from me.... And yet how can a mother love by measure and by rule? Did
Our Lady withhold any part of her love from her Divine Child? Did not
the dearest of all earthly mothers say to me--in that waking Vision, the
God-given reality of which I have never doubted--'_Be to a son of Owen's
what I have been to you!_'"
Her strained composure gave way. Her face quivered and the tears broke
forth. She nipped her trembling lips close and shut her quivering
eyelids with her fingers, but the fountains were unsealed, and she wept.
Perhaps it was better so. She dried her eyes presently, and yielding to
Saxham's persuasions in that she consented to go and lie down, she came
into his embrace and laid her arms about his neck and kissed him with
wifely tenderness, saying:
"I will answer now, what you said a little while ago. You shall see
under the only leaf of my heart, Owen, that has ever been folded down
over a secret kept from you. When my boy was to be born, and I was weak
and suffering, the doubt--the dread, that has haunted and tortured you,
assailed me and made me wretched--for a little while. Then I gathered
together, jealously, every noble, true and brave thing you had ever done
for me or for others; every good deed of kindness, every unselfish
tender thought. I asked you to take me with you to visit your poorer
patients. I saw their hollow eyes brighten and heard them bless you when
you turned from their bedsides to carry comfort and help elsewhere. And
I wrote down these things in a book. They shine from its pages like
jewels. When I die it was to be given to Bawne.... It will be if he
lives to come back to us.... There is a prayer at the end that, in His
goodness, God might give me in my boy a man like you!"
He went with her to the door and looked after her earnestly as she
passed down the corridor out of his sight.
Then he locked himself in, and went back to his chair at the
consulting-room table. The bright boy had stood there beside him a few
short hours before. He was there now, pleading with a silent voice,
coaxing with unseen looks, tugging with invisible hands. He always
would be. Though Time softened the mother's anguish of loss, there would
be no forgetfulness for Saxham, the grim stern man whose nature was
Fidelity. Other children might yet call the Dop Doctor father, but
their little fingers would never blur the imprint of the firstborn's
babyish hand upon his heart.
Perhaps you can see the man, wan and haggard and unshaven, trying to
attend to the pressing correspondence that had accumulated since the
previous noon. Even as, to the shrill crying of the Fleet bugles, a
windy grey day broke over the choppy Solent, showing the huge pageant of
Sea Power ready for the King.
Down forty-mile avenues of floating steel fortresses one might follow
Majesty, with a great muster of Naval sea-planes and aeroplanes
manoeuvring somewhat wildly overhead.
As Saxham sat there with Fate's trident rankling in him, those lights he
had spoken of were burning behind closely-curtained windows at the
Admiralty and at the Foreign Office, and at the Belgian and German
Embassies. In Berlin and Vienna, in Brussels and Paris and St.
Petersburg--later to cast off its Teutonic name in loathing and be
Petrograd--similar phenomena might have been observed. "Austria was
going to take some step," as Prince Lichnowsky had nervously stated to
Britain's Foreign Secretary, adding that he regarded the situation as
very uncomfortable. And the German Foreign Secretary ingenuously
confided to the British Charge d'Affaires in Berlin that it was the
intention of Austria-Hungary to offer Serbia a pill which she could not
swallow, in the Note demanding the removal of all officers and
functionaries guilty of propaganda against the Dual Monarchy, presented
by Baron Giesel at Belgrade, on the 24th of July. The ultimatum was to
be accepted or rejected within forty-eight hours, a sweeping proviso, in
which one recognises the Hohenzollern touch.
The world trembled on the brink of Armageddon. Men even then were
doubtful as to the issue. It might yet, some said, be Peace. But if
Man, who arrives at conclusions by intellectual processes, was unsure,
not so things that are guided merely by Instinct. Like the wise
creatures of Natal and the Transvaal and Bechuanaland in 1900, these
knew quite well that War was in the air.
It is on record that in these days preceding the Great Calamity, huge
droves of wild pig, great herds of deer and small bands of the rarer
elk, with bears, hares, martens, and foxes, evacuated the forests of
Bavaria and South Germany for the mountain fastnesses of Switzerland.
Immense flights of birds not usually migratory, partridges, pheasants,
grouse, plover, wild-doves and water-fowl went South with the animals.
