was my mother." There was an electrical silence. I knew enough to know
that no words fitted here. The old officer went on: "She was one of the
wonderful people. What she seemed to think of, after the horrors she had
gone through, was not herself or her suffering, but only to show her
gratitude. It was a long journey--weeks--through that land of hell,
while she was in Kitchener's hands, and not once did she lose courage.
The Sirdar told me that it was having an angel in camp--she held that
rough soldiery in the hollow of her hand. She told Kitchener her story,
and after that she would not talk of herself. You've heard that he never
had a love affair? That's wrong. He was in love then, and for the rest
of his life, with my mother."
I gasped. The shrapnel eyes menaced me.
"She could not speak of herself, d'you see? It was salvation to think
only of others, so that she'd not told him that she was engaged to my
father. Love from any other was the last thing she was thinking of.
After what had happened she was living from one breath to another and
she dared not consider her own affairs. The night before they reached
Cairo, Kitchener asked her to marry him. He was over forty then; she was
nineteen. She told him of her engagement, of course--told him also that
it might be she would never marry at all; a life of her own and
happiness seemed impossible now. She might go into a sisterhood. Work
for others was what she must have. Then, unexpectedly, my father was at
Cairo to meet her, and Kitchener went to him and told him. From that on
the two men were close friends. My people were not married till five
years later, and when I came to be baptized General Kitchener was
godfather. All my young days I was used to seeing him about the house at
intervals, as if he belonged to us. I remember his eyes following my
mother. Tall and slight she was, with a haunted look, from what she'd
seen; she moved softly, spoke softly. It was no secret from the two, my
father and mother, that he loved her always. Yet, so loyal, so crystal
he was that my father had never one moment of jealousy. On the contrary
they were like brothers. Then they died--my father and mother. The two
almost together. I came into Kitchener's hands, Lord Kitchener by then.
When he met me in London, a long lad of seventeen, he held my fingers a
second and looked hard at me.
"'You're very like her, Donald,' he said. And held on. And said it
again. 'Your mother's double. I'd know you for her boy if I caught one
look of your eyes, anywhere,' he said. 'Her boy.'--Well--what? Do I want
more tea? Of course, I do."
For the smiling plump maid had long ago brought the steaming stuff, the
bread and butter and jam and plum cake, I had officiated and General
Cochrane had been absorbing his tea as an Englishman does,
automatically, while he talked.
About us the tables were filling up, all over the rose-garden. The
Americans were there with the beautiful long-legged giant deer-hound
puppy, Jock, and were having trouble with his table manners. People came
in by twos and threes and more, from the river, with the glow of
exercise on their faces; an elderly country parson sat near,
black-coated, white-collared, with his elderly daughter and their dog, a
well-behaved Scottie this one, big-headed, with an age-old, wise, black
face. And a group of three pretty girls with their pretty pink-cheeked
mother and a young man or so were having a gay time with soft-voiced
laughter and jokes, not far away. The breeze lifted the long purple and
rose-colored motor veils of mother and daughters. The whole place was
full of bright colors and low-toned cheerful talk, yet so English was
the atmosphere, that it was as if the General and I were shut into an
enchanted forest. No one looked at us, no one seemed to know we were
there. The General began to talk again, unconscious as the rest of
anything or anybody not his affair.
"I got my commission in 1915 in K-1, Kitchener's first hundred thousand,
and I went off to the front in the second year of the war. I had a
scratch and was slightly gassed once, but nothing much happened for a
long time. And in 1916, in May, came the news that my godfather, the
person closest to me on earth, was drowned at sea. I was in London, just
out of the hospital and about to go back to France."
The old General stopped and stared down at the graveled path with its
trim turf border lying at his feet.
