The dull tramp of heavy Service boots, following the maid who was
that day John Hazel's guide, over the carpeted stone flags of the
corridor to the little panelled morning parlour, brought an
unexpected, welcome sense of relief to Katharine's overstrained
nerves. The door opened, and she moved swiftly to him--stopping him
with both hands held out, when he would have made his strange,
half-Eastern salutation--saying in her full, womanly tones:
"How can I thank you, Mr. Hazel?"
He answered, tritely and clumsily, but with very evident sincerity:
"By showing me straight off the reel, how I can be of use to you."
Some aching spot in her sore heart was touched by his genuine
eagerness to serve her. For a moment she could not speak.... So
they stood, her fine white hand engulfed by Hazel's great brown one,
his strong black eyes, unrebuked, dwelling on his lady's face.
She looked older, with wide purplish shadows round about her
beautiful eyes, and their clear golden-amber changed to sorrowful
rust-colour. The clear cream and carnation of her skin was dulled to
a pale olive.... The rich brown hair upon her temples, and above her
brow, showed here and there a thread of silver. She began, speaking
with a curious, hurried breathlessness:
"Mr. Hazel, I know you must have seen newspaper accounts of the
inexplicable disappearance of--a friend who--I have no need to hide
the fact!--is very, very dear to me.... You must know that I speak
of Colonel Yaill. You saw him here the Saturday you came here first,
and later at my father's funeral. You--_Ah--!_ ..."
Her eyes were on John Hazel's when the memory leaped into them. They
dilated, blazed with tawny fire.... John thought of a lioness....
She snatched her hand instantly away from his, crying:
"What am I thinking of? Why,--it was you who threatened him!--he
told me so himself! You said you would save him the trouble if he
did not tell me of his marriage. How could I have forgotten? Is my
memory failing me? And you.... How could you have come by the
knowledge with which you menaced him? ... In Hospital? ... No! Where
and how, then? The whole thing is a horrible mystery to me! ..."
John Hazel told her, in a few bluntly-spoken sentences, just how the
story of Yaill's marriage had been given him. She heard him to the
end of it, and said, with the ghost of a smile:
"So you entered upon your hereditary office of champion, straightway.
And Lady Wastwood got the story from her Headquarters--I understand
the whole thing clearly! She is a dear, and I love her, but a terror
of a talker.... The whole county must have rung with scandal, ages
before I dreamed that anybody knew...." She shuddered. "Oh, me!
what things they must have said about Edward!--must be saying about
him at this moment when he--"
Her voice broke in a sob, and her full heart brimmed over. John
Hazel said roughly, for he could not bear to see her tears:
"They may talk, but there's one thing nobody on earth--or
elsewhere!--will ever be able to say of him. That he isn't a
thundering brave man!"
The sudden, fierce carnation that had flooded the wide oval of her
face a moment before, had given place to the olive paleness. Now a
faint tinge of the banished red came creeping back again.
"You threatened Edward Yaill--yet you defend him?"
John Hazel answered simply enough:
"I had to see that you were undeceived. You were, first of all, my
business. But knowing what shell-shock means--as men have learned to
know the hellish thing in this damned War--how, in common justice,
can I condemn Colonel Yaill?"
"Thank you! Oh, thank you! That does my heart good!"
The wide, sweet smile curved Katharine's mouth again, and her dimmed
eyes found a sparkle to cheer their sombre rust-colour. She went on:
"To know that somebody besides myself pities him--you don't know--you
can't know, what it means to me! For no one will have a kind thing
to say for Edward. Beyond the newspaper flummery and flapdoodle,
there won't be a word, nor a thought, that isn't--merciless to him!
..."
She was sitting now in her hearthside chair and John was standing on
the other side of the fireplace. The antique mirror above the little
Tudor clock, that had reflected Yaill's thin, handsome face and
haunted grey eyes, gave back an image of the huge black head, the
portentous hooked nose, and swarthy countenance of this new and
strangely dominating force that had moved across the threshold of
Kerr's Arbour, out of the veiled, mysterious Past, but a few days
previously. His elbow rested on the mantelshelf, where the other man
had leaned his: he clenched his great hand as he answered Katharine:
"'Merciless.' ... And why on this rotten little planet should people
be merciless to the man?"
"Because"--she frowned and looked at John from between her narrowed
eyelids--"because of the odd, clandestine fashion in which--after his
strange marriage--Colonel Yaill has gone away.... I am not
brilliant, it may be, nor very highly cultured. But I know, and very
thoroughly--the world to which we belong. I speak, be it understood,
of his world and mine." John felt himself an alien. "The world we
choose to call Society. And Society will never pardon nor condone,
nor exonerate this act of Colonel Yaill's."
