That Which Hath Wings 18That Which Hath Wings (part 18)
18
Literature · Romance
That Which Hath Wings 18
That Which Hath Wings (part 18)
DehanEnglish
He turned away and began the Credo. As the deep chorus of male voices followed, Patrine found herself agreeing with the preacher's discourse.
"What was it," she asked herself, "that led me out from overheated, crowded rooms, oppressive with the scent of flowers and perfumes of triple extract--where the Tango and the Turkey Trot were being danced by half-clad, painted women and effeminate young men--and set my feet upon a mountain-slope with the free winds of heaven blowing upon me? I must answer--It was the War!"
As the great waves of the Credo surged and beat against the old brown rafters she went on thinking:
"What has made me quicken to the call of Humanity--awakened me to the knowledge of my sisterhood with my fellow-women? What has taught me how to live without dissipation and do without useless luxuries? Again--the War! And oh! what has taught me the meaning of Love in all its fulness, and set within the shrine of my heart this great sacred sorrow, and kindled in my soul the pure altar-flame of Faith? The War, the terrible War!"
She prayed for Sherbrand at the Commemoration of the Living! A somewhat incoherent petition that her Flying Man might be helped to bear his blindness, and find some happiness in her unchanged love. And the thought of the dead Agnostic haunted her. Who was the man, and what had brought about his ending? Was he a patient in the Ursuline Hospital?
A French, an English, or a German soldier? By a subtle change in her mental purview, recollections of von Herrnung began to occupy her mind.
"I will not think of him!--I will not!" she said to herself desperately. Then the obsession assumed an acute form. All that she most wished to forget in her relations with the Kaiser's Flying Man was being revived in her memory. Scene by scene, sentence by sentence, she was forced to live over the hated Past again.
She must have risen from her knees and left the chapel, so unbearable became the torment, but that the sacring bell rang its triples, the deep tones of the Sanctus answered from the turret, and the Host was lifted up. Then her tense nerves relaxed. The almost tangible presence of evil withdrew itself. She breathed more freely, and peace flowed in balmy waves upon her stormy soul. In prayer for herself and those who were most dear to her, she lost the sense of the unseen hands plucking at her garments and the soundless voice whispering at her ear. And presently at the Ipsis Domine, when supplication is made by priests and people for the departed, she prayed for the soul of the Denier--that the Divine Mercy might reach and enfold him, and lead him yet into the Way of Peace.
"Christ is risen who created all things, and who hath had pity upon mankind.... Purchased people, declare His virtues, alleluia! Who hath called you out of darkness into His admirable light."
To Patrine the Call had come.
It was Easter Week and there were many communicants. The nuns and the French and English Red Cross nurses helped the lame to reach the Altar-rails and guided the blind. When a tall, blond young English Officer with bandaged eyes and an empty sleeve was led up to his Master's Table, Patrine was grateful that the chapel was so dusk.
She was to meet the Chaplain of the Pophereele Stationary Hospital after Mass, the Mother Superioress had said. Thus, guided by an Ursuline Sister, she passed from the chapel into a long, whitewashed cloister looking on the garden, its open arches facing the doors of what had been class-rooms, and now were wards. Another Ursuline, the Sister Superintendent of the Hospital, with a young, gentle face framed in her close white guimpe and flowing black veil, sat writing in a big book at a plain deal table. Near her were some shelves with rows of bottles and a chest of drawers with measuring-glasses upon it, and a pestle and mortar and druggists' scales. Above the table a black wooden Crucifix hung against the whitewashed wall.
"This is Soeur Catherine, who keeps the Hospital accounts and dispenses the medicines, and posts the register in which we set down the names of all the wounded received and discharged. Take care, Mademoiselle! That paint is new and comes off!" cried the chaperoning Sister, snatching aside the skirt of Patrine's long blue V.A.D. coat.
She had brushed, in passing, against a wooden tablet that leaned against the wall near the door through which she had come. A big square of black-painted deal surmounted by a gabled and eaved Cross of German pattern, and bearing an inscription in white Gothic lettering:
"HIER RUHT IM GOTT
EIN DEUTSCHER FLIEGENDE OFFIZIER."
"That is for the grave of the German officer who died yesterday. One of the Bavarian soldiers is painting it. He has not finished--he has only gone away for a moment to get some more ceruse from Mother Madeleine."
Sister Catherine offered the explanation. She added, as the tall English girl glanced at something that lay on the deal table beside the register:
"That is his flying-cap, poor man! and the belt that shows his rang militaire. They will be placed upon the pall when they carry him to the cemetery. But pardon! One should have observed before that Mademoiselle was suffering! What! Mademoiselle is not ill, not even a little fatigued? Then what Mademoiselle needs is a petit dejeuner."
And Patrine was whisked away to the guest's refectory to be refreshed with pistolets and coffee. Monseigneur would follow a little later. Madame la Superieure had arranged for Monseigneur to take dejeuner with M. l'Aumonier. Later, Monseigneur hoped for the pleasure of meeting the English Mademoiselle.
Mademoiselle's tall rounded figure, ushered by the little active Ursuline Sister, had barely passed through the glazed swing-doors leading from the cloister to the Convent, when the short, spare, elderly priest who had celebrated Mass entered from the chapel, followed by the Convent Aumonier, who had served him at the altar. Even as the nun rose from her table, the vividly clear eyes of Monseigneur, set in the mask of dry walnut-brown wrinkles, dropped on the painted head-board propped against the wall.
"That is for him?"
The supple right hand of Monseigneur waved towards the chapel, then extended itself to the Sister, who curtsied and kissed his amethyst ring.
"For him, Monseigneur," answered the Aumonier, to whom the question had been addressed.
"Dieu veuille avoir son ame!"
