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From the terrace before the house came the blare of the bugle sounding the officers' mess call. She turned to go to her door. "But, signorina!" Jovannic moved towards her. The sense of her, of the promise and power of her beauty and womanhood, burned in him. And to the allurement of her youth and her slender grace were added a glamour of strangeness and the quality of the moment.
Poor Jovannic, it was at this moment that, to the fantastic and absurd character of the whole event, as arranged by Captain Hahn, there was now added a quality of sheer horror.
Beyond the orchard of old derelict fruit trees behind the stable two men dug a grave in the sun, while from the shade the old sergeant smoked and watched them; and a little apart lay a stretcher, a tattered and stained blanket outlining the shape upon it. Jovannic was aware of the old man's shrewd eye measuring him and his temper as he stopped by the stretcher.
The man dived through the door. "And now you, Jovannic!" "At your orders, Herr Hauptmann?" Jovannic looked up in astonishment. The other's face was blazing at him across the table. "Who," Captain Hahn seemed to have a difficulty in compressing his feelings into words, "who ordered you to untie that prisoner?" "No one," replied Jovannic. His gaze at the convulsed face opposite him narrowed.
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 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 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.
"Hey!" cried the sergeant suddenly, and flapped loose the blanket, letting it fall to cover the body again. "See, Herr Leutnant the young lady!" "Eh?" Jovannic started and turned to look. She was yet a hundred yards off, coming through the wind-wrenched old trees of the orchard towards them. In her hand and lying along the curve of her arm she bore what seemed to be the green bough of a tree.
"I wasn't going to have soldiers kept out of their beds for stuff like that rotten, sentimental Austrian nonsense! I sent 'em off to get their sleep; but you, you knew, you." "Ah!" said Jovannic. "Then the Herr Hauptmann cancelled my arrangements for the prisoner's safety and substituted his own! I am glad I am not responsible. So he hanged himself?"
Jovannic saluted mechanically. Life his own life clogged his feet; to act was like wading in treacle. He had an impulse of utter wild rebellion, of ferocious self-assertion. Then: "Zu Befehl, Herr Hauptmann!" he said, and saluted. Eight bells had sounded, and in the little triangular fo'c'sle of the Anna Maria the men of the port watch were waiting for their dinner.
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