dull red glow, which was already beginning to rival the deepening
crimson of the Maine sunset. The central portion of the house was still
standing, though much of it had been blown bodily away, and the fire was
laying fierce hands upon it from all sides. We turned to the north,
where we supposed the wharf had been. The remains of half a dozen sheds
were burning on one side of the cove, and it looked as if half the cliff
had been tumbled into it on the other.
The heat of the fire along the wharf was so fierce that we turned back
to the house again.
"Well," said Duncan, "there's evidence enough to give a few good
headlines to the neutral press,--'_Gasoline Explosion on Maine Coast!
Wealthy New Yorker Escapes Death in Fiery Furnace!_' Fortunately,
there's also enough for Washington to lay up in its memory."
Another section of the house fell as we looked at it; and we saw the
interior of the dining-room, with the flames licking up the three
remaining walls. By one of those curious freaks of high-explosive, the
table was hardly disarranged; and our last glimpse of it, through a
fringe of fire, showed us those twelve queer champagne glasses. They
stood there, flickering like evil goblins, a peach in every glass....
We watched them for five minutes. Then the whole scintillating fabric
collapsed; and we sat down to wait for the frantic motor-boat, which was
already thumping towards us, with the reporter of the _Rockport
Sentinel_ furiously writing in her bows.
VIII
MAY MARGARET
"_Clerk Sanders and May Margaret
Walked ower yon garden green,
And sad and heavy was the love
That fell thae twa between._"
May Margaret was an American girl, married to a lieutenant in the
British Army named Brian Davidson. When the regretful telegram from the
War Office, announcing his death in action, was delivered to her in her
London apartment, she read it without a quiver, crumpled it up, threw it
into the fire, and leaned her head against her arm, under his photograph
on the mantel-piece. When her heart began to beat again, she went to her
bedroom and locked the door. This was not the Anglo-American love-affair
of fiction. Both of them were poverty-stricken in the estimation of
their friends; and it was only by having her black evening dress "done
over," and practising other strict economies for a whole year, that May
Margaret had been able to sail from New York to work in an European
hospital. The marriage had taken place a little more than three months
ago, while Davidson was home on a few days' leave.
After the announcement of his death, she did not emerge from her room
until the usual letter arrived from the front, explaining with the usual
helplessness of the brother officer, that Davidson was really "one of
the best," that "everybody liked him," and that "he was the life and
soul of his company." But the letter contained one thing that she was
not expecting, an official photograph of the grave, a quarter-plate
picture of an oblong of loose earth, marked with a little cross made,
apparently, of two sticks of kindling wood. And it was this that had
brought her back to life again. It was so strangely matter-of-fact, so
small, so complete, that it brought her out of the great dark spaces of
her grief. It reminded her of something that Davidson had once written
in a letter from the trenches. "Things out here are not nearly so bad as
people at home imagine. At home, one pictures the war as a great blaze
of horror. Out here, things become more sharply defined, as the lights
of a city open up when you approach them, or as the Milky Way splits
itself up into points of light under the telescope. I have never seen a
dead body yet that looked more imposing than a suit of old clothes. The
real man was somewhere else."
She examined the photograph with a kind of curiosity. In this new sense
of the reality of death, the rattle of the traffic outside had grown
strange and dreamlike, and the rattle of the tea-things and the smell of
the buttered toast which an assiduous, but discreet landlady placed at
her side, seemed as fantastic and remote as any fairy-tale. All the
trivial details of the life around her had assumed a new and mysterious
quality. She seemed to be moving in a phantasmagorical world. The round
red face of the landlady came and went like the goblin things you may
see over your shoulder in a looking-glass at twilight. And the center of
all this insubstantial dream-stuff was that one vivid oblong of loose
earth, marked with two sticks of kindling wood, in the neat and sharply
defined official photograph.
There was something that looked like a black thread entwining the arms
of the tiny cross; and she puzzled over it stupidly, wondering what it
could be. "I suppose I could write and ask," she said to herself. Then
an over-mastering desire seized her. She must go and see it. She must go
and see the one fragment of the earth that remained to her, if only for
the reason that there, perhaps, she might find the relief of tears. But
she had another reason also, a reason that she would never formulate,
even to herself, an over-mastering impulse from the depths of her being.
