That Which Hath Wings 12That Which Hath Wings (part 12)
18
Literature · Romance
That Which Hath Wings 12
That Which Hath Wings (part 12)
DehanEnglish
"Ah! You throw a ray," said Mrs. Charterhouse in that sugared way of hers, "on a mystery that has intrigued me. Now I know why Miss Saxham went to the Atelier Wiber in the Rue de la Paix and got her crepuscular tresses changed to terra-cotta!"
"Not saffron? Now," said Lady Wastwood, pensively tilting her own green-gold head and elevating her arched black eyebrows, "I should have called that shade saffron or tumeric. Who do you suppose footed the bill for the process? The wretch Wiber simply won't look at you under four hundred and fifty francs!"
"I think not. Vivie preferred the crepuscular effect. It contrasted capitally with her own style of colouring. You must have noticed, they are seldom seen going about together as they used. Dear Lady Wathe, do you feel faint? Can I get you anything?"
For something had clicked behind the Goblin's pearls, and she had suddenly stiffened in her seat. The superb figure of Patrine Saxham had entered by the swing-doors leading from the vestibule followed by a tall, broad-shouldered young man in loose grey tweeds, whose left sleeve displayed a band of black significantly new.
"Can that be Miss Saxham? It must be!--her type is so unusual! Not having seen her since the night of the dinner I referred to I did not quite grasp the meaning of your references to ingredients common in Indian curries. Of course, I understand now!" The Goblin surveyed the tall, pliant figure with the dead beech-leaf hair through her lorgnette before she leaned forwards and roused the sleeping Brayham by a brisk application of the instrument. "Look, Sir Thomas! Would you have known Miss Saxham?"
"Beparr! ... Wharr? ... God bless my soul, no!"
Brayham, turning in the armchair as the Zoo walrus turns in his concrete pond, surveyed Patrine with a bloodshot stare.
"Silly girl! Spoilt her looks!" he snorted. "Handsome as the dooce with her gipsy-black tresses. Won her bet. Won't get her ring now though, unless von Herrnung paid before he flew!"
"Was there a bet between them? How is it you never told me? Have I deserved this from you?" demanded Lady Wathe indignantly, as Mrs. Charterhouse and Lady Wastwood exchanged glances and smiles.
"Sorry! ... Forgot! ..." Brayham gobbled apologetically. "Man I know happened to be close to 'em leaving Spitz's Restaurant that Sunday night in Paris. Told me he heard von Herrnung lay Miss Saxham his magpie pearl solitaire against a bit o' Palais Royal paste she was wearing--that she wouldn't change the colour of her hair! Made the appointment for her, with Wiber--'Pastiches Artistiques,' and so on, Rue de la Paix. He bragged of it afterwards at the Cercle Moderne! Dam Germans! no idea of decency! Why do Englishwomen intrigue with 'em? Bounders that kiss and tell!"
There was a significant pause, broken by the Goblin's shrillest peal of laughter. The ex-Justice, whose vitality was low, folded his hands and dozed again. Then----
"Now we know who footed the bill," said Cynthia Charterhouse in dove-like accents. While Trixie murmured in the vexed ear of Margot:
"Kitts, my dinkie, you are a pal of the Saxhams. How far had the affair really gone?"
"There was no affair!" said Margot's sweet little voice, very clearly. "Pat rather hated Count von Herrnung than otherwise!"
"Judging by the mute evidence of her hair--" began Mrs. Charterhouse, languidly. How Margot loathed these women, erstwhile her chosen friends and associates, tearing with greedy beaks and vicious claws at the reputation of an unmarried girl....
"Her hair belongs to her! She can bleach it if she wishes!" The little figure rose to its altitude of four feet seven inches and surveyed the scandalmongers with wrathful eyes. "I have said that there was nothing between Miss Saxham and Count von Herrnung"--the little voice was crystal-cold: "I should be extremely obliged to all of you if you will understand this clearly! Miss Saxham is engaged to my husband's cousin, Alan Sherbrand."--Had Franky heard that stately reference to my husband, he would have been "bowled," to quote himself. "Franky likes him, and so do I, tremendously! We're both keen on their bringing off the match!"
There was another resounding silence. Brayham snored melodiously. Then Trixie Wastwood said with her Pierrot smile:
"Really, Kitts, it was--hardly cricket not to have warned us!"
While Mrs. Charterhouse added in tones of iced velvet:
"Regard me also as prone beneath Miss Saxham's Number Eight shoes. Did you say her fiance was a cousin of Lord Norwater's? Not possibly the son of the uncle who died quite recently? Captain the Hon. Noel Sherbrand, late of the Royal Gunners.... My husband used to know him before--people left off!"
"It is the same. He muddled his career somehow, and--most people cut him! But he is dead," said Margot very deliberately, "and his son, if we have no--" the delicate cheeks flushed with sudden vivid crimson--"his son is perfectly tophole and Franky's next heir. We met him in June in Paris, and so did Pat Saxham! How do any of you know she didn't tint her hair to please him."
"Possibly she did! But, according to Sir Thomas--it was the other man who paid!"
"Odd, isn't it? In this world," said the Goblin with her crackling laugh, "the other man invariably pays the bill! And so the young gentleman over there--who is quite remarkably good-looking in the blond Norman style--and who is going to marry Miss Saxham--succeeds to Lord Norwater in--a certain eventuality! May one be permitted to hope, dear Lady Norwater, that Fate and yourself will combine fortuitously, to keep the cousin out of the House of Peers!"
"Rude, ill-bred, horrid woman!" thought Margot, clenching her little teeth to keep back these epithets. "How dare she twit me with--that! How dare--" Then her hot flush sank away and a mist came before her eyes, and she would have fallen, but that Trixie Wastwood jumped up from the sofa and threw about the little figure a kind, supporting arm.
"I've got you! You're not going to faint, Kittums, are you? Forgive us, my dinkie! What pigs we have been!"
"Heckling the tomtit for defending the saffron-crested blackbird! I rather agree with you," admitted Mrs. Charterhouse as Margot freed herself, saying it was nothing, and proudly moved away. "We women are horribly spiteful," continued Cynthia. "Yes, we are spiteful, Lady Wathe! I am perfectly in earnest. What is the reason? Will anything cure us? Do somebody tell me! Colonel Charterhouse would say it is because we eat too much rich food, walk too little, automobile too much, and want some useful work or other to occupy our minds! He is coming here to lunch with me--he was quite touchingly anxious to be invited!" Her beautiful eyes widened as the swing-doors thudded behind three entering masculine figures, "Why, here he is with Lord Norwater, and your boy, Trixie! All three in khaki! What a day we are having!"
