That Which Hath Wings 13That Which Hath Wings (part 13)
18
Literature · Romance
That Which Hath Wings 13
That Which Hath Wings (part 13)
DehanEnglish
Then, with the whiffling swoop of the Jabberwock--the Food Scare was upon us. Letters showered from venerable maiden aunts in remote country districts, describing economies practised by our great-grandmothers in 1801 and 1814. Hot-eyed friends buttonholed one and whispered of Famine that was coming, and pressed crumpled pamphlets, dealing with Food Values, into one's unwilling hand. The Specie Scare came next, rousing the most phlegmatic to frenzied indignation. What! In lieu of the smooth plump British sovereign and half-sovereign welcomed in every corner of the civilised world, must we perforce accept the "magpie," or One Pound note, and the "pinky" or ten-shilling bill!
People frothed and vituperated. We were all frothing, what time the stocky Kalmuck-faced von Kluck with 130,000 Germans of the Kaiser's First Army came rolling down in overwhelming force upon the First and Second British Army Corps. Eighty thousand men of our blood holding the line of the canal from Conde to "a place called Mons" with, as the flanking angle, another place called Binche.
The 5th French Army was in full retreat from Namur and Charleroi; borne back by the resistless pressure of von Buelow, Chief of the Second Army of Attila, 250,000 strong. The 4th French Army was retiring before von Hahsen and a third tidal wave of armed Germanity--humping its huge snaky columns after the fashion of the looper caterpillar--along the menaced line of the Meuse.
The Krupp and Skoda motor-howitzers that had crushed Belgian fortresses like eggshells were coming into position; the circling enemy aeroplanes were directing with smoke-rockets the uncannily excellent shooting of the German Artillery. We who thought we had no more than a couple of Army Corps in front of us, and possibly a Division of Cavalry, were beginning to realise the ugly truth. As the frightful blizzard of iron and flame broke upon the British batteries, and the shallow trenches made in desperate haste and crowded with the flower of the British Army, began to lose the shape of trenches, to melt--to become mere scratches in the earth, littered with human scrap....
We did not suspect, we never dreamed of grave disaster to our Forces, though some of us were strangely haunted by well-loved looks and dear familiar touches before the Iron Curtain of official silence lifted that quarter-inch and the thick red stuff oozed slowly underneath.
An hour or two before the Great Awakening, Margot had 'phoned asking Patrine to come round. Arriving, her friend found Kittums sorely exercised in spirit. The housekeeper, in tears, had sought an interview on the Food Question and entreated her lady to lose no time in provisioning the domestic citadel with Flour, Sugar, Bacon, Tea, Coffee, Potatoes, Cereals, and tinned meats against the approaching days of famine. She begged to submit a List. It would be well to lose no time for all the Banks were breaking. She felt it her duty to mention the fact.
"And so I told Wallop to dry her poor old eyes," explained Kittums, "and I'd go and buy up the Army and Navy Stores as soon as I'd had a look in at what Franky calls the Dross House, just to ask the Manager, as man to man, if there's any chance of the Bank going biff? Your adorable Lynette and your Uncle Owen may say that hoarding things to eat isn't playing the game and all that. Well! When you're too sharp-set to think Imperially, come round here and I'll grub the lot. How is your Flying Man?"
"Doing some Army Coaching. Out Farnborough way," said Patrine. "I've not set eyes on him twice since that Club lunch."
"When Franky cottoned to him so," said Margot. "You've not had a scrimmage?"
"God forbid!"
"Engaged people always squabble."
"Alan and I don't," asserted Patrine.
The car came round and they drove to the Bank. Most Banks had enjoyed a Run and a few had experienced the combination of a Run with a Panic. There had been a severe Run on Margot's bank. Now it was over and a huge majority among the people who formed queues at the doors and crowded the counters were paying in the deposits they had nervously withdrawn. Relieved in mind, Kittums cashed a cheque of magnitude, and the respectable Williams turned the car in the direction of the Stores.
On this Day of the Great Awakening, Woman stormed the departments. Kittums and Patrine plunged into the scrum, to emerge after having achieved a modified success. Lady Norwater's explanation, that she required provisions in wholesale bulk because of a yachting-trip she meditated, had been hit upon by several thousands of other terminological inexactitudinarians. The mounds of bacon, the castled tins of tea and coffee, the sacks of sugar, rice, and cereals, the raisins, currants, and tinned comestibles--had been nearly all picked up by these knowing early risers. Still enough had been secured to relieve the mind of Mrs. Wallop, and scare the wolf from the threshold of 00, Cadogan Place.
"Beg pardon, m' lady." The sedate face of the respectable Williams looked over the last Brobdingnagian parcel transferred to his embrace. "I think if your ladyship 'as no objection it would be better to close the car."
"If it will close," began Margot, looking with interested speculation at the mountainous accumulation of bulky, whitey-brown string-tied bags and packages upon the front seat.
"FOOD 'OGS!" bellowed a man in a rusty bowler hat and soiled shirt sleeves, so suddenly and powerfully that Kittums jumped.
"Garn 'ome!" vindictively shrieked a fiery-faced female. "Greedy-guts! Yah! Git along 'ome!"
"FOOD 'OGS!" reiterated the Stentor in shirt sleeves, backed by an approving murmur from a crowd of dingily-clad men and women gathered upon the pavement right and left of the imposing entrance to the Stores.
"Now then, move on 'ere!" came from a policeman, and the crowd began to dissolve, with lowering glances. Motorcars were moving away, carrying their owners embedded in groceries. Others were driving up to the door.
"Move on, please!" repeated the Man in Blue.
"Not till I've got rid of these things. Call the Commissionaire. Tell him my name and number!--say the orders were given by mistake! ..." Margot went on, when the Alpine range of parcels had melted away under the combined efforts of chauffeur and Commissionaire: "Poor old Wallop will wail, but I've purged myself of the contempt of being a Food Hog. Great Snipe! to think of deserving to be called such an awful name. It made me feel all of seventeen stone, with a row of chins like saddle-bags!" She pinched her own dainty chin between a tiny finger and thumb. "Still, I've enjoyed the scrum," she went on, as the car slid towards Piccadilly. "It's bucked me splendidly! I shall know what to do now, when I want to lay my ghosts. You know one of them"--the little fingers twitched in Patrine's--"what's coming in November. The other started haunting me only a few days back." All the new-won colour had died out of the small oval face and the great dark eyes were tragic in their terror. "You're too good a pal to laugh. Well, then--I'll own up. Franky's my latest ghost of all!"
"But you have heard? You have had letters?"
The answer was strangled between a laugh and a sob.
