A few days after his return came a letter from Martin. And it was written from a hospital.
My Dearest Félise:
I am well and sound and in perfect health. But a bullet got me in the left arm while we were attacking a German trench, and a spent bit of shrapnel caught me on the head and stunned me. When I recovered I was midway between the trenches in the zone of fire and I had to lie still between the dead bodies of two of our brave soldiers. I thought much, my dear, while I was lying there expecting every minute a bullet to finish me. And some of what I thought I will tell you, when I see you, for I shall see you very soon. After some thirty-six hours I was collected and brought to the field hospital, where I was patched up, and in the course of a day or so sent on to the base. I lay on straw during the journey in a row of other wounded. France has the defects of her qualities. Her soil is so fertile that her stalks of straw are like young oak saplings. When I arrived I had such a temperature and was so silly with pain that I don’t very well remember what happened. When I got sensible they told me that gangrene had set in and that they had chopped off my arm above the elbow. I always thought I was an incomplete human being, dear, but I have never been so idiotically incomplete as I am now. Although I am getting along splendidly I want to do all sorts of things with the fingers that aren’t there. I turn to pick up something and there’s nothing to pick it up with. A week before I was wounded, I had a finger nail torn off, and it still hurts me, somewhere in space, about a foot away from what is me. You would laugh if you knew what a nuisance it is. . . . I make no excuses for asking you to receive me at Brantôme; all that is dear to me in the world is there—and what other spot in the wide universe have I to fly to?
“But sacré nom d’une pipe!” cried Bigourdin—for Félise, after private and tearful perusal of the letter, was reading such parts of it aloud as were essential for family information—“What is the imbecile talking of? Where else, indeed, should he go?”
Félise continued. Martin as yet unaware of Bigourdin’s return, sent him messages.
“When you write, will you tell him I have given to France as much of myself as I’ve been allowed to? Half an arm isn’t much. Mais c’est déjà quelque chose.”
“Quelque chose!” cried Bigourdin. “But it is a sacred sacrifice. If I could get hold of that little bit of courageous arm I would give it to Monsieur le Curé and bid him nail it up as an object venerable and heroic in his parish church. Ah! le pauvre garçon, le pauvre garçon,” said he. “Mais voyez-vous, it is the English character that comes out in his letter. I have seen many English up there in the North. No longer can we Frenchmen talk of le phlègme britannique. The astounding revelation is the unconquerable English gaiety. Jamais de longs visages. If a decapitated English head could speak, it would launch you a whimsical smile and say: “What annoys me is that I can’t inhale a cigarette.” And here our good Martin makes a joke about the straw in the ambulance-train. Mon Dieu! I know what it is, but it has never occurred to me to jest about it.”
In the course of time Martin returned to Brantôme. The railway system of the country had been fairly adjusted in the parts of France that were distant from scenes of military operations. Bigourdin borrowed Monsieur le Maire’s big limousine which had not been commandeered—for the Mayor was on many committees in the Department and had to fly about from place to place and with Corinna and Félise and Fortinbras he met Martin’s train at Périgueux. As it steamed in a hand waved from a window below a familiar face. They rushed to the carriage steps and in a moment he was among them—in a woollen Kepi and incredibly torn blue-grey greatcoat and ragged red trousers, the unfilled arm of the coat dangling down idly. But it was a bronzed, clear-eyed man who met them, for all his war battering.
Bigourdin welcomed him first, in his exuberant way, called him mon brave, mon petit héros, and hugged him. Fortinbras gripped his hand, after the English manner. Corinna, happy and smiling through glistening eyes, he kissed without more ado. And then he was free to greet Félise, who had remained a pace or two in the background. Her great, dark eyes were fixed upon him questioningly. She put out a hand and touched the empty sleeve. She read in his face what she had never read before. His one poor arm, stretched in an instinctive curve—with a little sobbing cry she threw herself blindly into his embrace.
The tremendous issues of existence with which for five months he had been grappling had wiped out from his consciousness, almost from his memory, the first enthralling kiss of another woman. Caked with mud, deafened by the roar of shells, sleeping in the earth of his trench, an intimate of blood and death day after day, he had learned that Lucilla had been but an ignis fatuus leading him astray from the essential meaning of his life. He knew, as he lay wounded beneath the hell of machine-gun fire between the trenches that there was only one sweet, steadfast soul in the world who called him to the accomplishment of his being.