WORLD'S END

She put her ear to the opening again, and heard a whisper: "All right." She touched him gently on the shoulder, not knowing what part of him might be a wound, and said: "Wait for me. I'll come back just as quickly as I can make arrangements. Anything else I can do?"

"Water," he said. She didn't know how to give it to him, for she was afraid to lift his head, and she had no tube, and no one to ask. She dipped her handkerchief into a glass and squeezed a little into his mouth, and kept that up until he said it was enough.

III

The doctors made no objection to having a patient taken off their hands. They said he couldn't be crowded into an automobile, that would surely kill him; and there was no ambulance available. It was a question of making changes in Beauty's own car, one of the new and fashionable kind called a "limousine," a square black box. It might be possible to take out two of the seats, the right-hand ones, and make a place to lay a narrow mattress on the floor. Then Jerry made a suggestion - why not put a board platform on top of the two seats, with a mattress on that?

They drove to a garage; there was nobody but the wife of the proprietor and an elderly mechanic, both greatly startled by the idea of cutting out a piece of the back of a luxury car, so that a wounded soldier could be slid into it. The windshield was large, and the mechanic thought he might be able to remove that. Beauty said: "Break it if necessary. We can have it replaced in Paris." Jerry took the proprietress aside and spoke magic words: "C'est I'ami de cette belle dame."

"Ah, c'est I'amour!" That explained everything, and they went to work with enthusiasm. Love will find out the way! They managed to get the windshield off without too great harm, and they put some boards together and made a platform, and the proprietress brought an old mattress, and Lanny worked at it with his pocket knife, cutting it down to the right size. "Ah, ces Amйricains!"

While all this was being done, Beauty was out looking for a telephone, to call a surgeon she knew in Paris, and arrange for Marcel to be received at a private hospital. When she got back, the platform was in place, and the mattress on top of it, a reasonably good place for a wounded man to lie for the time it would take to get him to the big city.

Two tired attendants carried the patient down and slid him onto the mattress without damage. Beauty distributed money to everyone who helped them, and Jerry gave them cigarettes, which they wanted even more at the moment. It was dark when they set out, but no matter - Marcel was alive, and Beauty sat in the rear seat, which brought her head about level with his ear, and for two hours she whispered: "Marcel, I love you, and you are going to live for my sake." She found a thousand variations of it, and Lanny listened, and learned things about love. He was in a cramped position - they had taken out some of the bags and tied them onto the rear of the car, and Lanny was squatting on the floor at his mother's knees, underneath Marcel's mattress. He couldn't see «anything, but he could hear, and he learned that love is not all pleasure, but can be agony and heartache, martyrdom and sacrifice. He learned what the clergyman was talking about in the marriage service: "For better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death us do part."

IV

The human body is a complicated engine with many miles of elastic pipes large and small. In order that the engine may develop the maximum horsepower per pound of weight, the pipes are made of fragile materials, and the framework which encloses and supports them is porous and brittle. When you take such a contraption fifty feet up in the air and explode a mass of hydrogen gas above it, and let it crash onto hard ground, you produce in a second or two results which surgeons and nurses may need a long time to remedy.

There were no physicians in Paris who were not overworked, and no hospital which was not crowded; but the lady with the magical name of Budd used her influence, and Robbie, getting the news by cable from his son, replied: "Spare no expense." So Marcel was X-rayed and investigated, and his burns were treated according to the modern technique of cleaning away damaged tissues. After several days of watching, the doctors said that he would live, if he did not become discouraged by the ordeals he would have to undergo, and if his amour propre was not too greatly wounded by the certainty of looking like a scarecrow.