"Do you think the pardon of Society particularly worth having? Do
you think the good opinion of a Society as fat-headed, as
thick-witted and as narrow-minded as you represent it--matters a tin
of ration apple-jam? ... Now listen, Miss Forbis! If you think me
rude, an offensive brute, say to yourself, 'This man can't help it!
He isn't in Society--but he is out to work for me! The wag of a
finger of my hand would bring him from the ends of the world to serve
or fight for me!' Please don't interrupt, for time is time--and I
have more to say--"
He drew a big breath that hurt his wounded lung, and went on speaking:
"When you sent for me, I believed you thought that Colonel Yaill had
put an end to himself. When I saw you I knew you had never for a
minute entertained the idea--"
She broke in now:
"Never! The suggestion of suicide has been spread by people who know
nothing of the man they slander. In absolute confidence I will tell
you now--for how could you be of any help to me unless I absolutely
trust you!--Edward Yaill has gone to the East to find my lost
Julian--my dear brother, whom I have since heard was killed on August
21st--"
John Hazel's black eyes flashed. He broke in:
"Miss Forbis, something of that sort is what I have suspected."
"Wait," she said. "_He_ told me that he would not return to--to his
wife--upon the old footing.... She had cruelly tricked and deceived
him--he could not, once he knew the truth--endure to live with her!
... So he made up his mind to go secretly away. He might have
applied to the War Office--he has powerful friends at Whitehall--for
a transfer to the Eastern Front. Why didn't he? That's one of the
things I can't understand! ..."
"Don't you know? ..."
John's big voice boomed out, drowning the little silvery chime of the
Tudor timepiece.
"When questions like that crop up, the answer is, shell-shock. A man
who is possessed of ordinary, healthy nerves, will act in an ordinary
way. But the man who's been subject to the devilries of High
Explosive, will pop up queer byways in his impatience of
circumlocution--adopt unexpected measures; reach his objective by
methods as destructively simple as--the rat's way of getting into a
cheese. He _might_--supposin' he'd been a normal man--have
engineered the thing at Whitehall. Being shell-shocked, he simply
burns his boats and swims."
Katharine begged:
"Oh, go on! You're helping me!--you're helping me wonderfully.
Things that seemed crazy--out of the comprehensible--are beginning to
arrange themselves.... Now there's another point. You saw, perhaps,
a newspaper reference to Sir Arthur Ely? Well, it has occurred to me
as possible that Edward confided his plans to Sir Arthur--that
impenetrable sarcophagus of Society secrets. You may have noticed
that Sir Arthur's reply to Press inquiries showed a--a considerable
degree of reserve?"
John had noticed it. He admired Katharine's cool, clear, masterful
way of assembling her evidence, and making her points tellingly, each
in its turn. He kept back his own solid piece of conviction until
she finished--
"He has gone, I am convinced that I know where--though I can't make
out how he managed going.... But one thing is clear. I must get
word to him! ... He has gone to find Julian, whom he loved!--my
Julian, who was killed by a Turkish shell, in the storming of
Scimitar Hill on August 21st. That is where you come in!--that is
where you can help me. In getting the news through to Colonel Yaill
in case he does not know! ..."
John thought a moment and said:
"We might--in case he has gone out to the East believing your brother
to be living--get the news to him _per_ advertisement in sundry
foreign rags. Personals, discreetly worded, might do the
trick--inserted in French and British papers, published in the
Levant,--in Egypt,--and at Salonika, and in such others as are
printed and disseminated by the Germans in the Near East."
She caught her breath.
"Can you manage that last stroke? ..."
"I'll not swear I can, but there's a chance I may engineer it. Write
out the ads. and let me have them at once! In English, French and
German. Worded so that he'll understand.... Some ought to be in
Turkish,--and others in Arabic, and some in Egyptian Arabic.
For--your man's a bit of a linguist, unless I judge him wrong!"
Katharine's eyes brightened with pride in her man as she answered:
"He speaks most of the languages of the Orient, and Nearer East."
