Read Ebook: Those Who Smiled and Eleven Other Stories by Gibbon Perceval

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Ebook has 2053 lines and 86458 words, and 42 pages

"Shut up, you!" ordered Jovannic, with the parade-snarl in his voice. "And now, untie that man!"

He flung out a peremptory hand; in the girl's presence he meant to have an end of the sergeant's easy manners. But now it was she who astonished him by intervening.

"No!" she cried. "No!"

She moved a swift step nearer to the bound man, her arms half outspread as though she would guard him from them; her face, with its luminous, soft pallor, was suddenly desperate and strange.

"No!" she cried again. "You mustn't, you mustn't untie him now! You, you don't know. Oh, wait while I speak to him! Luigi!" She turned to the prisoner and began to speak with a quick, low urgency; her face, importunate and fearful, was close to the still mask of his. "Luigi, promise me! If I let them, if they untie your hands, will you promise not to, not to do it? Luigi will you?"

Jovannic could only stare at them, bewildered. He heard her pleading "Will you? Will you promise me, Luigi?" passionately, as though she would woo him to compliance. The peasant answered nothing; his slow eyes rested with a sort of heavy meditation on the eagerness of her face. They seemed to be alone in the midst of the soldiers, like men among statues. Then, beyond them, he caught sight of the old sergeant, watching with a kind of critical sympathy; he, at any rate, understood it all.

But Jovannic began in uncertain protest. None heeded him. The prisoner sighed and moved a shoulder in a half-shrug as of deprecation. "No, signorina," he said at last.

"Oh!" The sound was like a wail. The girl swayed back from him.

The sergeant clapped the man on the shoulder. "Be a good lad now!" he said. "Promise the young lady you'll behave and we'll have the cords off as quick as we can cut them. Promise her, such a nice young lady and all!"

The prisoner shook his head wearily. The girl, watching him, shivered.

"All this" Jovannic roused himself. "I don't understand. What's going on here? Sergeant, what's it all about?"

The old man made a grimace. "She knows," he said, with a nod towards the girl. "That proves it's spreading. It's got so now that if you only clout one of 'em on the side of the head he'll go out and kill himself. Won't let you so much as touch 'em!"

"What!" Jovannic gaped at him. "Kill themselves? You mean if his hands are untied, that man will?"

"Him?" The sergeant snorted. "Tonight if he can; tomorrow if he can't. He's dead, he is. I know 'em, Herr Leutnant. Dozens of 'em already, for a flogging or even for a kick; they call it 'escaping by the back door.' And now she knows. It's spreading, I tell you."

"Good Lord!" said Jovannic slowly. But suddenly, in a blaze of revelation, he understood what had lurked in his mind since the scene in the village; the smiles that mirth of men who triumph by a stratagem, who see their adversary vainglorious, strong and doomed. He remembered Captain Hahn's choleric pomp, his own dignity and aloofness; and it was with a heat of embarrassment that he now perceived how he must appear to the prisoner.

It did not occur to him to doubt the sergeant; for the truth sprang at him.

"You, you knew this, signorina?"

The girl had moved half a dozen paces to where the shadow of the great yews was deepening on the path. There she lingered, a slender presence, the oval of her face shining pale in the shade.

He heard her sigh. "Yes," she answered; "I knew."

Jovannic hesitated; then, gathering himself, he turned to the sergeant. "Now, I'm going to have that man's hands untied," he said. The brisk speech relieved him like an oath in anger. "No!" as the sergeant began to rumble "If you answer me when I give you an order I'll put you in irons. He's to be untied and fed; and if anything happens to him, if you don't deliver him alive in the morning, I'll send you before the tribunal and I'll ask to have you shot. You understand that?"

The old sergeant dropped his hands; he saw that he had to deal with an officer who, for the moment, meant what he said, and he was old in wisdom. He dragged himself to a parody of "attention."

"I understand, Herr Leutnant," he growled. But the habit of years was too strong for him, and he slacked his posture. "It means watching him all night; the men'll get no sleep."

"You can watch yourself, for all I care," snapped Jovannic. "Now bring me the book."

The signing and so forth were completed; the prisoner, unbound, stood between two watchful guards, who attitudinised as though ready to pounce and grapple him upon the least movement. "Now," commanded Jovannic, "take him in and feed him. And for the rest you have your orders."