"Letters. Three post-cards from Somewhere in France and a queer epistle all squares of blacking. Not much between--except that he is tophole and coming Home at Christmas and sends love to us both! That's Franky's way. He always talks as--" A shudder went through the little figure, and shadows were about the great wild eyes, and the pale lips quivered:
"Poor little Kittums!" said Patrine's big warm baritone. She slipped an arm tenderly about the little thing. Who could have dreamed that Kittums could care so about Franky--or any other man. "Are you worrying so badly, my dinkie?" she went on, soothingly: "Try not. It isn't wise!"
"I'm not worrying," came the weary answer. "I'm being haunted--that's all. Day and night since it started, his hands are on me and his eyes are looking at me. When I sleep, I'm wandering through desolate places looking, always looking for him! And thousands of other selfish, silly women are being haunted in the same way. Oh, Pat, be always kind when you're married to your Flying Man!"
"When!"--Patrine echoed. But what of sorrow or doubt her tone conveyed was lost upon Margot. She had told her own grief, and the telling had relieved her. Like the child with the kissed bruise, she could prattle of other things. She was twittering and chirping in the gay little voice Franky knew so well, as Williams, the respectable, turned smoothly into Short Street. There was a dense block at the corner by the Aldebaran Hotel, and amidst the swishing of the motor-engines and the fidgeting of plump carriage-horses, loathful of the sudden release of the pungent exhaust from escape-valves under their noses--a little piece of dialogue between two Cyprians on the near sidewalk drove home to both the occupants of the car.
One Cyprian was well-to-do, past thirty-five and expensively caparisoned for conquest, from the tall feather topping her stove-pipe hat and her burnished wig of Angora goat-hair, to her silk stockings of liberally-open pattern and the tips of her high-heeled, buckled shoes. Her hard eyes under their painted brows took critical stock of the other, younger woman, whose make-up could not hide ill-health, and whose flaunting fineries were the worse for wear.
Said Hard Eyes, indicating with a jerk of her powdered double chin, a procession moving down Piccadilly Circus-wards--a publisher's catchpenny advertisement of "WEEP NO MORE, MOTHERS!" ingenious in its employment of robust-looking matrons as bearers of the sandwich-boards plastered with posters of rose-colour and gold:
"You could give some of the swell West End ladies a tip or two, I reckon, Lallie, about that Purple Dreams dope?"
"Honest to God, I could! But I wouldn't!" The haggard eyes leapt viciously out of their languor. "Let 'em run up against it--same as me! Me that went all the way to Brussels to get the new treatment. Great Scott! When I came to I was black and blue and green all over. And my face! It was a fair scream!" She threw an appraising side-glance in a shop window. "No! My skin'll never be what it used, I reckon."
"But the"--the hard eyes between the elder woman's blued lids were hideously significant--"the Trouble, eh?"
"The Trouble"--Lallie's still girlish shoulders shrugged.--"Oh, that's all right! I heard no more of it! There's the one comfort. Good-bye, ducky. I got to meet somebody at the Cri."
"Well, better luck!" And as the block broke and the car moved on, the women nodded and parted. Margot and her friend Patrine did not look at each other as the car stopped before the Club.
A glance showed the vestibule crowded, the second pair of swing-doors thudded momentarily as members and their guests passed on into the Club rooms, without relieving the congestion that fresh arrivals renewed. Some doors above, a piano-organ in charge of two men was jolting out the last bars of the Russian National Anthem. One of the men, olive-skinned, grey-haired, and dressed in threadbare black, sang the words with perfunctory fervour in a cracked tenor voice. As the last chord banged out and the organist jerked the changing-lever over, and the Marseillaise summoned jangling echoes of its lyrical frenzy from the pavement and the surrounding walls, Patrine, meeting Sherbrand's eyes over the crowded heads of people, knew a sudden shock of apprehension in the strangeness of their regard.
For day and night since that strange, impulsive visit she had made to the Confessional--"You must tell him. It is your duty to tell him!" had sounded in her ears. She set her teeth and determined that she would never tell him, none the less knowing that the revelation would be made. A Power infinitely stronger than her woman's will was bearing upon it. Her treasure was in peril, her fairy-gold at any moment might turn to withered leaves at a breath from her own mouth.
*CHAPTER LV*
*NEWS OF BAWNE*
"Pat!--what luck!"
Sherbrand was standing before her, tall and lean and masterful, saluting her with the touch of three fingers to a soldierly forage-cap with three buttons, set jauntily atilt on the broad tanned brow.
Ah! the delight of seeing the cold grey glance warm into sea-blue, the lean, eagle-face flash into smiles. For a little while yet he was hers, she told herself, as the hard hand gripped on hers that answered the swift fierce pressure, and her blood that the sickly chill of fear had stagnated, whirled on its crimson circle singing for joy. And then--a second glance, sweeping from the top to the toes of the tall manly figure, stopped the song.
"Alan! You--in khaki!"
"I suppose so," he said a little clumsily, echoing thousands of other men. "It's the universal wear just now, isn't it? We fellows must make good while we can--and we're all of us joining. Even Macrombie--you can't have forgotten Macrombie--has got his rating, and is acting a P.O.T. on a Destroyer in the North Sea."
Do you see the dour drunkard standing up, under the eye of the smart young inspecting Fleet Surgeon, naked save for the leather bootlace that held a battered silver locket round his harsh and swarthy scrag.
"Your age? ..."
"Ye micht ca' me forty," said the subject, with caution.
"I might, but I'd be a liar!" said the Fleet Surgeon, "so try again, my man!"
"Ye micht pit twa to the forr-ty," came rumbling from the hairy chest.
"And tack eight on to that," thus the Fleet Surgeon, tucking the hooked ends of the stethoscope into his ears, and deftly applying the microphone. "And then I'd be wide of the actual! Breathe deeply, will you!" The effort provoked a volley of coughs sounding like half-bricks pitched against the sides of an empty cistern and the Fleet Surgeon shook his head.
"Hough--hough--hough!--why didna' ye--hough! lat weel alane?" gasped Macrombie, with eyes blazing hell-fire through the moisture engendered by the cough. "Dinna ye ken I'll never no' be wanting to breathe deeply whaur ye're needing to send me? There is nae room whatever for lung-play oot o' the ordinar'," he added scornfully, "aboard ane o' thae kittle, cranky, tinpot Destroyers!"
"Hold out your hand!" commanded the arbiter of Destinies. He contemplated the extended member, wavering and fluttering like the indicator-needle on the dial of an atmospheric pressure-gauge. "Pretty wobbly, what?" he commented to the owner with the sarcastic inflection that advertised a keen advocate of Temperance.
"Man, O! man!" broke from Macrombie in a harsh rattling whisper, desperate appeal flashing in his burnt-out eyes, "you that are young enough to be my son, tak' me or leave me, ane or the tither--but shame me nae mair!"
