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Show THE STORY THUS FAR: Spratt Hor-lonfj, Hor-lonfj, motion picture producer, married Elizabeth after her first husband, Arthur K I tired Re, had been reported killed in World War I. Kll'abeth had been orphaned or-phaned when a baby and raised by her aunt and uncle In Tulsa, where she met and married Arthur. Shortly after their marriage, Arthur enlisted, and soon afterwards aft-erwards was reported killed. Elizabeth moved to I.os Angeles, where she met and married Spratt. Arthur had not been killed, but disfigured and left almost helpless. help-less. Dr. Jacoby worked over him and managed to save him. Under the name of Kessler, Arthur landed In Los An-fries An-fries In Spratt'i office. some time about the script, and if Kesslcr's attention had wandered it was no matter, since he was going to read the script tomorrow anyway. When Spratt had finished, and he himself had risen to leave, he glanced at the photograph on the desk, saying with the casualness born of years of self-command, "Your wife, Mr. Herlong?" Spratt said, "Why yes," taking up the picture and handing-it to Kess-ler Kess-ler with the proud smile of a man showihg his friend a treasure. "But that's not very good of her at least, I never did think those formal portraits por-traits were as good as candid shots, too smooth and pressed-out, if you get what I mean." "Yes, I understand and agree with you." Kessler was looking at her face. "But this is very charming." "Oh yes, so it is, but this one on the wall looks more like her. Over here by the door. Those are the children chil-dren with her." Kessler followed Spratt and looked at the picture on the wall. . i 1 ii i . 1 1 1 1 1 ii "But this is very charming." they were not worth the trouble of listening, for all the doctor said was, "Quiet. You be quiet." . Arthur tried again, desperate with pain and weakness. "Do me a kindness. Give me something to finish fin-ish it, won't you? Please listen I'm talking as plain as I can! Finish Fin-ish it. That's not much to ask, is it?" Again the doctor said, "Quiet." "If you don't care about doing a kindness to me, do it for somebody who can get up again one of your own men. Why should you let me fill up a bed when German soldiers are lying on the floor? Or waste food on me when you haven't enough for your own? Don't keep me " His words ended in a gasp of pain. But he still looked at the doctor, too weak to say any more but conscious enough to plead with his eyes. Whether or not the doctor had understood un-derstood all his words, he had grasped enough to know what Arthur Ar-thur wanted. He shook his head. "No," he said. "No." Exhausted as he was, Arthur could see him groping for more words. Mustering all his strength, Arthur managed to say again, "I am going to die anyway." "No, no. You are not going to die." He spoke with a grim resolution that seemed to typify all Arthur had ever heard about the coldness of Germans and their inability to understand un-derstand any reason why they might not always be right. Arthur was not able to form any more words, but he looked at the doctor with eyes that Jacoby told him later conveyed all his rage and disbelief. Arthur knew he was going to die and he wanted it over. But Jacoby's thin face had no yielding in it. Jacoby left him then, but he came back later, and this time his bony hand brought up a German-English dictionary dic-tionary out of his frayed pocket. Even with this aid, his English was so poor that he could convey nothing noth-ing but a repetition of his refusal. Alone in his prison of pain, Arthur thought, "At home they'd shoot a dog that had been smashed by a truck. But this can't last much longer. long-er. It can't. If I hadn't been so healthy it would be over by now. But, have these people no mercy at all? I'd shoot the most heartless German under heaven before I'd let him die a death like this." - , . He was glad Elizabeth could not see him. She would never know anything any-thing about this lingering torment. They would simply tell her he was dead and she would think it had been quick and clean. "He never knew what hit him," they would say to her, and at least it would be easier easi-er for her than if she had to know how long it had taken him to die. And of course he did have one thing to be thankful for if that shell had to hit him, he could be glad it had done its work. He would be dead and done with, and would not have to go back to her a half-human caricature cari-cature of what used to be her husband. hus-band. Though that wretch of a German Ger-man doctor refused to shorten this last phase, though he might be beast enough to enjoy seeing one of his enemies get what was coming to him, even he could not indefinitely prolong it. But at last Arthur discovered, with a revulsion that he could not have expressed if he had known the whole dictionary by heart, that this was exactly what the doctor meant to do to him. Jacoby had been trying to talk to him for some days. Arthur had ceased trying to understand him. He had about given up trying to do the only thing that interested him, which was to refuse nourishment and get it over that way, for they fed him through a tube and he was too weak to resist. He hated the sight of the, doctor with his gaunt face and thin cruel hands. But though he could not resist him, he did not have to listen to the man's awkward manipulations of the English Eng-lish language and try to make sense out of them. However, the creature persisted, talking to him with many references to his dictionary. Unable to pronounce pro-nounce Arthur's name, he called him Kitt. He kept telling him something, in a low, insistent voice. He kept at it so long that at last one day the words he had been hearing arranged ar-ranged themselves in Arthur's mind and became an orderly sequence. Stripped of its grotesqueries and repetitions, what Arthur understood went like this: "You are not going to die, Kitt. You will be alive a long time. Not as you were. But you have your eyes, your hearing, the jaw will heal and there will be a hand. I think you will be able to sit upright. Walking I cannot promise, but I will try. It will be long and hard. But work with me, Kitt, and I will work with you. Do you understand me? You are not going to die." Arthur made an inarticulate noise. He looked at the doctor's steely blue eyes. They were fixed on him with a determination that made Arthur feel that this fellow was regarding him not as a man but as the subject of an inhuman experiment. Instead In-stead of letting him go, Jacoby was going to keep him conscious for years to come, simply to prove that he could do it. i 1TO BE CONTINUED) CHAPTER XI He shivered with a cold gust of hate whenever he remembered how the Nazis had hounded that great man to his death for no crime but the unforgivable un-forgivable Iniquity of having been born a Jew, and of being so rock-bound rock-bound in his own goodness that he was incapable of accepting the evil of mankind until it had crushed him