She added, as her handsome middle-aged Colonel made his spurred way through the ever-thickening crush to her:
"I am enlightened! So this was your surprise!"
"Not half as big as mine when I found they were willing to take me. 'Fit as a fiddle,' according to the M. O. Gad!"--he went on, as his wife made room for him on the settle by her side--"as willingly as though he had been somebody else's husband," Lady Wathe said subsequently--"It's to my golf I owe it--these A.M.S. sawbones finding me in the pink! And instead of a back-seat, what do you think they've given me? Command of the Third Reserve Battalion of the blessed old Regiment, the Loyal North Linkshires, vice Crowe-Pinckney, kicked out by a gouty toe! ... How's that for an oldster of fifty-five, ... Eh, what?" His chuckle was that of a Fourth Form athlete picked to supply a gap in the School Eleven. And Cynthia's beautiful eyes, as she slipped her hand into the Colonel's, looked at him as the boy's mother's might have looked upon her son.
Lady Wastwood's Pierrot smile might have played upon the reunited couple mockingly, but that the unexpected apparition of her boy Wastwood in single-starred khaki, adorned with the badge of a crack Hussar Regiment, girt with the Sam Browne and narrow officer's shoulder-strap, and clad as to the legs in spurred brown butcher-boots--dimmed her bright green eyes and brought a choke into her throat. Wastwood the son was so like Wastwood the father--killed at Magersfontein in 1900,--whom Trixie, for no reason apparently, had romantically adored. A burly young man, pink as a baby, with thick fair hair growing down within two inches of his eyebrows, small, fierce blue eyes, and a huge roaring voice, softened down now to a tender bellow as he answered a pale girl's eager question with:
"Well, I can't say exactly when we're going to the Front, but I hope to Christmas it'll be soon!"
Wastwood's engagement to the girl had been announced only the week previously in the Society Columns of the leading dailies. Now, while Wastwood's younger brother Jerry anguished in the throes of a final Exam, at Sandhurst, the said Jerry being set upon getting a Commission in time to go to the Front with one of the First Divisions--his elder sat on a Club sofa and made love to the girl Jerry was subsequently to marry. For not only Wastwood's title, but his vacant Commission as a Lieutenant in the Dapple Greys and his sweetheart went to his junior after Mons.
There was a lot of family and regimental re-shuffling and re-dealing, you will remember, after Mons.
The leaven of the Great Awakening was working in the souls of these worldly-minded, ultra-modern men and women, even as the crowd in the rooms grew denser, as the buzz of talk became almost solid, and khaki mingled with the brilliant toilettes. Hardly a man but wore dead-leaf brown. Wives were entertaining their husbands, mothers were lunching their sons, that day, at the multitudinous little tables in the great and lesser dining-rooms,--there was a revival of old code-words, an interchange of almost forgotten pet-names, a resurrection of ancient jokes, when the atmosphere seemed dangerously charged with emotion. How many Last Sacraments of renewed love were eaten and drunk by husbands and wives who, estranged for years, were to be reunited by the War, and parted by the War until the Day when Wars shall be no more.
That a tall young man in grey tweed with a crape armlet should sit opposite Patrine that day at Margot's special table was one of the thousand miracles already wrought.
Sherbrand had shelved all recollection of that June adventure in the Bois de Boulogne, when a flushed young husband in immaculate top-hat and frock-coat had thanked an angry young man in waterproof overalls and gabardine for not chopping his wife into kedgeree.
Could one be angry any more when this little human dragon-fly was what Patrine called "a frightful pal" of hers. Thank Heaven! Patrine had known nothing of the cousinship when she had answered Sherbrand's plain question, "Will you marry me?" with an assent:
"Sooner than not!"
"Then--it is settled?"
"Yes, you poor dear! If you think me worth having!"
Worth having! Sherbrand's glorious Patrine. Whom to be near was heaven on earth. Whom to obey was a lover's luxury, even when she had issued the mandate:
"Now, you must come to the Club and lunch with me, and meet my friends. Do be decent to them!"
Perhaps you can see Sherbrand bowing rather stiffly to Margot and accepting with the briefest hesitation the smallest of offered hands.
"I thought it must be the same!--I was certain there couldn't be two Flying Sherbrands. Pat!--Mr. Sherbrand can't deny the relationship, though he disapproves of Franky and me most fearfully. You'll have to teach him," went on the coaxing little voice, "that we're lots and lots nicer than he thinks us! For we've got to be friends," said Kittums, "if you and my dear Pat are going to be married! No time like the present! Can't we begin now?"
What a vivid little face it was, though there were tired marks like faint bruises under the great dark eyes, and the rose-flush in the cheeks was less bright than it had seemed in June. He released the tiny jewelled fingers, and found himself presented to the husband.
"Frightfully glad to meet you--more reasons than one!"
Franky, slim, sleek-headed, and dapper in unblemished Regulation tea-leaf, held out his hand, saying as he looked the other squarely in the eyes:
"If I had known your Home address, I should like to have dropped a line to you, when I--when I saw the newspaper yesterday."
"My mother lives at Bournemouth. My father had been an invalid for years. I go down to-day by the afternoon train."
"Ah! Please remember me to my--Aunt Jeannette."
From what dusty shelf of memories had Franky reached down the name of his uncle's unknown wife? But it sounded pleasantly to Mrs. Sherbrand's son. The cloud upon his forehead cleared away, and his cold sea-blue eyes began to thaw into kindness:
"I'd like a word with you in private. Do you mind comin' out of this clackshop into the vest*i*bulee?" Franky went on, quoting his favourite Jimmy Greggson, and with a word to Margot and a glance on Sherbrand's part at Patrine, the two men passed through the swing-doors. Here Franky wheeled, and said with effort:
"This is a bit subsequent! but--if there's time available and the date of my uncle's funeral doesn't happen to be fixed, I should like to say--" He grew furiously red and began to stammer: "My father ... myself ... Dash! how brutally I bungle! But my uncle has a right to--to lie in the family vault with his ancestors. It's at Whins--the Church is in the Castle grounds. I can guarantee that my father--every facility--sympathy--proper respect--" He broke down. Sherbrand answered, now the cooler of the two:
"You are very kind, Lord Norwater. My mother has already received a telegram from Lord Mitchelborough conveying a message to the same effect."
"I engineered that!" thought Franky complacently. But he was fish-dumb. Sherbrand went on:
"She would thank you, as I do, gratefully. But my father--would have preferred to be buried where he died!"