The left sleeve of Monseigneur's decidedly rusty serge soutane bore the well-known brassard. Its scarlet and white peeped between the folds of his heavy black mantle as he made the Sign of the Cross.
"His name is missing from the inscription," he commented, producing a battered silver snuff-box and helping himself to a generous pinch. "Why, might one demand?"
"The initials will be painted in presently, Monseigneur. There will be no name--by desire of the deceased!"
"He preferred anonymity?" The amethyst ring of Monseigneur's prelacy flashed violet as he dusted the brown powder from his upper-lip with a blue checked handkerchief. "The Pere Aumonier tells me," his startlingly clear eyes were on the Sister, "that terrible as were his injuries, he might have recovered--that his death occurred suddenly and unexpectedly."
"But yes, Monseigneur, he might have recovered!" The fair face framed in the narrow guimpe was shadowed and troubled. "The coup d'obus had spared the brain, arteries, and vertebra. His sight was uninjured--M. le Commandant and his colleagues had achieved wonders in the partial restoration of the visage. Speech was difficult--but we could understand him--unless he was sullen and would only speak German to us. But at those times a Bavarian soldier interpreted--he who has painted the headboard for the grave."
"He--the German officer--was grateful to those who nursed him?" inquired Monseigneur of the Aumonier.
The stout little Chaplain visibly hesitated. It was the Sister who answered in her clear and gentle voice:
"Alas! no, Monseigneur! He was arrogant, even brutal. But then--he suffered so terribly, in mind as in body--one could not be angry at anything he said. He could not resign himself to his disfigured condition. It was intolerable, he would cry, that he should now be an object of horror to women--women who had worshipped him almost as a god!"
"Chut--chut! Eh--well! One presumes he meant a certain type of women," observed Monseigneur.
"Possibly so, Monseigneur." The simplicity of the fair face in the narrow guimpe was touching. "For when we assured him that we did not regard him with horror he would say to us: 'That makes nothing! I speak of women. You are only nuns.'"
"But nuns are women," objected Monseigneur.
"Monseigneur, he said not. When his condition seemed to him most miserable he found relief in saying things--abusive--outrageous--about nuns. We didn't mind. We pitied him--poor Number Twenty! But the French and English officers in the same ward resented this. They entreated us to remove him to a separate room. This we did, and at his request the Bavarian was placed in the same apartment--he has been an officer's servant--and is active and useful, even though he has lost a leg. Thus things went better. Poor Twenty seemed more contented. He even looked forward to leaving the Hospital!"
"And then? A change?--a relapse?" suggested Monseigneur.
"A change. He became more gloomy--more violent after a letter arrived for him from England at the Jour des morts. Since two days comes another letter. We heard him raving of perfidy, the folly of his agents--the injustice of his Emperor--the revenge upon the Englishwoman that he would never have now! ... Then all was quiet. Towards morning the Bavarian came out of the room and called an orderly. The Herr Hauptmann was sleeping, he said, in such a queer way.... From that unnatural stupor he never awakened. All his letters and papers were torn up and scattered in fragments. There was a little cardboard box on the night-table and a pencil billet for me. I am to send a ring he always wore to the address of a noble young lady at Berlin. She was his fiancee, I believe, Monseigneur. He thanks me for the little I have been able to do for him!--he begs the Sisters to pardon his rudeness.... He wishes no name upon his grave--but to be forgotten.... Poor broken body--poor rebellious heart--poor stubborn, desperate soul!"
"You think, then, that--he killed himself?" asked Monseigneur with directness.
"I dare not think!" She was searching in her table drawer with tears dropping on her hands. "I can only pray that the autopsy of the surgeon will not reveal that the death was not natural. Look, Monseigneur!--this is his ring. A big black-and-white pearl. And under the pearl, which lifts up--is a little box for something.... A relic perhaps--or a portrait, or a lock of a friend's hair."
"It might serve as a reliquary--at need, my child," said Monseigneur, examining the platinum setting. He gave one swift glance at the unsuspicious Aumonier and another at the innocent nun. He peered again narrowly at the empty hiding-place, to the shallow sides of which a few atoms of glittering grey dust were adhering. He lifted the ring to his nose and sniffed, tapped the little box on his thumb-nail, and touched his tongue to one of the glittering grey specks. Then he hastily spat in his handkerchief, and thunder-clouds sat on the furrowed forehead over the great hooked beak.
"Listen!"
The nun started and grew paler still. She hurried to the glazed doors opening on the garden and threw them wide apart. As the chill outer air rushed in, sporting with the scant white locks of M. l'Aumonier, fluttering the purple lappets at the throat of Monseigneur, and tugging as with invisible hands at the Sister's thin black veil, approaching footsteps crunched over the sloppy gravel of the cloister walk.
The small stout figure of the Sister-Keeper of the mortuary headed the small, solemn procession. She held up her habit out of the slush, and carried as well as a mammoth iron doorkey, a small bunch of spring flowers.
A stretcher-squad of the French Red Cross followed the Sister of the mortuary. In life the man they bore must have been a magnificent specimen of humanity. In death the length of his rigid form appeared phenomenal. The black velvet pall, over which had been draped the black-red-white German War Ensign, was far too short to cover the stiff blanket-swathed feet. That they projected beyond the stretcher-end with an effect of arrogance and obstinacy, was the thought that occurred to one of the three people gathered in a little group upon the threshold of the cloister-doors.
"Monseigneur.... My Father! ..." Sister Catherine was speaking in suppressed but eager accents. "It is Number Twenty. They are taking him to the mortuary. The Sister-Keeper promised to carry flowers as a sign that all was well. You understand, do you not? The surgeons have decided--thanks be to God!--that the poor man did not poison himself!"