"Good! Now, are you quite sure your brother has been killed?" He
went on, meeting her startled look.... "Because the War Office isn't
infallible.... A pal of mine--reported dead over eleven months
ago--has spent about three in trying to convince the authorities that
he's very much alive! Last week he heard from them, asking him to
reconsider the matter! and send in another detailed statement; and
now that he's convinced 'em of his existence--they've docked his pay
for the eleven months he's been officially dead! ... And I know
another man, a virtuous unmarried one-pipper,--who gets paid an
allowance, monthly, for a missus and three kids.... They don't
exist--and never did, but the Pay Department says they do,--and
returns him the money when he tries to pay it back! One day they'll
say he's robbed 'em--and call a Court Martial--but till then he
spends the cash in cigars, and other forms of crime. Not as
applicable as the first illustration, but still a case in point." He
grinned.... "And hasn't it struck you, that Colonel Yaill, knowing
the dudheads at Whitehall--would be likely to go on looking for
Father Forbis as long as a chance remained? Now, what about those
ads. you were going to write for me? I'm quite certain they ought to
go in.... But mind you make it clear to Colonel Yaill that you've no
private, first-hand information.... Put it '_Julian reported
killed_' and then he'll understand!"
She levelled her fine brows and thought a moment, then rose from her
chair, saying:
"Would this do? '_Edward ... Julian reported killed Gallipoli,
August 21st. Seek no further_' or '_Search useless. Send address
for communication. K._" Then as he nodded his approval, "Very well,
I'll write the advertisements at once," she said. "Of course I don't
know any Arabic, and my Italian is simply rocky--it always sent
Father into fits of laughter.... But my German is passable, and my
French is--quite decent.... I was educated at the _Sacré Cœur_
Convent, Chalkcliff--where most of the nuns are Parisian ladies....
Smoke if you care to, while I'm writing.... And do find yourself a
comfortable chair...."
She crossed the room to a well-used escritoire, inlaid ebony of
Indian workmanship, glancing back to smile at John Hazel as she drew
up her writing-chair. Her Persian cat leaped purring on her
shoulder, and she rubbed her cheek against his warm silver-grey coat,
giving the caress craved by his cattish little soul, before she
gently set him down.... Then she began to write, and John sat
watching her, revelling in her vigorous, healthful uprightness, and
the grace with which her long limbs disposed themselves in the seated
pose....
"Don't rush it.... Take your time!" ... He was speaking from behind
her. "I'll see that the others are cautiously worded.... A man in
disguise as an Arab or a Turk might betray himself unconsciously, if
his eye happened to drop on a line that was meant for him, you know."
"'A man in disguise.' ..." She caught her breath. "Oh!--you are
wonderful!"
"Not even my mother ever thought that," said Hazel, with his gleaming
grin. "But I'm ready to put money on my theory that the Colonel--to
get out of England in the quietest way possible--has enlisted in some
unit of the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force."
"As a common soldier--an ordinary Tommy! ... You think so meanly of
him? ..."
For a moment her broad front of displeasure was turned upon John
Hazel. Then the anger died out of her as he said quietly:
"I've learned to think a lot of ordinary Tommies, since I've been in
this beastly War. And I stick to my opinion--for a reason!"
He got up. His big hand had been in his bulging tunic-pocket. He
pulled out a Brass Hat, ignominiously squashed, and with the peak
broken--and said as he offered it to Katharine:
"Here's my reason! Good enough, I think!"
"Oh!" she cried, "where did you get that? ... It is Edward's!" ...
And snatched it almost fiercely, and crushed it against her breast....
"This too!" ... John thrust on her the silver whistle.... "A child
was playing with it near the plantation below your Private Road....
That put me on the scent.... I annexed the whistle--here it is for
you!--you'll see his name is on it!--and went in and poked about....
To discover the complete uniform of a British C.O., Field jacket,
badges, Bedford cords, and the whole posh kit, wrapped up in a
trencher, strapped with a Sam Browne, and stuffed into a fox's hole.
Presently when it's dark enough, I'll lug the rest of the kit up to
you.... Now, do you think I've grounds for my belief? ..."
Katharine was trembling.
"You frighten me!" she said to him. "The police and their helpers
have searched and found nothing.... You come--and these hidden
things are uncovered at your feet.... What does it mean? Do you
believe that you and I have lived on earth before now? ... Are we
taking up old threads that were broken ages ago? ..."
"Not for a second do I believe that!" answered John Hazel. "But that
we are influenced and guided by others who have walked this earth
before us,--yes!--I certainly think we are! While they were about it
they might have shown me where the Colonel got the suit of civvies he
changed into when he gave his swank rags to Brother Fox for keeps.
Plain clothes!" ... He answered Katharine's inquiring look as though
she had spoken. "And pretty well worn.... Don't stop to ask me how
I know!" ...
"'Plain clothes'! ... A shabby shooting-suit...." Katharine repeated.
