Cornelius James could find no words applicable to the situation.
"But--but," he finally exclaimed, "even if she is, what's she got to
cry about?"
Jane clambered up beside her brother. "Well, you see," she began,
"it was that picnic."
"It was a jolly picnic," maintained the other.
"Yes, but Georgie counted on having Mr. Jakes all to herself on the
way back."
"So she jolly well did!" commented her brother wrathfully.
"Yes, but he never opened his mouth 'cept once, and then he only said
something about selling a farm and going to sea, and Georgie thinks
he hates her."
Cornelius James pondered over this insight into the enigma of the
feminine heart.
"She's an ass!" was his final comment. "And what about Miss Mayne?
Don't tell me she's in love!" Assuredly the queen could do no wrong
nor stoop to such folly.
"I don't know," replied Jane, "but last night I went to her room to
borrow a ribbon to tie my hair up with 'cos I'd lost mine, an' she
was lying on her bed with her face in her hands. I thought she had a
headache, and I was going out again when she jumped up. Her face was
all smeary and her eyes were red, like when her brother was killed.
'Member? I per-tended I didn't notice anything, and asked for the
ribbon and she got it from a drawer and gave it to me without a word,
and suddenly she sat down on the window seat and put her arms round
me and held me against her so tight I could hardly breathe."
The mystified eyes of the brother and sister met. "But didn't she
_say_ anything?" demanded the former. "Has anybody been killed she's
fond of?"
"I don't think so," replied Jane; "she hardly said anything. Just
whispered little soft words like 'darling.'"
"She did that when we tried to cheer her up 'cos her brother died,"
said the boy, as if condoning a lapse on Miss Mayne's part.
"Oh, there was one thing," added Jane after reflection; "she said,
'Oh, Janie, Janie, don't grow up!'"
Which left Cornelius James not much the wiser.
To a more sophisticated mind the utterance might have meant much or
little. For my part I look for my clue to the riddle in a later
remark Miss Mayne made aloud to the darkness, from off a crumpled
tear-wet pillow.
"He never said he loved me," she pleaded. The darkness held no
answer.
PART TWO
THE NARRATIVE OF COMMANDER WILLIAM DALRYMPLE
HORNBY, ROYAL NAVY
1
The ship was doing her annual refit at a Dockyard Port in the south,
and the Captain and I shared what leave there was going; in my case
it amounted to eight days, and I spent them trout fishing in
Breconshire. I have tried a good many experiments in the way of how
to make the most of a week's leave, and I have come to the conclusion
that few things take the taste of war out of a man's mouth as
effectively as whipping a "mountainy" trout stream.
It was a long and tedious railway journey back; I suppose I am as
fond of my ship as most Commanders: she probably means more to me
than a ship does to a man with a wife and bairn of his own, but I
can't say I looked forward to slipping into harness again after the
week's freedom from routine and responsibility, and the contemplation
of returning to another nine months' exile in the North Sea didn't
add any gaiety to the train journey. I was uncommonly glad,
therefore, when I changed at Bristol and walked into Frank Milsom on
the platform.
He was a "Red" Marine and an old shipmate of mine in the
Mediterranean Flagship 'way back in the dark ages: one of those born
leaders of men, possessing (although I believe it doesn't always
follow) a curiously magnetic fascination for women. Yet I believe
women bored him; I remember he once told me he would as soon kiss a
dog as a woman, unless he was drunk. He was full of
"parlour-tricks," too--the things that make a man sought after as a
messmate; he could vamp a comic song and do sleight of hand conjuring
tricks, and he had the most infectious laugh that ever kept a mouldy
wardroom alive. The only vice I ever observed in him was a passion
for gambling, but he had a peculiarity which is unusual in the Navy:
we used to say he was "fey." He had queer dreams sometimes that used
to come true--the date for paying off and things like that--and on
one occasion I recollect drawing back the curtain of his cabin on my
way down from the middle watch, because I heard him laughing and
wondered who was with him at that hour. He was sitting up in his
bunk with the moonlight pouring through the open scuttle, and his
hand stretched out in gesticulation (a way he had when animated);
otherwise the cabin was empty. He was wide awake, told me he was
talking to his mother, and cursed me for interrupting. She was at
the time about 2,800 miles away as the crow flies.
