his Highness Prince Egon von Witgenstein. The thought that the Prince might be in Valoise, lying in wait for the young French Red Cross nurse, disturbed him, made him restless. If only he could remember! But it was as if great stretches of his mind and memory were darkened, hopelessly.
'Honoured miss?' he muttered feebly.
And she answered, oh so gently, in a voice he had never heard her use to him, though often these last few days he had heard it whispering kind, consoling, hopeful things to the suffering and the dying: 'Yes, my friend?'
'Where is Prince Egon—my patient who was here?'
'He left for Paris the day my father became so much worse—don't you remember?'
He remembered nothing, but the nurse reassured and comforted him, gave him a sense of spacious leisure in which to think of himself. 'What has to me happened?' he asked. 'Why am I here?'
'You were wounded by a shell, and I think by the wall of a falling house. We—I and your head surgeon—thought you would be more comfortable here than in the church.'
'And have you the whole time here been?' he asked wonderingly.
'Yes, and I have promised to stay with you till a surgeon comes.'
'You are hülfreicher than any surgeon,' he muttered, in so low a tone that she had to lift herself and bend over him to hear the words she did not understand.
The pale white glimmer of the dawn filtered through the white curtain stretched across the little window, and she saw that there was a change, a pinched grey look, in his face. Tears started to her eyes. Then he was not better, as she had ardently hoped. This return to consciousness, to connected thought, was not the good sign she had ignorantly supposed it to be?
Suddenly he groaned, a spent, weary groan. 'Pardon, honoured miss, it is fatigue which the pain hard makes.'
She gave him morphia. 'Try and sleep, my poor friend, and I will do likewise. The morning will soon be here.'