She dropped to her knees and began to say a decade of her Rosary, the wooden beads running between her fingers like brown water as she prayed. The priests made the Sign of the Cross silently as the body was borne past. When the last feather of the Black Eagle had vanished, and the crunching of footsteps on sloppy gravel had thinned away in distance, the nun rose.
"You feel happier now, my sister, do you not?" Monseigneur asked kindly.
"Much happier, Monseigneur," she said, "for now I may pray for him!"
Monseigneur, who had retained the ring, shut the hiding-place with a decided click, snapped into its slot the end of the bar that held the magpie pearl in place, and said as he restored the bauble to the nun:
"Who knows but that some ray of Divine Grace may yet shine upon that darkened soul! Do as the owner begged of you, and pray for him by all means!"
"That I will!" she said fervently. "And you also, will you not pray for him? the poor, proud Pagan who believed no resurrection possible--unless one were to exist again as a vapour or a tree. Alas! I fear I have sinned much in yielding to the feeling he inspired in me!"
She added, meeting the keen glance of Monseigneur's vivid eyes:
"The feeling of repugnance. Of horror, Monseigneur! Here comes the Bavarian to finish the inscription. Well, my good Kuehler, you have got some more ceruse?"
The glass-doors had been darkened by the shape of a one-legged man on crutches, a black-haired, swarthy fellow dressed in the maroon flannel uniform distinctive of the Hospital. A little pot with a brush in it dangled from one of his big fingers. He glanced up under his heavy brows, with a muttered word as he passed the Sister, and returned the greeting of Monseigneur with a clumsy attempt at a salute.
"You are better? You are getting on?" said Monseigneur to him in German.
"Better, mein Vater, and getting on."
"That is well! And you have only a little bit to do, and then your work is done?"
"Done, mein Vater!" echoed the one-legged man.
He went to the head-board where it was near the door leading to the chapel, leaned his crutches against the wall, and began cautiously and painfully to let himself down. Monseigneur and the Aumonier hurried to his assistance, saw him safely squatted upon his folded sack, took leave of the Sister, who knelt to receive the blessing of the hand that wore the amethyst ring,--and vanished through the farther door at the urgent summons of a bell.
The Sister turned again to her big ledger. A list of articles appertaining to the deceased would have to be checked and verified. Two pairs of binoculars--surely the one bearing the name and address of an officer in a British Guards regiment ought to be sent to the Allies' Headquarters at St. O--. Two purses, one full of English sovereigns, a stout roll of French bank-notes in a pigskin case, and so forth. When next she looked round, the Bavarian was wiping his brushes. The finished inscription now stood:
"HIER RUHT IM GOTT
EIN DEUTSCHER FLIEGENDE OFFIZIER
T. v. H.
30 YAHRE ALT."
"You are sorry for him, are you not, my good Kuehler?" the nun asked mildly as the Bavarian scrambled to his solitary foot, and stood supporting himself against the wall.
"Sorry, my Sister?" He spoke in thick Teutonic French, and looked at her under his lowering black brows as he reached his crutches out of the corner and tucked them under his arms. "Why should I be sorry? He's dead--and so an end of him. Total kaput for another officer!" He saluted the Sister and stumped out.
*CHAPTER LXXII*
*LOVE THAT HAS WINGS*
Under a blue sky--the forget-me-not blue of April--tiny blizzards--mere dust of snow--alternated with slashes of sleet. The road running east from Pophereele was villainous; bad pave in the centre, and on either side morasses of mud from which rose at irregular intervals, scraggy poplars hacked by shell-fire and barked by the impact of innumerable iron-shod wheels.
An almost continuous line of transports bumped over the abominable pave. Staff cars with British Brass Hats and red French kepis gold-braided, motor-guns and caissons, motor-lorries, motor-ambulances, motor-cyclists, pedestrians--chiefly Belgian peasants in tall peaked caps and long blue blouses, caked to the knees in sticky mire. Odd detachments of French Artillery, a squadron of Chasseurs in the new uniform of sallow blue--a half-battalion of magnificent, singing Canadians, loaded on the dark green motor-buses that used to run from Holloway to Westminster Bridge.
Where French police were posted at cross-roads and a working-party of British Engineers were mending the highway--filling up shell-pits, and the cunningly-concealed emplacements where a battery of French 75's had been in action a few months before, and the shrapnel-riddled houses of a small village yet harboured a few wizened Flemish peasants, was the point whence you first caught sight of the towers of the ancient capital of Western Flanders, rising above a bank of grey mist, sucked from the thawing earth by the warmth of the April sun.
An historic city of gabled houses, a city on a river long lost and vaulted over--a city as famous through its industries of cloth-weaving, and the exquisite manufacture of cob-webby lace of Valenciennes, as precious to students of Art and Literature by reason of its stirring history, and the wonders it enshrined. A matchless city, the glory of Flandre Occident, with its Cloth Hall of the marvellous Early Gothic facades, its Renaissance Nieuwerk and ancient Stedehuus, its glorious cathedral on the north opposite the Halles, with the unfinished tower by Marten Untenhove, and the triumphal arch in the West porch by Urban Taillebert.
Since October, 1914, when a British Brigade with two battalions of another B.B., had successfully withstood the desperate attacks of the flower of the Prussian Imperial Guard, the beautiful old city had suffered bombardment, furious, purposeful, desultory, or intermittent, from the enemy's 11.2-in. long range Krupps. That First Battle--fought upon a line extending from a few miles north-east of the city--had been succeeded after the partial lull of winter, by a second, a stubborn and sanguinary renewal of the struggle, rendered hideous by the use of the Boche's trump-card, flaming oil-jets and asphyxiating gas.