"Wait one minute--I must look! ..."
And she was gone.... The sixty seconds were barely ticked off by the
gilded arrow of the Tudor timepiece before the door opened to admit
her, minus the finds of the plantation,--panting a little, with
flushed cheeks and radiant eyes of joy....
"I have been to his room," she told John Hazel, breathlessly. "There
is a camphor-wood press there where--since August, 1914,--I have kept
the suit Edward was wearing when the War call came to him. Rough
grey homespun--with a Norfolk jacket. And the things have gone out
of the press. He must have taken them--"
"I'm dead sure he took them! Now another question crops up, Miss
Forbis. In these days of Compulsory Service--though the Act's not a
fortnight old--how's an able-bodied man in plain clothes to avoid
being captured by the Government's Fine Tooth Comb? Tapped on the
shoulder by a Recruiting Officer or a policeman--and challenged to
cough up his Conscription papers, or produce his Exemption Sheet?
What would the Colonel's age be? Anything over the Limit?"
The coarseness of his tone offended delicacy.... Her brows
contracted as she answered with chilly dignity:
"He was thirty-nine in May. (_Thirty-nine. And he might have
married me when he was thirty-one!_)" her heart cried rebelliously.
What had Edward thought to gain by those continued delays? She had
been at her loveliest, she knew, when they had first loved each
other.... Twenty-three--and between twenty-three and
thirty-one--eight worse than wasted years!
Years lost--foregone--wilfully forfeited.... Her heart wailed like a
plover over its rifled nest.... And yet not lost.... Five of them
at least had been glorious with happiness. There had been rare
glimpses of sweetness even in these last three years of War....
"Forgive me!" she said, wakened from sad memories by John Hazel's
taking leave of her. "I was thinking.... I did not hear you....
Must you absolutely go?"
"I must not stay, Miss Forbis. The other things that are hidden in
the plantation I shall leave you to find for yourself. The fox-hole
is at the bottom of the bank facing south beside a big stone--you can
hardly miss it! You will hear from me, when there is anything you
should know--until there is, good-bye!"
She said, with her characteristic, cordial imperiousness: "Good-bye
comes after luncheon! ... You must not leave this house again without
breaking bread! ..."
He yielded, and soon they were seated at a long, well-covered table
in a room whose sombre panelling was relieved by inset portraits of
dead-and-gone Forbises, glittering trophies of Indian weapons, horns
and heads of big game; some fine pieces of Oriental porcelain and a
noble buffet of silver plate. That sense of strangeness still
remained. Strongly as the good things of the palate appealed to John
Hazel's sensuous nature, he found himself swallowing hot savoury
Scotch broth--demolishing cold game-pie and salad with the barest
appreciation of their excellence--and gulping down the Chateau
Margaux of the Kerr's Arbour cellars, as indifferently as though it
had been the beer of the canteen....
"Good-bye, Mr. Hazel," Katharine said at parting, "and God bless you!
I shall never forget what you have done. Should I hear from Colonel
Yaill, I shall communicate to the address you have given me. Should
you hear of him--you will write to me here at Kerr's."
She gave him both her white hands, returning his big strong grasp
with warm, sisterly friendliness, sending a strange and wonderful
thrill through the giant frame of the man.
"May I--" he asked, almost humbly, with his black eyes entreating
hers, in the way that a woman who has been wooed can never
misunderstand....
"If you wish!" she answered, cordially, and he stooped and touched
with his fleshy lips the beautiful hands he held. Then he released
them.... He was at the door, looking back at Katharine.... As he
turned the handle she spoke impulsively:
"Where are you going?--you haven't yet told me!"
"I suppose because I thought you would guess," John Hazel returned.
"The fact is, I got orders yesterday to join my old crowd--the
'Fenchurch Streets'--at Salonika. So I'm going out to the Near
East--to look for your friend!"
"Not to fight?" Katharine asked, smiling, though touched by his
rugged simplicity.
He answered:
"To do that, and the other job too...."
"It is almost certain that I, myself, shall be going out to Egypt
shortly," she told him, "to work at the Hospital of Montana near
Alexandria--with my friends of the Red Cross."
He nodded gravely.
"Good luck to you and them! There's a thing I'd like to hear you
say, Miss Forbis. Do you mind just telling me to carry on?"
"Carry on, John Hazel!" said Katharine royally.
He waved a hand to her, and was gone. And the great lonely, empty
House of Kerr's Arbour was tenfold emptier and lonelier without that
vital, powerful embodiment of faith and loyalty....
