And the Sister is of a goodness! But yes. Yet the Sister may laugh at
me, for it is a thing entirely childish, my trouble."
"I will not laugh at you, Corporal," said Evelyn, gravely, and felt
something wring her heart.
"If--then--if the Sister will not think it foolish--I will tell." The
Sister's answer was to stroke his fingers. "It is my child, my little
girl," Duplessis began in his deep, weak tones. "It was to her I made
the promise."
"What promise?" prompted Evelyn softly, as he stopped.
"One sees," the deep voice began again, "that when I told them goodbye,
the mother and Marie my wife, and the _petite_, who has five years,
then I started away, and would not look back, because I could not well
bear it, Sister. And suddenly, as I strode to the street from our
cottage, down the brick walk, where there are roses and also other
flowers, on both sides--suddenly I heard a cry. And it was the voice of
little Jeanne, the _petite_. I turned at that sound, for I could not
help it, Sister, and between the flowers the little one came running,
and as I bent she threw her arms about my neck and held me so tight,
tight that I could not loosen the little hands, not without hurting her.
'I will not let you go--I will not let you go.' She cried that again and
again. Till my heart was broken. But all the same, one had to go. One
was due to join the comrades at the station, and the time was short. So
that, immediately, I had a thought. 'My most dear,' I spoke to her. 'If
thou wilt let me go, then I promise to send thee a great, beautiful
doll, all in white, as a bride, like the cousin Annette at her wedding
last week.' And then the clinging little hands loosened, and she said,
wondering--for she is but a baby--'Wilt thou promise, my father?' And I
said, 'Yes,' and kissed her quickly, and went away. So that now that I
am wounded and am to die, that promise which I cannot keep to my
_petite_, that promise hinders me to die."
The deep, sad voice stopped and the honest eyes of the peasant boy
looked up at Evelyn, burning with the pain of his body and of his soul.
And as Evelyn looked back, holding his hand and stroking it, it was as
if the furnace of the soldier's pain melted together all the things she
had ever cared to do. Yet it was a minute before she spoke.
"Corporal," she said, "your little girl shall have her doll, I will take
it to her and tell her that her father sent it. Will you lie very still
while I go and get the doll?"
The brown eyes looked up at her astounded, radiant, and the man caught
the hem of her white veil and kissed it. "But the Americans--they do
magic. You shall see, Sister, if I shall be still. I will not die before
the Sister returns. It is a joy unheard of."
The girl ran out of the hospital and away into Paris, and burst upon
Madame. Somehow she told the story in a few words, and Madame was crying
as she laid "La Marquise" in a box.
"It is Mademoiselle who is an angel of the good God," she whispered, and
kissed Evelyn unexpectedly on both cheeks.
Corporal Duplessis lay, waxen, starry-eyed, as the American Sister came
back into the ward. His look was on her as she entered the far-away
door, and he saw the box in her arms. The girl knelt and drew out the
gorgeous plaything and stood it by the side of the still, bandaged
figure. An expression as of amazed radiance came into the fast-dimming
eyes--into those large, brown, childlike eyes which had seen so little
of the gorgeousness of earth. His hand stirred a very little--enough,
for Evelyn quickly moved the gleaming satin train of the doll under the
groping fingers. The eyes lifted to Evelyn's face and the smile in them
was that of a prisoner who suddenly sees the gate of his prison opened
and the fields of home beyond. It mattered little, one may believe, to
the welcoming hosts of heaven that the angel at the gate of release for
the child-soul of Corporal Duplessis, the poilu, was only Robina's doll!
DUNDONALD'S DESTROYER
This is the year 1977. It will be objected that the episode I am going
to tell, having happened in 1917, having been witnessed by twenty-odd
thousand people, must have been, if true, for sixty years common
property and an old tale. But when General Cochrane--who saved England
at the end of the great war--told me the Kitchener incident of the story
last year, sitting in the rose-garden of the White Hart Inn at
Sonning-on-Thames, I had never heard of it.
I wonder why he told me. Probably, as is the case in most things which
most people do, from a mixture of impulses. For one thing I am an
American girl, with a fresher zest to hear tales of those titanic days
than the people or the children of the people who lived through them.