"Good egg! And now there's another thing to get off my chest," said Franky. "You know you stand in for the Viscounty when I succeed my father, or if I get knocked out in this scrap--supposing I should kick without heirs! That being so, suppose you bury the hatchet and lunch with us? Wouldn't in Paris--perhaps you will now? The War seems to rub up old saws like new somehow. That copy-book tag about Blood bein' thicker than water! that's one of the ones I mean. In case my wife got left--do you tumble?"--the ambiguous term was quite expressive--"I'd like to think that you were--would be kind to her!"
"I should certainly--in that case--try to do what I could." A certain physical and mental resemblance showed between these two long-legged, lightly-built, clean-made Sherbrands, standing together talking of grave matters, with candour and simplicity and British avoidance of sentiment and excess of words.
"But,"--Sherbrand found himself yielding to an impulse of confidence in the owner of the brown eyes that were some inches below his own, "this War is my chance! I'm a certified pilot-aviator and constructor and engineer. Perhaps there'll be a chink in the Royal Flying Corps for me--and many another fellow like me--before long--I hope, not very long! For my father's sake as much as for my own, I'm bound to make good--you understand?"
The brown eyes understood. His kindred blood warmed to the look in them.
"He knew--my father knew that he had failed in life through his own fault. He did not resent his brother's attitude. He bore the consequences more or less patiently, and when he died he left the cleansing of his name to me. Not that he was as badly to blame as people thought. He was born without sufficient of the quality called--objectivity. It's the power that keeps a man slogging, slogging in one groove without getting mechanical or stupid, as long as he attain his ends or can serve his country by keeping on. It's indispensable!"--he emphasised the word, his strong blue-grey eyes full on Franky's--"as indispensable as lymph in your inner ear-tubes. Without it you can't keep a level balance--whether you stand, or walk, or fly!"
"Miss Saxham--knows, I suppose?"
A flush crept up through Sherbrand's tanning:
"I have told her. It wasn't pleasant. But she--likes me enough to overlook it. She--seems to think I should never fail in that way! I hope to God I never shall!" The old boyish terror of inherited weakness cropped up in the tone of the man grown. "It would be horrible to suspect the bacillus of slackness lurking in my blood! If there is--the sooner I get scrapped, the better for her and for me!"
"Well, you've chosen the--kind of career that is going to use up a good many men pretty quickly." Franky was warming more and more to this big blond, candid cousin. "Not that I think there's much of the slacker about you. Few chaps more fit and nervy--that is, going by looks, you know! But if the Kaiser's Flying Men can shoot on the wing as well as they brag they can"--his brown eyes were watchful for a change in the other's face--"then----"
"Then I tumble out of my sky, a dead bird!" said Sherbrand, squaring his broad shoulders, "and someone luckier fills my place!"
"Thumbs up! Ten to one you'd come down with a broken wing or so." There was something that touched Franky's latent quality of imagination in the fellow's queer way of saying "my sky." "This cousin of mine is a handsome fellow," he said to himself, "and a plucky one. And--by the Great Brass Hat!--now I come to think of it--the livin' image of old Sir Roger Sherbrand--his and my great-grandfather--goin' by the portrait in the gallery at Whins."
"So you're firm on joinin' the Flying Corps..." he went on, feeling for the moustache which had been reduced to Regulation toothbrush size. "Good egg You! Wish you all the sporting chances----"
"And better luck," said Sherbrand drily, "with Bird of War No. II. than I had with No. I.!"
"You're building a new 'plane?" The brown eyes were alight with interest.
"Rather! Come and have a look at her one day."
"Like a shot, if only I'd time! Did she tot to a hatful of money?"
"Something under L700. L500 of that goes for the new 'Gnome' engine. You see that German--" Sherbrand broke off.
"I remember! Pretty rough on you, that North Sea crossin' business. Must have been an awful loss. Look here!" Franky reddened again and began to flounder. "Could I--couldn't I--help with the boodle? Got L700 lying by idle. Frightfully glad if you'd let me chip in!--just in a cousinly sort o' way!"
"I am much obliged to you, Lord Norwater."
Confound the fellow! how he froze at the least hint of patronage. He went on, holding his head high:
"You are very kind, but I am not poor, unless as poverty is understood by people of your world. Apart from what my profession brings me I have something in the way of income. My mother's brother left me a sum of money that brings in yearly over L200." He went on as Franky regarded with unaffected interest the man who wasn't poor on two hundred per annum: "The principal--I suppose it tots up to L6,000--I shall naturally settle on my wife."
He warmed and brightened with the utterance of the word. His cold eyes grew soft and his brows smoothed pleasantly. He said with a glowing pride, and a kind of brave shyness that a woman who loved him would have adored:
"I have said nothing yet to Miss Saxham about my hopes of a Commission--I suppose for fear of not pulling the thing off. But the moment it comes along I shall persuade her to marry me. We'll be man and wife before I fly for the Front."
As cocky as though he had landed the biggest catch in the matrimonial waters, thought Franky, instead of that great, slangy, galumphing young woman without a halfpenny at her back. But he did the amiable, in a way characteristic of Franky, ushering the guest back to the luncheon-room, introducing "my cousin" to people worth knowing, doing the honours with a pleasant cordiality that won upon Sherbrand more and more.
Sherbrand took leave directly after lunch, saying that he had to catch the afternoon express for Bournemouth. He had left his bag and suit-case in the hall-porter's care. Would Patrine?--Patrine read the entreaty in the hiatus and yielded to it, saying Yes, she would drive with him, and see him off from Waterloo.
"It's lovely of you!" Sherbrand said to her gratefully as they rose. She gave him her cordial smile and a soft glance from the long eyes. They took leave of their hosts and passed out together, heads slewing as the tall young figures went by.
Once in a taxi, spinning down Short Street, Sherbrand possessed himself of the hand he coveted. Its warm strong, answering clasp thrilled him to speechlessness. He looked at the long white fingers intertwined with his own, and asked himself whether he were deserving of a happiness too great to be credited. When her shoulder touched his, its warm creamy whiteness gleaming through the dead-white of her thin sleeve, his heart drummed until it seemed as though she could not but hear it. But his was not the only heart that beat....
"Thank you." It was her rich warm voice speaking close by his ear. "Thank you for being so nice to my Kittums! She is the truest little soul going. We have been chums ever since I joined the Club. Never quarrelled once--until she made up her mind to marry Franky----"
"And now you're going to marry Franky's first cousin." Sherbrand laughed rather breathlessly. "'Marry' ... 'Marriage.' Two splendid words with meanings and meanings beyond meanings packed into them. Isn't it wonderful? ..." He gripped the warm white hand in his strong brown one. "Pat, your pulses are playing a tune!"
"So are yours," she answered in a low tone.