Now the pride of Flandre Occident stood as it stands to-day, like the heart of a martyr calcined but unconsumed in the cold ashes of the pyre. Its sad and stately dignity was marvellously beautiful, under the blue April sky, with its lashes of wintry sleet. Its gardens were dressed in green spring livery, the grass was peeping between the cobble-stones, the scorched and broken chestnut-trees that had shaded the promenades on the site of its ancient ramparts were thrusting out their pinky-brown finger-like buds. And above the shell-pitted waste of uncut brass now representing the Plaine d'Amour,--where the reviews used to take place and the Kermesses, and athletic Club competitions--where the aerodrome is cut by the line of the canal that receives the waters of the subterranean river--a lark was singing joyfully as it climbed its airy spiral, and a blind man was standing by the twisted ruins of a British aeroplane drinking in the music that rained from the sky.
In the battered Rue d'Elverdinghe, behind a block of the ruined prison, the car that had brought Sherbrand waited. A grey car with the Red Cross and a miniature replica of Old Glory on the bonnet. The Belgian chauffeur smoked cigarettes and read the Independence Belge industriously; the American V.A.D. orderly smoked also, surveying the wreckage at the end of the wide thoroughfare, between whose gaunt and roofless walls was revealed a vista of the Grand Place,--where the west facade of the Cathedral reared, a calcined skeleton above the ruined Halles,--and the Belfry whose massiveness defied the genii of destruction for a few weeks to come. Yet he kept his eye on his charge, solicitously. No creature is so utterly unaided by the senses, so pathetically defenceless as a recently blind man.
Drives were part of the treatment prescribed for Sherbrand by the American surgeon of the Hospital at Pophereele. The chauffeur and the attendant were instructed to humour him, and his humour craved solitude and the sense of space. This excursion to the plain lying north-west of the stricken city where Death and Ruin were Burgomaster and Bishop was not the first by several. The few remaining inhabitants--the pale women who made lace in the shelter of broken doorways, the feeble old folks from the almshouses, who peered from their cellar-refuges at the crunch and grind of armoured wheels upon the bricks and timbers heaped upon the littered thoroughfares--dully wondered at these visits of the blind Englishman.
They had seen many strange things of late, the red-eyed, meagre, ague-bitten old people, since that day in early October when fifteen thousand Kaisermen, chanting the German War Song, had defiled for six mortal hours through the streets of their ancient town.
"There are a great many of you gentlemen," some of the old folks had ventured to say.
"That may be so," they had been told, "but we have millions waiting to follow. We are sure to win; the French are cowards, and the English stupid fools. As for you--you are now all Belgo-Germans, our Kaiser has said so! When we leave here we are going to Calais, Paris next, and then London--it's nothing at all to get to London in our magnificent Zeppelins!"
Then suddenly the Germans had gone away--and with them trains of waggons crammed with booty. A week later, amidst the vivas of the people, twenty-one thousand British had poured into the town. They had rolled down the streets like a tawny river singing lustily:
"Here we are--here we are--here we are again!
Hallo! Hallo! Hallo! HALLO!"
And the crowd had been quick to catch up the chorus, responding:
And the British Headquarters had established itself in its spider-web of Intelligence at the house of the Burgomaster, and the very next day a Boche aviator had tried to drop a bomb on it, and had been winged by a clever shot from an anti-aircraft gun, and brought crashing down on the Plaine d'Amour. And there had been rejoicings on the part of the young people who were thoughtless. But the wise old folks had known quite well that many more Taubes would come.
What an autumn it had been, dear Lord! thought the trembling old people. The first Sunday in August, with its decorations, processions, hymns, and litanies, all in honour of Our Lady of Thuyn, had been turned into a demonstration of penitents. The Kermesse had been prohibited with the other festivities. No use baking honey-cakes and marzipan. Nobody would have bought them. The Yprais were too busy listening to the distant firing of terribly great guns. All the window-panes rattled and shivered, and the earth vibrated without ceasing. Each morning brought dreadful news, contradicted every afternoon, and confirmed at night. Towns bombarded, townsmen shot, hung, or burned, children and women--even nuns--violated and murdered. Villages wiped out--these were the stories that found their way into the deafest ears. Crowds of refugees evacuated from these towns and villages presently began to throng in. Soon the streets were full from wall to wall. Spies moved everywhere, and no lights dared be shown at night-time. Bread grew scarce, the dreadful sound of the guns drew nearer. Wounded, Allies and Germans also, were brought in, in thousands, by the ambulance-cars. The hospitals and hotels and convents were full--all the schools--and many of the private houses. Terrible rumours gained ground of a great battle about to be fought in the neighbourhood of the town.
Peering from garret-windows by day or night, one could see great banks of black smoke towering on the north, east, and west horizons, pierced by broad licking tongues of cherry-coloured flame. Taubes and Allied aircraft fought battles in the heavens. Bombs were dropped upon public buildings. Death had begun to be common in the streets when the first Krupp shells fell and exploded in the moat behind the Abbey Church of St. Jacques. Ten minutes later--upon the doomed city fell the direst fury of the German hate.
It had been as though hell had opened, as under that hail of iron and fire the troops and transports of the Allies, and the long processions of townspeople afoot and in carts and carriages had rolled out of the town. Even the dogs had left, following their owners. Like the cats--who clung to their familiar surroundings, and had to be removed by force, if they were to be taken--the old folks resisted the sturdy hands that tugged at them. "Leave us! ..." they quavered. "We are so old! ... We can never bear the journey! ... We should only die upon the roads if we were to go!"