He came towards me wheeling a ramshackle motor-bicycle, with a cocker
spaniel on a chain, and a porter following with his bags and golf
clubs. "Bill Hornby!" he said, and the years between us and our last
meeting seemed to close up like a telescope. We climbed into an
empty carriage and settled down in two corners facing each other,
lugging out our pipes and 'baccy pouches preparatory to a long yarn
when, just as the train was starting, there was a bit of a commotion
outside. A porter jerked open the door, pitched a woman's
dressing-case on to the seat (we were sitting at the end furthest
from the door), and fumbled for his tip as the owner of the
dressing-case followed. She was a long-legged, graceful girl,
dressed in tweeds and rather neatly shod. Milsom swore softly under
his breath when the dressing-case appeared and stopped filling his
pipe. But presently, when the train had started and our
fellow-passenger had settled down in the corner facing the engine
next to the door and opened a novel, Milsom leaned forward in his
seat and asked her permission to smoke.
Until she was addressed the girl had not shown that she was aware of
our presence in the carriage. She had not even glanced in our
direction, and now, hearing herself spoken to, she turned a rather
pale face and two almost startled grey eyes towards each of us in
turn.
"D'you mind this?" enquired Milsom, in the kindly tolerant voice in
which he spoke to women, and held out his iniquitous looking briar
for her inspection.
The girl shook her head unsmiling. "Not at all. I--I----" she
glanced swiftly from us to the window and the obvious
[Illustration: (mirror-image SMOKING)]
on the glass panel. "I beg your pardon," she said. "I didn't
notice. I was late and the porter hustled me in----" She turned her
eyes on me; she had well marked, delicate brows, and a firm chin.
Altogether I thought her a remarkable-looking young woman (I was
sitting with my back to the engine, facing her diagonally), and had
it not been for a certain touch of diffidence in her rather shy
manner, I should have written her down as decidedly strong-minded.
For a moment she looked as if she were contemplating flight to the
corridors in search of another carriage.
"Train's very full," said Milsom, "but if you like I'll go and see if
there's room in a non-smoker."
She shook her head. "I don't mind smoking--unless you mind my
staying where I am?"
We both mumbled polite reassurances, and she returned to her book,
obviously dismissing us completely from her consciousness.
For all our protestations, neither of us was much at ease after that;
we kept up a desultory conversation for a bit, but we were
unaccustomed to having women near us, and a man can't talk squarely
to another man with a woman in hearing. So after a bit we gave it up
and retired behind our papers. I even dozed for a bit, and must have
slept for nearly an hour when I was awakened by my pipe dropping out
of the corner of my mouth.
My eyes, as they opened, rested first on the girl. She appeared to
be sleeping; at all events she was leaning back with her eyes closed
and her book lying unheeded on her lap. I glanced at Milsom in front
of me, and found him leaning forward with his elbows on his knees,
staring across the carriage at the window beside the only vacant
corner--that is to say, the one opposite the girl. There was a
faintly puzzled expression on his face, and he kept glancing from the
window to the girl. Then he looked at me with a queer enigmatic
smile. We neither of us spoke, I suppose with the idea of not waking
our fellow-passenger, but Milsom presently drew a pencil-case from
the pocket of his waistcoat and scribbled something on the margin of
his newspaper. This he handed to me:
"Come and sit beside me; don't make a noise."
I obeyed rather curiously, and he continued to study the window. We
had just emerged from a short tunnel when he wrote again on his paper:
"Watch that window and tell me if you can see anyone's reflection in
it." He indicated with a nod the window alongside the vacant seat
opposite the girl.
I stared and could see nothing but the landscape and the telegraph
poles flicking by. Then we plunged into a cutting, and for a moment
the sheet of glass became a mirror. I felt Milsom grip my arm hard
above the elbow. "Well?" he breathed.
I shook my head, and for the third time he drew the paper on to his
knee and scribbled hard.
"Don't tell me you couldn't see that bloke's reflection?"
I frowned at him in hopeless bewilderment. "What bloke?" I mouthed.
He shrugged his shoulders and shook his head with raised eyebrows,
and at that moment the train began to slow and shudder as the brakes
were applied.
"Get back," he whispered, and I resumed my seat opposite him as the
third occupant of the carriage began to stir her limbs like one
awaking from sleep.