"What is it?" He bent his head and set his lips in a swift caress to the back of the white hand. Then he turned it gently over and looked earnestly at the blue wrist-veins. They were full and throbbing tumultuously. Her blood was answering to the call of his. He set a second swift kiss upon them and his voice was unsteady as he said:
"I know the name of the tune, my wonder. Patrine! Love!--it's the Wedding March!"
"Whose? Grieg's, or Wagner's in Lohengrin, or Haydn's?"
"Neither Wagner's nor Haydn's nor Grieg's. Yours and mine! I told Lord Norwater to-day that I meant to make sure of you before I fly for the Front."
"You're going to the Front? Oh!--why?" Her long eyes looked at him with sharp terror in them. He answered:
"When the Powers that be offer me a Commission in the Royal Flying Corps."
"I see." She breathed freely. "And so--we are not to be married until then?"
"Would you--to-morrow, if I----"
"You know I would!" Her voice broke over him in a wave of tenderness. "You've made me love you--so dreadfully, Alan. Now if the little tin gods hear us--the spiteful little gods who spoil people's lives--something will happen to part us, soon."
His arm went round her and gathered her against him. He said with a great thrill of triumph:
"If the Great God is for us we can defy the little tin devils! It was He who made us for each other, brought us together--will bring us closer still!"
He added, as a handsome boy of nineteen or twenty, dressed at the zenith of the fashion, and already showing the worn lines of habitual dissipation, flashed by driven in a silver-grey Lanchester, with a notorious Cyprian enthroned at his side:
"How can I thank Him enough for what He has done for me? How many temptations He has helped me resist, that I might come to you clean to-day!"
"Were any of the temptations like Mrs. Mallison?" She had freed her hand from his, and now leaned forwards, hiding her clouded face from Sherbrand under the pretext of following the grey car with her eyes. "That was little Wyvenhoe with her.... How young he is! And how old she must be! Why, I've seen her portrait in a Book of Beauty dated forty years back--with a chignon and waterfall. They called her the Marble Marvel in those days, didn't they? Before she pitched her cap over the windmill, and made hay of the Prunes and Prisms. Now she acts in Music Hall sketches--has a voice like a raven's, paints a quarter-of-an-inch thick, and exploits Eton boys. Is anything the matter?"
Sherbrand had suddenly started and pulled his watch out. Now he rapped on the glass at the back of the chauffeur, leaned out of the window and spoke to the man, and resumed his seat, answering:
"The matter is that I had forgotten an important appointment. I can manage to keep it by the skin of my eyelids by taking the three o'clock train to Bournemouth instead of the two-thirty Express. You won't mind? You'll come with me and wait for me?"
"Not a little bit! ..." she answered to the one question and to the other: "Of course I will!"
*CHAPTER LI*
*THE INWARD VOICE*
The taxi, arrested and reversed on its way to Piccadilly Circus, was soon speeding Westwards. It whirred up Berkeley Street, traversed Berkeley Square, and turned into a short street ending in railings, enclosing grass wonderfully green for August, clipped bushes of evergreens, and some autumn-foliaged planes.
"We'll keep the man. I'll take his number. He'll look after my kit for me. Let me help you out, dear!"
He opened a gate in the railings and let her through. A large double house, with many windows, severely screened with brown curtains and wire blinds, loomed behind them, commanding the oblong patch of London green. The Modern Gothic porch of a lofty building of smoke-darkened freestone rose up before them. Patrine said under her breath, realising the ecclesiastical character of the edifice:
"Great Scott! It's a church!"
But Sherbrand, who had stayed to shut the gate in the railings did not hear the tabooed expletive. He caught her up and turned the massive iron handle of the porch-door which was braced by bands of iron with trefoil heads, and studded with heavy nails. They went down two shallow steps into an oblong, vaulted chamber, very cool and dark and fragrant, tesselated with squares of black and white stone. Slabs of black marble lined the walls to the height of a tall man. An inscription in Early English lettering, cut into the black background and gilded, caught Patrine's eye in passing. She read beneath the symbol of the Cross:
Under were lists of names, all male, ranged alphabetically. Her quick eye dropped to the initial S. and found Sherbrand there. But when she looked for her companion, he was waiting hat in hand, at a door some distance beyond them.
"You will come in and wait for me?" he whispered as she came towards him.
"Why not? As well here as anywhere!" He opened the door and she passed in.
To Patrine's left hand, close to the door by which they had entered, was a small unpretending altar supporting the tinted image of an emaciated, bearded monk in a black robe girdled with a white cord. A clustered pillar of red and white marble supported a shallow basin containing a little water. Patrine shrugged as Sherbrand dipped his fingers and made upon brow and breast the sacred Sign. Then he seemed to hesitate--dipped again and held the wetted finger tips towards her, evidently courting her touch. She shook her head hastily. Her eyes swept purposely past his, scanning the vast interior. They were standing in the shorter southern transept of what was some church.
The vast nave was dark and cool, full of silence and shadow and the perfume of flowers and incense, mingled with a fragrance far subtler than these. Pillars of richest Modern Gothic design supported the roof, whose forest of rich dark timbers showed little adornment, except at the Sanctuary end. Here coffering, diapering, and gilding made for splendour; rich marble cased the pillars and floored the stately choir with its rows of stalls, wrought in dark wood, elaborately carved. The north transept housed the organ, a towering instrument of many pipes. The scarlet cushion on the vacant organ-bench, the book of chants left upon the rack, the black and yellow-white of the well-used keys, the numbered heads of the stops, showed through the lattice-work of a high wrought-iron screen, wonderfully painted and gilt. Between Patrine and the nave was a pulpit of red and white marble like the pillars, with a carved sounding-board of obviously ancient work. Rows of pews flanked the wide central aisle and the two smaller, and on the right of a lofty oaken screen that masked the west door, with the mellow light of a great rose-window falling on it, towered a huge Crucifix in black marble, upholding a white tortured Figure whose drooping thorn-crowned Head, like His hands and feet and side, dripped with crimson.... Patrine winced at the sight, and turned hastily away.
Now she was looking over the head of Sherbrand, who knelt before her upright and motionless,--at the High Altar, backed with a noble triptych, its three panels displaying the Annunciation, the Visitation, and the Nativity. A silver lamp depending by chains from the centre of the Sanctuary roof burned with a small steady flame before the Tabernacle--standing between tall tapers burning in gleaming candlesticks, and vases of huge white golden-anthered August lilies--hiding behind its broidered curtains and golden doors, the Ineffable Mystery.
"Come!" Sherbrand's whisper said, close at her ear as he rose up. She turned and followed him down a side-aisle. "Sit here!" he signed to her, pointing to a narrow bench. He waited until she was seated, laid his hat and stick beside her, gave her a grave smile, bent his knees once more, looking towards the High Altar and moved noiselessly away.