Telegraphists were sorely needed, so Macrombie of the racking hoast and the shaky hand was passed as fit for Service, and duty rated as Petty Officer Telegraphist aboard one of the contemned tin-pots.
The Crown and winged double-thunderbolt must have nerved the arm they came back to. For, on the day of the Battle of Jutland, when a point-blank salvo from an enemy cruiser wrecked the bridge and searchlight platform, carrying away the forward mast and funnel of Macrombie's particular tin-pot, and men in respirators were fighting the smothering fumes of the fire caused by German shells of the incendiary description, a dour, stark man whose clothes were alight and burning on him, stuck grimly to his post among the wreckage of the shattered Wireless room, sending out the message last dictated by the officer who lay dead across the blistering steel plating--for the short circuit set up by the smashed searchlight had created its own separate conflagration, and the electricity was "running out of everything like oil."
When the tin-pot heeled over, and, having duly buried her steel chest and secret documents, went down with colours flying in a smother of oily steam, men who were saved on the rafts told this tale of Macrombie, who sleeps well, after Life's thirsty fever, at his post in the Destroyer's battered Wireless cabin, on the deep-ridged, sandy bottom of the wild, shallow North Sea.
Patrine felt her heart crushed as in the grip of a cold steel gauntlet. Her apprehensions had not been unfounded. She and Alan were to be parted, if not as she had feared.
"I--suppose I ought to congratulate you--" Her unwilling eyes admired the tall manly figure in the plain workmanlike uniform. The buttonless tunic with its Lancer plastron, the riding-breeches of ampler cut than the cavalryman's, the high spurless boots of supple brown leather, and the belt that carried a revolver and no sword. "What--what are you in?" she asked draggingly, and he answered with a smile and a flash of his grey eyes:
"I hope I'm in for some of what's going on!"
"How glad you are!"
"Rather. I should think so! Now that they've let me into the Royal Flying Corps as a T.S.L. Look at my wings!" He touched the white outspread pinions on the tunic-breast with a reverent finger-tip and went on pouring out his story without a break. "It's cost me some badgering of High Officials of Military Aeronautics at Whitehall, and a lot of time wasted in baby tests. Squad drill, Harris tube, bomb-dropping, air-signalling, Webley and Scott practice, and so on. Now I'm teaching trick-flying to Army aviators from 4.30 A.M. till 11 P.M. The Powers that Be have taken over the Flying Schools--Durrant's Cafe is our Officer's Mess now. You should see old Durrant in his glory as Head Waiter. And Mrs. D--" His white teeth flashed as he laughed.
"And they have known of this"--she nodded at the eagle-wings--"while I have been kept in ignorance! How long?"
"Not quite a fortnight. Don't be unreasonable, dear!"
The new tone stung. Did a yellow star upon the cuffs and shoulder-straps and a pair of white wings on the left breast mean so much to him that her just claims upon his confidence seemed wanting in reason now? Anger and resentment choked her as he added:
"I am here now, as it happens, because I'm crossing the Channel to-morrow at peep o' day." Something in her pale face made him add: "Don't worry!--I'm likely to be back again by nightfall. That's what I've rushed in here to tell you, though I've a man in tow, a Wing Commander of the French S. Ae. Hot from the Front and just landed at Hendon. I had to take him in my car to his Embassy, and now I've got to find him a room at an hotel. When I've done it I'm coming back here to talk to you. Where on earth has my man got to? Why, there he is, talking to Lady Norwater. The little chap with the grey moustache and the gold-banded kepi."
"I am honoured by Madame's gracious remembrance," the person indicated could be heard protesting, during an instant's lull in the Babel of voices round. "But my own--a thousand pardons! is less accurate."
"Oh!" Margot expostulated, "but you can't have forgotten. That Sunday of the Grande Semaine--when you were in the Bois, timing a Flying Officer who was testing an English invention--a sort of a----"
"But assuredly, Madame!" His quick nod and the gesture of his gloved hand summoned up the scene vividly. "I remember, but perfectly, though much water has rolled under the bridges since that day. And Milord--Madame's husband?"
"He's at the Front," Margot explained, "wherever the Front is!"
"Unfortunately at the moment," returned the suave voice, "the Front is everywhere. It is easy to find without binoculars. Adieu, Madame. Merci bien de la souvenir si gracieuse, dites mes amities a Monsieur." And in another moment he arrived beside Sherbrand, exclaiming with his vivacious shrug and gesture: "My faith, my friend, your London Cercle des Dames is a veritable Paradise of Mahommed. Now in Paris, at least before the War--instead of ten thousand houris to every true Believer, one counted at least three Adams to every Eve. But I observe your search has been successful. Will you not present me to Mademoiselle your fiancee?"
And the dapper middle-aged Wing Commander in the gold-banded kepi, whose dark plain uniform displayed the gold badge of the Service Aeronautique under the Cross of the Legion of Honour, was introduced as Captain Raymond by an off-hand young Briton who comprehended not in the least the immense condescension that had prompted the request.
"Sapristi!" thought Raymond, as Patrine gave him her large hand and assured him in her big warm voice that she was frightfully pleased to meet a friend of Alan's.--"A magnificent type of the human female animal to have paired with this bluff, simple English boy. Part femme du monde, part romping hoyden, part cabotine, she should have been a Duchesse of the old Napoleonic regime, or at least the effect that lies behind a cause celebre of the Paris Law Courts of modern days. And she will be expected by this honest fellow to live in a stucco villa at Kensington or the Crystal Palace, and bear and rear his children, and live and die in all the deadly respectability of the British middle-class milieu!"
But he made his beautiful bow and murmured some civil phrases. In the spring, at the Hendon Flying Grounds of M. Fanshaw, he, Raymond, had been interested to meet the friend of Mademoiselle. Had been profoundly impressed by the displayed inventions of a young man so gifted as aviator and engineer. Had had the good fortune subsequently to obtain the consent of his own Chiefs of the S. Ae. F. to a test of an invention--the value of which had been hall-marked by the approbation of Messieurs les Allemands. True, M. Sherbrand had been the victim of their unscrupulosity. But Fortune, who knew? might be kinder in the near future. This War so grievous, so brutal, so deplorable, waged by the Prussian against Civilisation and Progress, would open up not only le metier des armes, but countless other avenues of prosperity to thousands of ardent and gifted young men. Like M. Sherbrand. To whom Raymond said with an authoritative glance of his blue eye: "My friend, we keep your auto waiting at the door!"
"Ah, but stay!" Patrine began, with a sense of hatred towards the well-used little Ford runabout standing in much grander company by the kerb outside the Club: "do stay and lunch and smoke and tell us things about the War, won't you?"
"A thousand thanks, but impossible, Mademoiselle!"