Under cover of night the colossal game-preserves of East Prussia emptied
into Poland--their furred and feathered peoples passing into the
labyrinthine swamps of the Russian Dnieper and Dniester--spreading the
news, sending the alarm before them:
"_Man is coming, and with him War!_"
Man was coming. That strange trembling of the earth had warned its
creatures, even before the tramp, tramp, tramp of millions of marching
feet, the rumbling that betokened the slow but sure approach of Titanic
death-engines, told Fine Ears to seek safety in flight, before the
cataclysm of human flesh and iron and steel, and chemicals a thousand
times more deadly, rolled down to overwhelm, and destroy. Hence through
those July nights the sound of rushing wings above, and stealthy pads,
and trotting hoofs, and heavy bodies crashing through sedge and brake
and underbrush, hardly for a moment ceased. Puffs of sweet wild breath,
and musky odours from hidden lairs; tufts of hair upon the thorns, and
crowded spoor upon the dust of the forest-paths or the mud of the
river-banks, told of their going, to those who were skilled to read such
signs. But the same mysterious instinct that urged them to flight, bade
the eagle and vulture that prey upon carrion, the raven and owl and
crow, the wolf and lynx be on the alert, for the table of Earth would
shortly be spread for them as never before in the whole History of War.
And their hoarse croaking and hooting and baying and barking answered:
War, War, War!
*CHAPTER XLIV*
*PATRINE REMEMBERS*
Patrine knelt beside the bed in her charming chintz-draped,
white-enamelled room at Harley Street, and clumsily thanked God for
having taken away von Herrnung. She petitioned that darling Bawne might
be quickly found and brought back, and that if he were not, Lynette
might not die. And she wound up with 'Our Father,' rather imperfectly
remembered, and got into bed wondering whether Sherbrand would be
pleased if he could know her not quite as irreligious as she had
boasted--and lay revelling drowsily in the comfort of cool
lavender-scented linen, until she fell asleep.
She had not tasted sleep for nights: age-long nights of broad staring
wakefulness. Now Somnos, the gentle brother of Thanatos, took her and
lapped her divinely round. She felt herself drifting away on a
wide-flowing tide of deep sweet restfulness. Then it was as though an
electric light were suddenly switched on in the dark galleries of her
brain. Insomnia, the malevolent hag-witch, jests thus merrily with her
victims, suffering them to taste sleep, and then whisking the cup away.
Like many other practical jests, this ends in breakdown and brain-fever,
or drives its victims to the chemist for sleepy drugs, and to the
madhouse subsequently.
In the middle of the dazzling cocoon-shaped patch of brightness thus
created, Patrine recognized the outlines of an ornamental fountain that
occupied the centre of the vestibule leading to the supper-room of the
Upas Club. Executed in the New Art style of sculpture, of white and
black, and tawny marble, it was shaded by tall palms with gilded leaves.
On low pedestals rising from the rim of the shallow oval basin of the
fountain were three nude life-sized shapes delicately tinted, with gilt
hair, carmined lips, darkened eyebrows, vague round eyes of pale blue.
They had the flattened breasts and narrow hips of masculine adolescence
with women's faces and shoulders, arms and thighs. One held a finger
hushingly on its lip; another was putting on a black vizard through
which its pale eyes peeped slyly, the third was smiling over the rim of
a golden drinking-cup. The Three were sharing a pleasant secret between
them--or so it had seemed that night to Patrine.
After complying with certain formalities, and paying a heavy fee for
admission, Patrine with her friend had passed through to a wonderfully
decorated supper-room with a big grill at the end, where white-capped
cooks were busy with savoury things. Wind and strings filled the room
with great waves of music. Liveried attendants were serving champagne
in crystal jugs to men and women seated supping at the
daintily-appointed tables. The hot eyes and lividly-pale or
purple-flushed faces of many of the revellers, already told their tale
of excess.
The champagne at a guinea a jug, a speciality of the Upas, had seemed
excellent to Patrine. She was out for enjoyment, and fizz made you feel
top-hole. They had supped--was it lobster Americaine or grilled oysters
that had preceded the other things?--when there came a change in the
music. The unseen orchestra sighing and thrilling forth the amorous
phrases of _Samson et Dalila_, leaped all at once into another familiar
theme. To wit, the dance of the Jaguars in the Jungle, with its wail,
clang, clash and growl as of strange, discordant, exotic instruments.