Turning her head to follow him with her eyes, Patrine saw that the large dark church was not as empty as she had supposed. Kneeling or seated figures of men and women were scattered here and there amongst the wilderness of empty pews. The serried rows of rush-bottomed kneeling-chairs in either side-aisle showed aggregations of people, ten or a dozen together, chiefly in the neighbourhood of certain narrow wooden doors appertaining to small structures that might be little chapels or vestries, set between groups of pillars in regular sequence down the length of the side-walls. Still following Sherbrand's figure with her eyes she saw him knock at one of the doors, wait as though for an answer, and enter. As the door swung towards her, she saw that it bore a name in gilt letters within an oval on the upper panel. Each of the doors, a questing glance satisfied her, bore a name.
Of course the little wooden chapels were confessionals. Was Confession the important business that necessitated Sherbrand's losing a train and foregoing the company of Patrine to the station, a favour so eagerly sought and so ardently received? Her red lips curled a little at the corners as she turned her face back towards the High Altar, rising within the low barrier of the red and white marble Communion-rail. So remote and pure and set apart with its tall, shining lights and gleaming vases of pure white lilies, its snow-white silk frontal embroidered with a golden ray-surrounded Chalice, its fair white linen Altar-cloth, with a running border of Old English lettering in dark rusty red:
"He had borne our Infirmities and Carried out
Sorrows. He was Wounded for our Iniquities.
He was Bruised for our sins."
The words seemed to have a physical as well as mental force and impressiveness. It was as though they swept from the high white Table through the fragrant, wax-lit stillness of the Sanctuary, winnowing the still, spicy air of the dark nave and the lighter side-aisles as with wide, powerful, unseen wings. And despite the presence of nearly a hundred people scattered about the great building, the stillness was extraordinary. It got on the nerves.
Almost awfully upon the nerves. For a long way behind her, where the shadowy dusk brooded thickest, and the white tortured Figure of the Crucified hung drooping from the great Cross of black marble against the background of the towering oak screen, it was as though the first great drops of a thunder-shower were falling, pat, pat, pat! upon the pavement below.
Merely a trick of imagination--and yet it tortured. One knew by sensations like these that one had been frightfully overstrained of late. One had done lots of things one regretted--several things one disliked to think of; one thing that made one hate oneself sometimes with a very fury of intensity, when one wasn't too busy hating him. But since he was drowned, one had felt it scarcely cricket to go on expending fierce resentment and savage disgust and acute loathing in that direction. One heaped it on the living of the two gross, sensual offenders. Oh God! when Sherbrand had said in that tone of triumph:
"I come to you clean!"
How inexpressibly one had abominated oneself. How one had shrunk against the side of the taxicab, pretending to look after wretched little decadent Wyvenhoe and the unquenchable Mrs. Mallison--feigning sudden absorption in the Piccadilly shop-windows, to escape those clear undoubting eyes that pierced one to the very soul. To be thought good when one was wicked, pure when one was the other thing; believed candid when one was a living lie. Ah!--that not only pierced but scorched.
If anybody, a month or so back, had asked Patrine: "Are you a Christian?" she would have retorted: "What are you playing at? Of course I am--I suppose!" Of late that conjectural Being she had called God had receded, faded, grown dimmer, and vanished. But here in the stillness, looking towards the Altar, she was conscious as those candle-flames went up like prayers from faithful souls, that Good and Evil were living warring Forces. You chose White or Black deliberately, and when Death came--it was anything but the end.
Her hair stiffened slightly on her scalp and a light shudder thrilled through her. She felt with a growing awe, and sense of dreadful certainty, that Someone was looking at her. And to relieve the insupportable tension she stretched out her hand, and took a squat, thick little book from the shelf below the seat in front of her. It was a copy of the Douai translation from the Latin Vulgate of the Bible, and there was a purple marker where she opened it, in the middle of the Book of Job.
"Power and terror are with Him...."
That was the first line that caught her eye. A little lower on the page came:
"Was it not Him that made life? Hell is naked before Him and there is no covering for destruction.... He stretched out the North over the empty place, and hangeth the earth upon nothing.
"He hath set bounds about the waters, till light and darkness come to an end....
"The pillars of heaven tremble and dread at His beck. By His power the seas are suddenly gathered together, and His Wisdom hath struck the proud one.
"His Spirit hath adorned the heavens ... and seeing we have heard scarce a little drop of His Word, who shall be able to withstand the thunder of His greatness?"
It was like a Voice speaking--a Voice of inconceivable magnitude. It made one go cold, asking oneself the question: What if sin were an insult to Him? A scrap of filth flung in the Face of One who created the atom, the protoplasm, the cell, and the bacillus, and built from these in His own Image, Man.
Sitting in the stilly duskiness the woman He had made shut her eyes and tried to envisage Him. He was not the God of the Curate's Confirmation-class, nor the God the Anglican Vicar of the West End Church preached about, but a Being the hem of whose garment extends beyond the confines of Space, and in whose lap lies Eternity. Infinite Goodness, infinite Love, infinite Purity, infinite Beauty, He could stoop to care for the little beings of His Workmanship so much, that for them He did not hesitate to sacrifice Himself in the Person of His Only Son. Did not love such as this make wilful sin an insult to Him in that Son's Person? Wasn't it--pretty rough on Our Saviour--to have poured out His Blood upon the Cross of Calvary as an atonement for the sins of men like dead von Herrnung, and women like Patrine Saxham, and know them still so beastly, so prurient, so base, so vile? ... It began to dawn upon Patrine, still possessed by that strange hallucination of the Blood that dripped heavily from the tortured Body on the great black Cross behind her, how it might be that evil wilfully committed, opened its Wounds afresh. Drove the thorns anew into the drooping Head of the Crucified, pierced once more the Heart, that inexhaustible fountain of love....
"O! all you that pass by ... attend and see if there be any sorrow like unto My Sorrow."
The words came cropping up through layers of sentences heard and forgotten, clearly as though a voice had spoken them at her side.
This afternoon the headlines of papers had shrieked of horrors. You remember that at seven o'clock in the morning two German Army Corps had poured into Belgium by the eleven strategic railways that provided for The Day. The vast grey-green flood of marching men, the huge python-like columns of machine-guns, the splendidly-horsed batteries of field artillery, the Brobdingnagian siege howitzers thundering behind their traction-engines, the miles of motor- and horse-drawn transport-waggons, carts, and lorries, blotted out the familiar features of the landscape, as, preceded by massed brigades of cavalry, with squadrons of Field Flying Service aeroplanes reconnoitring three thousand feet overhead, the hosts of Germany rolled down towards the banks of the Meuse.