"It was to me as if the world, seething in its troubles, was suddenly
empty--with that man gone. I drifted with the crowd about London town,
and the crowd appeared to be like myself, dazed. The streets were full
and there was continually a profound, sorrowful sound, like the groan of
a nation; faces were blank and gray. Those surging, mournful London
streets, and the look of the posters with great letters on them--his
name--that memory isn't likely to leave me till I die. Of course, I got
hold of every detail and tried to picture the manner of it to myself,
but I couldn't get it that he was dead. Kitchener, the heart of the
nation; I couldn't comprehend that he had stopped breathing. I couldn't
get myself satisfied that I wasn't to see him again. It seemed there
must be some way out. You'll remember, perhaps, that four boats were
seen to put off from the _Hampshire_ as she sank? I tried to trace those
boats. I traveled up there and interviewed people who had seen them. I
got no good from it. But it kept coming to me that it was not a mine
that had sunk the ship, that it was a torpedo from a German submarine,
and that Kitchener was on one of the boats that put off and that he had
been taken prisoner by the enemy. God knows why that thought
persisted--there were reasons against it--it was a boy's theory. But it
persisted; I couldn't get it out of my head. I was in St. Paul's at the
Memorial Service; I heard the 'Last Post' played for him, and I saw the
King and Queen in tears; all that didn't settle my mind. I went back to
the front, heavy-hearted, and tried to behave myself as I believed he'd
have had me--the Sirdar. My people had called him the Sirdar always.
Luck was with me in France; I had chances, and did a bit of work, and
got advancement."
"I know," I nodded. "I've read history. A few trifles like the rescue of
the rifles and holding that trench and--"
The old soldier interrupted, looking thunderous. "It has a bearing on
the episode I'm about to tell you. That's why I refer to it."
I didn't mind his haughtiness. It was given me to see the boy's shyness
within that grim old hero.
"So that when I landed in London in 1917, having been stupid enough to
get my right arm potted, it happened that my name was known. They picked
me out to make a doing over. I was most uncommonly conspicuous for
nothing more than thousands of other lads had done. They'd given their
lives like water, thousands of them--it made me sick with shame, when I
thought of those others, to have my name ringing through the land. But
so it was, and it served a purpose, right enough, I saw later.
"Then, as I began to crawl about, came the crisis of the war. Ill news
piled on ill news; the army in France was down with an epidemic; each
day's news was worse than the last; to top all, the Germans found the
fleet. It was in letters a foot long about London--newsboys crying awful
words:
"'Fleet discovered--German submarines and Zeppelins approaching.'
"A bit later, still worse. 'The _Bellerophon_ sunk by German
torpedo--ten dreadnoughts sunk--' There were the names of the big ships,
the _Queen Elizabeth_, the _Warspite_, the _Thunderer_, the
_Agamemnon_, the _King Edward_--a lot more, battle cruisers, too--then
ten more dreadnoughts--and more and worse every hour. The German navy
was said to be coming into the North Sea and advancing to our coast. And
our navy was going--gone--nothing to stand between us and the fate of
Belgium.
"Then England went mad! I thank God I'll not live through such days
again. The land went mad with fear. You'll remember that there had been
a three-year strain which human nerves were not meant to bear. Well,
there was a faction who urged that the only sane act now possible was to
surrender to Germany quickly and hope for a mercy which we couldn't get
if we struggled. The government, under enormous pressure, weakened. It's
easy to cry 'Shame!' now, but how could it stand firm with the country
stampeding back of it?
"So things were the day of the mass meeting in Trafalgar Square. I was
tall, and so thin and gaunt that, with my uniform and my arm in its
sling, it was easy to get close to the front, straight under the
speakers. And no sooner had I got there than I was seized with a
restlessness, an uncontrollable desire to see my godfather--Kitchener.
Only to see him, to lay eyes on him. I wish I might express to you the
push of that feeling. It was thirst in a desert. With that spell on me I
stood down in front of the stone lions and stared up at Nelson on his
column, and listened to the speakers. They were mad, quite, those
speakers. The crowd was mad, too. It overflowed that great space, and
there were few steady heads in the lot. You'll realize it looked a bit
of a close shave, with the German navy coming and our fleet being
destroyed, no one knew how fast, and the army in France, and struck down
by illness. At that moment it looked a matter of three or four days
before the Huns would be landing. Never before in a thousand years was
England as near the finish. As I stood there fidgeting, with the
starvation on me for my godfather, it flashed to me that there's a
legend in every nation about some one of its heroes, how in the hour of
need he will come back to save the people--Charlemagne in France, don't
you know, and Barbarossa and King Arthur and--oh, a number. And I spoke
aloud, so that the chap next prodded me in the ribs and said: 'Stop
that, will you? I can't hear'--I spoke aloud and said:
"'This is the hour. Come back and save us.'