"March him in," directed the sergeant to the men. The prisoner turned obediently between them and passed towards the open door of the guardhouse. He did not look round, and his passivity, his quiescence, suggested to Jovannic, in a thrill of strange vision, that the world, action, life had ceased for him at the moment when Captain Harm's blow fell on his brow.

He was passing in at the door, a guard at either elbow, when the girl spoke in the shadow.

"Arrivederci, Luigi," she called. "Till we meet again, Luigi."

From the doorway came the prisoner's reply: "Addio, adieu, signorina!" Then the guardhouse received him.

Jovannic turned. The girl was walking away already, going slowly in the direction of the wing of the great house that was left to her and her mother. He joined her, and they came together from the night of the yew-walk to where, upon the open lawn, the air was still aflood with the last light of the dying sun.

For a while he did not speak; her mood of tragedy enveloped them both and hushed him. But never before had he had her thus alone; even to share her silence was a sort of intimacy, and he groped for more.

"It it is really true, signorina what the sergeant said?" he asked at length.

She raised her face but did not look towards him. Her profile was a cameo upon the dusk. "It is true," she answered in a low voice.

"I don't know what to do," said Jovannic. "But you know, signorina, it was not I that struck him. I had nothing to do with it. I, I hope you believe that."

Still she gazed straight ahead of her. "I know who struck him," she said in the same low, level voice.

"Well, then isn't there anything one could do?" pressed Jovannic. "To stop him from killing himself, I mean. You see, he can't be tied or watched continually. You know these people. If you could suggest something, signorina, I'd do what I could."

She seemed to consider. Then "No," she answered; "nothing can be done." She paused, and he was about to speak when she added: "I was wrong to try to persuade him."

"Wrong!" exclaimed Jovannic. "Why?"

"It is your punishment," she said. "They have doomed you. You made them slaves but they make you murderers!" She turned to him at last, with dark eyes wide and a light as of exaltation in her face. Her voice, the strong, restrained contralto of the south, broke once as she went on, but steadied again. "You must not strike an Italian; it is dangerous. It is more than death, it is damnation! A blow and they will strike back at your soul and your salvation, and you cannot escape! Oh, this people and I would have persuaded him to live!"

She shrugged and turned to go on. They had reached the end of the wing in which she lived. The path went round it, and beyond was the little irrigation canal one of those small artificial water courses, deep and full-volumed, which carry the snow water of the Cadore to the farms of the plain. The dregs of the sunset yet faintly stained its surface like the lees of wine in water.

"Signorina," began Jovannic. He was not sure f what he wished to say to her. She paused in her slow walk to hear him. "Signorina," he began again, "after all, in war, a blow, you know, and I have never struck one of them never! I don't want you to think of me as, as just a brute."

"No," she said. "And it is because you ordered Luigi to be untied that I have warned you of your danger."

"Oh!" Jovannic sighed. "I don't think I really understand yet; but you have managed to make it all." He made a vague gesture towards the village and the tree-thronged land. "Well, gruesome! Every man in the place, apparently."

"And every woman," she put in quickly. "Never forget, Signor Tenente, it was the women who began it."

"The women began it?"

"Yes," she answered. "The women! You hadn't heard no, it was before you came of the girl here, in this house of my mother's, who was among the first? No? Listen, Signor Tenente."

"Yes," he said. It was in his mind that he was about to hear the stalest story of all, but it was strange that he should hear it from her.

"I am proud to tell it," she said, as though she answered his thought. "Proud! A little Friulana of these parts, a housemaid, we had masses for her till you took our priest away. One of your officers used to, to persecute her. Oh!" she cried, "why am I afraid even to name what she had to endure? He was always trying to get into her bedroom; you understand? And one day he caught hold of her so that she had to tear herself loose from him. She got free and stood there and smiled at him. She knew what she had to do then."

"I know, I know," half whispered Jovannic. "In the village today I saw them smile."

"He did not catch hold of her again; he misread that smile, and said that he would come that night. 'What hour?' she asked, and he answered that he would come at midnight. She put her hand to her bosom and drew out the little crucifix they wear on a string. 'Swear on this that you will come to me at midnight,' she said, and he took it in his hand and swore. Then it was evening she came out here, to where the canal runs under the road. And there she drowned herself."

She paused. "Duilia, her name was," she added quietly.

"Eh?" said Jovannic.

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