_Book the Third:_ THE FINDING
I
Weeks after John Hazel had sailed with a draft of leave-expired
"Fenchurch Streets,"--to join the Division to which that gallant
London regiment was attached--with the British Mediterranean
Expeditionary Forces at Salonika--and while brave British men in
Palestine were cracking their teeth on that hard nut of Gaza--H.M.
Transport _Loyalty_, (an ex-Austrian Lloyd Liner captured at the
beginning of the War, and converted into a Mediterranean Hospital
ship), sailed for Egypt,--and in the _Photographic Puff_ of the
week's issue appeared--under an enlarged snapshot of the pre-War
departure of the ex-Austrian Lloyd from Southampton Docks--this
announcement:
"POPULAR SOCIETY PEERESS, COMMANDANT OF L.L.W.S.L.,
SAILS FOR EASTERN THEATRE OF WAR."
Another periodical of the type that daily caters for readers of
another order, published, under a portrait of Lady Wastwood in
exiguous dinner dress:
"TRIXIE MAKES TRACKS FOR EGYPT TO FIND OUT WHY
SPHINX SMILES."
While in the _Daily Wire_ of a few days' later issue was published a
brief paragraph to the effect that H.M. Transport _Loyalty_ had been
torpedoed on the fifth day of her voyage out to Alexandria; carrying
some officers and men of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force returning
from sick-leave; a detachment of Military Nurses and fourteen
brand-new ambulance-cars; many War Hospital stores and comforts
destined for our wounded, together with a complete unit of the
British Red Cross.
"Miss Forbis, V.A.D., of Kerr's Arbour, N.B., is included in the list
of the rescued, as also Trixie, Lady Wastwood, O.B.E., Commandant
L.L.W.S.L., who was on her way to the East to employ her well-known
powers of organisation in the establishment of a Hostel for
Convalescent Officers (Auxiliary) in the neighbourhood of
Alexandria." The famous motto of the Legion is, doubtless, familiar
to our readers: "Do Anything, Go Anywhere, Stick At Nothing, and
Never Grouse."
The usual boat-drill had not been neglected, and when the alarm had
once been sounded, everybody had dutifully turned up at his or her
allotted station in overcoat and cork lifebelt, to be not at all
astonished by the intelligence that the scare was simply a dud....
No attack upon the part of enemy submarines had been anticipated....
The _Loyalty_, with her three vast squares of green paint bounding a
white-edged Red Cross (outlined at night by brilliant electric
lights)--amidships on each side, ought to be regarded as sacrosanct
by German submarines.... But of course people understood there were
loose mines in the Mediterranean, though the minefields were all
known.
Lady Wastwood had rather ruffled the good-humour of the Captain by
constantly asking him how he could be Certain of this? But after he
had personally conducted the Commandant, life-belt and all--for from
this practical insurance Trixie never separated--to his chart-house
on the Lower Bridge, and displayed before her green eyes a chart of
the Mediterranean, ornamented with designs in coloured inks by the
Navigating; Lieutenant--indicating areas strewn with floating mines
by the Kaiser and the Sublime Porte, "G.M. at such-and-such a depth,
and T.M. at such-and-such another," and illustrated the uses of the
telephones between the Wireless Room and the chart-house, and the
telegraphs linking the officer on the bridge with the engine-room,
and the speaking-tubes communicating with the batteries of
quick-firing guns fore and aft,--Trixie's anxieties were completely
laid to rest. She thanked the Captain effusively, and with a
gracious smile and bow to the Navigating Lieutenant, descended to the
saloon-deck cabin,--which she shared with Miss Forbis--to renew her
complexion for the 12.30 lunch.
To wash your hands, arrange your hair and refresh your complexion
while arrayed in a life-belt being impossible, Trixie removed her
practical insurance, hanging it on the cabin sofa-end while she
monopolised the looking-glass.
"Of course I am a grouse--and a disgrace to the Legion, I know it too
well!" she owned to Katharine, as she intensified her V-shaped
Pierrot smile with a stick of scarlet paste, "and instead of playing
rounders and quoits and clock-golf--which is exactly the same kind of
thing as playing water polo in a wash-hand basin--what I really long
to do is to huddle in a deck-chair, and look out for oily streaks and
white breaks in the water. But I am the victim of a morbid
imagination--that keeps telling me what happens to you when you get
wrecked at sea. You go down and come up three times--and see all the
events of your past life processioning before you. That must be
horrible! And they say it always happens--the people, I mean, who
have nearly been drowned--and were only just saved in time!"