For the life of me I don't know why, but I had the feeling that it
would be wrong to see her face as she opened her eyes. I somehow
felt it would be like listening if she had talked in her sleep.
Milsom was collecting his impedimenta. "Change here," he said,
yawning, and hauled the reluctant spaniel from under the seat. "This
train goes on to London. Heigh-ho! Who wouldn't sell his little
farm and go to sea?"
I was turning to get my rod down from the rack when I saw the girl
give a little start and shoot a swift interrogatory glance at Milsom
over her shoulder. It was the first symptom of interest she had
shown in either of us. But after Milsom and I had disembarked on to
the platform, and the train began slowly to resume its journey
Londonwards, I saw her knit her handsome brows and stare rather
curiously at Milsom from the window of the moving train.
We stood beside our luggage in silence, watching the train pass from
sight round a distant curve in the line.
Then I turned to Milsom. "Now," I said, "what did all those billets
doux you wrote me mean?"
He looked at me quizzically. "Sure you saw no one there?"
"What d'you mean--reflected in the window?"
He nodded, with a smile hovering about the corners of his mouth.
"No, of course I didn't. There were only three of us in the
carriage, and from where we were sitting--all facing the engine--that
window couldn't catch the reflection of any of us. I've forgotten
most of the optics I ever learned, but I remember enough to be sure
of that."
Milsom fingered his moustache. "I might have realised----" he said
musingly. He gave an imperceptible shrug of the shoulders and
laughed softly.
I got rather irritated. "Come on, Soldier," I said. "For heaven's
sake explain, and don't keep on with this Maskelyne and Devant
business." But he shook his head, still laughing. "No," he said,
"it's too good to waste here. Come and have dinner up at the Mess
to-night and we'll exchange theories. And now," he continued,
hauling in the slack of the spaniel's chain, "let's buy a pack of
cards and play picquet. Our train's due already."
The carriage was too full for me to broach the subject again, and
Milsom took thirty shillings out of me instead. At our destination
we parted: he to go to the Marine Depôt, where he was Adjutant; I in
a musty four wheeler to the dockyard where the ship was lying.
2
Milsom greeted me a couple of hours later in the big oak-panelled
hall of the Officers' Mess at the Marine Headquarters. I had been on
board the ship, had half an hour's yarn with the Skipper (who was
full of the ways of Dockyard Officials and the tale of our Defect
List), shifted, and got up to the Marines' Mess as the first dinner
bugles were sounding.
Every time I enter that hall, with its tattered Colours hanging from
the walls and the portraits of bygone Commandants staring down over
their gorgets, I am struck afresh by the reminders, cherished here on
all sides, of the proud past of the Corps. Greenwich Hospital
excepted, the Navy has no shrines where the emblems of its traditions
are preserved, but the Marine Headquarters always seem to echo with
whispers of the Marines' history. In the seconds that it took me to
cross the wide floor, I had a blurred vision of the Rock, taken by
storm and held against odds; of haggard, fever-stricken detachments
in rotting pith helmets, fighting their way through swamp and jungle,
of the African sun catching the reddened bayonets of a desert
square....
"Cocktail, I think." Milsom beckoned to a waiter, and, slipping his
arm through mine, drew me down beside him on to the high-padded
fender of the old fireplace that is a miracle of carving. He had had
a game of squash, he explained, and a tub since his arrival, and felt
that he had decidedly earned a drink. "Plenty of time," he added as
he lit a cigarette. "Guest night, and the Colonel's waiting for a
guest!" We sipped our cocktails, and while we yarned I studied the
gathering all round us on the look-out for old shipmates and familiar
faces. The Commandant I knew well, a grizzled veteran, whose skin
had been so baked by tropic suns that it had the appearance of
ancient parchment. He came towards us for a few minutes' chat,
limping slightly from the effects (so it was said) of a mauling by a
lion in Somaliland, and sat rolling his cigarette round and round
between his fingers and thumb, his keen old eyes watching the door
for his guest. Markham was there, upright and groomed to the last
hair, and the sight of his face instantly recalled the vision I
always cherish of him astride the wall of a Chinese fort, plying his
sword like a swashbuckler, and endeavouring to shield the body of an
unconscious N.C.O. from the pikes of the Boxer rabble below. Ye
gods! And we called that war!
