“Aha!” cried the captain, gaily, when she had drunk the water. “You’re feeling better, I think, eh, Little Mother Coralie?”
“Much better.”
“Capital. But that was a bad minute we went through just now! What an adventure! We shall have to talk it all over and get some light on it, shan’t we? Meanwhile, my lads, pay your respects to Little Mother Coralie. Eh, my fine fellows, who would have thought, when she was coddling you and patting your pillows for your fat pates to sink into, that one day we should be taking care of her and that the children would be coddling their little mother?”
They all pressed round her, the one-armed and the one-legged, the crippled and the sick, all glad to see her. And she shook hands with them affectionately:
“Well, Ribrac, how’s that leg of yours?”
“I don’t feel it any longer, Little Mother Coralie.”
“And you, Vatinel? That wound in your shoulder?”
“Not a sign of it, Little Mother Coralie.”
“And you, Poulard? And you, Jorisse?”
Her emotion increased at seeing them again, the men whom she called her children. And Patrice Belval exclaimed:
“Ah, Little Mother Coralie, now you’re crying! Little mother, little mother, that’s how you captured all our hearts. When we were trying our hardest not to call out, on our bed of pain, we used to see your eyes filling with great tears. Little Mother Coralie was weeping over her children. Then we clenched our teeth still firmer.”
“And I used to cry still more,” she said, “just because you were afraid of hurting me.”
“And today you’re at it again. No, you are too softhearted! You love us. We love you. There’s nothing to cry about in that. Come, Little Mother Coralie, a smile. … And, I say, here’s Ya-Bon coming; and Ya-Bon always laughs.”
She rose suddenly:
“Do you think he can have overtaken one of the two men?”
“Do I think so? I told Ya-Bon to bring one back by the neck. He won’t fail. I’m only afraid of one thing. …”
They had gone towards the hall. The Senegalese was already on the steps. With his right hand he was clutching the neck of a man, of a limp rag, rather, which he seemed to be carrying at arm’s length, like a dancing-doll.
“Drop him,” said the captain.
Ya-Bon loosened his fingers. The man fell on the flags in the hall.
“That’s what I feared,” muttered the officer. “Ya-Bon has only his right hand; but, when that hand holds anyone by the throat, it’s a miracle if it doesn’t strangle him. The Boches know something about it.”
Ya-Bon was a sort of colossus, the color of gleaming coal, with a woolly head and a few curly hairs on his chin, with an empty sleeve fastened to his left shoulder and two medals pinned to his jacket. Ya-Bon had had one cheek, one side of his jaw, half his mouth and the whole of his palate smashed by a splinter of shell. The other half of that mouth was split to the ear in a laugh which never seemed to cease and which was all the more surprising because the wounded portion of the face, patched up as best it could be and covered with a grafted skin, remained impassive.
Moreover, Ya-Bon had lost his power of speech. The most that he could do was to emit a sequence of indistinct grunts in which his nickname of Ya-Bon was everlastingly repeated.
He uttered it once more with a satisfied air, glancing by turns at his master and his victim, like a good sporting-dog standing over the bird which he has retrieved.
“Good,” said the officer. “But, next time, go to work more gently.”
He bent over the man, felt his heart and, on seeing that he had only fainted, asked the nurse:
“Do you know him?”
“No,” she said.
“Are you sure? Have you never seen that head anywhere?”
It was a very big head, with black hair, plastered down with grease, and a thick beard. The man’s clothes, which were of dark-blue serge and well-cut, showed him to be in easy circumstances.
“Never … never,” the girl declared.
Captain Belval searched the man’s pockets. They contained no papers.
“Very well,” he said, rising to his feet, “we will wait till he wakes up and question him then. Ya-Bon, tie up his arms and legs and stay here, in the hall. The rest of you fellows, go back to the home: it’s time you were indoors. I have my key. Say goodbye to Little Mother Coralie and trot off.”
And, when goodbye had been said, he pushed them outside, came back to the nurse, led her into the drawing-room and said:
“Now let’s talk, Little Mother Coralie. First of all, before we try to explain things, listen to me. It won’t take long.”
They were sitting before the merrily blazing fire. Patrice Belval slipped a hassock under Little Mother Coralie’s feet, put out a light that seemed to worry her and, when he felt certain that she was comfortable, began:
“As you know, Little Mother Coralie, I left the hospital a week ago and am staying on the Boulevard Maillot, at Neuilly, in the home reserved for the convalescent patients of the hospital. I sleep there at night and have my wounds dressed in the morning. The rest of the time I spend in loafing: I stroll about, lunch and dine where the mood takes me and go and call on my friends. Well, this morning I was waiting for one of them in a big café-restaurant on the boulevard, when I overheard the end of a conversation. … But I must tell you that the place is divided into two by a partition standing about six feet high, with the customers of the café on one side and those of the restaurant on the other. I was all by myself in the restaurant; and the two men, who had their backs turned to me and who in any case were out of sight, probably thought that there was no one there at all, for they were speaking rather louder than they need have done,