"The speakers had been ranting along, urging on the people to force the
government to give in and make terms with those devils who'd crushed
Belgium. Of course there were plenty there ready to die in the last
ditch for honor and the country, but the mob was with the speakers.
Quite insane with terror the mob was. And I spoke aloud to Kitchener,
like a madman of a sort also, begging him to come from another world and
save his people.
"'This is the hour; come and save us,' said I, and said it as if my
words could get through to Kitchener in eternity.
"With that a taxicab forced through the crowd, close to the platform,
and it stopped and somebody got out. I could see an officer's cap and
the crowd pressing. My eyes were riveted on that brown cap; my breath
came queerly; there was a murmur, a hush and a murmur together, where
that tall officer with the cap over his face pushed toward the speakers.
I felt I should choke if I didn't see him--and I couldn't see him. Then
he made the platform, and before my eyes, before the eyes of twenty
thousand people, he stood there--Kitchener!"
General Cochrane stared defiantly at me. "I'm not asking you to believe
this," he said. "I'm merely telling you--what happened."
"Go on," I whispered.
He went on: "A silence like death fell on that vast crowd. The voice of
the speaker screaming out wild cowardice about mercy from the Germans
kept on for a few words, and then the man caught the electrical
atmosphere and was aware that something was happening. He halted
half-way in a word, and turned and faced the grim, motionless
figure--Kitchener. The man stared a half minute and shot his hands up
and howled, and ran into the throng. All over the great place, by then,
was a whisper swelling into a bass murmur, into a roar, his name.
"'Kitchener--Kitchener!' and 'K. of K.!' and 'Kitchener of Khartoum!'
"Never in my life have I heard a volume of sound like London shouting
that day the name of Kitchener. After a time he lifted his hand and
stood, deep-eyed and haggard, as the mass quieted. He spoke. I can't
tell you what he said. I couldn't have told you the next hour. But he
quieted us and lifted us, that crowd, fearstruck, sobbing, into courage.
He put his own steady dignity into those cheap, frightened little
Johnnies. He gave us strength even if the worst came, and he held up
English pluck and doggedness for us to look at and to live by. As his
voice stopped, as I stood down in front just under him, I flung up my
arms, and I suppose I cried out something; I was but a lad of twenty,
and half crazed with the joy of seeing him. And he swung forward a step
to me as if he had seen me all the time--and I think he had. 'Do the
turn, Donald,' he said, 'The time has come for a Cochrane to save
England.'
"And with that he wheeled and without a look to right or left, in his
own swift, silent, shy way he was gone.
"Nobody saw where he went. I all but killed myself for an hour trying to
find him, but it was of no use. And with that, as I sat at my lunch, too
feverish and stirred to eat food, demanding over and over what he meant,
what the 'turn' was which I was to do, why a Cochrane should have a
chance to save England--with that, suddenly I knew."
General Cochrane halted again, and again he gazed down the little river,
the river of England, the river which he, more than any other, had kept
for English folk and their peaceful play-times. I knew I must not hurry
him; I waited.
"The thing came to me like lightning," he went on, "and I had only to go
from one simple step to another; it seemed all thought out for me. It
was something, don't you see, which I'd known all my lifetime, but
hadn't once thought of since the war began. I went direct to my bankers
and got a box out of the safe and fetched it home in a cab. There I
opened it and took out papers and went over them.... This part of the
tale is mostly in print," General Cochrane interrupted himself. "Have
you read it? I don't want to bore you with repetitions."
I answered hurriedly, trembling for fear I might say the wrong thing:
"I've read what's in print, but your telling it puts it in another
world. Please go on. Please don't shorten anything."