Raymond shrugged, conscious that her look of disappointment was for Sherbrand, and pleaded fatigue as an excuse.
"For these are iron times, Mademoiselle," he went on in his smooth, musical accents, "and we who live in them are unfortunately of flesh and blood. When the War is done perhaps there will again be social pleasures like the lunch you were so kind as to offer me. That I am tempted to accept I will not conceal from you. I have not eaten since I flew from France at la pointe du jour--one of the smallest of the little hours of this morning, and then I broke fast on two fingers of little red wine, and a hunch of soldier's bread."
"You mean to say you're fresh from flying the Channel?"
"Crossing the Channel came near the end of my journey, Mademoiselle. I should have arrived earlier"--he shrugged indifferently--"had not some German aviators caused delay."
"Oh-h!" Her vexation passed like a breath from a mirror. Her long eyes danced with delight under her hat-brim. Her breath came quick, her red lips curled, and a sweet faint pink showed under her creamy skin. "You're a knight of the skies hot from a fray with two flying dragons--and you were going without saying a word! What do you think we Englishwomen are made of?"
"Very desirable flesh, some of you, at least, Mademoiselle," occurred to Raymond, but he suppressed the equivoque and answered with professional brevity:
"Mademoiselle, I regret there is but little to tell you. The enemy possesses an aerial organisation of great effectiveness which is being chiefly employed in the killing of harmless civilians and the destruction of unfortified towns. But small success has hitherto attended his efforts in the Channel. Your British Expedition was conveyed across the water without the loss of one piou-piou, or any damage received by the explosion of a German bomb. As for the German aviators of whom I speak, their attitude towards myself and my pilot was modest. Flying their double-seated military Taubes, of which the wings and tail resemble those of the dove after which they have been named, they pursued our biplane half-way from Calais to Dover before deciding to attack."
"Then--" She hesitated, softly clapping her palms together and dimpling like a big child over the telling of a new fairy tale.
"Then one climbed, possessing the advantage of a powerful engine, and dropped a bomb from a height of some 600 metres which exploded without hitting us and went to the bottom of the sea. While the second aviator, who was armed with a repeating-carbine, wounded my pilot so severely that it was only by a miracle of endurance he preserved consciousness long enough to land without a crash. So I left him at Dover and--with a pilot mechanic from the Air Station, completed my passage, descending at Brooklands at twelve demie."
"Was your pilot hurt very badly? Will he be able to fly back to France?"
"Mademoiselle, being a pious Catholic, he has already flown to Heaven."
"He is dead.... And you can joke!" Patrine reproached him. His face was very wrinkled as he smiled.
"Mademoiselle, if a soldier could not jest at Death upon occasion, Life for a soldier would be impossible! Of verity, the loss of a good pilot-aviateur is not a thing to joke about, but fortunately I have your friend to fill his place."
"Alan! You must not--I will never consent to it!"
All taken aback, her colour banished, she fixed Sherbrand with blazing imperative eyes. He reddened to the hair and his mouth shut firmly. For the first time there was a clash of wills between the pair.
"Alan, why didn't you ask me?"
He was redder than ever.
"Because it wasn't for you to say. It is an order from my Chiefs--don't you understand?"
She did not care that the French officer was smiling. She would have liked to have struck him in his merrily-crinkled face. Wretch! to have blurted the truth at her that Alan had hidden. What was he saying:
"Permit, Mademoiselle, that I make my adieux. I go to secure an apartment where I may repose myself." He looked at Sherbrand, saying in his cool tone of authority: "The Aldebaran,--that is in the next street and a good hotel, is it not so? A little sleep will not come amiss after a cutlet and a demi-bouteille. And whilst I eat we will settle our affaires. Eh, mon lieutenant?"
His gloved hand took Sherbrand neatly by the elbow. He was skilfully steering him towards the doorway when Patrine, white and flaming, placed herself in their path.
"My affairs come first!" she was beginning.
"Shut up!" came from Sherbrand, in an exasperated aside whisper. "My duty comes before you--or anything in the world. It should come first for you if you cared a damn for me!"
No one but Raymond had overheard the curious, fierce colloquy. She felt literally scorched by the hot look of anger. She knew an agony like the tearing of the tissues of the flesh when Sherbrand passed her and went out with that gloved hand of authority upon his arm.
"Women are the devil!" he thought bitterly, as he opened the door of the runabout Ford to admit the French Staff Officer. "She'd had a shock in being told the news so suddenly; but to ballyrag me--to make me look such a thundering idiot before him!"
He swung the crank with violence and wrenched angrily at the levers when he took the driving-seat. A gloved hand patted his arm, and Raymond's voice said in his ear:
"Bah! You are chagrined, my friend, because a handsome woman has made you a little drama. Think no more of it! I have forgotten, for my part." He added, as they got out at the Aldebaran: "I propose to detain you but a little while, mon ami. When we have completed arrangements for the start to-morrow, you will be free to return and make your peace with Mademoiselle."
"Thank you, sir. She was rattled at my telling her so suddenly about my Commission," said Sherbrand, still beclouded. "Women are all like that, I suppose?"
"Except in France," said the agreeable voice of Raymond, "where the love of Country is stronger in our women than the love of lover or even of child. It was so before 1870. They have remembered through the centuries, as their sisters of Britain have not. They--the women of England are patriotic--oh yes! but patriotism is not yet a religion to them. It will cost millions of lives, and of blood an ocean to kindle that flame within their souls. Then, they also will hold the bayonet to the grindstone with their soft white hands and say: 'Become sharp, to drink the blood of Germans!' And they will mend the soldier's ragged breeches and clean the soldier's dirty rifle, and when they do they will not be less womanly. No, by my faith! nor less beloved by men. Try one of these. You will not find them too bad."
He offered Sherbrand a cigarette and took a light from him as they stood under the Aldebaran's tall Corinthian portico.
"One should always be accurate. When I told you that in France there lived no woman who was not patriotic, I was in error. Such a woman existed since three or four days."
He blew out a puff of smoke and watched its mounting spiral. Then he resumed:
"She was very young, very pretty, the bride of a month, and passionately enamoured. When her husband received orders to proceed with his Regiment of Chasseurs to the Belgian Front, she made him a scene of desperation. She would do this and that mad thing if he did not take her. Then she became calmer. She had exacted a promise from her doting cavalryman. She should visit him at the Front at a suitable opportunity. She chose her own moment, my faith!--and what a moment! She appeared in her husband's quarters in the French cavalry camp near Antoineville when the Germans were attacking Dinant. When the Cavalry Division of the Prussian Guards, and the Cavalry of their First Division, with some infantry battalions and machine-gun companies crossed the Meuse, and we were to attack, she was lying in his arms, the little idiot! He told her to go and she would not. Then he entreated her--a fatal error that!"