"But nobody who has been quite drowned has ever given an account of
it," said Katharine, with her wholesome, heartening laugh.
Sea and sunshine had done much for Miss Forbis. Private Abrahams
would have recognised her for the bright-eyed, smiling woman he had
met that day on the Menin Road.... We cannot always mourn the dead,
or bewail the lost that are living; though often her heart cried out
in anguish for her dear ones; and waking of nights upon the shallow
pillow of the upper bunk in the suffocating cabin, she would feel for
a silver whistle she carried in her bosom--and kiss it--and cry
herself to sleep again.... Or lie sleepless amidst the creakings,
the overhead tramplings and shoutings; the snorting of
electrically-driven ventilators; the occasional thump! of a bigger
sea than usual upon the bows of the _Loyalty_, and the dismal sounds
emitted by sufferers from the malady of the sea....
"How sensibly you look at things, Kathy dear," said Lady Wastwood,
putting the final touch to her Pierrot smile....
Friendly and even affectionate as were the relations between these
two women,--no reference had ever been made by one or the other to
that February day of Trixie's encounter with Edward Yaill on board
the Scotch Express. But the subject was in the air, and both felt
it,--and possibly because of this, their conversation was elaborately
casual....
Trixie added, as she intensified the eyebrows that resembled musical
slurs, with a black pencil: "But really, my stupid nerves are
quieting down! The skipper has cheered me wonderfully. There's
something so refreshingly bluff and reassuring about a big smiling
sailor man with white ducks and an Irish accent,--of the northern
kind that one doesn't associate with dynamite and revolvers and
masks. He has quite put my idiotic fears to bed. I shall
never--AH!"--
A hot, violet-yellow light seemed to fill the cabin, as the terrible
detonation shook the _Loyalty_. The air seemed flame.... Dust
filled their lungs and nostrils, and the shattering crash of
descending tons of water, mingled with the great cry blended of
innumerable voices, that goes up to Heaven from a mined or torpedoed
ship.... Then the shrieks and cries ceased, as Discipline asserted
itself. Through the deafening roar of escaping steam--and the racket
of shattered engines--the bugle sounded the alarm--in deadly earnest
now....
"Come!" said Katharine Forbis. She wrenched open the cabin door,
letting in a rush of water, seized both their life-belts and gripped
hold of Lady Wastwood, who, half-swooning, wavered as though about to
fall. Somehow Miss Forbis dragged her charge through a jam of
white-faced men and women--along the broad gangway, oddly tilted
forwards--ankle-deep in water--up the main companion--tilted too, at
that queer forward angle--down which the sea was rushing in a heavy
waterfall. Drenched and gasping, to reach the
promenade-deck--emerging into the radiant beauty of a Mediterranean
day with the shout:
"All passengers on deck with life-belts on! All passengers on deck
with life-belts on!" ringing in her ears....
Sun and sea, sea and sun,--and Death at its ugliest--an uncanny
combination.... There was no panic after the first outcry and the
headlong scrimmage for the upper deck. The deafening boom of
escaping steam made it necessary to shout so as to be heard by those
who stood nearest.... The forward tilt of the smooth white planks
increased momentarily. The _Loyalty's_ bow-plates and forward
compartments had been stove in by the explosion. She was settling
down by the nose, into the mirror-clear water--while the Military
Nurses in their grey cloaks,, and the men and women of the Red Cross
stood to attention on her tilting decks--and her officers went to and
fro....
There never had been panic, there was even a little laughter.... No
fear of horrors of thirst and starvation attending on shipwreck in
the crowded Mediterranean Sea.... The low grey hulls of the
_Loyalty's_ two attendant Destroyers were visible on her starboard a
long way ahead.... They were getting steam up.... "Coming to look
after us!" shouted somebody to somebody. Of course they had been
apprised by Wireless of what had occurred....
"Great invention, Wireless!" shouted somebody else to Katharine....
Katharine nodded back. She hardly felt depressed.
"_B'mm. Hm'm! Oom'm m! ..._"
A seaplane came droning out of the bright distance from where the low
grey hulls of Destroyers showed, shepherding a stately procession of
camouflaged troopers and battleships,--and hovered in narrowing
circles over the _Loyalty_. Her pilot shut off--and his observer
shouted something through a megaphone. What he said could not be
heard through the roar of the escaping steam. Then he dropped a
weighted note and flew away southwards, and the Second Officer
grabbed the note and hurried off to take it to the Captain on the
bridge.... Katharine never saw him again.... But inside the space
of twenty seconds every soul on board the doomed vessel was in
possession of the ugly fact....