Many did go, and many died, and of those who stayed behind them, Steel, Iron, and Fire claimed a heavy toll. But in the Northern quarter, some yet dwelt in cellar-basements, feeding on mouldy flour, and frozen potatoes. Sleeping on sacks of straw, covered with rugs or blankets, warming their lean, shivery bodies at braziers, choking behind masks taken from slain men through deadly gas-attacks,--creeping up between bombardments for a breath of purer air. Venturing forth to kneel upon the littered pavements of roofless churches, and pray to Our Lord before His vacant tabernacles and shattered Crucifixes--for an end to the dreadful War.
And no answer came, it seemed, for all their praying. They had grown used to the dampness underground. Their eyes were now accustomed to the gloom, as their ears to the stunning crashes of the bombardments--and the perpetual whirr and buzz and whine of the aircraft in the sky. So natural had become to them the abomination of desolation that they actually resented the occasional visits of the Red Cross car from Pophereele.
"Behold him again," they grumbled, "the tall, blind Englishman. What does he seek here? Hardly to view our ruins that he has no eyes to see! And now in another big grey car arrive a French priest and a woman, asking, wherever they meet a soul to ask, if the blind Englishman is here? The priest is a Monseigneur--Old Ottilie swears to the ring and the purple collar. The woman is English, it appears. Perhaps she is the blind man's wife?"
The car moved on where the roadway was not broken by trenches, crawling painfully over litter and wreck. In the shadow of the ruined prison, while yet the sun was high, they halted. Their chauffeur nodded to his Belgian compatriot, the Red Cross orderly, interrogated by Monseigneur, pointed to the tall brown figure standing on the grass beside the twisted wreckage of a British aeroplane.
"I will wait here for you, Mademoiselle," said Monseigneur, getting out and assisting his fellow-traveller. She was very tall and of supple figure, and wore a long blue coat with the Red Cross shield-badge, and a felt hat banded with the V.A.D. ribbon, pulled down over luxuriant masses of hair--hair that had been cloudy-black as storm-wrack and had been bleached to the hue of wintry beech-leaves, and now had darkened to the brown of peat-earth, deepening in colour every day.
She gave Monseigneur her hand, thanking him, and suddenly he thought her beautiful, although the tall young woman had not previously appealed to the sense of beauty in Monseigneur. Her long eyes under their widely arching brows were stars, her mouth was smiling. When she moved away over the snow-patched grass, she seemed to tread on air....
Throughout the drive Patrine had been torn with horrible misgivings. "What shall I say or do," she had wondered. "How shall I bear it if the look upon his face should tell me, when Alan first hears my voice--that I was wrong to come?" But the chilly fit had passed with the first glimpse of Sherbrand. The rich, warm flood rising in her veins had swept her doubts away.
Here on this shell-pitted expanse of turf you felt the War-pulse beating. French 75's were putting over a furious barrage from the south. North of the City of the Salient the British guns were slogging, and through the chain-fire of the enemy's 77 mm.'s, his 11.2-in. howitzers bellowed at short intervals, and sent in 600-pound shells.
The smoke of a train rose north-west in the direction of Thourout Junction. That the train was a German train, carrying troops and guns and munitions for War purposes, did not at once occur to Patrine. All was well. Not a doubt remained. She was near her Flying Man again after months of separation. Here at last was food for her hungry eyes and drink for her thirsting soul.
"He has grown thin, poor dear!" she thought, seeing how the war-stained khaki hung in folds on his tall figure. The broad shoulders stooped. The chest had sunken, and he leaned upon a heavy walking-stick. The beloved face was turned away, the line of the cheek was careworn. She choked upon a sob and stopped short, fighting her emotion down.
The song of the soaring lark broke off. The bird dived to earth and hid itself amongst the frosty grasses as the snoring whirr of aircraft came out of the distance high in the sky to the west. Now the shape of a big biplane gleamed pinky-white as a seagull, beating up against the thrust of the snow-tanged easterly breeze.
Nearer and nearer flew the 'plane. Now one could see it distinctly. A French machine by its blue-white-red rings, and a Caudron by its great square tail. A silver-grey monoplane scurried in its wake, a Weiss by the backward curve of its wing-tips. The whirr of its tractor and the blatter of its machine-gun wakened the echoes sleeping among the leprous white ruins of the city. The Caudron wheeled and circled beautifully, and the trac-trac of its mitraille answered the machine-gun, and spent bullets began to patter on the Plaine far below.
Suddenly the Frenchman banked and began to climb. The Weiss, its aluminium sheathing glittering in the sunshine, climbed too, so rapidly that the enemy's purpose was foiled. Then, at a great height they circled round each other, and the crack and flare of explosive revolver-bullets began to mingle with the blatter and trac-trac, and little blobs of something that blazed and sputtered wickedly began to drop with the bullets that tumbled out of the skies. It was the prettiest sight. It suggested the amorous dallying of two big butterflies, the squabble of a pair of hawking swallows, and yet the issues were Life and Death. Suddenly the Weiss took to flight. A second Caudron had showed upon the distance and the Kaiser's flier was not taking any more on. Waiting for his countryman to come abreast, the Frenchman hovered like a kite-hawk. And at the familiar buzz of the horizontal screws a visible thrill went through Sherbrand. He took off the smoked glasses that he wore, and turned his blind eyes upwards towards the sound, and on his haggard face was stamped the anguish of his despair.
"My poor boy!" nearly broke from Patrine, and hot tears scalded her eyelids. He started, though she had uttered no word, and brought down those unseeing eyes. His nostrils expanded as he inhaled the air. His thick fair brows contracted. The first Caudron, exchanging signals with the second, had ceased hovering and floated onwards, but Sherbrand's thoughts had been brought down out of his sky.
"What is it? ... Why?" said the intent and frowning look. He snuffed the air again and pondered still, and suddenly Patrine comprehended. Some waft of perfume from her hair or clothes had reached the sense made keener by his blindness, evoked some once-loved image, roused some memory of her.