Also the great war of 1914 has stirred me since I was old enough to know
about it, and I have read everything concerning it which I could lay
hands on, and talked to everyone who had knowledge of it. Also, General
Cochrane and I made friends from the first minute. I was a quite
unimportant person of twenty-four years, he a magnificent hero of
eighty, one of the proud figures of England; it made me a bit dizzy when
I saw that he liked me. One feels, once in a long time, an unmistakable
double pull, and knows that oneself and another are friends, and not
age, color, race nor previous condition of servitude makes the slightest
difference. To have that happen with a celebrity, a celebrity whom it
would have been honor enough simply to meet, is quite dizzying. This was
the way of it.
I was staying with my cousin Mildred Ward, an Atlanta girl who married
Sir Cecil Ward, an English baronet of Oxfordshire. I reached
Martin-Goring on a day in July just in time to dress for dinner. When I
came down, a bit early, Milly looked me over and pronounced favorably.
"You're not so hard to look at," she pronounced. "It takes an American
really to wear French clothes. I'm glad you're looking well tonight,
because one of your heroes--Oh!"
She had floated inconsequently against a bookcase in a voyage along the
big room, and a spray of wild roses from a vase on the shelf caught in
her pretty gold hair.
"Oh--why does Middleton stick those catchy things up there?" she
complained, separating the flowers from her hair, and I followed her
eyes above the shelf.
"Why, that's a portrait of Kitchener--the old great Kitchener, isn't
it?" I asked. "Did he belong to Cecil's people?"
"No," answered Milly, "only Cecil's grandfather and General Cochrane--or
something--" her voice trailed. And then, "I've got somebody you'll be
crazy about tonight, General Cochrane."
"General Cochrane?"
"Oh! You pretend to know about the great war and don't know General
Cochrane, who saved England when the fleet was wrecked. Don't know him!"
"Oh!" I said again. "Know him? Know him! I know every breath, he drew.
Only I couldn't believe my ears. The boy Donald Cochrane? It isn't true
is it? How did you ever, ever--?"
"He lives five miles from us," said Milly, unconcernedly. "We see a lot
of him. His wife was Cecil's great-aunt. She's dead now. His daughter is
my best friend. 'The boy Donald Cochrane'!" She smiled a little. "He's
no boy now. He's old. Even heroes do that--get old."
And with that the footman at the door announced "General Cochrane."
I stared away up at a very tall, soldierly old man with a jagged scar
across his forehead. His wide-open, black-lashed gray eyes flashed a
glance like a menace, like a sword, and then suddenly smiled as if the
sun had jumped from a bank of storm-clouds. And I looked into those
wonderful eyes and we were friends. As fast as that. Most people would
think it nonsense, but it happened so. A few people will understand. He
took me out to dinner, and it was as if no one else was at the table. I
was aware only of the one heroic personality. At first I dared not speak
of his history, and then, without planning or intention, my own voice
astonished my own ears. I announced to him:
"You have been my hero since I was ten years old."
It was a marvelous thing he did, the lad of twenty, even considering
that the secret was there at his hand, ready for him to use. The
histories say that--that no matter if he did not invent the device, it
was his ready wit which remembered it, and his persistence which forced
the war department to use it. Yes, and his heroism which led the ship
and all but gave his life. And when he had fulfilled his mission he
stepped back into the place of a subaltern; he was modest, even
embarrassed, at the great people who thronged to him. England was saved;
that was all his affair; nothing, so the books say, could prod him into
prominence--though he rose to be a General later--after that, after
being the first man in England for those days. It was this personage
with whom I had gone out to dinner, and to whom I dared make that sudden
speech: "You have been my hero, General Cochrane, since I was ten years
old."
He slued about with the menacing, shrapnel look, and it seemed that
there might be an explosion of sharp-pointed small bullets over the
dinner-table.
"Don't!" I begged. The sun came out; the artillery attack was over; he
looked at me with boyish shyness.
"D'you know, when people say things like that I feel as if I were
stealing," he told me confidentially. "Anybody else could have done all
I did. In fact, it wasn't I at all," he finished.
"Not you? Who then? Weren't you the boy Donald Cochrane?"
"Yes," he said, and stopped as if he were considering it. "Yes," he said
quietly in the clean-cut, terse English manner of speaking, "I suppose I
was the boy Donald Cochrane." He gazed across the white lilacs and pink
roses on the table as if dreaming a bit. Then he turned with a long
breath. "My child," he said, "there is something about you which gives
me back my youth, and--the freshness of a great experience. I thank
you."
