tried to envisage Him. He was not the God of the Curate's
Confirmation-class, nor the God the Anglican Vicar of the West End
Church preached about, but a Being the hem of whose garment extends
beyond the confines of Space, and in whose lap lies Eternity. Infinite
Goodness, infinite Love, infinite Purity, infinite Beauty, He could
stoop to care for the little beings of His Workmanship so much, that for
them He did not hesitate to sacrifice Himself in the Person of His Only
Son. Did not love such as this make wilful sin an insult to Him in that
Son's Person? Wasn't it--pretty rough on Our Saviour--to have poured out
His Blood upon the Cross of Calvary as an atonement for the sins of men
like dead von Herrnung, and women like Patrine Saxham, and know them
still so beastly, so prurient, so base, so vile? ... It began to dawn
upon Patrine, still possessed by that strange hallucination of the Blood
that dripped heavily from the tortured Body on the great black Cross
behind her, how it might be that evil wilfully committed, opened its
Wounds afresh. Drove the thorns anew into the drooping Head of the
Crucified, pierced once more the Heart, that inexhaustible fountain of
love....
"_O! all you that pass by ... attend and see if there be any sorrow like
unto My Sorrow._"
The words came cropping up through layers of sentences heard and
forgotten, clearly as though a voice had spoken them at her side.
This afternoon the headlines of papers had shrieked of horrors. You
remember that at seven o'clock in the morning two German Army Corps had
poured into Belgium by the eleven strategic railways that provided for
The Day. The vast grey-green flood of marching men, the huge python-like
columns of machine-guns, the splendidly-horsed batteries of field
artillery, the Brobdingnagian siege howitzers thundering behind their
traction-engines, the miles of motor- and horse-drawn transport-waggons,
carts, and lorries, blotted out the familiar features of the landscape,
as, preceded by massed brigades of cavalry, with squadrons of Field
Flying Service aeroplanes reconnoitring three thousand feet overhead,
the hosts of Germany rolled down towards the banks of the Meuse.
Directly in line of them rose the fortified City of Liege, termed "the
Birmingham of Belgium," holding in the suburb of Seraign, five miles
distant from the city, the huge Cockerill machine-plant and foundry, one
of the largest ironworks in the world. They had stayed three hours at
the frontier station of Vise, a Belgium Custom House town of less than
4,000 inhabitants, where a few squadrons of Belgian Cavalry and the
Belgian 12th Line Regiment, aided by some heroic peasants, farmers, and
townspeople had risen up with desperate gallantry to oppose their
inevitable advance.
They had written the sign-manual of the Hun upon the ashes of Vise in
the blood of its massacred inhabitants. Frightfulness, the many-headed
hydra, was uncaged and let loose ere they rolled on to Liege peeved by
their three hours' intolerable delay. While I who write and you who
read far from the sound of fusillades, or the crash of shells or the
yells of peasants dying amongst the flames of burning houses, learned of
these deeds from the shrilly clamorous headlines, and asked one another
with raised eyebrows, in incredulous voices: "_Can these hideous things
possibly have been done?_"
Patrine had no doubt that they had been done!--were being done even
while she sat waiting in Sherbrand's church for Sherbrand. Did she not
know von Herrnung? Were not his fellow-officers and the soldiers he and
they commanded, lustful, brutal, cruel, rapacious, arrogant, and
pitiless even as he? He was a Type--not the isolated example of a new
species. It would not be easily stamped out; its dominating
characteristics would write themselves upon a conquered race. Those
outraged wives, those violated daughters of Belgium would live to see it
reproduced in the living fruit of their humiliation. What honest man
could bear to stoop over his wife's bedside and meet the eyes of the
Enemy looking at him--from the face of a new-born child!
A rigor of horror seized upon her body and shook it. Her jaw dropped,
her eyes closed as though they shrank and withered under their
contracting lids. She slid from her seat and fell upon her knees
helplessly. Her head sank forwards upon the hands that rose
instinctively to hide her face. In the same instant Sherbrand's low
voice speaking behind her turned the heart in her bosom to ice.