Directly in line of them rose the fortified City of Liege, termed "the Birmingham of Belgium," holding in the suburb of Seraign, five miles distant from the city, the huge Cockerill machine-plant and foundry, one of the largest ironworks in the world. They had stayed three hours at the frontier station of Vise, a Belgium Custom House town of less than 4,000 inhabitants, where a few squadrons of Belgian Cavalry and the Belgian 12th Line Regiment, aided by some heroic peasants, farmers, and townspeople had risen up with desperate gallantry to oppose their inevitable advance.
They had written the sign-manual of the Hun upon the ashes of Vise in the blood of its massacred inhabitants. Frightfulness, the many-headed hydra, was uncaged and let loose ere they rolled on to Liege peeved by their three hours' intolerable delay. While I who write and you who read far from the sound of fusillades, or the crash of shells or the yells of peasants dying amongst the flames of burning houses, learned of these deeds from the shrilly clamorous headlines, and asked one another with raised eyebrows, in incredulous voices: "Can these hideous things possibly have been done?"
Patrine had no doubt that they had been done!--were being done even while she sat waiting in Sherbrand's church for Sherbrand. Did she not know von Herrnung? Were not his fellow-officers and the soldiers he and they commanded, lustful, brutal, cruel, rapacious, arrogant, and pitiless even as he? He was a Type--not the isolated example of a new species. It would not be easily stamped out; its dominating characteristics would write themselves upon a conquered race. Those outraged wives, those violated daughters of Belgium would live to see it reproduced in the living fruit of their humiliation. What honest man could bear to stoop over his wife's bedside and meet the eyes of the Enemy looking at him--from the face of a new-born child!
A rigor of horror seized upon her body and shook it. Her jaw dropped, her eyes closed as though they shrank and withered under their contracting lids. She slid from her seat and fell upon her knees helplessly. Her head sank forwards upon the hands that rose instinctively to hide her face. In the same instant Sherbrand's low voice speaking behind her turned the heart in her bosom to ice.
"Dearest--I am ready, that is if you are? My keeping you was unavoidable. I am going to Communion with my mother, before the Funeral Mass to-morrow, and I wanted to make my Confession first. Has the time seemed long?"
"Not long. Shall we go now?"
He bent the knee to the High Altar and moved with Patrine down the nave towards an altar dedicated to the Virgin Mother, that was on the south side of the church near the great west door. Wax tapers of several sizes burned in a brass stand beside the tiny altar-rail. Sherbrand lighted three tapers and placed them, felt in his waistcoat-pocket for a bit of silver and balanced it on the slotted top of the money-box too gorged with pennies to admit of the slender sixpenny bit. Then with a beautiful, devotional simplicity he knelt upon the narrow blue golden-starred cushion for a moment, looking up at the gracious veiled head that bent above.
But for the modernity of the tweed clothes, the pose of the athletic, lightly-built body would, with the mellowed light from the great rose window falling on the keen bronzed face and thick fair hair, have suggested a knight at prayer. In a moment he rose. They returned as they had come, passed through the chapter-house of the Sodality, and issued through the door into the garden. She said, as he triumphantly possessed himself of the dear white hand:
"Tell me, when you lighted and placed those three candles and knelt down--what did you intend--what was it for? A practical insurance against a railway-accident?"
The dull, ill-timed gibe was no sooner uttered than she sickened with self-contempt. For Sherbrand answered with direct simplicity:
"Well, no! Call my three candles a reminder that I have asked Our Lady's help and protection and guidance for three dear people. My father, my mother, and my wife that is to be. For myself I asked that I might never disappoint you. You don't know how I shall try to live up to your belief in me!"
"You dear boy!" Touched to the quick response of tears she could barely falter: "You're a million times too good for me, if only you knew!"
"I know this--that the wide world doesn't hold another woman like my woman! Why, Pat, the very sound of your voice lashes all the blood in me into big red roaring waves of love."
"'Big red roaring waves.' Oh, Alan!"
She laughed, driving back the hot salt tears that stung her eyelids. The taxi was waiting at the corner of Blount Street, patiently ticking out twopence. Sherbrand whistled and it approached them. But this time Patrine did not enter. She could not now drive to Waterloo. It was much, much too late. She refused even to be dropped anywhere. She infinitely preferred walking. It was quite a pleasant stroll from there to Harley Street.
So they wrung hands and looked in each other's eyes and parted. When the taxi vanished round the corner of Blount Street, the tall, gallantly-borne figure in the golden-braided hat and pale rose gown began to walk swiftly towards Grosvenor Square. Suddenly it paused, wheeled, and returned upon its paces, passed through the gate in the railings and disappeared into the church.
In bed that night in the chintz-hung room at Harley Street, Patrine, recalling the experience that had followed the yielding to that irresistible prompting, wondered if it had actually taken place, or were woven of the tissue of dreams.
Kneeling upon a bast matting-covered hassock behind the door of the narrow little wooden cell into which she had slipped as a tall, grey-haired officer in Service khaki passed out,--she had rested her elbows upon a narrow ledge before her and peered through a close grating of bronze wire at a figure dimly descried beyond.
The priest was white-haired and of small stature. A meagre ray of light falling from above upon the hands clasped over the ends of the narrow stole of violet-purple that hung loosely about his neck, showed them wasted and yellow-white and deeply wrinkled. By the testimony of the hands he was an old man. Something in the manner of her address must have struck him as unusual. She had not spoken six words in her quick, hot, stammering whisper before he lifted a hand and said authoritatively:
"Stop!"
And as she had arrested the rush of her words, he had continued, in a grave, dry voice, quite devoid of unction or sympathy, cautiously lowered and yet wonderfully distinct:
"You say that you wish to 'confide something' to me 'under the seal of Confession,' and you are not a Catholic!"
"No, I am not! I suppose I would be called--a sort of Christian, though." She said it haltingly. "Does my not being a Catholic prevent you listening to anything I ... want to say?"
The dry voice came back:
"I do not refuse to hear what you have to say. But Confession, Absolution, and Penance are Catholic Sacraments. I cannot extend the benefits of the Church to one who stands without her pale."
"I'm sorry! ... I suppose, I really haven't got the right to ask advice from you, or to expect you to keep anything--secret?"
There was a little old man's cough. The dry voice followed:
"I did not say that. As a priest, I am bound to give good counsel to those who ask it. And I promise you, also as a priest, to respect your confidence.... Now if you desire to go on--for I have several penitents waiting--I will ask you to do so. Be clear and truthful and brief. Mention no person by name. Let there be no exaggeration. Now begin! ..."
