She had been working in the big Red Cross shop on Fifth Avenue, rolling bandages and making dressings with a crowd of other white-fingered women. A cable had come that there was a sudden need for at least ten thousand bandages. These were not yet for American soldiers in France, though their turn would come, and their wholesale need. But as Marie Louise wrought she could imagine the shattered flesh, the crying nerves of some poor patriot whose gaping wound this linen pack would smother. And her own nerves cried out in vicarious crucifixion. At noon she left the factory for a little air and a bite of lunch.
Nicky Easton appeared out of her list of the buried. She gasped at sight of him.
“I thought you were dead.”
He laughed: “If I am it, thees is my Doppelgänger.” And he began to hum with a grisly smile Schubert’s setting to Heine’s poem of the man who met his own ghost and double, aping his love-sorrow outside the home of his dead sweetheart:
|
“Der Mond zeigt mir meine eig’ne Gestalt. Du Doppelgänger, du bleicher Geselle! Was äffst du nach mein Liebesleid, Das mich gequält auf dieser Stelle So manche Nacht in alter Zeit.” |
Marie Louise was terrified by the harrowing emotions the song always roused in her, but more by the dreadful sensation of walking that crowded Avenue with a man humming German at her side.
“Hush! Hush, in Heaven’s name!” she pleaded.
He laughed Teutonically, and asked her to lunch with him.
“I have another engagement, and I am late,” she said.