"Dearest--I am ready, that is if you are? My keeping you was
unavoidable. I am going to Communion with my mother, before the Funeral
Mass to-morrow, and I wanted to make my Confession first. Has the time
seemed long?"
"Not long. Shall we go now?"
He bent the knee to the High Altar and moved with Patrine down the nave
towards an altar dedicated to the Virgin Mother, that was on the south
side of the church near the great west door. Wax tapers of several
sizes burned in a brass stand beside the tiny altar-rail. Sherbrand
lighted three tapers and placed them, felt in his waistcoat-pocket for a
bit of silver and balanced it on the slotted top of the money-box too
gorged with pennies to admit of the slender sixpenny bit. Then with a
beautiful, devotional simplicity he knelt upon the narrow blue
golden-starred cushion for a moment, looking up at the gracious veiled
head that bent above.
But for the modernity of the tweed clothes, the pose of the athletic,
lightly-built body would, with the mellowed light from the great rose
window falling on the keen bronzed face and thick fair hair, have
suggested a knight at prayer. In a moment he rose. They returned as
they had come, passed through the chapter-house of the Sodality, and
issued through the door into the garden. She said, as he triumphantly
possessed himself of the dear white hand:
"Tell me, when you lighted and placed those three candles and knelt
down--what did you intend--what was it for? A practical insurance
against a railway-accident?"
The dull, ill-timed gibe was no sooner uttered than she sickened with
self-contempt. For Sherbrand answered with direct simplicity:
"Well, no! Call my three candles a reminder that I have asked Our
Lady's help and protection and guidance for three dear people. My
father, my mother, and my wife that is to be. For myself I asked that I
might never disappoint you. You don't know how I shall try to live up
to your belief in me!"
"You dear boy!" Touched to the quick response of tears she could barely
falter: "You're a million times too good for me, if only you knew!"
"I know this--that the wide world doesn't hold another woman like my
woman! Why, Pat, the very sound of your voice lashes all the blood in
me into big red roaring waves of love."
"'Big red roaring waves.' Oh, Alan!"
She laughed, driving back the hot salt tears that stung her eyelids.
The taxi was waiting at the corner of Blount Street, patiently ticking
out twopence. Sherbrand whistled and it approached them. But this time
Patrine did not enter. She could not now drive to Waterloo. It was
much, much too late. She refused even to be dropped anywhere. She
infinitely preferred walking. It was quite a pleasant stroll from there
to Harley Street.
So they wrung hands and looked in each other's eyes and parted. When
the taxi vanished round the corner of Blount Street, the tall,
gallantly-borne figure in the golden-braided hat and pale rose gown
began to walk swiftly towards Grosvenor Square. Suddenly it paused,
wheeled, and returned upon its paces, passed through the gate in the
railings and disappeared into the church.
In bed that night in the chintz-hung room at Harley Street, Patrine,
recalling the experience that had followed the yielding to that
irresistible prompting, wondered if it had actually taken place, or were
woven of the tissue of dreams.
Kneeling upon a bast matting-covered hassock behind the door of the
narrow little wooden cell into which she had slipped as a tall,
grey-haired officer in Service khaki passed out,--she had rested her
elbows upon a narrow ledge before her and peered through a close grating
of bronze wire at a figure dimly descried beyond.
The priest was white-haired and of small stature. A meagre ray of light
falling from above upon the hands clasped over the ends of the narrow
stole of violet-purple that hung loosely about his neck, showed them
wasted and yellow-white and deeply wrinkled. By the testimony of the
hands he was an old man. Something in the manner of her address must
have struck him as unusual. She had not spoken six words in her quick,
hot, stammering whisper before he lifted a hand and said
authoritatively:
"Stop!"
And as she had arrested the rush of her words, he had continued, in a
grave, dry voice, quite devoid of unction or sympathy, cautiously
lowered and yet wonderfully distinct:
"You say that you wish to 'confide something' to me 'under the seal of
Confession,' and you are not a Catholic!"