The cigarette was burning crookedly, forgotten between Raymond's fingers.
"Then he commanded her. She laughed, and kissed him. He gave back the kiss, drew his revolver and shot her dead. Then he ran out--in time to mount and wheel to his place as second in command of his squadron, before the Regiment swept on to the charge. Fate was kind to him. He charged like a Centaur, and died like a soldier of France the Beloved. Tell the story to Mademoiselle Saxham. She is magnificently handsome, but forgive me! not a patriot. And a woman without patriotism is--an altar without a Sacred Host and a lamp without a flame."
They went into the hotel. When the Frenchman had secured a quiet bedroom on the fourth floor, and intimated that no German was to serve him, they went together into the dining-room.
"Pfui! It smells of soot, and petrol, and drainage, this London air of yours," said Raymond, as he chose a table in a quiet corner. "You will eat with me? No! Then smoke and share my wine." He ordered cutlets, petit pois, a sweet omelette, and a bottle of Beaujolais, and, filling his own glass and one for Sherbrand, touched brims gaily and said with a smile: "To France and her Allies, Victory! On earth," a clink, "by sea," a clink, "under the sea," another clink, "and in the Air!"
He clinked three times, and emptied the glass thirstily. Sherbrand asked:
"Was the battle near Dinant a big affair?"
"Not big." He broke a roll and munched bread. "Not on the grand scale. A spectacle tres interessante, regarded from the--archaic point of view. An example of the ancient mode de bataille that will be dead as the Dodo in three months. Chasseurs a cheval and German Imperial Guard Regiments charging and meeting with shocks like thunder. Much slaughter. So fierce was the onslaught upon our side that the Germans were driven back across the Meuse. Many missed the bridge and were drowned. One French regiment followed them in pursuit for several kilometres. They were led by the man of whom I have told you. A glass to his memory--and hers!"
They touched full glasses and drank. Raymond went on.
"My Flying Centre was near Maubeuge on the 16th. Some escadrilles of my command were engaged that day near Dinant. My faith! those cotellettes are slow in arriving." He munched more bread, and his blue eyes narrowed smilingly. "We had only the little bombs we used in Morocco, but yes!--we did some good work with the balles-bon. Flying low, at ordered distances--for to make War by Air successfully the science of tactics must assist the aviator.... What says your great Field Marshal, who has bent his neck to the collar-work of Administration--who has conjured an Army of trained soldiers out of your shops and counting-houses, and playing-fields,--and will make another and another when the time comes?"
Sherbrand quoted the words uttered by the great voice now quenched for ever in the bitter waters of the North Sea.
"Until aviators learn to fly, manoeuvre, and attack in regular formation, the Fifth Arm will remain a useless limb."
"Tonnerre de Dieu! but that goes to the point," said Raymond, "straight and sharp as a thrust from his sword. If we possessed that man we should make use of him. He should be Marshal of France, or President or Emperor--all we should ask of him would be to lead us. Notr' Joffre would not be jealous--they would agree like the hilt and the hand. But I was telling you of an attack by the flechette.... You may imagine how the Uhlans loved that rain of steel. It changed the retreat to a rout. Only it spoiled so many German horses. Right through the man, you understand, into the animal! ... Sieves on four legs are useless as Remounts for French Chasseurs."
"And the German Field Flight?" Sherbrand interrogated.
"Their Fifth Arm was represented," said Raymond, sipping his burgundy, "by many Taubes and Aviatiks armed with the machine-gun and some ordinary bombs of schrapnel,--also a dirigible of 'Parsifal' type dropping big bombs. We were hampered in our offensive by a prejudice which does not trouble the Germans. To throw bombs upon friend and foe alike--that is not our idea of War. It annoyed me, and I wasted on that flatulent brute of a 'Parsifal' all my remaining flechettes and little Morocco bombs. Aha, the cotelettes!"
A waiter set them before him. He tucked his napkin under his chin, and helped himself, and said:
"Thus, though I had damaged her steering-gear and riddled her outer envelope, and the Flying Pig wallowed in difficulties below me, I could not pursue the advantage I had got. When the pilot of an Aviatik launched himself to the rescue, all the ammunition of my carabine was exhausted. I had one cartridge left in my automatic revolver, and not a single bomb with which to return the compliments of the German's mitraille. My petrol-tank had been perforated. My single bullet missed him. The duel was too unequal, so I withdrew from the field, leaving him to cavalier the Flying Pig. We may meet again upon terms more equal, when French military aviators fight with machine-guns. And now to business. It concerns your gyroscopic stabiliser, the patent of which my Chiefs desired to buy for the use of our Service Aeronautique. You demanded, according to M. Jourdain's statement, L8,000 and a royalty for the world-patent. We will buy it of you outright for L12,000. Is it agreed?"
Sherbrand straightened in his chair, and said, looking the other squarely in the eyes:
"No, sir, thank you! You see, though the War Office wouldn't have anything to say to me----"
"It occurs to you that now you may find a market for your invention?" To the devil with this smug young British tradesman! thought Raymond behind his knitted brows. "Come!" he said. "Another proposal. Will you make and supply us with your hawk-hoverer? Or sell us the right to manufacture a thousand for the sole use of the S. Ae.? Name your price--I shall not be frightened. It is not State money, but my private fortune that I draw upon--with the approval of my Chiefs. It has been my whim to lavish on my escadrille what other men hang in jewels upon their mistresses. Efficiency is my vice. I have heard of worse!" He scrawled some invisible figures with a polished finger-nail upon the tablecloth and exclaimed, with a laugh and a shrug: "Sapristi! At even a hundred pounds apiece you would soon be a millionaire, even without the fortune you expect from your War Office! Upon occasion it pays to be a patriot. Decide, Monsieur, lest my patience run dry before my purse!"
"I've not asked you a hundred, sir," Sherbrand said with his disarming simplicity. "I can make and sell the hoverers at a profit for L60. It's the cutting and welding of the horizontal flanged screws with the acetylene flame that eats up that money. But for the cost of the process, hang it!--I'd have had more than seventy ready by me now."
"You have seventy, you say, laid by in readiness?"
"Laid by in grease," said Sherbrand, "at the aerodrome."
"Waiting the moment when the authorities at Whitehall awaken to the fact that you are a genius, mon ami! A la bonne heure! We buy your seventy equilibrisers!"
"I'll sell you ten," said the British tradesman doggedly. "And I'll give the Belgian Government another ten, if you think they'd honour me by accepting them?"
"Parole d'honneur! I can guarantee they will. And of the other fifty?"
"They are for England to take or leave," said Sherbrand. "No doubt I'm an ass, but a man must act according to his lights."