She crouched low, and looked up at the lean, lined visage yearningly. Dear heart! how changed he was to-day from her young Mercury of the Milles Plaisirs. And yet this altered face of his, marred by the broad, new-healed scar that traversed the left cheek and temple, and the cloudy look of suffering in the prominent grey-blue eyes, was dearer than ever to Patrine.
How bravely the ribbon of the Croix de Guerre and the purple, green, and silver of the Belgian Order showed against the war-stained khaki. What woman living would not glory in such a lover, welcome the sacred charge, rejoice to be his guide and minister! ... "Oh, my blind eagle, to sit mateless in the darkness shall not be your fate, God being good to me!" Some words like these were on the lips of Patrine.
But the words were unspoken. He was turning those cloudy, troubled eyes towards his unseen sky again as though trying to project the vision of his soul through the depths of aerial distance. Then he desisted as though wearied by the effort. His stern face softened to dreamy tenderness. His lips moved. Very quietly, but with infinite wistfulness, he uttered her own name:
"Patrine! Patrine!"
He was thinking of her--he was dreaming of her--he was still her lover. She knew a joyful shock, a checking of the pulses.... Then her blood whirled on its crimson circle as though arteries and veins were brimmed with wine. Her bosom heaved, her eyes were misty jewels, and out of the wonderful silence about them came to her the low, sweet soughing of her long-lost Wind of Joy.
She moved to Sherbrand, kissed him full upon the mouth, and called him: "Alan!" And a great cry broke from him--a cry of wonder, triumph, and joy. As his arms swept out to enfold her she knew that she had conquered. She had not been deceived in reading love between the formal lines.
"Life has nothing more to give!" was Patrine's thought as his arms held her. It seemed that Death would be a tiny price to pay for such a wonderful moment as this.
"My love, my love! Did you really think we could live without each other?" she stammered through his eager kisses. "Didn't you know I would have to come and carry you back home by the hair of your head? Did you dare to dream that I or any of the people who love you could get on without you? Your mother, and Aunt Lynette--and Bawne and Uncle Owen--and Sir Roland--who managed things for me to come to you!--and Margot and her boy ... for there is a boy--a regular topper--born last November--with eyes just like poor Franky's! And you're to come back and be kind to him and his mother--because you promised Franky you would! So that old ghost of your succession to the Viscounty is laid--and I'm glad of it! Another stone heaved out of the way that leads me back to you!"
She went on, holding him as he held her embraced, pouring herself out in a swift rush of eager utterance:
"Come back and help us readjust values. Everything's changed--everything's altered--since the beginning of the War. We women have found out--even the idlest and the vainest of us--that the things we used to live for really meant nothing! What we have called Society is a box of broken toys. The plays we have laughed or cried at--the books we have read--the music we have gone rabid over--the frocks we have sported--the flirtations we have revelled in--the scandals we have discussed--none of these mean anything, count for anything--weigh anything! Nothing is real but Life--and Love--and Death. Not life like the life we used to know--nor love like the love we talked of. A life of work, and help, and prayer, and hope--and courage--and the kind of love that has wings and doesn't crawl in the mud. Nothing like the Death we used to dodge and blink and dread so, but something nobler. Something that leads through the Gate of the Grave--to God! Don't you see that the War was sent to change us?--don't you see----"
He cried out:
"I shall never see again!" An ugly spasm wrenched his jaw aside. "They think I take it pluckily. But every night I dream it over once more--and the sky is rushing back, and the ground is swirling up--and the Bird is toppling, spinning downwards, in a trail of smoke and fire. I can hear my observer screaming, poor, poor fellow! How I escaped burning I don't know. Then comes the crash!--and the grey void of Nothingness out of which, aeons later, I crawl into a blind man's dreadful world. A world that is all sounds and voices and sounds and touches. A world where I must live--and die--in the dark!"
She said in her deep sweet voice, with her velvet cheek pressed against Sherbrand's:
"With me. And suppose you saw me, and could not feel nor hear me?"
She felt him shudder as he answered:
"The thing would be Hell!"
"Well, then, let me try and make the best of it! For both of us, my dear one!" She pressed closer to his breast, magnetising him with her touch, her breath, her presence, summoning all her forces of womanly allurements to charm him from despair. "Couldn't I reconcile my lover to the dark?" she whispered.
"Are you cold, dearest?" he asked. For as the last words left her lips a sharp vibration had passed through her. "You shivered as though you were."
"Perhaps? ... I hardly know," said Patrine, thrusting away the loathed memory of the Upas. "Perhaps the wind has shifted--or a goose walked over my grave."
She changed her tone and began to tell him how Margot had evicted her Uncle Derek and his Lepidopthingambobs and handed over the caravanserai in Hanover Square to the Red Cross people for a Hospital--and how all the wards were to be covered with vulcanised rubber--not a corner to catch a dust-speck anywhere. And she went on to describe her journey in search of Sherbrand, and her disappointment at finding him absent from the Hospital at Pophereele--and the kindness shown her by the Monseigneur who had escorted her from St. O--, and subsequently insisted on accompanying her here.
"For it's supposed to be risky," she ended, smiling. "He says--to me it seems like spitting in the face of a dead body!--that the Germans shell the poor place nearly every day."
"It's true. They've pitched High Explosive in once already this morning--and as I mean to marry you to-morrow," said Sherbrand, "we had better be off out of it before they repeat the dose." He added: "There's an English Catholic priest at the Hospital--and I've my Special Licence still tucked away in a pocket!"
She exclaimed in delight:
"Then you never meant to give me up? Own it--you didn't!"
"It was you who took your solid oath you wouldn't marry me."