I gazed into those compelling eyes, gasping like a fish with too much
oxygen, I felt myself, Virginia Fox, meshed in the fringes of historic
days, stirred by the rushing mighty wind of that Great Experience. I was
awestruck into silence. Just then Milly got up, and eight women flocked
into the library.
I was good for nothing there, simply good for nothing at all. I tried to
talk to the nice, sensible English women, and I could not. I knew Milly
was displeased with me for not keeping up my end, but I was sodden with
thrills. I had sat through a dinner next to General Cochrane, the Donald
Cochrane who was the most dramatic figure of the world war of sixty
years ago. It has always moved me to meet persons who even existed at
that time. I look at them and think what intense living it must have
meant to pick up a paper and read--as the news of the day, mind
you--that Germany had entered Belgium, that King Albert was fighting in
the trenches, that Von Kluck was within seventeen miles of Paris, that
Von Kluck was retreating--think of the rapture of that--Paris
saved!--that the Germans had taken Antwerp; that the _Lusitania_ was
sunk; that Kitchener was drowned at sea! I wonder if the people who
lived and went about their business in America in those days realized
that they were having a stage-box for the greatest drama of history? I
wonder. Terror and heroism and cruelty find self-sacrifice on a scale
which had never been dreamed, which will never, God grant, need to be
dreamed on this poor little racked planet again. Of course, there are
plenty of those people alive yet, and I've talked to many and they
remember it, all of them remember well, even those who were quite small.
And it has stirred me simply to look into the eyes of such an one and
consider that those eyes read such things as morning news. The great war
has had a hold on me since I first heard of it, and I distinctly
remember the day, from my father, at the age of seven.
"Can you remember when it happened, father?" I asked him. And then: "Can
you remember when they drove old people out of their houses--and killed
them?"
"Yes," said my father. And I burst into tears. And when I was not much
older he told me about Donald Cochrane, the boy who saved England.
It was not strange to my own mind that I could not talk commonplaces
now, when I had just spent an hour tailing to the man who had been that
historic boy--the very Donald Cochrane. I could not talk commonplaces.
Milly's leisurely voice broke my meditation. "I'm sorry that my cousin,
Virginia Fox, should have such bad manners, Lady Andover," she was
drawling. "She was brought up to speak when spoken to, but I think it's
the General who has hypnotized her. Virginia, did you know that Lady
Andover asked you--" And I came to life.
"It was Miss Fox who hypnotized the General, I fancy," said Lady Andover
most graciously, considering I had overlooked her existence a second
before. "He had a word for no one else during dinner." I felt myself go
scarlet; it had pleased the Marvelous Person, then, to like me a
little, perhaps for the youth and enthusiasm in me.
With that the men straggled into the room and the tall grizzled head of
my hero, his lined face conspicuous for the jagged, glorious scar,
towered over the rest. I saw the vivid eyes flash about, and they met
mine; I was staring at him, as I must, and my heart all but jumped out
of me when he came straight to where I stood, my back against the
bookcase.
"I was looking for you," he said simply.
Then he glanced over my head and his hand shot up in a manner of salute;
I turned to see why. I was in front of the portrait of Lord Kitchener.
"Did you know him, General Cochrane?" I asked.
"Know him?" he demanded, and the gray glance plunged out at me from
under the thick lashes.
"Don't do it," I pleaded, putting my hands over my eyes. "When you look
at me so it's--bombs and bullets." The look softened, but the lean,
wrinkled face did not smile.
"You asked if I knew Kitchener," he stated.
I spoke haltingly. "I didn't know. Ought I to have known?"
General Cochrane gazed down, all at once dreamy, as if he looked through
me at something miles and æons away.
"No," he said. "There's no reason why you should. You have an uncommon
knowledge of events of that time, an astonishing knowledge for a young
thing, so that I forget you can't know--all of it." He stopped, as if
considering. "It is because I am old that I have fancies," he went on
slowly. "And you have understanding eyes. I have had a fancy this
evening that you and I were meant to be friends; that a similarity of
interests, a--a likeness--oh, hang it all!" burst out the General like a
college boy. "I never could talk except straight and hot. I mean I've a
feeling of a bond between us--you'll think me most presuming--"
I interrupted, breathless. "It's so," I whispered. "I felt it, only I'd
not have dared--" and I choked.