"They are stars, your lights," said Raymond with a crackling oath, "and they point the path of Honour!" He pulled a cheque-book and a fountain-pen from a pocket within his tunic and wrote a cheque on the Credit Lyonnais for the price of the ten stabilisers, their packing, carriage and duty, saying as he signed, and tossed the lilac slip of paper across the tablecloth: "Your endorsement is my receipt. For the stabilisers--they must be sent not later than to-morrow. I would give something if I could fly back to France with a couple in my valise. But patience! In a week at most we will give the Germans news of us. Perhaps I shall have the good fortune of a rencontre with my Boche pilot-aviator. For--listen, lieutenant! He too possessed the device that solves for the avion the problem of stability. And--listen well!--he carried a young boy with him in the nacelle. It was the man who robbed you. Von Herrnung! Could you not have guessed before?"
It seemed to Sherbrand that he had always guessed. Raymond went on:
"When I read of the finding of the wreck of your 'Bird' in the North Sea, I knew what coup the Prussian and his confederates had carried out. We had met in Berlin, and at the Hanover aerodrome, and at Paris. And--I could have shot him the other day if it had not been for the child. The legions of the modern Attila employ women and babes as bucklers and breastworks, by their Emperor's order. Perhaps he carried the boy for protection!" His moustache bristled like an angry cat's as he added:
"A beastly idea, but the German Idea is bestial. Well, au 'voir! To-morrow, six demie, we start from the aerodrome!"
He rose, whisked his napkin over his mouth, and said, giving Sherbrand a hearty hand-grip:
"I shall be punctual. Do not forget. My compliments to Mademoiselle!"
But Sherbrand was occupied less by thoughts of his angry love than by Raymond's story of the boy in the German warplane. He telephoned to Sir Roland and to Saxham before he drove back to the Club thinking:
"Bawne!--It must be Bawne!--out there in the midst of all those horrors. If I could only meet that fellow von Herrnung! ... I've owed him no grudge because he robbed me.... But--for this--I could kill him now!"
*CHAPTER LVI*
*LA BRABANCONNE*
"You saint, Pat!" Margot, amidst Raymond's polite excuses, had recognised Sherbrand's hatchet-face under the khaki cap. "You've stolen a whole morning for me from your Flying Man. Why didn't you tell me he'd come back to town? How perfectly tophole he looks in tea-leaves! Franky and I came across that French officer who was with him, last June, in Paris. We're been rubbing noses on the strength of having met before. Is Alan going to the Front? My poor Pattums, it'll be your turn to be haunted. Here's Rhona Helvellyn. Cheer, Rhona! Do tell us why you look so smudgy? Have you been hiding up the chimney of the House of Commons, or bombarding a Minister's front door with coal?"
She beckoned, and Rhona came stalking through the crush of marvellously got-up members, the round, fair, freckled boy-face that topped her long swan-neck and deceptively sloping shoulders pinched with weariness under the wreck of a Heath hat, her usually immaculate tailor-mades covered with the dust of what might have been a Claxton Hall conflict or a Downing Street Demonstration, and strange fires burning in her light-lashed eyes.
"Am I such a sweep? I feel one! But so'd you be grubby if you'd done the crossing from Folkestone to Ostend and back again to London without a dab of a puff. I'd an appointment here at three-thirty." Beyond anything in life Rhona plumed herself on her punctuality. "Mrs. Saxham--the Mrs. Saxham, had promised to meet me in the Chintz Room." The Chintz Room is the first-floor drawing-room securable for private teas and interviews. "We got in too ravenous even to wash for lunch. You should have seen us eat. My hat! the scrum on those boats. And the dirt. Nothing but a Turkish bath will get me clean again. As for Brenda, she's a nigger." Thus Rhona in her loud young accents. "Nobody'd believe she'd been born a white girl!"
"Is she here?"
"My Christmas! I should rather hope so! Upstairs scraping off the top-crust before I take her to Eccleston Square. Don't do to startle the Mater. She's been frightfully off-colour with worry over her precious youngest. You see, Brenda was due home for the Autumn holidays from the Convent of the Dames de l'Annonciation at Huin on the Sambre, when the War broke out. And--Huin's near Charleroi, where they say the Germans are--and we'd nary a letter, and no answer to a hailstorm of wires from the Mater. So I got passes and permits on the Q.T. and skipped over to Ostend--to see what might be done."
"And you got through?"
"Did I? Not much! We don't get things properly rubbed into us--tucked away in our blessed old island. I forgot that Belgian trains wouldn't be running from Ostend to Brussels, now the Germans have got a grab on there.... As for getting South-East by Courtrai and Valenciennes--all trains were required by the Allies for military purposes. Perhaps if I'd been a hefty War Correspondent or an Army Nursing Sister or a V.A.D. in diamond earrings and a Red Cross armlet, I'd have had a chance. But I'm doubtful! Transport officers, English and Belgian, keep their mouths shut--and once they've opened them to say "No!" they never open 'em again. And"--Rhona breathed as though she had been running--"there were Official War News placards stuck up at the Customs Office, and on the quays and at the Prefecture. They said that the Germans under von Buelow have been having a scrap with the 5th French Army on the Sambre--from Namur to Charleroi--and that the French have been beaten back. And the hospitals are crowded with Belgian and German wounded"--she gulped and something twinkled on her pale eyelashes--"and trains crammed with more keep coming in and in. I've seen some sights, I tell you, that gave me horrors. That showed me, even more than those Ostend quays and wharves and squares and Places--packed solid with refugees--Great Christmas!--shall I ever forget 'em!--the devilish, hellish work of War!"
"Refugees.... Common people?" Margot was a little puzzled. Rhona nodded and repeated:
"Refugees. Swells and mechanics, rag-pickers and shopkeepers, sweeps, schoolgirls, lacemakers, and students. Professors, priests, and prostitutes. Madame la Comtesse and her gardener's wife, wheeling the babies in trams and go-carts. Dust-covered, dirty, done up, desperate, with faces that make you think of the damned in the Tartarus scenes of Orpheus and Eurydice. And someone squealed my name, and there was Brenda. Just got in, with three of the Sisters, and a baker's dozen of English pupils and a herd of other miserables, evacuated from Charleroi and Huin. Three-and-a-half days on the journey, travelling by fits and starts on branch-lines--tramping when trains weren't available. Eating whenever anything was to be had, and going without when there wasn't! Sleeping in barns and on the floors of railway-station platforms, or waiting-rooms, when they were lucky--such a pack of tramps you never saw in your life. But Great Scott! how thundering glad I was to get hold of Brenda and whisk her away from that Chorus of the Damned in Orpheus, pent up like cattle behind ropes, and moaning and stretching their arms out to the sea!"
"Why on earth the sea?"