"Unless you were poor and ill--and wanted a woman to nurse you and look after you"--her voice broke--"and work for you! Oh, Boy!--no, not boy any more! My man of all the men that ever were or will be! Don't refuse me the right my love gives me--of working for you!" she urged.
"Such true love. Such fine love. Pat, you're a glory of a woman. And you shall work--I'll give you lots of work," he promised her. "But--my sweet girl, I'm not poor."
She asked him in her deep sweet voice:
"Do you think you'd be poor to me--if you hadn't a copper halfpenny?" And with his arm about her still, and her heart beating against his hand, as they moved over the grass together, she began to describe their home. Quite a small, unpretending, but comfortable home. The home of two people who adored each other, and wanted nothing better than to go on doing it up to the last day of their lives.
"We'll have children--stacks!" she assured him. "Long-legged boys with beaky, hatchet faces--boys who'll invent and build aeroplanes and fly them too, you bet!"
"And girls," put in Sherbrand, tightening his clasp about the supple womanly body, "great big galumphing girls, like their mother!"
"The sweets!" she sighed. "I can see them now!"
"Ah, that's what I shan't do ever," said Sherbrand. "Don't you think they'll be bored with their blind father, sometimes, Pat?"
"Just let them dare! Let them--that's all!" She winked away the tears crowding to her eyelashes. "Besides you mayn't be always blind--I'll never give up praying! Didn't that American surgeon at the Hospital say that cases of functional blindness from shock--like yours--supposing there is no serious lesion in the brain--have been known to recover sight suddenly and completely? Don't shake your head! Isn't there a chance--a blessed possibility--to cling to, and fight for? Ah! if you were cured, don't you know I'd send you back to the Front next day? Don't you, Alan? Yes!--yes! you do!" The bright drops rushed in spate over her underlids, and hopped over the front of her long blue coat, to lose themselves among the frosted grasses as she went hotly on:
"Don't you believe--you must believe--I'd lay down my life--just for the glory of doing that! Perhaps I usedn't to care much about England--before the War. But now I've found out what it means to be a pup of the old bull-mother,--I'd meet Death jumping--rather than fail cf doing my bit. What's up?"
Someone had whistled shrilly behind them, and she wheeled, to see Monseigneur and a Red Cross orderly beckoning and signalling, standing on a heap of rubbish on the outskirts of the Plaine. Sherbrand, for whom the call was meant, waved his stick and whistled in answer. The orderly, at a gesture from Monseigneur, got nimbly down from the rubbish-heap and started to cross the intervening stretch of grass.
"Why is he coming?" began Patrine, vexedly.
"To fetch the blind man, I suppose."
"Ah-h!" Her long eyes blazed resentment. "If anyone but yourself had called you that! ... Send him back!" she pleaded, jealously. "From henceforward nobody is to fetch you--or carry you either, except Me!"
So Sherbrand laughed in his companioned darkness, waved again, and shouted to the orderly to go back. What he said was lost in the racket accompanying the arrival of a German H.E. shell.
For still at intervals during each day and sometimes at night-time the sad dignity of the deserted City of the Salient was outraged by these monstrous messengers of hate. The thing came from the enemy's position east of the city, and fell with a hideous droning note in the wooded park by the Dixmude Gate.
A shattering crash followed--as though the roof of the world were tumbling in. The green park of budding trees was rent and splintered, cratered and riven as though a Dinosaur had died there of acute rabies, biting and tearing and howking up the earth.
Love is a wonderful wit-quickener in necessity. It taught Patrine Saxham, the woman of limitations, exactly what to do at the moment when the great shell droned down to ground. Irresistible as a mountain torrent, she leaped straight for the blind man before her, hurling him backwards by the sudden impact, over-balancing and bearing him down. Pinning him with the sheer weight of her vigorous young body--covering him as Nature teaches a tigress to cover her menaced cub, whilst their ears were deafened with the appalling detonation, the solid earth heaved and billowed under their prone, locked bodies, and the air surged and winnowed about them as though beaten by the passage of huge invisible wings.
"Is this Death?" she asked herself. "Then--for both!" was her half-conscious prayer. But Death passed by in a blizzard of scorching gases, splinters of rending steel, gravel, and stones, splintered timber and pulverised soil, leaving a huge cloud of reddish-yellow billowing over the Plaine d'Amour. A brown powder that stank of verbena, thickly coated all visible objects. Hair, skin, and clothes were tinted to uniformity, and a smothering oppression burdened the lungs. Yet as Patrine lay gasping, nerveless, beaten, that fierce new-kindled instinct of protection lived in her, potent, vital with possibilities as the spark in the battery or the germ in the cell.
The Great Test had found her not wanting nor unready. The dross of self had been burned away in the flame of a passion high and pure. The Crown of a noble womanhood was hers in that great moment when her body had made a rampart for the shielding of her love.
Under the heave of her bosom Sherbrand's broad chest panted. He lived--and her heart went up in a rush of passionate thanks to Heaven. She moved from him, quaking in every nerve and fibre, crouched beside him, found her handkerchief, and wiped the pungent dust from his face. It was pale, the mouth and eyes were closed, the nostrils fluttered with quick panting. His head had struck against the ground when her leap had hurled him backwards. He had been stunned, she told herself. He would revive soon.
"Patrine!" he choked out, opening his eyes.
"Pat's here by you, my darling!" She slipped her strong arm under his neck and helped him to sit up:
"You're not hurt?" His lungs pumped hard, and his reddened eyes ran water. He blinked it away and caught her hands, crushing them in his grip. "You're sure you're not?"
"Quite, quite sure! And you're all right, aren't you?"
"As right as rain, except for a bump on the head!" He freed a hand and rubbed it. "When the shell came over--and the ground rose up and hit me. How did it happen?"