Old General Cochrane frowned thoughtfully. "Curious," was what he said.
"It's psychology of course, but I'm hanged if I know the explanation.
However, since it's so, my child, I'm glad. A man as old as I makes few
new friends. And a beautiful young woman--with a brain--and charm--and
innocent eyes--and French clothes!"
One may guess if I tried to stop this description. I could have listened
all night. With that:
"'Did I know Kitchener!' the child asked," reflected the General, and
threw back his splendid head and laughed. I stared up, my heart pumping.
Then, "Well, rather. Why, little Miss Fox--" and he stopped. "I've a
mind to tell the child a fairy-story," he said. "A true fairy-story
which is so extraordinary that few have been found to believe it, even
of those who saw it happen."
He halted again.
"Tell me!"
General Coehrane looked about the roomful of people and tossed out his
hand. "In this mob?" he objected. "It's too long a story in any case.
But why shouldn't you and I have a séance, to let a garrulous old fellow
talk about his youth?" he demanded in his lordly way. "Why not come out
on the river in my boat? They'll let you play about with an
octogenarian, won't they?"
"I'll come," I answered the General eagerly.
"Very good. Tomorrow. Oh, by George, no. That confounded Prime Minister
comes down to me tomorrow. I detest old men," said General Cochrane.
"Well, then, the day after?"
The Thames was a picture-book river that day, gay with row-boats and
punts and launches, yet serene for all its gaiety; slipping between
grassy banks under immemorial trees with the air of a private stream
wandering, protected, through an estate. The English have the gift above
other nations of producing an atmosphere of leisure and seclusion, and
surely there is no little river on earth so used and so unabused as the
Thames. Of all the craft abroad that bright afternoon, General
Cochrane's white launch with its gold line above the water and its
gleaming brass trimmings was far and away the prettiest, and I was
bursting with pride as we passed the rank and file on the stream and
they looked at us admiringly. To be alive on such a day in England was
something; to be afloat on the silvery Thames was enchantment; to be in
that lovely boat with General Cochrane, the boy Donald Cochrane, was a
rapture not to be believed without one's head reeling. Yet here it was
happening, the thing I should look back upon fifty, sixty years from
now, an old gray woman, and tell my grandchildren as the most
interesting event of my life. It was happening, and I was enjoying every
second, and not in the least awed into misery, as is often the case with
great moments. For the old officer was as perfect a playmate as any
good-for-nothing young subaltern in England, and that is putting it
strongly.
"Wouldn't it be nicer to land at Sonning and have our tea there?" he
suggested. We were dropping through the lock just higher than the
village; the wet, mossy walls were rising above us on both sides and the
tops of the lock-keeper's gorgeous pink snapdragons were rapidly going
out of sight. My host went on: "There's rather a nice rose-garden, and
it's on the river, and the plum-cake's good. What do you think, that or
on board?"
"The rose-garden," I decided.
Sonning is a village cut out of a book and pasted on the earth. It can't
be true, it's so pretty. And the little White Hart Inn is adorable.
"Is it really three hundred years old?" I asked. "The standard roses
look like an illustration out of 'Alice in Wonderland.' Yes, please--tea
in the White Hart garden."
The old General heaved a sigh. "Thank Heaven," he said. "I was most
awfully anxious for fear you'd say on the boat, and I didn't order any."
We slipped under an arch of the ancient red bridge and were at the
landing. I remember the scene as we stood on shore and looked down the
shining way of the river, the tall grasses bending on either side like
green fur stroked by the breeze; I remember the trim sea-wall and velvet
lawn, and the low, long house with leaded windows of the place next the
inn. A house-boat was moored to the shore below, white, with scarlet
geraniums flowing the length of the upper deck, and willow chairs and
tables; people were having tea up there; muslin curtains blew from the
portholes below. Some Americans went past with two enormous Scotch
deer-hound puppies on leash. "Be quiet, Jock," one of them said, and the
big, gentle-faced beast turned on her with a giant, caressing bound, the
last touch of beauty in the beautiful, quiet scene.
It was early, so that we took the table which pleased us, one set a bit
aside against a ten-foot hedge, and guarded by a tall bush of tea-roses.
A plump maid hurried across the lawn and spread a cloth on our table and
waited, smiling, as if seeing us had simply made her day perfect. And
the General gave the orders.
