VICTORY!
A Prussian command had been given. The three would be undisturbed in
their retreat as long as they remained within the grounds of the
chateau. Of itself this was no great hardship; its irritation deep
from the fact that it was by Prussian command.
Any sense of awkwardness in their personal situation had passed. It
seemed quite natural that they should be there together with Jacqueline
and her saucepans. Their story as a story halted, even as the
heartbeats of mankind halted, while it waited for the result of the
Marne.
How quiet the house! How quiet the shaded paths! The roads were empty
now of all save transport feeding man and gun and of ambulances
returning with German wounded. Quiet here and hell far away over the
hills, where the destiny of France and the world was being settled in
the toss with death. Be it the three, or the children and the women
and the old men in the village, the personal thought had been submerged
in straining inquiry of how the battle was going.
Sound was its barometer. Farther and farther the voice of the guns had
travelled, but never out of hearing. It hovered at one point as the
titanic struggle came to a decision. The three talked little;
consciously or unconsciously, they were always listening for something
from the distance. No newspapers; no letters; no telegrams! Only
flagellating wonder and suspense! All the world behind dense curtains
of secrecy, not knowing whether, when they were drawn, there would be
sunlight or black night outside.
Helen went on with her sketching or pretended to, but found herself
staring at the paper and listening and praying for France. Twice
Henriette attempted to continue with the portrait, but she made no
progress. All three read a good deal, Helen by herself, slipping away
from the other two when they were together. They awakened and they
went to sleep to the echo of low thunder, thunder marching in a
treadmill. Then there were lapses when the guns were not heard, and
something seemed to catch in their throats. Had the Germans won? When
the wind changed and the rumble became distinct again, what relief!
Their steps seemed always to lead to the terrace, for there they could
hear more plainly; and there they would walk up and down after dinner,
the dew-moist air soft against their faces, Phil in the middle, with
the voices of the two girls so alike that they seemed to express a
delightful cousinship in one personality. He had ceased to think of
the future. Everything waited on the result of the battle. At times
he wished for action; that he, too, might be striking some kind of a
blow.
Those strolls in the darkness and the voice in his ears, now Helen's,
now Henriette's, seemed to have become a part of his life; something
from which he would never be disassociated. It was the symbol for
Henriette, frightened and helpless, as he carried her to the gully and
for Helen emerging, with triumph shining in her eyes, from the dust and
smoke of the shell that had exploded between them. Helen had a little
prayer for France which she used to repeat, sometimes softly, again
belligerently with hands clenched.
"As if prayers did any good!" she said. "Only killing counts! A
butcher boy from Berlin could fire a shell that would destroy the Venus
di Milo."
"France will win because there is still a God in heaven!" was the
rallying judgment of Jacqueline, when everybody was blue.
Up at dawn, sweeping, dusting, and scouring, it was she who brought the
first glorious word. She burst into Helen's room, awakening her with a
cry of:
"It's nearer--nearer! Listen!"
Helen ran to Henriette's room and then she pounded on Phil's door.
Could imagination be deceiving them again? Phil slipped into his
clothes and hurried out to the terrace. He could see the burst of
light smoke once more against the green of the hills which had hidden
the battle, and transport going to the rear along the road was more
numerous. Only ammunition trucks and ambulances were moving forward.
He ran back to the house in schoolboy delight, shouting the news.
"They will dent my saucepans, will they," said Jacqueline, "and rub
sausage grease into my floors!"
She, too, went to the terrace to watch that unfolding panorama of
German retreat; of cavalry which was covering it caught in the hot
breath of the _soixante-quinze_; of guns which were covering it forced
back from position to position.
Staggering through the village street came the conquerors of yesterday,
their glazed eyes under heavy lids, keeping dogged step from force of
long discipline--they who were not to see Paris! French shell-fire
kept approaching till shrapnel began to break over the village. Again
the three had to take to the cellar, where for a while they heard the
rattle of rifle and machine-gun fire and an occasional cheer--a kind of
cheer that sounded strangely familiar to Phil. When they came upstairs
the figures passing in the village street were no longer in green, but
in khaki. The remnants of the little British army which had retreated
from Mons was tasting the joy of pursuit.
Everybody in the village was out, lining the road; everybody, from Mere
Perigord to infants in arms, displaying the smiles they had been
conserving while they had been glaring at the Germans. The children
gathered flowers and tossed them to _les Anglais_ before their eyes in
the life, looking just as they had looked in the picture papers.
"How do you like being a conquering hero, Bill?" one _Anglais_ called
to another, as he stuck a rose in his cap and relit the "fag" cigarette
stump which he had been saving behind his ear in the midst of charges
and shell-fire. Plodding stoically on, these regulars, taking the
day's work as it came, and this was a day's work to their liking. "Are
we down-hearted? No!" Every one of them looked at Phil. There was no
mistaking him; he must speak English. The lean, tired officers waved
their hands in greeting to the young man and two girls who were beaming
the welcome of their hearts.
"Sorry we can't stay to tea!" one called merrily.
It was a suggestion. Afternoon tea for the English! An opportunity
for the chateau to furnish an important British munition of war, as the
battalion halted waiting orders from somebody up ahead! Jacqueline made
a pail of tea, which the three passed out, along with slices of bread
spread with jam as long as there was any left.
"Jolly good of you!" said the officers. "Such good tea, too--and jam!
This takes a bit of beating. Thanks awfully!"
The battalion passed on with the tide of battle.