"Drums covered with serpent-skin, gombos of elephant-tusk, human
skull-rattles and all the paraphernalia of Voodoo," to quote Lady
Beauvayse.
Couples rose, and began passing out through a wide curtained exit at the
farther end of the supper-room. The music grew madder. Patrine,
laughing, took von Herrnung's offered arm.
"Now," he told her, "you are going to see something that is very _chic_!
We shall dance in the Hall of the Hundred Pillars!"
"How frightfully ripping!" said Patrine.
Thus they joined the mob of people--a singularly quiet mob,--and passed
through the heavy, curtained entrance. The much-talked-of Hall was
merely a big circular ballroom, lighted by groups of electric lilies,
set about with pillars of tinted glass, slanting from a dado of black
marble, ending at a broad frieze of black beneath the ceiling-dome.
Theatrical and tawdry, gaudy and glittering, the scheme of decoration
reminded Patrine of the inside of a solitaire marble. The walls of
fierce bright orange were striped in curving oblique and transverse
lines of black-and-silver, the silver dome was decorated with similarly
curving lines of orange-and-black.
To the strange barbaric music of the dance from Sao Paulo men and women
were gyrating and posturing, gliding and pausing, as other men and women
had done at the Milles Plaisirs. Presently Patrine and her friend were
revolving like the others, in the Valse with the hesitations and the
Tango steps in it. You had only to know Tango and the thing came
easily--or you imagined it did, after so much champagne. Reflected in
the wall and ceiling-mirrors the girl had seen herself, twisting and
twirling amidst the mob of dancers, with her head thrown back, and her
long eyes blazing, and her wide red mouth laughing wantonly, before the
black-and-orange-and-silver walls, the silver-and-black-and-orange dome
spun giddily round her with the mob of dancers. Dazed, she had shut her
eyes. She had felt herself being hurried somewhere--out of the pillared
dancing-hall....
She shivered, lying there in the sunshine remembering.... She recalled
von Herrnung's face as they had passed out of velvet-curtained,
soundless darkness into a tapestry-hung, softly-carpeted corridor. The
inner angles of the eyebrows were lifted, the laughing mouth under the
red-rolled moustache displayed the big white teeth in a tigerish way.
The pupils of his eyes were dilated, the irises pale as water. He had
looked at her curiously, and said with a strange accent:
"So, Isis, you are mine now!"
"I suppose so!"
"I did not suppose so. The experience has been very real for me. Shall
we go back--or would you prefer----"
She said with her face turned from him sullenly:
"I should prefer to go--to where I live!"
He had been loth to let her go. Then under a promise of renewal of
those strange, shameful, secret relations, he had wrapped her
theatre-mantle about her, and helped her arrange her lace scarf about
her head, and taken her through a passage back to the vestibule where
the three ambiguous statues stood about the central fountain, upon whose
restless jet of water played shifting lights of different hues. By some
arrangement of those who had planned the Upas, there faced you as you
issued with your companion from the furtive side-passage the figure that
had its finger on its smiling, carmined lips....
And then--the stale air of London at dawn in midsummer. In the shabby
side-street where long ranks of private cars stood waiting, von Herrnung
had signalled the chauffeur of one of them--could the man have been the
German who had leered at her that day at Hendon?--and then he had put
her in, and followed her, and taken her back to Berkeley Square....
It irked her to remember that she had told to the sleepy manservant who
had admitted her at 3 A.M. an absolutely supererogatory falsehood to
account for her return at that belated hour. For Lady Beau wouldn't
have bothered if you'd arrived with the milkman, so long as you turned
up smiling at her bedside with your fountain-pen, and her coroneted
paper-pad, when she'd had her early grape-fruit, and roll, and coffee,
and was ready to tackle her morning mail.
Patrine must be discreet. Cautious. Must tell no lies of the
unnecessary kind. For even though von Herrnung had been removed, just
when his attitude had become formidable and menacing--there might yet be
pitfalls of her own digging to brave and shun.
Pitfalls ... Perils ... As she lay wakeful, conscious through shut
eyelids of the white mouldings of the ceiling her face was turned to,
suddenly a keen sharp terror ran her through. She had heard her own
voice say to von Herrnung:
"My God! Can't you understand that I ask nothing better than never to
see nor hear of you again!"
He had mocked her with his hateful smile, and she had not understood.
"Under no--possible conditions? Just think a bit, my dear! Because--to
burn one's boats behind one--that is not prudent at all!"