The shadow of a smile played. "I rather like telling you a story, d'you
know," he spoke, half absent-mindedly--his real thoughts were with that
huge past. He swept back to it. "You know, of course, about Dundonald's
Destroyer--the invention of my great-grandfather's kinsman, Thomas
Cochrane, tenth Earl of Dundonald? He was a good bit of an old chap in
various ways. He did things to the French fleet that put him as a naval
officer in the class with Nelson and Drake. But he's remembered in
history by his invention. It was a secret, of course, one of the puzzles
of the time and of years after, up to 1917. It was known there was
something. He offered it to the government in 1811, and the government
appointed a committee to examine into it. The chairman was the Duke of
York, commander-in-chief of the army, said to be the ablest
administrator of military affairs of that time. Also there were Admirals
Lord Keith and Exmouth and the Congreve brothers of the ordnance
department. A more competent committee of five could not have been
gathered in the world. This board would not recommend the adoption of
the scheme. Why? They reported that there was no question that the
invention would do all which Dundonald claimed, but it was so
unspeakably dreadful as to be impossible for civilized men.
"There was not a shadow of doubt, the committee reported, that
Dundonald's device would not merely defeat but annihilate and sweep out
of existence any hostile force, whole armies and navies. 'No power on
earth could stand against it,' said the old fellow, and the five experts
backed him up. But they considered that the devastation would be inhuman
beyond permissible warfare. Not war, annihilation. In fact, they shelved
it because it was too efficient. There was great need of means for
fighting Napoleon just then, so they gave it up reluctantly, but it was
a bit too shocking.
"The weak point of the business was, as Dundonald himself declared, that
it was so simple--as everybody knows now--that its first use would tell
the secret and put it in the hands of other nations. Therefore the
committee recommended that this incipient destruction should be stowed
away and kept secret, so that no power more unscrupulous than England
should get it and use it for the annihilation of England and the
conquest of the world. Also the committee persuaded the Earl before he
went on his South American adventure to swear formally that he would
never disclose his device except in the service of England. He kept that
oath.
"Well, the formula for this affair was, of course, in pigeonholes or
vaults in the British Admiralty ever since the committee in 1811 had
examined and refused it. But there was also, unknown to the public,
another copy. The Earl was with my great-grandfather, his kinsman and
lifelong friend, shortly before his death, and he gave this copy to him
with certain conditions. The old chap had an ungovernable temper,
quarreled right and left, don't you know, his life long, and at this
time and until he died he was not on speaking terms with his son Thomas,
who succeeded him as Earl, or indeed with any of the three other sons.
Which accounts for his trusting to my great-grandfather the future of
his invention. I found a quaint note with the papers. He said in effect
that he had come to believe with the committee that it was quite too
shocking for decent folk. Yet, he suggested, the time might come when
England was in straits and only a sweeping blow could serve her. If that
time should come it would be a joy to him in heaven or in hell--he
said--to think that a man of his name had used the work of his brains to
save England.
"Therefore, the Earl asked my grandfather to guard this gigantic secret
and to see to it that one man in each generation of Cochranes should
know it and have it at hand for use in an emergency. My grandfather came
into the papers when he came of age, and after him my father; I was due
to read them when I should be twenty-one. I was only twenty in 1917. But
the papers were mine, and from the moment it flashed to me what
Kitchener meant I didn't hesitate. It was this enormous power which was
placed suddenly in the hands of a lad of twenty. The Sirdar placed it
there.
"I went over the business in an hour--it was simple, like most big
things. You know what it was, of course; everybody knows now. Wasn't it
extraordinary that in five thousand years of fighting no one ever hit on
it before? I rushed to the War Office.
"Well, the thing came off. At first they pooh-poohed me as an unbalanced
boy, but they looked up the documents in the Admiralty and there was no
question. It isn't often a youngster is called into the councils of the
government, and I've wondered since how I held my own. I've come to
believe that I was merely a body for Kitchener's spirit. I was conscious
of no fatigue, no uncertainty. I did things as the Sirdar might have
done them, and it appears to me only decent to realize that he did do
them, and not I. You probably know the details."
I waited, hoping that he would not stop. Then I said: "I know that the
government asked for twenty-five volunteers for a service which would
destroy the German fleet, but which would mean almost certain death to
the volunteers. I know that you headed the list and that thousands
offered." My voice shook and I spoke with difficulty as I realized to
whom I was speaking. "I know that you were the only one who came back
alive, and that you were barely saved."