"This is the only time that I have not felt perfectly helpless," said
Helen. "There is so little a woman can do when fighting is all that
counts."
"I was thinking of that myself," said Phil. "How helpless I am, though
an able-bodied man!"
"But you did knock a German down!" said Helen, with one of her
mischievous glances.
From the terrace they could now see the French everywhere, in the
ravines and on the roads, sweeping across the fields in the wonderfully
ordered system of a great army which had had generations of training.
"It is good--good--good!" said Helen.
They had recovered something which they had lost: the sense of freedom.
The chateau and the grounds were once more their own; their minds and
their souls were their own. Jacqueline's exaltation expressed itself
in an amazingly good dinner; Helen's in a series of fresh cartoons over
their coffee, which included "our hero" from the Southwest knocking
down the German.
A call from the cure brought word that trains would begin running to
Paris on the morrow, which was a reminder to all that their period of
isolation was over; and for Phil a strange and memorable holiday would
be at an end. Helen went out with the cure and Phil and Henriette
turned up the path. After they had watched the flashes of the guns in
the distance for a while, they started walking slowly back and forth.
"I don't know what we should have done if you had not been here," she
said.
"At least, I kept you in the cellar! Are you glad that you came?" he
asked.
"I would not have missed it for worlds!" answered Henriette. "And I
owe it to you."
"No, to Helen. But for her we should have been in Paris."
"Yes, that's true," she replied thoughtfully. "And what would have
become of her if we had not come?"
"Gone on sketching until a shell hit her, I should say."
"Or until she saw a wounded man and fainted! But there is something
that I do owe to you and to you alone," Henriette went on softly. "I
am appalled when I think of it--of the obligation. I--well----" now
one of her trickling, enchanting laughs. "There's the portrait to
repay you! I think that we might have a sitting in the morning."
Here a white figure appeared around the corner of the path, and they
were face to face with Helen. She drew back in the embarrassment of
one conscious of more than a mere inadvertent intrusion.
"I was going to look at the gun-fire for a minute," she said. It might
have been Henriette's voice suddenly changing the subject. She had on
the simple gown whose cut was the same as Henriette's, who had dressed
for dinner that evening with her usual care. Something in Helen's
distraitness, a sense of her loneliness, aroused an impulse in Phil.
"Make it three!" said he. He went to her, took her hand and drew her
arm into his. She seemed to resist slightly and then to yield almost
tremblingly. Henriette also slipped her arm into his.
"Cousins!" she exclaimed, a happy thought in view of the situation in
more ways than one.
They paced on together, two white slippers moving from under white
skirts against the dark earth in unison with his own steps. Cousins!
But any reason for his remaining at Mervaux was past.
"Now I shall go to Paris to-morrow," said Phil, "and inform your
mother, wherever she is, that you are all right, and get off a cable to
an old couple in Longfield which will stop their worrying."
"I think that we had better go with you," said Henriette. "Don't you,
Helen?"
"Yes, to Paris!" said Helen, with such definiteness that it surprised
her sister. Her mind was no less fixed than when she had decided to
remain alone at Mervaux. She and her thousand francs and her sketches
were going to America in the hazard of new fortunes. "I only ran up to
see the gun-fire and I think I'll look in on Mere Perigord and get her
views on the state of affairs in France," she added, starting to
withdraw her hand; but Phil held it fast.
"Our last night together at Mervaux," he said. "Let Mere Perigord
wait."
Something strong and irresistible in his grip made her yield; but he
could not see the twinge in her features hidden by the darkness. It
was torture for her, this promenade with the man to whom she had said
"Yes." The desire for flight had never been so strong; flight from
Mervaux and all old associations to new worlds.
They had ceased to talk as they kept on rhythmically pacing in the
dark, each with his own thoughts. Phil, looking backward now when the
strain had passed, saw the whole experience at Mervaux with a sense of
personal incompetency; as a helpless spectator of action.
"I'm getting sleepy!" Helen pleaded at last.
"So am I," Phil replied. "Four more turns!"
He did not like to part with their companionship in the faint starlight
this last evening at Mervaux.
"You will go straight to America?" Henriette asked, as they started
toward the house.
"I think so, if I can catch a steamer. I imagine that not one-tenth of
the homeward rush has been accommodated yet."
Not until they reached the door did the three unlink arms. Helen,
blinking into the lamplight of the hall, bent her head. She was
swallowing as if she would try her voice before she said "Good-night!"
with the faintest smile, as for an instant her eyes looked into his and
he saw something that reminded him of the brilliancy and fearlessness
that had shone when she rose from the ground after the shell-burst, but
now veiled.
Henriette paused and, as the door closed behind Helen, held out her
hand to say her own good-night. After looking into Helen's eyes he was
looking into Henriette's, which had the wondering gratitude of the
moment when he had laid her on the turf in the gully, and her smile, as
her eyelashes flickered, added the touch of exquisite charm to her
appealing beauty. Involuntarily in answer to it he drew her hand
toward him.
"Henriette!"
She turned her head, her profile with parted lips toward him, and her
cheek so near that impulse pressed his lips to it. At this she drew
away, not quickly but steadily, looking back into his eyes, and after a
tightening of her fingers drew them free. Then in a flutter, her own
eyes luminous with surprise, she precipitately turned toward the door.
In her room, smiling into her mirror which smiled back, she was pleased
with the way the thing had been done; but to Phil her figure, as it
passed through the doorway, became unaccountably the figure of Helen.