And later:
"You give me to understand that whatever happens--_whatever
happens_--you will have nothing more to do with me?"
Idiot!--besotted idiot! She leaped up in the bed, visualising the
peril, clearly as though a shutter had snapped back within her brain.
Horror froze her, realising the shame she might live to bring upon those
who loved Patrine. Uncle Owen ... Lynette ... Bawne....
Mildred and Irma were minor considerations, shadowy silhouettes,
negative quantities. Neither Irma nor Mildred had ever loved Patrine.
Dad had though. Poor, dear Dad! She was glad he wasn't alive now. And
Margot ... Would Kittums cut one if--that happened? And--Sherbrand! A
blush burned over her, and she flung herself face downwards, burying her
scorching face among the pillows, stifling the scream that the sheer
torture wrung from her, by nipping a fold of the smooth linen in her
teeth.
So she lay and writhed on the red-hot griddle of her anguished
recollection, until a neat housemaid knocked at the door and brought her
morning tea. And as she set down the emptied cup, someone else knocked,
and opened the door softly, and Patrine turned--to meet the look of
Lynette.
And then, though her struggling conscience warned her that she was
unworthy to be held in arms so pure, she cried out wildly, and felt
herself enfolded, and the fierce emotional tumult within her broke forth
in wild sobs and drenching tears. She heard herself saying:
"I would have given my life over and over to have saved you from grief
like this!"
And yet these were not the words she would have spoken. We are actors
often and often when we least suspect ourselves, even when Calamity with
one swift stroke of the scalpel has divided the palpitating flesh and
quivering nerves down to the living bone.
"I would have given my life!" she wept, and Lynette seated by the
bedside and bending over her, answered tenderly:
"I know it, my kind heart! You have always loved him. You wished him
not to go--you begged Owen not to allow----"
There was unutterable loyalty in the breaking of the sentence: "He
thought it best. I trust my husband," said the sweet voice. "But yet I
thank you, dear one, for your loyalty to me."
"Don't touch me! I'm not fit!" Patrine stammered, resisting the
mothering, encircling embrace. But the cup of pure sweetness was held
to her feverish lips, she craved it too much to thrust it from her. You
can see her coming out of the bed in a galumphing outburst of
passionate, remorseful tenderness:
"Here is my place!--here!" she gulped out brokenly, hiding her wet face
on the elder woman's knees. Together they made a group not unlike
Bouguerau's great canvas of the Consolatrix, save that there was no
dead, lovely boy lying amidst the scattered petals of the fallen roses
on the stone. Perhaps if there had been and the worst known, Bawne
Saxham's mother could hardly have suffered more.
Not to understand ... not to be sure. To be bereaved, and never to know
just how the Beloved was taken from you.... Can there be anything more
fantastically horrible than this, the fate of thousands of sorrowing
women since the beginning of the Great War?
It was Sunday morning, brilliant and hot even for July weather. The
clangour of church-bells mingled with the clashing of milk-cans, and the
scent of pot-roses mingled with the hot smell of London in midsummer.
Lynette shivered in spite of the sultriness, and looked down at the
girl, spilt out at her knees under the meretricious splendour of her
dead beech-leaf hair. She did not--how could she?--fathom the secret of
such wretchedness, but love and pity flooded her heart, thawed out of
its frozen misery by the vital warmth of the contact. She drew the
unresisting arms upwards and about her, and lifted the prone head and
took it to her bosom, saying:
"My poor girl! My dear Patrine!"
They were silent awhile. Then Lynette asked, her soft breath stirring
the heavy tresses:
"Why did you do this, dearest? Wasn't it sufficiently beautiful?"
Patrine choked out, blazing crimson to the tips of her little ears:
"No! At least!--It is hideous now and he hated it! I--I had to tell
him," a sob and a laugh tangled together, "it was the effect of Paris
air!"
Lynette smiled, though the golden eyes were running over: "Bawne thinks
so much of you, always!"
"I don't deserve that any one should!"
"Nobody shall speak ill before me of any one I care for! Why did you
start?"
For a vision had flashed into the brain of Patrine, of all the world
mocking and jeering and vilifying, and Saxham and Lynette upholding and
defending David's daughter, who had brought disgrace upon them. She
lifted her head and released herself almost roughly from Lynette's
embrace. She stooped down and took the hem of Mrs. Saxham's gown and
kissed it, and rose up looking wonderfully big and stately, and
extraordinarily tall.