May Margaret had no intimate friends in London. She had established
herself in these London lodgings with the cosmopolitan independence of
the American girl, whose own country contains distances as great as that
from London to Petrograd. The world shrinks a little when your own
country is a continent; and it was with no sense of remoteness that she
now went to the telephone and rang up the London office of the _Chicago
Bulletin_.
"I want to speak to Mr. Harvey," she said. "Is this Mr. Harvey? This is
Mrs. Davidson,--Margaret Grant--you remember, don't you? I want to see
you about something very important. You are sending people out to the
front all the time, aren't you, in connection with your newspapers?
Well, I want to know if you can arrange for me to go.... Yes, as a woman
correspondent.... Oh, they don't allow it? Not at the British front?...
Well, I've got to arrange it somehow.... Won't you come and see me and
talk it over?... All right, at six-thirty. Good-by."
The official photograph was still in her hand when Mr. William K.
Harvey, of the _Chicago Bulletin_, was announced. He was a very young
man to be managing the London office of a great newspaper, but this was
not a disadvantage for May Margaret's purpose.
"So you want to go to the front," he said, settling down into the
arm-chair on the other side of the fire. "It would certainly make a
great story. We ought to be able to syndicate it all through the Middle
West; but you'll have to give up the idea of the British front. We might
manage the French front, I think."
"But I want particularly to go to Arras. Surely, you can manage it, Mr.
Harvey. You must know all sorts of influential people here." Her voice,
with its husky contralto notes, rather like those of a boy whose voice
has lately broken, had always an appeal for Mr. Harvey, and it was
particularly pleasing just then. He beamed through his glasses and ran
his hand through his curly hair.
"I was talking to Sir William Robertson about a very similar proposition
only yesterday, and Sir William told me that he'd do anything on earth
for the _Chicago Bulletin_, but the War Office, which is in heaven, had
decided finally to allow no women correspondents at the British front."
May Margaret rose and went to the window. For a moment she pressed her
brow against the cool glass and, as she stared hopelessly at the busses
rumbling by, an idea came to her. She wondered that she had not thought
of it before.
"Come here, Mr. Harvey," she said. "I want to show you something."
He joined her at the window. A bus had halted by the opposite pavement.
The conductor was swinging lightly down by the hand-rail, a very
youthful looking conductor, in breeches and leggings.
"Is that a man or a woman?" said May Margaret.
"A woman, isn't it?"
"And that?" She pointed to another figure striding by in blue overalls
and a slouch hat.
"I don't know. There are so many of them about now, that on general
principles, I guess it's a woman. Besides, it looks as if it would be in
the army if it were not a woman."
"Yes, but I am an American correspondent," said May Margaret.
"Gee!" said Mr. Harvey, surveying her from head to foot. His face looked
as if all the printing presses of the _Chicago Bulletin_ were silently
at work behind it. She was tall and lean--a college friend had described
her exactly as "half goddess and half gawk." Her face was of the
open-air type. Her hair would have to be cropped, of course. "Gee!" he
said again. "It would be the biggest scoop of the war."
A fortnight later, a slender youth in khaki-colored clothes, with
leggings, arrived at the Foreign Office, presented a paper to a sad-eyed
messenger in the great hall, and was led to the disreputable old lift
which, as usual, bore a notice to the effect that it was not working
to-day. The sad-eyed messenger heaved the usual sigh, and led the way up
three flights of broad stone stairs to a very dark waiting-room. There
were three other young men in the room, but it was almost impossible to
see their faces.
"Mr. Grant, of the _Tribune_, wasn't it, sir?" said the messenger.
"Mr. Martin Grant, of the _Chicago Bulletin_," said May Margaret, and
the messenger shuffled into the distance along a gloomy corridor which
seemed to be older than any tomb of the Pharaohs, and destined to last
as long again.
In a few minutes, a young Englishman, who looked like an army officer in
mufti, but was really a clerk in the Foreign Office, named Julian
Sinclair, was making himself very charming to the four correspondents.