"It's like this..." And she had blurted out the ugly, sordid story, that in the plain, unvarnished narration grew uglier and more sordid still.
He had listened without the movement of an eyebrow or the twitch of a muscle. At certain points where she had deviated from the sheer fact by a mere hairsbreadth the dry little cough had interjected: "Think again!" When she touched upon the circumstances that had resulted in "another man's" offer of marriage:
"You have accepted this other?" he had asked, and followed her affirmative by saying, quietly, just as he had told her she was not a Catholic: "You have not told him of--what has taken place. Is he an honourable, upright man?"
"Very!"
"H'mm!" said the dry cough. "What is his religion?"
"He is a Catholic."
"H'mm! ... A devout Catholic?"
"He seems--awfully keen on his Church!"
A silence had followed, during which the beating of Patrine's heart and the singing of the blood in her ears had seemed to fill the clean little wooden place. Then:
"Do you intend to tell this keen Catholic," asked the merciless voice, "that you do not come to him--pure?"
"No! ... At least..." The heave of her bosom against the little shelf before the lattice made the dry wood quiver and creak. A deep sigh broke from her. The priest's voice continued:
"You have made it quite clear why you have applied to me. To be encouraged not to tell! But even for your own sake I advise you to make confession. Do you expect God's blessing upon a marriage that is--upon your side--a fraud?"
"Men aren't angels!" Patrine burst out rebelliously. "How do I know that he--Yes, I do know!"
His face had risen up before her, and his voice was in her ears saying with that note of gladness in it: "I come to you clean!" and shame and compunction choked her, as she added:
"He's straighter than I should have believed it possible for any man to be."
"H'mm!" The dry hacking old man's cough came again. He sniffed twice, sharply. Now he was speaking again.
"You have not known many--or any Catholic men before this one. Your doubt as to the existence of masculine purity proves with what type of persons you have hitherto mixed. For your own sake you will be wise to tell the truth to this gentleman. If you loved him you would tell him for his. Now you must leave. I have given you too much time as it is. Repeat after me as I dictate." He clasped the withered hands and began briskly: "Oh, my God----"
After a brief ineffectual hesitation, Patrine echoed him. He went on trailing after him a voice that stumbled and dragged:
"_Oh, my God! I am very sorry that I have offended Thee by the sin of fornication, and have yielded up my body to uncleanness, instead of keeping myself pure as Thou commandest. I beseech Thee for the love of Thy Son my Saviour Jesus Christ to bestow upon me the grace of a genuine sorrow for my sin; and while I implore that Thou wouldst mercifully spare me the ruin and disgrace I have merited by my own act, I faithfully promise Thee to profit by the bitter lesson I have learned. But if I find myself as the natural consequence of my wickedness----_"
"--of my wickedness----"
The dragging echo failed. A mist came before her eyes.
"Go on," said the stern voice from the other side of the grating. It went on dictating:
"But if I find myself as the natural consequence of my sinfulness about to be the mother of a child, I vow not to be guilty of any violence to the innocent. But to bear my bitter punishment meekly, as coming from Thy Hand. Amen."
She said the words. He blessed her with some such words as these:
"Now may God bless and forgive you, and bring your soul from darkness into His Light. Leave me now. Please shut the door."
She heard the dry little hacking cough again as she closed it after her. But she did not go away thinking him harsh and merciless. She had seen great shining tears dropping, dropping upon those withered hands.
*CHAPTER LII*
*KHAKI*
Remember how upon the great grey canvas of London, broadly splashed in with khaki, from the becoming dead-leaf of the Regular troops to the deadly ginger of the newly mobilised Reserve or the hideous mustard-yellow of the latest recruit to the newest Territorial unit--Recruiting posters of every shape, size, and method of appeal to patriotism, suddenly flared out, ranging from the immemorial red-and-blue printing on white to the huge pictorial hoarding-plaster in monochrome. Dash in as values the glow of re-awakened patriotism, the resounding silences in which Royal Messages to British Citizens and lieges were delivered by grave officials in scarlet gowns and curly white wigs, and the singing of the National Anthem by huge crowds gathered in front of Buckingham Palace, to cheer, over and over again the King, the Queen, and the Heir to the British Throne.
Recall how keenly-curious Britons densely thronged the neighbourhood of the Houses of Parliament, eager to ascertain the British attitude towards France and other Continental Powers; while immense aggregations of people blocked the entrance to Downing Street, surging outside the wrought-iron screens protecting Ministerial windows; congesting Whitehall until omnibuses proceeded at a snail's pace.
Revive the strange newness of things, the snap and tingle of seeing not only Royal Palaces and Government Offices, but vital places such as Arsenals, Docks, Railway, and Electric Power stations, Powder-magazines and Munition Stores closely guarded by men in tea-leaf or ginger-brown. Sickly the hot flush of things so new with the pale dread of ruin, the ugly rumours of Invasion. Shadow in broad and black, a panic on the Stock Exchange, the dizzying fall of prices on Continental Bourses, the record slump on Wall Street, the frenzied stampede of the run upon the Banks, the Proclamation from the steps of the Royal Exchange of the strange thing called by nearly everybody--anything but a Moratorium; as, for example, a Monatorial, a Monoroarium or Honorarium, and so on.
Who could ever forget the excitement attendant on the sailing of famous passenger and cargo-liners with quick-firers and Maxims nosing through steel shields abaft the lower bridge? How the Red Cross notified its surgeons, nurses, and ambulance-helpers to hold themselves ready for business, and a neat khaki rig-out that had puzzled us in several unfamiliar details, turned out to be the Service uniform of the Royal Flying Corps.
German and Austro-Hungarian Reservists of all classes, summoned home by the strident bellow of Fatherland, surged round their respective Consulates. Prince Cheraowski, Representative of Germany, having had his passports handed him, shrugged the shrug of a disgruntled man, lighted a cigarette, and took a farewell constitutional through St. James's Park. And, on the Declaration of War with Austria-Hungary a few days later, Count Lensdorff received his walking-ticket, and gracefully vanished from the scene. And from the hall-doors of one Embassy in Carlton House Terrace and another in Belgrave Square, British workmen, cheerfully whistling, unscrewed the massive brazen plates. Crowds watched the operation in phlegmatic silence; the single individual who loosed a "boo" being promptly bonneted by a disapproving majority, and moved on by the police, while the windows of the British Embassy at Berlin were being shattered by brickbats, as were those of divers British consulates and Legations throughout the Fatherland. On the mud, stones, and verbal filth lavished on their inmates, of the Yahoo-like usage undergone by Englishmen and Englishwomen, we may not dwell, but I do not think we are likely to forget.