"No, I am not! I suppose I would be called--a sort of Christian,
though." She said it haltingly. "Does my not being a Catholic prevent
you listening to anything I ... want to say?"
The dry voice came back:
"I do not refuse to hear what you have to say. But Confession,
Absolution, and Penance are Catholic Sacraments. I cannot extend the
benefits of the Church to one who stands without her pale."
"I'm sorry! ... I suppose, I really haven't got the right to ask advice
from you, or to expect you to keep anything--secret?"
There was a little old man's cough. The dry voice followed:
"I did not say that. As a priest, I am bound to give good counsel to
those who ask it. And I promise you, also as a priest, to respect your
confidence.... Now if you desire to go on--for I have several penitents
waiting--I will ask you to do so. Be clear and truthful and brief.
Mention no person by name. Let there be no exaggeration. Now begin!
..."
"It's like this..." And she had blurted out the ugly, sordid story,
that in the plain, unvarnished narration grew uglier and more sordid
still.
He had listened without the movement of an eyebrow or the twitch of a
muscle. At certain points where she had deviated from the sheer fact by
a mere hairsbreadth the dry little cough had interjected: "Think again!"
When she touched upon the circumstances that had resulted in "another
man's" offer of marriage:
"You have accepted this other?" he had asked, and followed her
affirmative by saying, quietly, just as he had told her she was not a
Catholic: "You have not told him of--what has taken place. Is he an
honourable, upright man?"
"Very!"
"H'mm!" said the dry cough. "What is his religion?"
"He is a Catholic."
"H'mm! ... A devout Catholic?"
"He seems--awfully keen on his Church!"
A silence had followed, during which the beating of Patrine's heart and
the singing of the blood in her ears had seemed to fill the clean little
wooden place. Then:
"Do you intend to tell this keen Catholic," asked the merciless voice,
"that you do not come to him--pure?"
"No! ... At least..." The heave of her bosom against the little shelf
before the lattice made the dry wood quiver and creak. A deep sigh
broke from her. The priest's voice continued:
"You have made it quite clear why you have applied to me. To be
encouraged not to tell! But even for your own sake I advise you to make
confession. Do you expect God's blessing upon a marriage that is--upon
your side--a fraud?"
"Men aren't angels!" Patrine burst out rebelliously. "How do I know that
he--Yes, I do know!"
His face had risen up before her, and his voice was in her ears saying
with that note of gladness in it: "I come to you clean!" and shame and
compunction choked her, as she added:
"He's straighter than I should have believed it possible for any man to
be."
"H'mm!" The dry hacking old man's cough came again. He sniffed twice,
sharply. Now he was speaking again.
"You have not known many--or any Catholic men before this one. Your
doubt as to the existence of masculine purity proves with what type of
persons you have hitherto mixed. For your own sake you will be wise to
tell the truth to this gentleman. If you loved him you would tell him
for his. Now you must leave. I have given you too much time as it is.
Repeat after me as I dictate." He clasped the withered hands and began
briskly: "_Oh, my God----_"
After a brief ineffectual hesitation, Patrine echoed him. He went on
trailing after him a voice that stumbled and dragged:
"_Oh, my God! I am very sorry that I have offended Thee by the sin of
fornication, and have yielded up my body to uncleanness, instead of
keeping myself pure as Thou commandest. I beseech Thee for the love of
Thy Son my Saviour Jesus Christ to bestow upon me the grace of a genuine
sorrow for my sin; and while I implore that Thou wouldst mercifully
spare me the ruin and disgrace I have merited by my own act, I
faithfully promise Thee to profit by the bitter lesson I have learned.
But if I find myself as the natural consequence of my wickedness----_"
"_--of my wickedness----_"
The dragging echo failed. A mist came before her eyes.
"Go on," said the stern voice from the other side of the grating. It
went on dictating:
"_But if I find myself as the natural consequence of my sinfulness about
to be the mother of a child, I vow not to be guilty of any violence to
the innocent. But to bear my bitter punishment meekly, as coming from
Thy Hand. Amen._"
She said the words. He blessed her with some such words as these:
"Now may God bless and forgive you, and bring your soul from darkness
into His Light. Leave me now. Please shut the door."