To one of them he talked very fluently in Spanish: to another he spoke
excellent Swedish, bridging several moments of misunderstanding with
smiles and gestures that would have done credit to a Macchiavelli; to
the third, because he was a Greek, he spoke French; and to Martin Grant,
because he was an American, he spoke the language of George Washington,
and behaved as if he were a fellow-countryman of slightly different,
possibly more broad-minded, but certainly erroneous politics.
Then he gave them all a few simple directions. He was going to have the
pleasure of escorting them to the front. It was necessary that they
should be accompanied by some one from the Foreign Office, he explained,
in order to save them trouble; and they had been asked to meet him there
to-day for purposes of identification and to get their passports. These
would have to be stamped by both the British and French military
authorities at an address which he gave them, and they would please meet
him at Charing Cross Station at twelve o'clock to-morrow morning. It was
all very simple, and Mr. Martin Grant felt greatly relieved.
There was a drizzle of rain the next morning, for which May Margaret was
grateful. It was a good excuse for appearing at the station in the
Burberry raincoat, which gave her not only a respite from
self-consciousness, but an almost military air. Her cloth cap, too, the
peak of which filled her strong young face with masculine shadows,
approximated to the military shape. It was a wise choice; for the soft
slouch hat, which she had tried at first, had persistently assumed a
feminine aspect, an almost absurdly picturesque effect, no matter how
she twisted it or pulled it down on her close-cropped head.
She was the first of the party to arrive, and when Julian Sinclair
hurried along the platform with the three foreign correspondents, there
was no time left for conversation before they were locked in their
compartment of the military train. They were the only civilians aboard.
She dropped into a corner seat with her newspaper. But her eyes and
brain were busy with the scene outside. The train was crammed with
troops, just as it had been on that other day when she stood outside on
the platform, like those other women there, and said good-by to Brian.
She was living it all over again, as she watched those farewells; but
she felt nearer to him now, as if she were seeing things from his own
side, almost as if she had broken through the barriers and taken some
dream-train to the next world, in order to follow him.
There was a very young soldier leaning from the window of the next
compartment. He was talking to a girl with a baby in her arms. Her wide
eyes were fixed on his face with the same solemn expression as those of
the child, dark innocent eyes with the haunted beauty of a Madonna. They
were trying to say something to each other, but the moment had made them
strangers, and they could not find the words.
"You'll write," she said faintly.
He nodded and smiled airily. A whistle blew. There was a banging of
doors, and a roar of cheering. The little mother moved impulsively
forward, climbed on to the footboard, threw her right arm around the
neck of her soldier, and drew his face down to her own.
"Stand back there," bellowed the porters. But the girl's arm was locked
round the lad's neck as if she were drowning, and they took no notice.
The train began to move. A crippled soldier, in blue hospital uniform
and red tie, hobbled forward on his crutch, and took hold of the girl.
"Break away," he said gruffly. "Break away, lass."
He pulled her back to the platform. Then he hobbled forward with the
moving train and spoke to the young soldier.
"If you meet the blighter wot gave me this," he said, pointing to his
amputated thigh, "you give 'im 'ell for _me_!"
It was a primitive appeal, but the boy pulled himself together
immediately, as the veteran face, so deeply plowed with suffering,
savagely confronted his own. And, as the train moved on, and the wounded
man stood there, upright on his crutch, May Margaret saw that there were
tears in those fierce eyes--eyes so much older than their years--and a
tenderness in the coarse face that brought her heart into her throat.
The journey to Folkestone was all a dream, a dream that she was glad to
be dreaming, because she was now on the other side of the barrier that
separated people at home from those at the front. The queerest thoughts
passed through her mind. She understood for a moment the poor groping
endeavors of the war-bereft to break through those darker barriers of
the material world, and get into touch, no matter how vaguely, with the
world beyond. She felt that in some strange way she was succeeding.
They had lunch on the train. She forced herself to drink some black
coffee, and nibble at some tepid mutton. She was vaguely conscious that
the correspondents were enjoying themselves enormously at the expense of
the State, and she shuddered at the grotesque sense of humor which she
discovered amongst her thoughts at this moment.