The _Loyalty_ had got out of her course,--strayed miles from the
guarded ocean highway, traversed in comparative safety by the
shipping of the Allies, patrolled by British Fleet hydroplanes,
submarines and Argus-eyed T.B.D.'s.... She was in the middle of a
Turkish minefield, one of those fulminating enemy areas marked out on
her charts with lines and letters in coloured inks, that had been
displayed by her Captain to the anxious eyes of Lady Wastwood. The
powerful magnetos of a German submarine,--hovering in her near
vicinity, had caused deviation in the British transport's compasses.
Or, there had been a blunder--the truth will never be known....
Of the boats that had got away from the ship,--the first were crowded
with women only; the next were packed with women and a sprinkling of
men.... They pulled away towards those grey shapes on the southern
horizon--topped by columns of slanting smoke--and presently were mere
specks upon the straining sight....
As Katharine and Lady Wastwood were helped over the rail into their
boat, and it was lowered to the level of the water--something like a
shudder went through the _Loyalty_.... Her stern-ports lifted at a
greater angle, and her bows were submerged more deeply. Looking up
at her huge grey bulk, it seemed to Katharine that some vast
cetacean,--bombed and harpooned--lay dying in agony upon the smooth
and glassy sea....
She saw the Captain on the bridge, binoculars in hand, speaking to
one of the minor officers. Urged in some way, he shook his head as
though in refusal, and as his subordinate quitted the bridge--resumed
his interrupted scanning of the distant sea. Perhaps the binoculars
had focussed the travelling top of a periscope, and the breaking of
white water, miles away to the east....
When the double White Death Streak cleaved the blue sea, and one
after another two torpedoes hit the _Loyalty_ on her port side
amidships--her bows plunged downwards, throwing most of the people
remaining on her decks, into the water. Others clung to her rails
and the roofs of her deck-structures, as with a thunderous rattle of
scrapping iron, her bowels fell out of her mangled body,--and she
dived and vanished in a whirlpool of her own. As her stern heaved up
perpendicularly, lifting her huge triple screws sheer out of the
swirling water, a Portuguese sailor scrambled up upon her counter,
naked as in the hour of his birth,--and so stood poised; his rich
brown body gleaming,--his wild eyes and bared teeth glittering in the
sun:
"_Mao riao parta o' diabo!_ ... (May the Thunderbolt split you,
devil! ...")
He shook his dark clenched fist towards the east, shrieking out the
imprecation--meant perhaps for the Kaiser or the Sultan or the
Commander of the submarine,--and dived magnificently as the ship
sank, dragging down with her the last boats....
And then, through suffocation, and roaring sounds of water in her
ears--flashes of sunlight piercing her smarting eyes, wedges of
blackness driving over mind and soul--lightning flashes of
consciousness--gasped-out prayers to God, wild cries for
help,--washed down her choking throat by volumes of bitter
waters--Katharine Forbis came up out of the depths--to find herself
floating in sunlight and strange silence, on a sea covered with a
strange confusion of floating _débris_....
Not alone, for all the silence. In the company of a good many other
people, pluckily bent on keeping their courage up, and other folks'
as well. Military nurses and Red Cross V.A.D's, orderlies, officers,
sailors, Tommies.... Some of the men on duty forward had been
horribly injured by the explosion of the Turkish contact-mine. What
could be done for them had been done before quitting the sinking
_Loyalty_. But as the blood from their cruel wounds drained away
into the waste of water.... It was not the first time that Katharine
Forbis had seen brave men die.... Then a V.A.D. woman perched with
two others on a gangway, called to her across a patch of water--a
lagoon ringed-in with floating wreckage:
"Oh, do look at the Commandant!--I am afraid she is dying!"
Treading water, paddling with a wooden fruit-dish, horribly hampered
by her cork panoply,--Katharine crossed the patch of sea. The thin
bluish wedge of Trixie's face lay tilted upwards to the jeering
sunshine, against the slab of cork outcropping at the back of her
belt. Her green eyes, half-open, looked hard and glassy as
enamel--the livid lips were parted, showing the set white teeth....
"Oh try to live!" begged Katharine. "See--there are ships in the
distance!" She pointed to some grey shapes moving on the southern
horizon under their slanting columns of grey smoke. "The boats that
have left us will be picked up--they will be sent back for us! ..."
