Men in War | Page 6

certain that his outburst had reference to her and held a grim deadly reproach, which she did not comprehend. She felt her husband draw back and start convulsively under the touch of her lips. And she sobbed aloud at the awful prospect of spending an endless night in the chilly neglected room in the hotel, left alone with this tormenting doubt. But the Frau Major drew her along, forcing her to run, and did not let go her arm until they had passed the sentinel at the gate and were out on the street. The gentlemen followed them with their eyes, saw them reappear once again on the street in the lamplight, and listened to the sound of the car receding in the distance. The Mussulman picked up his crutches, and winked at the Philosopher significantly, and said something with a yawn about going to bed. The cavalry officer looked down at the sick man curiously and felt sorry for him. Wanting to give the poor devil a bit of pleasure, he tapped him on his shoulder and said in his free and easy way:
"You've got a chic wife, I must say. I congratulate you."
The next instant he drew back startled. The pitiful heap on the bench jumped up suddenly, as though a force just awakened had tossed him up from his seat.
"Chic wife? Oh, yes. Very dashing!" came sputtering from his twitching lips with a fury that cast out the words like a seething stream. "She didn't shed a single tear when I left on the train. Oh, they were all very dashing when we went off. Poor Dill's wife was, too. Very plucky! She threw roses at him in the train and she'd been his wife for only two months." He chuckled disdainfully and clenched his teeth, fighting hard to suppress the tears burning in his threat. "Roses! He-he! And 'See you soon again!' They were all so patriotic! Our colonel congratulated Dill because his wife had restrained herself so well--as if he were simply going off to maneuvers."
The lieutenant was now standing up. He swayed on his legs, which he held wide apart, and supported himself on the cavalry captain's arm, and looked up into his face expectantly with unsteady eyes.
"Do you know what happened to him--to Dill? I was there. Do you know what?"
The captain looked at the others in dismay.
"Come on--come on to bed. Don't excite yourself," he stammered in embarrassment.
With a howl of triumph the sick man cut him short and snapped in an unnaturally high voice:
"You don't know what happened to Dill, you don't? We were standing just the way we are now, and he was just going to show me the new photograph that his wife had sent him--his brave wife, he-he, his restrained wife. Oh yes, restrained! That's what they all were--all prepared for anything. And while we were standing there, he about to show me the picture, a twenty-eighter struck quite a distance away from us, a good two-hundred yards. We didn't even look that way. Then all of a sudden I saw something black come flying through the air--and Dill fell over with his dashing wife's picture in his hand and a boot, a leg, a boot with the leg of a baggage soldier sticking in his head--a soldier that the twenty-eighter had blown to pieces far away from where we stood."
He stopped for an instant and stared at the captain triumphantly. Then he went on with a note of spiteful pride in his voice, though every now and then interrupted by a peculiar gurgling groan.
"Poor Dill never said another word--Dill with the spur sticking in his skull, a regular cavalry spur, as big as a five-crown piece. He only turned up the whites of his eyes a little and looked sadly at his wife's picture, that she should have permitted such a thing as that. Such a thing as that! Such a thing! It took four of us to pull the boot out-- four of us. We had to turn it and twist it, until a piece of his brain came along--like roots pulled up--like a jellyfish--a dead one--sticking to the spur."
"Shut up!" the captain yelled furiously, and tore himself away and walked into the house cursing.
The other two looked after him longingly, but they could not let the unfortunate man stay there by himself. When the captain had withdrawn his arm, he had fallen down on the bench again and sat whimpering like a whipped child, with his head leaning on the back. The Philosopher touched his shoulder gently, and was about to speak to him kindly and induce him to go into the house when he started up again and broke out into an ugly, snarling laugh.
"But we tore her out of him, his dashing wife.