"The plum-cake is going to be wonderful," I said then, "and I'm hungry
as a bear for tea. But the best thing I've been promised this afternoon
is a fairy-story."
The shrapnel look flashed, keen and bright and afire, but I looked back
steadily, not afraid. I knew what sunlight was going to break; and it
broke.
"D'you know," said he, "I'm really quite mad to talk about myself. Men
always are. You've heard the little tale of the man who said, 'Let's
have a garden-party. Let's go out on the lawn and talk about me'? One
becomes a frightful bore quite easily. So that I've made rules--I don't
hector people about--about things I've been concerned with. As to the
incident I said I'd tell you, that would be quite impossible to tell
to--well, practically anyone."
My circulatory system did a prance; he could tell it practically to no
one, yet he was going to tell it to me! I instantly said that. "But
you're going to tell it to me?" I was anxious.
"Child, you flatter well," said the Marvelous Person, who had brought me
picnicking. "It's the American touch; there's a way with American women
quite irresistible."
"Oh--American women!" I remonstrated.
"Yes, indeed. They're delightful--you're witches, every mother's
daughter of you. But you--ah--that's different, now. You and I, as we
decided long ago, on day before yesterday, have a bond. I can't help the
conviction that you're the hundred-thousandth person. You have
understanding eyes. If I were a young man--And yet it's not just that;
it's something a bit rarer. Moreover, they tell me there's a chap back
in America."
"Yes," I owned. "There is a chap." And I persisted: "I'm to have a
fairy-story?"
The black-lashed gaze narrowed as it traveled across the velvet turf and
the tall roses, down the path of the quiet river. He had a fine head,
thick-thatched and grizzled, not white; his nose was of the straight,
short English type, slightly chopped up at the end--a good-looking nose;
his mouth was wide and not chiseled, yet sensitive as well as strong;
the jaw was powerful and the chin square with a marked dimple in it;
there was also color, the claret and honey of English tanned
complexions. Of course his eyes, with the exaggeratedly thick and long
black lashes, were the wonderful part of him, but there is no
describing the eyes. It was the look from them, probably, which made
General Cochrane's face remarkable. I suppose it was partly that
compelling look which had brought about his career. He was six feet
four, lean and military, full of presence, altogether a conspicuously
beautiful old lion in a land where every third man is beautiful.
"What are you looking munitions-of-war at, General, down the innocent
little Thames River? You must be seeing around corners, past Wargrave,
as far as Henley."
"I didn't see the Thames River," he shot at me in his masterful way. "I
was looking at things past, and people dead and gone. We ancients do
that. I saw London streets and crowds; I read the posters which told
that Kitchener was drowned at sea, and then I saw, a year later, England
in panic; I saw an almighty meeting in Trafalgar Square and I heard
speeches which burned my ears--men urging Englishmen to surrender
England and make terms with the Huns. Good God!" His fist came down on
the rattling little iron table.
"My blood boils now when I remember. Child," he demanded, "I can't see
why your alluring ways should have set me talking. Fancy, I've never
told this tale but twice, and I'm holding forth to a little alien whom I
haven't known two days, a young ne'er-do-well not born till forty years
after the tale happened!"
"What difference does that make?" I asked. "Age means nothing to real
people. And we've known each other since--since we hunted pterodactyls
together, pre-historically. Only--I hate bats," I objected to my own
arrangement. I went on: "If you knew how I want to hear! It's the most
wonderful thing in my life, this afternoon--you."
"I know you are honest," he said. "Different from the ruck. I knew that
the moment I saw you."
"Then," I prodded, "do begin with the posters about Lord Kitchener."
"But that's not the beginning," he protested. "You'll spoil it all," he
said.
"Oh, no, then! Begin at the beginning. I didn't know. I wanted to get
you started."
The gray eyes dreamed down the placid river water.
"The beginning was before I was born. It began when Kitchener, a young
general, picked up a marauding party of black rascals on his way to
Khartoum. They had a captive, a white girl, a lady. They had murdered
her father and mother and young brother. The father was newly appointed
Colonel of a regiment, traveling to his post with his family. The Arabs
were saving the girl for their devilish head chieftain. Kitchener had
the lot executed, and sent for the girl. She was--"
The old man's hand lifted to his head and he took off his hat and laid
it on the ground.