beyond escape. There had been Utile he could do in his love for Jacoby's memory, nothing but get to the United States while there was still time to save Jacoby's child. His grief and rage at what had happened to his friend, and his terror ter-ror lest he not be able to bring Jacoby's Ja-coby's little girl to safety, had been so great that not until he was on the westbound steamer did he realize real-ize that when he got to America he was probably going to see Elizabeth, lie knew her husband's name was Spratt Herlong and that he was employed em-ployed by Vertex Studio, and in his own luggage was a contract signed in the Paris office of Vertex. He would be virtually sure to meet Herlong Her-long some day, and it might follow as a matter of course that he would meet Elizabeth. He went into his cabin and looked at himself a long time In the glass, as he was doing now. If there was a chance of her knowing him he would break his contract and make a living as a translator, a clerk, anything that would provide little Margaret with three meals a day without destroying destroy-ing Elizabeth's peace of mind. But a long scrutiny satisfied him that there was no chance of it. In no sense, except the memory of her behind all that had happened since that explosion at Chateau-Thierry, could he believe he had any trace of the Arthur Kittredge she had known. He was Erich Kessler, dear friend of the late Dr. Gustav Jacoby, author of books based on case histories of Dr. Jacoby's patients, and the change in his personality was as thorough as the change in his name. No man who had endured what he had endured in body and spirit could have much left in common with a happy, arrogant youth who did not know what it was to want anything he could not get. He looked thoughtfully at his image im-age in the glass. Crippled as he was, his appearance was not repulsive. One could see that in spite of his uncertain legs he had been meant for a tall man, and since his torso had to carry his weight the muscles there were powerfully developed. The effect was inevitably one-sided, since his left sleeve had been empty so long, but his right arm was like that of an athlete, and the hand which for twenty years had supported support-ed him upon a cane, was strong enough to break a china cup between be-tween the thumb and fingers. His face had no visible trace of the wound there except a scar that went upward from beneath his beard in a thin curving line. His hair was still thick, gray like steel; his beard was heavy too, and darker. He had let it grow with no thought of disguise, but to cover the scars that all Jacoby's Ja-coby's careful skin-grafting had not been able to eliminate. Now he was glad he had it and was so used to it, for in spite of having seen thousands thou-sands of Hitler's pictures most Americans still thought of Germans as being professors in dark beards. She would not know him, but he would know her, as readily as he had known the picture standing on Spratt Herlong's desk. To be sure, he had been looking for it, but he would have recognized it anyway as Elizabeth. She had changed in those years, of course, but her alteration had been nothing more than the well-ordered well-ordered development from youth into the maturity that could have been foreseen by anyone who had been as intimately acquainted with her as he had. Elizabeth had always al-ways known what she wanted out of life, because she was so eminently fit to have it. Physically and spiritually, spirit-ually, she had wanted love, marriage, mar-riage, children, a home in which she would be no petted darling, but a versatile and devoted creator. From the beginning she had instinctively known herself capable of bringing all this into being, and so she had looked forward to it with the eagerness eager-ness of those who have no doubt of their destiny. When he met Spratt. and saw the pictures of Elizabeth Eliz-abeth in Spratt's office, he felt that the change time had made in her appearance had been no more than the change one observes in the achievement of something of which one has seen the beginning. Now that he could think of her without the pain of the earlier years, he was glad he had been wise enough to tep a:;We so that she could have it. He saw the pictures last week, on ' c first day he went into' Spratt's lice. Spratt had been talking for "Yes, yes," he said with involuntary involun-tary eagerness, "that, I am sure, is more like her." For It was like her, he knew that without having seen the original in so long. The picture had been taken somewhere outdoors, perhaps on a ranch. Today, alone in his office, he let his memory go back to the days when he had realized he had to do this because he loved Elizabeth too much to do anything else. The first days after the battle were nothing but confusion, fever and. pain. He was in a place where there were a lot of other men on other cots, and women with pale harassed faces trying try-ing to take care of them, but he could not understand anything that was being said or anything that was done. He was strapped up in bandages band-ages that were far from clean, and among the people around him was a man gaunt as an ascetic, who came over now and then and did various horrible things to him. He did not know then that in those closing days of the war in Germany there was not cloth enough for fresh bandages or soap enough to wash those that had been used, or drugs to relieve suffering, suf-fering, or that his attendants had white faces and shaky hands because be-cause they were not getting enough to eat. Even when he began to discover dis-cover this he did not care, because by that time he had begun to discover dis-cover also the extent of the damage these Germans had done to him. He had no doubt that he was going to die, and the only wish he was strong enough to make was that he might die quickly and get it over. Babbling in the only language he knew, he begged the gaunt cruel man to let him alone. At first the doctor seemed to be paying no attention, at-tention, but one day his patient observed ob-served that he was talking, and after aft-er several repetitions the ungainly syllables acquired meaning. The doctor was saying, "Forgive me that I hurt you." His accent was so thick as to be almost unintelligible, but the fact that he had any English at all gave a flash of hope to the mangled object ob-ject on the cot. Any effort was torture, tor-ture, but if this fool of a doctor could be made to understand that a dying man wanted nothing more than to be left in peace, it was worth the effort. His own words were muffled muf-fled because of the bandage on his chin, but he managed to get them out. "Listen to me. I am not one of your countrymen you know that, don't you? My name is Arthur Kittredge. Kit-tredge. I am an American. Your enemy don't you get that? I am going to die anyway. Why don't you just let me do it?" The doctor said something. Arthur did not understand it until it had been repeated several times, and ! when h finally caught the words |