The Channel-crossing on the troop-ship brought her nearer yet. There was
hardly standing-room on any of the decks, and the spectacle was a very
strange one, for all the crowded ranks in khaki, officers and men, had
been ordered to wear life-belts. A hospital ship which had just arrived
was delivering its loads of wounded men to the docks, and these also
were wearing life-belts.
The sunset-light was fading as the troop-ship moved out, and the seas
had that peculiar iridescent smoothness, as of a delicately tinted skin
of very faintly burning oils, which they so often wear when the wind
falls at evening. On one side of the ship a destroyer was plowing
through white mounds of foam; and overhead there was one of the new
silver-skinned scouting air-ships.
Away to the east, a great line of transports was returning home with the
wounded, and the horizon was one long stream of black smoke. It was all
so peaceful that the life-belts seemed an anomaly, and it was difficult
to realize the full meaning of this traffic. The white cliffs of England
wore a spiritual aspect that only the hour and its grave significance
could lend them; and May Margaret thought that England had never looked
so beautiful. There were other troop-ships all crowded, about to follow,
and their cheers came faintly across the water. The throb of the engines
carried May Margaret's ship away rhythmically, and somewhere on the
lower deck a mouth organ began playing, almost inaudibly, "It's a Long,
Long Way to Tipperary." The troops were humming the tune, too softly for
it to be called singing, and it all blended with the swish of the water
and the hum of the engine-room, like a memory of other voices, lost in
France and Flanders. May Margaret looked down at the faces. They, too,
were grave and beautiful with evening light; and the brave unquestioning
simplicity of it all seemed to her an inexpressibly noble thing. She
thought for a moment that no pipes among the mists of glen or mountain,
no instrument on earth, ever had the beauty of that faint music. It was
one of those unheard melodies that are better than any heard. The sea
bore the burden. The winds breathed it in undertone; and its message was
one of a peace that she could not understand. Perhaps, under and above
all the tragedies of the hour, the kingdom of heaven was there.
The cliffs became ghostly in the distance, and suddenly on the dusky
waters astern there shone a great misty star. It was the first flash of
the shore searchlights, and May Margaret watched it flashing long after
the English coast had disappeared. Then she lost the searchlight also;
and the transport was left, with the dark destroyer, to find its way,
through whatever perils there might be, to the French coast. Millions of
men--she had read it--had been transported, despite mines and
submarines, without the loss of a single life. She had often wondered
how it was possible. Now she saw the answer.
A little black ship loomed up ahead of them and flashed a signal to
their escort. Far through the dusk she saw them, little black trawlers
and drifters, _Lizzie_ and _Maggie_ and _Betsy Jane_, signaling all that
human courage could discover, of friend or foe, on the face of the
waters or under them.
In a very short time they caught the first glimpse of the searchlights
on the French coast; and, soon afterwards, they drew into a dark harbor,
amid vague cheerings and occasional bursts of the "Marseillaise" from
wharves thronged with soldiers of a dozen nationalities. A British
officer edged his way through the crowd below them on the quay, and
waved his hand to Julian Sinclair.
"Ah, there's our military guide, Captain Crump. Now, if you'll follow me
and keep together, we'll get our passports examined quickly, and join
him," said the latter, obviously relieved at the prospect of sharing his
neutrals with a fellow-countryman.
There followed a brief, but very exact, scrutiny and stamping of papers
by an aquiline gentleman whose gold-rimmed spectacles suggested a
microscopical carefulness; a series of abrupt introductions to Captain
Crump on the gloomy wharf; a hasty bite and sup in a station restaurant,
where blue uniforms mingled with khaki, and some red-tabbed British
staff-officers, at the next table, were drinking wine with some turbaned
Indian Princes. It was a strange glimpse of color and light rifting the
darkness for a moment. Then they followed Captain Crump again, through
great tarpaulined munition-dumps and loaded motor-lorries, to the two
motor-cars behind the station. In these they were whirled, at forty
miles an hour, along one of the poplar-bordered roads of France that
seemed to-night as ghostly as those titanic alleys of Ulalume, in the
song of May Margaret's national poet. Once or twice, as they passed
through a cluster of cottages, the night-wind brought a whiff of
iodoform, and reminded her that flesh and blood were fighting with pain
and death somewhere in that darkness.