"I--hardly know. Oh, Alan! God has been good to us! Hasn't He?"
There was no immediate response. Sherbrand's lean face was working. He rose to his knees and thus remained an instant, in silence that gave thanks. Then he got lightly on his feet, reached down and lifted Patrine. And thus they stood, the girl clinging to the young man's broad shoulders as he held her, the tears from her own still smarting eyes tracing white channels in the dust that masked her quivering face.
"You and I! ... My hat!--" she gasped--"what a precious pair of scallawags! You lose nothing in not being able to see, my Flying Man!--just now. Oh! but the station! And the park----"
She stopped in sheer astonishment. For the deadliest fury of the High Explosive had wreaked itself on the bit of municipal woodland. With the electric train-station that had neighboured it, and the abattoirs in its vicinity, it had been clean wiped out.
"Come," said Sherbrand, tightening his clasp as he felt her sway against him. He was supporting--he was guiding as they turned their faces south.
Here the Death that had passed by had left more traces of its passage. The rent carcase of a gaunt cow that had grazed upon the Plaine d'Amour, lay in a steaming crimson pool among the frosty grasses; and beyond, some thirty paces from the Rue d'Elverdinghe, where the automobiles waited near the ruins of the prison, Monseigneur in his flowing black cloak knelt over a stained bundle of ragged blue clothing and shattered humanity, and the Belgian and his fellow-chauffeur were bringing a stretcher from the Red Cross car....
"The poor orderly has been wounded ... No! ... killed!" flashed through Patrine's mind as Monseigneur glanced towards her, gesturing with a supple hand in a swift expressive way. "I must go over there--I may be wanted," she mentally added, controlling her sick shudder and reached back to take again the hand of her blind man. But a sudden exclamation from Sherbrand brought round her head, and the strange look stamped upon the face she loved, arrested movement and checked utterance.
"What is it? What has happened?" she forced her stiffened tongue to ask him. "Oh, Alan! tell me! You are not ill----"
"Not ill!" came from the twisted mouth, wrung and convulsed with--was it joy or anguish? He shut his eyes, striving for calmness and coherent speech and wrestling with a fierce emotion that made him sway and totter like a drunken man. "Give me your hand--both your dear hands! Don't mind my shutting my eyes--it'll steady me to tell you! ... Just now--when you let go of me--something happened--and I--saw!"
He choked upon the last word. She faced him, white and wild and desperate, and cried in a voice quite strange to Sherbrand's ears:
"You saw! ... My God!--do you want to drive me crazy? Do you mean--you can't mean----"
"Does the truth sound so insane?" His voice broke in a sob. He opened the shut, quivering lids through which the tears were streaming, and the grey-blue eyes that looked at her were no longer the dead orbs of one blind. Life and light throbbed in their depths, they glowed with such a radiance as the eyes of the First Lover may have shed on the face of the new-made Eve. What was he saying in shaken tones of mingled awe and rapture:
"I saw what I am seeing now. Trees--and green grass, and blue sky--and your face! Your dear face that stayed with me when the Big Dark blotted out the rest.... More loving--more lovely than ever I have dreamed it. Oh! Pat, did ever any man get such a wedding-present?" His tone changed: "My sight for me--and death for that poor chap there! Can it be Carpenter--the American who's been so good to me! ... And the priest helping to lift him--the old man with the noble face? ... Not Monseigneur--our Chaplain at the Hospital! He's beckoning! Come! Let's run!"
So these happy lovers with Death as travelling-companion drove away from the City of the Salient. There was a wedding next morning at the Hospital of Pophereele. And twenty-four hours later, the big black-capitalled broadsheets bellowed from Ludgate Hill up Fleet Street and along the Strand to Charing Cross, and all through the West End:
ROMANTIC SEQUEL TO FAMOUS AVIATOR'S STORY. SHERBRAND OF THE R.F.C., BLINDED IN AIR-BATTLE, RECOVERS SIGHT THROUGH SHELL-SHOCK. MARRIED YESTERDAY. RETURNS WITH BRIDE. CAPTAINCY AND D.S.O."
A closing picture of a young couple sitting very close together on a rustic seat in the garden of a cottage on Seasheere Downs, where hyacinths bloom, and clumps of pink-white peonies, and the Birds of War whirr overhead in a June's sky of speedwell-blue.
Patrine Sherbrand says to her husband, as the smoke of British transports and heavily-laden supply-steamers slants against the east horizon, and the knife-sharp bows of shepherding Destroyers cleave the grey-green waters of the North Sea:
"If without dishonour to your dear name it lay in my power to keep you with me, do you think I'd have it so? Not I! I'll have you carry on as though I'd never even existed. For me--the work that lies at hand. When that's done--dreams of you. If you were killed you'd live for me--my man I gave for England! Our England that they'll never beat--not even if they win!"
"Thanks, my sweet wife! Then when I say--our honeymoon is over----?"
"Ah, well! ... How soon? ..."
He told her, looking in her eyes, that did not flinch beneath his:
"In four days! The Medical Board finds me quite fit--and there's a Flying billet waiting. Our Western Front...."
She said, as her heart beat on his and their mouths met in a kiss:
"Then--four more days of love with me, and fly, my Bird of War!"
The Chief Scout had said to Sherbrand in those days of July, 1914: "The Saxham breed's a stark breed--hard as granite, supple as incandescent lava, with a strain of Berserk madness, and a dash of Oriental fatalism. They can hate magnificently and forgive grandly, and love to the very verge of Death."
Sherbrand had found it so. He thanked God that this heart that he had won would never change nor fail him. He knew that he could call his own the love that reaches living hands to Love beyond the grave.