Recall again, how vast public spaces carefully kept and tended by Committees and boards and Councils, became, as at the stroke of a wand, huge training camps of young, keen, healthy if pale-cheeked Britons in ill-fitting gingerbread or mustard-coloured clothes. How groups of unoccupied London houses, or large vacant stores, or the head-centres of the Y.M.C.A. in various districts, would suddenly overflow with bronzed and sturdy warriors of the Regular Forces, and as suddenly empty again. The platforms of railway termini, closely guarded and barred from the public, would be dotted with neat stacks of Lee Enfield rifles, while regularly-breathing sleepers in khaki pillowed on their packs, shielded by the peaks of their tilted caps from the blue-white electric glare, or the yellow dazzle of the morning sun. A whistle--a snort and clank of two big locomotives--and the platforms under the reverberating glass roofs would be empty again, under the dusty yellow sunshine, or the blue-white electric glare.
Remember all this to the daily accompaniment of those huge shrieking headlines, the trotting of innumerable iron-shod hoofs, the ceaseless rolling of iron-shod wheels, the clatter and vibration of huge motor-lorries, vans, and waggons commandeered for the use of the Auxiliary Transport (brilliantly painted in thousands of instances, and proclaiming in foot-long capitals the virtues of Crump's Curative Saline, or Bango's Extract of Beef), mingled with the steady tramp of marching men, all through the days and nights. By night you lay and listened to these sounds, mingled with the bleating of flocks of sheep, and the bellowing of herds of cattle, until the hoofs and wheels and marching boots mingled into the roar of one great ink-black, awful River, whose ice-cold woe-waters--sprung from some mysterious source--swept through our villages and towns and cities, carrying with them millions of lives, brute and human, towards the blood-red dawn of Death.
*CHAPTER LIII*
*FRANKY GOES TO THE FRONT!*
With the First Infantry Brigade of the First British Expeditionary Force went the First Battalion of the Bearskins Plain.
Exchanging with Ackroyd, "too sick a man for fighting" (who parted with several superfluous inches of appendix and convalesced in time to go out with the Second Battalion and meet a glorious end at Ypres), Franky was swallowed up in the vortex of Aldershot. 000, Cadogan Place saw him but once more before the roaring flood whirled him away, like a slim brown autumn leaf, to the Unknown.
His gift to Margot on the night of their parting was a silver elephant of truculent aspect, having ruby eyes and mother-o'-pearl tusks and a howdah on its back, accommodating a "Gladsome Days" pull-off kalendar.
"You're such nuts on mascots and gadgets, best childie, I thought I'd get you this beggar for a keepsake. Saw it in a shop in Bond Street. It goes like so!"--Franky demonstrated by sticking a penknife-blade under the liberal whack of leaves that had become obsolete since the First of January. "Rather a neat notion. Something appropriate for every day o' the week," he continued, indicating a rhymed distich appearing beneath the current date. This, the first of many utterances on the part of the Silver Elephant, ranging from the idiotically inappropriate to the appositely malign, ran as follows:
"Be very kind to Pussy-cat
And handle her with care:
You would not pull her by the tail
If her claws grew out of there!"
"Well, if that's the best this beast can do--" began Margot, sternly surveying the proboscidean. Then she softened, meeting Franky's disappointed eyes, and said it was a lovely present and she would always keep it on the table by her bedside. She and Franky were almost lovers again for the brief time that yet remained to them. She even endured without open resentment his continual references to the child.
"Take care of you both for my sake, won't you, Kittums? Of course, long before Christmas I hope to be back with you! But"--he tenderly crushed the little figure to him as he sat on the bedside holding it embraced--"but if by any old chance I get sent in--remember what kind of man I'd like my boy to be. Sanguine, ain't I?--on the point of his being a boy--putting a pink geranium in the front window before the house is built, but still----"
He laughed awkwardly, and brushed off a shining drop of moisture that splashed on the slender brown leather strap that marks the officer's caste. A third star showed on his khaki sleeve, but he had made no reference to it, and Kittums omitted to ask what it meant. He kissed her gravely on the eyes and lips and forehead, unwound the slender arms that clasped his neck, and gently laid her back upon the pillows. Then with: "Good-night and God bless you!" he went quietly out of the room. The hall-door shut and a servant put the chain up, and the waiting car slid away to the Tower. For "I'm to kip down at the old shop for to-night," Franky had explained, "and shepherd five hundred strengthy foot-sloggers--fat as prize bullocks every one of 'em!--to Nowhere in Particular in the morning."
Margot cried a little when the hall-door shut, and then fell soundly asleep among her big pillows. Waking as a ray of five o'clock sunshine penetrated between the blue-green silk blinds and the lacy curtains, to realise that Something had gone out of her life.
Something wilful, petulant Kittums had not valued until the hall-door had shut behind it. Something that--crawling, shuddering thought!--might never return. She sat up in bed, hugging her knees and staring into a Future without any Franky in it, a tragic little picture against the background of the big frilled pillows, her great dark eyes wide and wild under her tumbled gold brown hair-waves, her paleness enhanced by the rose-silk night-sheath, a maelstrom of thought, emotions, apprehensions, terrors, whirling in the humming-bird brain.
The ray of sunshine presently touched the face of the electric clock and elicited a malicious twinkle from the ruby eyes of the Silver Elephant. Remembering her promise, Kittums put out a hand, pulled off the paper-slip bearing the date of the previous day and read:
"May All Your Hours
Be Bright As This!"
*CHAPTER LIV*
*OFFICIAL RETICENCE*
The First British Expeditionary Force was in France. Thus much after considerable delay was vouchsafed us. Some studiously unenlightening Field post-cards, some industriously Censored private letters, some Press narratives and photographs were permitted us, of Highlanders, Guards, Scots Greys, Middlesex, Worcestershires, Gordons, and others, brought in upon the midnight tide and debarking from huge transports at Boulogne and Havre and Rouen, under burning blue skies and a sizzling sun. The illustrated weeklies and the cinematograph showed them, with battery after battery of R.F.A. and R.H.A. and R.G.A., Ammunition parks and columns, and Engineers with pontoons on motor-waggons, and Field Ambulance units, endlessly streaming into or out of the canvas cities erected on the sites of the old Napoleonic camps. Showed also Comic Relief, in the familiar form of British Tommy, grinningly appreciative of the welcome accorded him by command of the French Republic; meekly submitting to be plucked bare of buttons and badges, by sirens who sought these with offerings of chocolate, wine, and fruit. This meagre pabulum we champed, possessing our souls perforce, in patience; sitting before the great iron curtain of official reticence that had glided down into its grooves as though it never meant to go up again.