Every few minutes they passed troops of dark marching men. Several times
it seemed to her that she recognized the face for which she was looking,
in some momentary glimmer of starlight.
At last they reached the village where the guests of G. H. Q. were to be
quartered. The foreigners were assigned to the château which was used as
a guest-house; but there had been one or two unexpected arrivals, and
Captain Crump asked the American correspondent if he would mind
occupying a room in the house of the curé, a hundred yards away up the
village street. The American correspondent was exceedingly glad to do
so, and was soon engaged in attempts at conversation with the friendly
old man in the black cassock who did his best to make her welcome. There
were no more difficulties for her that night, except that the curé had
very limited notions as to the amount of water she required for washing.
They set out early the next morning on their way to that part of the
front which she had particularly asked to see. The long straight
poplar-bordered road, bright with friendly sunshine now, absorbed her.
She heard the chatter of the correspondents at her side as in a dream.
"Have you read Anatole France?" said the Spaniard. (He was anxious for
improving conversation, and wore a velvet coat totally unsuited to the
expedition.) But May Margaret's every thought was plodding along with
the plodding streams of dusty, footsore men, in steel hats, and she did
not answer. She pointed vaguely to the women working in the fields to
save the harvest, and the anti-aircraft guns that watched the sky from
behind the sheaves. At every turn she saw something that reminded her of
things she had seen before, in some previous existence, when she had
lived in the life of her lover and traveled through it all with his own
eyes. She was passing through his existence again. He was part of all
this: these camps by the roadside, where soldiers, brown as gipsies,
rambled about with buckets; these endless processions of motor-lorries,
with men and munitions and guns all streaming to the north on every
road, as if whole nations were setting out on a pilgrimage and taking
their possessions with them; these endless processions of closed
ambulances returning, marked with the Red Cross.
Once, over a bare brown stretch of open country, a magnificent body of
Indian cavalry swept towards them, every man sitting his horse like a
prince; and the British officers, with their sun-burned faces and dusky
turbans, hardly distinguishable from their native troops.
"Glorious, aren't they?" said Sinclair, leaning back from his place
beside the chauffeur. "But they haven't had a chance yet. If only we
could get the Boches out of their burrows and loose our cavalry at
them!"
She nodded her head; but her thoughts were elsewhere. This picturesque
display seemed to belong to a bygone age; it was quite unrelated to
this war of chemists and spectacled old men who disbelieved in chivalry,
laughed at right and wrong, and had killed the happiness of the entire
world.
She noticed, whenever they passed a village or a farm-house, or even a
cattle-shed now, that the smell of iodoform brooded over everything. All
these wounded acres of France were breathing it out like the scent of
some strange new summer blossoms. A hundred yards away from the ruined
outhouses of every village she began to breathe it. Her senses were
unusually keen, but it dominated the summer air so poignantly that she
could not understand why these meticulously vivid men--the foreign
correspondents--were unaware of it. It turned the whole countryside into
a series of hospital wards; and the Greek was now disputing with the
Spaniard about home-rule for Ireland.
At last, in the distance, they heard a new sound that enlarged the
horizon as when one approaches the sea. It was the mutter of the guns, a
deep many-toned thunder, rolling up and dying away, but without a single
break, incessant as the sound of the Atlantic in storm.
The cars halted in what had once been a village, and was now a rubbish
heap of splinters and scarred walls and crumbling mortar.
The correspondents alighted and followed Captain Crump across a broad
open plain, pitted with shell-holes. The incessant thunder of the guns
deepened as they went.
"Don't touch anything without consulting me," snapped Crump at the
Spaniard, who was nosing round an unexploded shell and thinking of
souvenirs. "The Boches have a charming trick of leaving things about
that may go off in your hands. A chap picked up a spiked helmet here the
other day. They buried him in the graveyard that Mr. Grant wants to see.
It's a very small grave. There wasn't much left of him."