"No ship commanded by a sane man will stick her nose into the middle
of a charted Turkish minefield!" came from a man who hung on to a
deck-seat and a wooden hen-coop next them, and had overheard. "When
the contact stove in our forward plates I sent out the S.O.S. and got
through to the Commander of one of those Destroyers...." He jerked
his chin angrily towards some slanting streaks of smoke to the
southward. "All he could do was to send that hydro from the nearest
Battle Cruiser to have a look at us; explain what kind of a mess we
were in--in case we hadn't guessed it already!--and tell us to wait
for the boats! ..."
And the speaker, who had been the Wireless Operator on board the
_Loyalty_, whose head was swathed in a bloody towel and whose right
arm hung broken by his side,--grinned a forlorn grin, and tightened
with his teeth the buckle of the leather waist-strap that supported
him on his improvised raft, as Trixie's head fell limply back, and a
faint moan fluttered from her lips, that were getting ashen grey....
"Please, please, don't give up!" said Katharine, mustering all her
forces. She splashed water on the grey, peaked face and shook the
thin shoulder. "Listen to me.... Do you hear? Don't you _dare_ to
die! ..."
But not Katharine's utmost efforts could have kept the dwindling life
in Trixie, as the hours dragged on, and the blazing sun beat on their
misery.... But that her good Angel, or Trixie's, reminded her that
the little courier-bag slung about her shoulders, containing her
money and papers, accommodated a tiny brandy-flask.
A sickness of sheer despair came over her as she realised that,
environed by the unwieldy cork slabs of her life-belt, she could not
possibly get at the bag.... Then she remembered, when there had been
a moment or two of delay in readying the ship's boat--she had taken
the flask out of the bag, and thrust it in the breast-pocket of her
serge jacket. With a rush of thankfulness she felt for it, and found
it there still.
It seemed long to Katharine before she could unscrew the flask-cap,
and force a few drops of Cognac between the other's tightly-clenched
teeth. When Trixie sighed, and opened her green eyes,--between her
dazed vision and the marvel of a Mediterranean sunset, leaned the
even greater wonder of a compassionate human face....
The glory of the sunset culminated to its utmost splendour. Floods
of blazing wine of rubies poured into the sapphire bowl of the
sea.... The water was calm as a mill-pond,--the air was balmy
sweetness--as the evening star kindled, under the round breast of
Asia's radiant moon.... And of all the innumerable ships that passed
and repassed along the crowded sea-road on the southern horizon, not
one altered her course for the castaway passengers of the luckless
_Loyalty_....
They had been so brave, talking and cracking jokes--singing
even,--asking riddles, and attempting recitations, "being British"
some of them would have called it--up to the last volt of
strength.... Towards morning they began to die,--the Wireless
Operator leading the way, slipping off quite easily.... A baby went
next, the only child on shipboard, and its desperate mother,--the
English wife of a native official at Malta--shrieking--cast loose the
rope that lashed her to some floating deck-fittings and, clutching
the tiny body to her--leaped into the sea. And others died of
exhaustion, and yet others; until quavering voices bravely raised in
familiar strains of well-loved hymns, were dumb for sheer despair....
But, after all, though not until Dawn had risen over the unseen
Desert of Syria--the boats that had pulled away, came back for yet
another freight....
"Are we dead, you and I?" asked Lady Wastwood dreamily, waking out of
an exhausted sleep, in a cabin of the trooper that had taken the
rescued ones on board....
"Not yet," said Katharine Forbis gently, stooping over her. "It
seems that God has yet some work in this world for you and me to do!"
"It is a lonely world," said Trixie faintly, and turned her peaked
face to the bulkhead, "I had done with it! And--though it sounds
horribly ungrateful, dear! I am sorry that you have brought me back!"
"But I am glad you aren't dead," said Katharine, kissing her,
"because I love you, and you know that you are fond of me!"
"You saved my life.... I can never forget that," said Lady Wastwood.
"My dear! there ought to have been somebody to photograph you doing
it! What a success it would have made on the screens! ..." She
returned Katharine's kiss with warmth. "It's quite true," she said.
"I always have been fond of you,--you dear thing! That is why I was
so frightfully down on poor Edward Yaill!"
"Do not--do not let us go back to that!" begged the other, wincing.
"I remember cutting him," continued Lady Wastwood reminiscently,
"enough to have drawn blood. My Jerry always said--you remember how
keen he was on golf? 'Mums carries too many clubs for one game, and
always uses a niblick when it ought to be a putter!' But, believe
me,--I really meant well!"
And that was the sealing of a compact of sisterhood between Katharine
and Trixie.... For that we have striven for we love as part of
us.... And Friendship forged on the anvil of Endurance is a metal
that will stand strain.