A foreign voice, resonant and rather nasal, startled Margot by answering:
"Pardon, Madame. Because these most unhappy fugitives believe that salvation and safety may be found in England, from whence come those strong brown English soldiers who are fighting in Belgium now."
"Are there--" Margot was beginning. But Rhona was introducing the speaker at length as Comte d'Asnay, Capitaine Commandant and Adjutant of the Belgian General Staff, Attached to the General Staff on the Third Division of the Belgian Army, and d'Asnay was saying with a smile:
"Mademoiselle bestows upon me all my titles, possibly because we Belgians have so little else left."
"Except Honour," snapped Rhona.
"Except our Honour and our self-respect, and a few other non-negotiable securities," he said, "that do not bring us much of credit on the Bourses of Vienna and Berlin. But Madame was asking of the refugees. Many from Liege have escaped to Antwerp or into Holland, thousands are rushing from Namur into the bosom of France. But from Louvain and Brussels and Tirlemont they flock to Ostend. The steamers of the Channel service are crowded with those who have money and can obtain the necessary laissez-passers. Your town of Folkestone is encumbered with arrivals. Were stones pillows there would be a head for every stone. But those who have neither money nor passports--and many of these were rich a week ago--remain, as Mademoiselle has told you, to weep, and stretch their arms towards the sea."
"They'd rush the boats," declared Rhona, "only that the Companies keep up the gangways. I suppose," she grimaced, "the authorities at Ostend don't want a scare. They believe--I hope they may get it!--there'll yet be an Autumn Season. Hang these profit-hoggers! If I'd my way I'd lower every blessed gangway and let everyone who wanted walk on board. If Belgium hadn't faced the music there'd be Germans in England now, murdering and burning.... They've a right to come. Let 'em all come! Britain's big enough, I should hope!"
"Brava, Mademoiselle. Bis!" d'Asnay applauded noiselessly. "That is what you said to me on the deck of the steamer. Say it again, say it often, and the people will be let come!"
"Oh, I've my plan." Rhona's light eyes sparkled wickedly. "People here want waking up. They're kept in cotton-wool. Eyes bunged up and ears stuffed. What they want is--to see and hear. Well, a few of 'em are doing it. That," she nodded knowingly at d'Asnay, "is where my Distinguished Visitors come in."
The lips under the fiercely-waxed moustaches smiled. Margot liked the look of this officer of the Belgian General Staff, with the savage eyes and the smooth olive skin, the pointed chestnut beard, fiercely-waxed moustache, and the cool, polite manner. He wore the uniform of the Belgian Chasseurs a Cheval, and the vulture-plumes of his high shako were cut and broken and scorched in places, the gold braiding of his dark blue tunic was tarnished and weather-beaten, and the grey, blue-striped overalls and spurred black knee-boots were rusty with old mud and white with new dust. "You're from the Front?" she queried, as she moved with Rhona and the Belgian towards the glass swing-doors, giving access from the vestibule to the Club's big ground-floor drawing-room.
He answered:
"There are several Fronts--and I have the honour to come from one of them, Madame."
"With dispatches?"
"Possibly with dispatches, Madame!" He answered with an amused side-glance at the small, vivacious face. "Though there are swifter methods of transmitting intelligence than by entrusting letters to a messenger's hands."
As he moved beside her, courteously replying, she saw the crimson and green enamelled, purple-ribboned Cross of the Belgian Order of Leopold shining upon the dark blue tunic-breast.
"How are--things--getting on? Nobody tells us anything," twittered the humming-bird. "We might live at the North Pole."
"Madame might find even at the North Pole compensations for the low temperature and the lack of society." The vulture-plumes on the dark blue shako nodded as he turned his face to her. "In the fact that there are no Boches there," he added, and the smile that had curved the soldierly moustache vanished as though the word had wiped it from his mouth.
"Do tell me what are Boches?" Margot begged, kindling to interest. He answered with an intensity that dug deep lines at the angles of his nostrils, and puckered the corners of the eyes that burned under his frowning brows:
"They are a nation of beings, Madame, that are no longer men!"
"Germans you mean, don't you?" she asked after a little pause of bewilderment, staring with shocked, dilated eyes at the left side of d'Asnay's close-cropped head, now revealed to her as he removed his shako, and standing a little in advance of the two women, held back with the thrust of his broad shoulders a leaf of the drawing-room swing-doors. The four-inch square of white surgical plaster adhering to a place whence the chestnut-brown hair had been shaven, showed the outline of a deep, jagged gash. "You are hurt! You have had some awful accident! ... Was it a motor-smash? Doesn't it pain you?" Kittums asked breathlessly. For d'Asnay had touched the surgical strapping with his gloved hand, and his smiling face had winced.
"It is nothing, Madame," he assured her, "and it was not caused by an accident. It is merely a whiff of schrapnel--a love-gift from Messieurs les Boches."
"You are wounded?"
"Madame, that is what one calls it, when one suffers a coup d'obus. They are common, these little tokens, on our side of the North Sea. Mine has procured me a visit to London, and the pleasure of meeting you."
She looked at him like a grieved child, and her lips so quivered that he softened to her behind the crinkles of his smiling bearded mask.
"You speak like this because you think I am heartless and indifferent. Perhaps I have been--until to-day! We are so far from things. We see nothing. And we hear so little about the War!"
"Alas, Madame!" came the answer. "Forgive the cruel prophecy, that the moment approaches when you will hear too much!"
The swing-doors thudded behind them like guns at a great distance. The capacious ground-floor drawing-room, not usually crowded before luncheon, was thronged nearly to the walls. A vacant space in the centre presumably accommodated the Distinguished Visitors. But between these and Margot's quickening curiosity intervened a solid wall of backs.
The Distinguished Visitors must be Royalties, decided Margot, as she skirted the barrier, looking right and left for a peephole, recognising the vast back of Sir Thomas Brayham, the skeleton back of the Goblin, the willowy back of Trixie Wastwood, the backs of Lady Beauvayse, Cynthia Charterhouse, Tota Stannus, and Patrine Saxham with other backs pertaining to divers dear friends, consolidated into the rampart of humanity over which the towering feathers of Vanity Fair nodded and bobbed and waved.
"They're taking it in," Margot heard Rhona mutter, behind her. "'Somebody's playing off a joke on us,' would be the first thing that'd come into their blessed heads. Well!--let 'em think what they choose. Ask me why I did it, Comte, and I swear I couldn't tell you. Blue murder! how my arms ache. But so must yours. You nursed the biggest of the babies all the way from Ostend to Charing Cross."