The hall was full, and the guests included a fair sprinkling of
soldiers from neighbouring camps and a good many N.O.'s from ships in
harbour. At one end of the room clustered a dozen freshly joined
subalterns: they whispered constrainedly amongst themselves and eyed
the assembly with furtive interest. "Straight out of the egg,"
observed Milsom. "Mammy's darlings, every one of 'em. They shall
sing us Songs of Araby after dinner or I'll eat my hat." I had my
own ideas how Milsom should amuse himself after dinner, but I said
nothing. "Watch them gloating over Markham and his V.C." Markham,
according to his kindly nature, had gone over and was talking to the
new-comers. They clustered round him in the unabashed hero-worship
of youth, their shyness perceptibly evaporating: clean, robust
striplings with down on their upper lips and the stamp of the Public
School plain upon them.
The swing doors opened and the Commandant tossed away his cigarette
and rose as the guest of the Mess entered. He was a youthful Colonel
of Marines on leave from the Western Front, a tall, lean man with a
scar across his forehead and the look of wearied habitual alertness
you always see in the faces of men fresh from the trenches, and also
of our patrol Destroyer Officers. I had never seen him in the flesh,
though the illustrated papers have by now made him a familiar figure
enough. For this was Henry Havelock, destined to wear before he died
every gallantry award in the gift of England and France. He was a
contemporary of Milsom's, and when presently we adjourned to the vast
arched messroom, I found myself sitting between them at the
Commandant's end of the table. The talk was war, of course, because
war made up every man's experience of life for the past three years
and a half. But the range and variety of the fields which were being
discussed down the shining length of the mahogany table made it
unique. In one sector it was Antwerp and the raging inferno that had
once been Lierre held for a live-long night against the headlong
onslaught of the Hun. In another, Gallipoli held sway, and as the
wine circulated and tongues were loosened, tales of that splendid
failure were told that assuredly will never find their way into any
printed history of the Great War. The hum of voices under the old
beams of the vaulted roof was the echo of strife carried from Serbia
to the Cameroons, with Mesopotamia and the Persian Gulf thrown in.
The only man who appeared disinclined to talk war was Havelock; he
and Milsom were exchanging pre-war reminiscences of a visit paid by
the Mediterranean Fleet to Monte Carlo; how a certain lady with an
impulsive temperament lost her heart to the embarrassed Milsom, who
was challenged to a duel by an indignant husband; this worthy
Havelock plied with absinthe until he (the husband) was all for
Havelock running off with the lady and thus easing a complicated
situation; and as the evening wore on and the assiduous Corporal of
Marines--brooding behind us with a gold-topped bottle gripped in one
white cotton gloved fist--redoubled his attentions, Havelock's eyes
lost their weary strained expression, and the stern lines round his
mouth relaxed.
We had finished dinner and the port had gone round for the King, and
following the second circulation the Commandant rose, and after a
neat little speech, proposed Havelock's health, which we drank with
musical honours. Havelock replied, and in a few brief sentences he
sketched the part played, not by himself but by the Royal Marine
Units at the front under his command. Listening to his pithy
descriptive rendering into prose of the epic of Beaumont Hamel, it
was not difficult to understand the magnetic command of men with
which he has been credited, nor the devotion of their willingness to
follow him to the gates of Hell.
The Commandant was for snooker after that. "Are you and your guest
going to take a cue?" he asked Milsom, but Milsom shook his head.
"No. They'll want me at the piano presently. Take Havelock along
and some of the others." So Havelock and his host departed to gather
in a party and Milsom beckoned for the cigars.
"Now," he said, "I promised you a yarn, didn't I? Well"--he clipped
and lit a cigar--"I've been thinking about the whole thing, and what
I am going to tell you is partly theory and the rest ain't fact as
you probably understand the term." He spilt a drop of water from his
finger-bowl on to the shining surface of the table and sketched an
oblong outline with the end of a burnt match. "This represents the
carriage we were travelling in this afternoon with that young woman:
[Illustration: (diagram of carriage seating)]
The arrow indicates the direction in which the train was travelling.
The blobs are you and me opposite each other, and the other's the
girl. Got that? Well----"
"What's the cross?" I asked.