General Cochrane seemed not to hear me. He was living over enormous
events.
"It was a bright morning in the North Sea," he talked on, but not to me
now. "Nobody but ourselves knew just what was to be done, but everybody
hoped--they didn't know what. It was a desperate England from which we
sailed away. We hadn't long to wait--the second morning. There were
their ships, the triumphant long lines of the invader. There were their
crowded transports, the soldiers coming to crucify England as they had
crucified Belgium--thousands and tens of thousands of them. Then--we
did it. German power was wiped off the face of the earth. German
arrogance was ended for all time. And that was the last I knew," said
General Cochrane. "I was conscious till it was known that the trick had
worked. Of course it couldn't be otherwise, yet it was so beyond
anything which mankind had dreamed that I couldn't believe it till I
knew. Then, naturally, I didn't much care if I lived or died. I'd done
the turn as the Sirdar told me, and one life was a small thing to pay. I
dropped into blackness quite happily, and when I woke up to this good
earth I was glad. England was right. The Sirdar had saved her."
"And the Sirdar?" I asked him. "Was it--himself?"
"Himself? Most certainly."
"I mean--well--" I stammered. And then I plunged in. "I must know," I
said. "Was it Lord Kitchener in flesh and blood? Had he been a prisoner
in Germany and escaped? Or was it--his ghost?"
The old lion rubbed his cheek consideringly. "Ah, there you have me,"
and he smiled. "Didn't I tell you this was a tale which could be told to
few people?" he demanded. "'Flesh and blood'--ah, that's what I can't
tell you. But--himself? Those people, the immense crowd which saw him
and recognized him, they knew. Afterwards they begged the question. The
papers were full of a remarkable speech made by an unknown officer who
strikingly resembled Kitchener. That's the way they got out of it. But
those people knew, that day. There wasn't any doubt in their minds when
that roar of his name went up. They knew! But people are ashamed to own
to the supernatural. And yet it's all around us," mused General
Cochrane.
"Could it have been--did you ever think--" I began, and dared not go on.
"Did I ever think what, child?" repeated the old officer, with his
autocratic friendliness. "Out with it. You and I are having a
truth-feast."
"Well, then," I said, "if you won't be angry--"
"I won't. Come along."
"Did you ever think that it might have been that--you were only a boy,
and wounded and weak and overstrained--and full of longing for your
godfather. Did you ever think that you might have mistaken the likeness
of the officer for Kitchener himself? That the thought of Dundonald's
Destroyer was working in your mind before, and that it materialized at
that moment and you--imagined the words he said. Perhaps imagined them
afterwards, as you searched for him over London. The two things might
have suggested each other in your feverish boy's brain."
I stopped, frightened, fearful that he might think me not appreciative
of the honor he had done me in telling this intimate experience. But
General Cochrane was in no wise disturbed.
"Yes, I've thought that," he answered dispassionately. "It may be that
was the case. And yet--I can't see it. That thing happened to me. I've
not been able to explain it away to my own satisfaction. I've not been
able to believe otherwise than that the Sirdar, England's hero, came to
save England in her peril, and that he did it by breathing his thought
into me. His spirit got across somehow from over there--to me. I was the
only available person alive. The copy in the archives was buried, dead
and buried and forgotten for seventy years. So he did it--that way. And
if your explanation is the right one it isn't so much less wonderful, is
it?" he demanded. "In these days psychology dares say more than in 1917.
One knows that ghost stories, as they called them in those ignorant
times, are not all superstition and imagination. One knows that a soul
lives beyond the present, that a soul sometimes struggles back from what
we call the hereafter to this little earth--makes the difficult
connection between an unseen world of spirit, unconditioned by matter,
and our present world of spirit, conditioned by matter. When the pull is
strong enough. And what pull could be stronger than England's danger? To
Kitchener?" The black-lashed, gray eyes flamed at me, unblinking the
rift of light through the curtain of eternal silences.
When I spoke again: "It's a story the world ought to own some day," I
said. "Love of country, faithfulness that death could not hinder."