"I love you!" she said in her large warm voice. "You are the best woman
I ever met or shall meet, and I am a rotten bad hat! Not worth a
penn'orth of monkey-nuts, take my word for it! But--if somebody like
you had been my mother--perhaps there'd have been something to show for
it to-day."
Lynette might have replied, but just then through the quiet house,
unnaturally still without the boyish voice and the boyish laughter, and
the clumping of little thick-soled brogues upon the stairs and in the
passages, there sounded the sharp whirring ting-a-ting of the hall
telephone-bell. She turned and was gone with no more noise than a thrush
makes in departure. Left alone, Patrine threw on her bathrobe over the
thin nightgown of revealing transparency, lined with the opulent beauty
that captures the desires of men, and looked at her fair reflection in
the long cheval-glass, smiling with something of the subtlety of the
androgynous genius of the Upas Club fountain--the figure that faced the
guests as they entered, tying a vizard over its mocking eyes.
"You're worse even than I thought you!" Patrine said calmly to Patrine,
"but now you know what he meant by what he said, you're not going to
trust to Chance and Luck. You're going--for Uncle Owen's sake, and Aunt
Lynette's, and Bawne's--and Mother's and Irma's and your own--don't
pretend you're a victim!--to marry Sherbrand, the Flying Man!"
Not a notion of any possible or eventual wrong or injury to Sherbrand
troubled her conscience. She had yet to develop on the side of moral
sensitiveness. Responsibility towards God, and duty towards her
neighbour--the sense of these two obligations that are the foundation
and cornerstone of Christianity--had not as yet awakened in Patrine.
She liked Sherbrand. It troubled her more that he had not the _cachet_
of one of the great public Schools, than to know him poor, with his four
hundred _per annum_--as the proverbial church-mouse. But she herself
was not altogether penniless. There would be a hundred and fifty pounds
a year for Patrine when she married; derived from moneys bequeathed to
his daughter's children by Grandpapa Lee Hailey, strictly tied up and
protected by various legal provisos, from depredations on the part of
the unknown possessive male.
Five hundred and fifty between them. Anyhow, she told herself, that was
better than a jab in the eye with a burnt stick. How soon might the
marriage be brought off? One must bend one's energies to the solving of
that question. How many sleepless nights--they were horribly
unbecoming!--lay between Patrine and Security? The Fear that lurked in
her dried her palate at the question. She felt like the runner of a
Marathon fainting in sight of the goal.
*CHAPTER XLV*
*FLOTSAM FROM THE NORTH SEA*
On Monday morning, July 20th, under a flying double-column of Naval
Goody Two Shoes and aeroplanes, the King led forth his Fleets for
tactical exercises in the Channel. There were pictures on the screens at
the music-halls that night and for many nights after, that evoked from
huge audiences tremendous outbursts of patriotic clapping. Hence first
blood in the Great War scores to Lil, belonging to the most ancient of
all professions--who had accepted the invitation proffered by a Teutonic
stranger to join the familiar crowd on the Empire Promenade.
The German paid for drinks. A friend joined him. There were more
drinks, and the two men began to talk, discussing the _ultimatum_
expected from Austria-Hungary, and the inevitable refusal of Belgrade to
eat Vienna humble-pie. War with Russia must ensue. They were cheering
in Berlin that night for _Krieg mit Russland_.
"It must come sometime," said Lil's patron in an undertone to his crony.
"Why then should it not happen now?"
"War with Russia means war with France!" the other returned in the same
key.
"And war with France a reckoning with these pig-dogs!" snarled Lil's
temporary owner. "If the Serbians and Russes are to be smacked--good!
If the French--good also! If the English, a thousand times the better!"
"Let us hope," said the more placable Teuton, emptying his second
liqueur-glass of Kuemmel--"that it will not be this time as at the
affair of Agadir!"
"We are ready!" said Lil's patron with an oath. "We have seven millions
of men ready, and two thousand millions of cartridges, and for
shell--one would not have dreamed the world held so much steel packed
with super-explosive. No, no! _Diesmal wird es nicht sein wie in der
Agadir!_"
He inquired as they left the bar and moved to where Lil, steeped in the
Pictures, was standing at the front of the Promenade:
"What are these _Gottverflucht_ jackasses braying about?"