The Red Cross Barge

by Marie Belloc Lowndes

The Red Cross nurse bowed distantly. 'Bon soir, Monsieur,' she said coldly.

The Herr Doktor also bowed stiffly. It was disconcerting, even strange, to find himself once more in enemy country.

She slipped through the narrow door of the larger ward, and he heard her draw the bolt.

Again he felt irritated, and surprised as he had been surprised at seeing that strange look of aversion and horror flash into her face when her eyes had first rested on him....

True, she was young, divinely compassionate, and very delightful to the eye, but she evidently misunderstood the situation! It was he, Herr Doktor Max Keller, who was now in command of the Red Cross barge, and that by the rules of the International Red Cross Society. He might, however, so far humour her as not to bring his orderlies to-night on board what had been her Red Cross barge. He had noticed with sincere annoyance that his men—who, by the way, were Prussians—were rough, not to say brutal, in their manner to those French people with whom they were perforce brought into contact.

So after he had made the old Frenchman understand what he wanted done, he asked him, in his halting French, 'Is there an hotel close by where sleep I can?'

'There's a kind of cabaret yonder'—and then, as if rather ashamed of his ungraciousness, the man added, 'I will come and show Monsieur le Médecin where it is.'

Together they climbed up on to the deck of the barge, and there the Herr Doktor stopped a moment, and looking round about him, drew a deep, long breath. The falling of the shade of night was singularly beautiful on this quiet stretch of slow-moving waters. Across the river a line of poplars looked like a row of ghostly, giant sentinels....

The two men, the Frenchman in front, the German behind, stepped off the barge on to the narrow stone jetty, and then they walked for a few yards in darkness along the leafy mall. None of the street lamps had been lit on this, the evening of the most tragic day in the life of Valoise, but dim lights twinkled in the house across the roadway to which old Jacob now led his enemy.

'M'sieur will find this place quite clean,' he observed, vigorously pulling the bell of a narrow door. There was a long delay—then a young woman, opening her door a few inches, looked timorously out at them. But Jacob now took everything on himself. With what seemed to his companion an unnecessary torrent of words, he explained that 'Monsieur' was a doctor of the Red Cross, who had come to look after the wounded on the Red Cross barge, and that therefore a room must at once be prepared for him. The woman's face cleared, she opened her narrow door widely, and led the way up to a large, clean bedroom on the first floor, of which the windows overlooked the mall, the river, and—the barge.