"Mademoiselle is right!" The swift, fierce undertone was d'Asnay's. "They do not comprehend yet. Not yet!" He breathed hissingly through his nose. "Wait--and presently the Truth will leap at them and strike them entre les yeux. But a place must be found for the friend of Mademoiselle!" He came noiselessly to the side of Margot. "A chair, so. A footstool, so. Madame will step on the one and mount to the other. Permit, Madame, that I offer my assistance! Now Madame commands an excellent view of--shall I call it--the spectacle?"
The speaker's voice was drowned in an outburst of strident music. Barely two doors from the Club the piano-organ had broken out with "La Barbanconne." And as the walls vibrated to its shrill cries of triumph, and the wild disonances of a joy that touches frenzy, the cracked but vigorous tenor began to sing:
"Apres des siecles, des siecles d'esclavage
Le Beige sortant du tombeau
A reconquis par son courage
Son nom, son droit et son drapeau.
Et ta main souveraine et fiere
Peuple desormais indompte
Grava sur ta vielle banniere
Le roi, la Loi, la Liberte!"
"Sapristi! It is strange that!" d'Asnay muttered at the first bars. "Mademoiselle Helvellyn devised the tableau, certainly, but who arranged the entr'acte?"
The shrill, unbearable frenzy of the piano-organ abated, the voice of the singer was more plainly heard. It chanted in thin nasal tones, with missed-out notes in each bar that were like gaps where teeth had been in an old sorrowful singing mouth:
"O Belgique, O mere cherie,
A toi nos coeurs, a tot nos bras,
A toi noire sang, O Patrie----"
While Margot, a-tiptoe en her chair, peered through the screen of towering feathers at the Club's Distinguished Visitors,--wondering that within the wall of absorbed faces there should be so little to attract or interest. Nothing more intriguing than the homely figure of a Flemish peasant woman, with four young children huddled round her, and a baby at her breast.
*CHAPTER LVII*
*THE BELGIAN WIFE*
Desolate advance-guard of the vast army so soon to invade the shores of Britain, how familiar the figure is now that was then so strange to us in the quaint old-world fashion of its homely garments, the thick white dust and travel-stains that covered it, from the linen coif to the wooden shoes.
She was not old, the woman who sat with her little flock gathered about her, on the Indian stool that had supported the superb person of von Herrnung, what time he had held forth to Mrs. Charterhouse and Lady Wastwood upon the loftiness of German Kultur, the perfection of German female beauty, and the overwhelming mental and bodily superiority of the German Superman. A Walloon peasant from a village near Jodoigne where she and her husband had worked upon a tiny farm.
Perhaps a dozen words of French were hers: "Tout brule!" and "En Angleterre ou il n'y a pas de Boches!"
We were to learn to reap terrible meanings from that hoarse, faint parrot-cry. Truths that raised the hairs upon the flesh and chilled the blood were to be imaged for us in the blank vacuity of her unseeing stare. We were to learn why all her children squinted, from Vic, the sturdy man of seven, and Josephine, his junior, possibly by a year, down to Georgette of the chubby cheeks and crinkly, roguish eyelids, and Albert, of the round blue stare, the big white-haired head, and the marvellous bow legs.
In their dull stunned quietude and their clayey pallor, the mark of the Beast was branded upon them, down to the livid baby in its little cap of soiled linen, swaddled in the old red shawl, that bound down its arms. You might have thought it dead, but for the flutter of a muscle in the cheek, and the faint movement of its lips, feebly sucking at the breast that had been large and bounteous, and now was lax, and flabby, covered by a network of darkish violet veins.
"Who are they? ... What are they? ... Where do they come from? ... Why were they brought here? ... Does no one know? ... Will no one tell? ..."
The silence of amazement was now breaking. The mouths belonging to the faces under the nodding feathers, old and young, handsome and ugly, vacuous and clever, silly and intellectual, were all prattling interrogations like the above. Pride of Place and Joy of Life, Thirst of Pleasure, Lust of Power, Gaiety and Weariness, Wisdom and Folly, Humbug and Sincerity, Meanness and Generosity, ringed-in the dusty group of wooden-shod mysteries and most frightfully wanted to know! And nobody offered any solution of the puzzle. The piano-organ was playing half a dozen doors below the Club, the cracked old tenor quavering to its accompaniment:
"Nous le jurons tu vivras!
Tu vivras toujours grande el belle
Et ton invincible unite
Aura pour devise immortelle----"
The music suddenly broke off. A policeman had ordered the organ to move on....
"Tout brule!"
Hitherto the Belgian woman had not looked up, nor changed her listless attitude. Now she lifted her empty expressionless eyes, and hoarsely iterated her parrot-cry. The suckling at her breast whimpered and let go the nipple. She glanced at it, saying in her own thick Flemish tongue:
"Daar is geen melk."
"There is no milk."
She rocked the baby for whom she had no milk. Its feeble whimper was not stilled. She went on to that accompaniment:
"De Duischer kwamen. Zy hebben alles gebrand! De geburen,--mijn voder--mijn man is gedood! Zy hebben hem in het vuur geworpen!"
"The Germans came. They burned everything. The neighbours, and my father, and my husband are dead. They threw them into the fire."
The baby's whimper became a wail of feeble protest. It fought and struggled frantically under the old red swathing shawl. The shawl loosened, slid to the floor, and the wizened arms rose free and jerking. One arm, tightly bandaged below the elbow, ended in a raw and bloody stump. She regarded it with her drained-out stare, not trying to replace the strappings that had bound it, saying in the heavy voice of a sleep-walker:
"Dees ook hebben ze gedaan. God sta ons bij!"
"This too they did. God help us!"
And sobs and weeping broke out around her, as though that little handless arm had been a veritable rod of Moses bringing water from the living rock. But no sigh lifted her bosom, nor were her dry eyelids moistened with the dew of tears. Prussian militarism had wrought its work upon her. She and hers had been trodden as grapes in the Hohenzollern Winepress. Those emptied eyes had seen things done that might well make devils laugh in Hell.
The Club walls vanished away as we looked, and behind that stricken figure spread the devastated plains of Belgium, the Sorrowful, the Glorious, who has endured agony and shame unutterable, that her neighbours might go free. We had a vision of the Son of Man descending in a blood-red, rainy dawning, and heard Him saying to the apostles of German Kultur:
"Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of these ... ye have done it unto Me!"
And not a woman among us who had a man with the British Expedition, but prayed in her soul, fervently:
"Vengeance is Thine, for Thou hast said it. But make him Thy scourge, O Lord!"
*CHAPTER LVIII*
*SHERBRAND BUYS THE LICENCE*
The spell of silence was broken. Excitement seethed as Patrine escaped out of the crush in the drawing-room and returned to the vestibule. There, subsiding into one of the tall-backed chairs beside the table that held the Members' Register and Visitors' Book, she waited, hoping against hope that the tall figure in khaki might reappear under the Club portico.