"That's an empty seat. The symbol is 'X,' which stands for the
unknown. That's the corridor on the right. Now, I was sitting
facing the engine--this is me in the bottom right-hand corner--and
from my seat I could see the window beside X quite
clearly--naturally; and you may have observed that if something dark
is placed between the light and a sheet of glass, the said sheet of
glass becomes to all intents and purposes a mirror. The effect, I
think, is increased if the observer is placed at an oblique angle to
the surface of the glass. In other words, from where I was sitting I
was better able to see a reflection in the glass than you were."
He drained his liqueur glass and puffed reflectively at his cigar for
a few moments.
"We were running parallel to a goods train--a line of big, closed
wagons, when I noticed a reflection in the window beside the blank
seat. I noticed it because it wasn't--as it ought to have been--your
reflection."
I laughed. "Whose was it--the Devil's?"
"No. A stranger's. I bent forward to have a better look at him
because I couldn't see very clearly, when we drew ahead of the goods
train and the reflection vanished."
Had it been anyone but Milsom telling the tale I should have put it
down as pure invention, but as I have hinted Milsom possessed
peculiar qualities, and I grew still more interested.
"Go on," I said.
"Well, I waited because I knew sooner or later I should get another
chance; any cutting or tunnel we passed would do the trick. But up
till then I hadn't somehow connected the thing with the girl. It
didn't occur to me. I wasn't interested in her and I ain't well up
on the science of these phenomena. However, in a little while we
boomed into a tunnel and I got all I wanted. It was no one I'd ever
seen before, a dark, thin, rather lugubrious-looking bloke. He had
his arm through the leather loop thing and his hand was tied up in
bandages."
"But do you mean you saw him?" I interrupted.
"No, no; his reflection only. And while I watched he shook his head
and smiled (not a very gay effort--sort of twisted) and said
something; at least, his lips moved. Of course I looked
instinctively at the girl then. She was sitting with her eyes shut
and her head leaning back, but what gave me the clue was the fact
that her lips moved too. She was talking to the fellow."
My cigar had gone out, and I discovered my brandy was still
untouched. I nodded, not because I understood any more clearly, but
because I felt that words would break a spell.
"Now my mater--she died a couple of years ago, bless her dear
soul--used to belong to a lot of societies that deal with phenomena
of various kinds. I don't mean spiritualistic séances and that sort
of humbug, but suggestion and telepathy. She used to believe in a
thing she called Projection; concentrating will power upon something
until the thought becomes more or less a material object--like
blowing tobacco smoke into a soap bubble--d'you tumble?"
I didn't, but I nodded again.
He was hopelessly out of my depth, but I remembered spending a few
days' leave once with Milsom at his home when we were youngsters, and
seeing a black spot against a white wall upon which his mother used
to concentrate her mind entirely by way of mental exercise for long
periods daily. She was a charming, sympathetic woman and, as far as
I could observe, perfectly normal in other respects.
"Now if my mother had been sitting in the carriage she'd have seen
the actual figure. I couldn't do that, but I'm what they call
clairvoyant enough to see the reflection. And then we whisked out of
the tunnel, and I got you to come and sit beside her. I wanted to
see if you could see him and recognise his face. As I've said, it
was no one I've ever seen before."
I drank my brandy then because I felt I wanted it.
"What's it all mean, Soj? What's projection and bubbles full of
smoke got to do with it? I'm a plain sailorman and I don't
understand all this psychic business."
Milsom chuckled. "I don't understand it either," he said, "and God
knows I don't want to understand too much. But this all seems simple
enough to me. The girl was thinking desperately hard about some
fellow--the hum of the wheels and the telegraph wires have a hypnotic
effect upon some temperaments, and she just unconsciously projected
the figure of the man she was thinking about into the seat opposite
her and in her imagination was having a chat with him. She was
probably in love with the real individual and possibly wasn't getting
much joy out of it. She didn't look happy."
Voices from the ante-room were shouting Milsom's name: someone was
strumming the piano. Milsom pushed back his chair.
"But was he really there, though?" I queried, as we rose. The long
messroom was empty save for the waiters and ourselves. The hubbub in
the ante-room redoubled, and someone started a song. Milsom laughed.
"How d'you mean? Of course he wasn't there really. Just because you
think of someone it doesn't mean they dump themselves down in front
of you. Think of someone now."
I obeyed and stared hard at the portrait of an ensign of "The Noble
Free and Spirited Manchester Corps of the Marines" hanging opposite.