She heard the dry little hacking cough again as she closed it after her.
But she did not go away thinking him harsh and merciless. She had seen
great shining tears dropping, dropping upon those withered hands.
*CHAPTER LII*
*KHAKI*
Remember how upon the great grey canvas of London, broadly splashed in
with khaki, from the becoming dead-leaf of the Regular troops to the
deadly ginger of the newly mobilised Reserve or the hideous
mustard-yellow of the latest recruit to the newest Territorial
unit--Recruiting posters of every shape, size, and method of appeal to
patriotism, suddenly flared out, ranging from the immemorial
red-and-blue printing on white to the huge pictorial hoarding-plaster in
monochrome. Dash in as values the glow of re-awakened patriotism, the
resounding silences in which Royal Messages to British Citizens and
lieges were delivered by grave officials in scarlet gowns and curly
white wigs, and the singing of the National Anthem by huge crowds
gathered in front of Buckingham Palace, to cheer, over and over again
the King, the Queen, and the Heir to the British Throne.
Recall how keenly-curious Britons densely thronged the neighbourhood of
the Houses of Parliament, eager to ascertain the British attitude
towards France and other Continental Powers; while immense aggregations
of people blocked the entrance to Downing Street, surging outside the
wrought-iron screens protecting Ministerial windows; congesting
Whitehall until omnibuses proceeded at a snail's pace.
Revive the strange newness of things, the snap and tingle of seeing not
only Royal Palaces and Government Offices, but vital places such as
Arsenals, Docks, Railway, and Electric Power stations, Powder-magazines
and Munition Stores closely guarded by men in tea-leaf or ginger-brown.
Sickly the hot flush of things so new with the pale dread of ruin, the
ugly rumours of Invasion. Shadow in broad and black, a panic on the
Stock Exchange, the dizzying fall of prices on Continental Bourses, the
record slump on Wall Street, the frenzied stampede of the run upon the
Banks, the Proclamation from the steps of the Royal Exchange of the
strange thing called by nearly everybody--anything but a Moratorium; as,
for example, a Monatorial, a Monoroarium or Honorarium, and so on.
Who could ever forget the excitement attendant on the sailing of famous
passenger and cargo-liners with quick-firers and Maxims nosing through
steel shields abaft the lower bridge? How the Red Cross notified its
surgeons, nurses, and ambulance-helpers to hold themselves ready for
business, and a neat khaki rig-out that had puzzled us in several
unfamiliar details, turned out to be the Service uniform of the Royal
Flying Corps.
German and Austro-Hungarian Reservists of all classes, summoned home by
the strident bellow of Fatherland, surged round their respective
Consulates. Prince Cheraowski, Representative of Germany, having had
his passports handed him, shrugged the shrug of a disgruntled man,
lighted a cigarette, and took a farewell constitutional through St.
James's Park. And, on the Declaration of War with Austria-Hungary a few
days later, Count Lensdorff received his walking-ticket, and gracefully
vanished from the scene. And from the hall-doors of one Embassy in
Carlton House Terrace and another in Belgrave Square, British workmen,
cheerfully whistling, unscrewed the massive brazen plates. Crowds
watched the operation in phlegmatic silence; the single individual who
loosed a "boo" being promptly bonneted by a disapproving majority, and
moved on by the police, while the windows of the British Embassy at
Berlin were being shattered by brickbats, as were those of divers
British consulates and Legations throughout the Fatherland. On the mud,
stones, and verbal filth lavished on their inmates, of the Yahoo-like
usage undergone by Englishmen and Englishwomen, we may not dwell, but I
do not think we are likely to forget.
Recall again, how vast public spaces carefully kept and tended by
Committees and boards and Councils, became, as at the stroke of a wand,
huge training camps of young, keen, healthy if pale-cheeked Britons in
ill-fitting gingerbread or mustard-coloured clothes. How groups of
unoccupied London houses, or large vacant stores, or the head-centres of
the Y.M.C.A. in various districts, would suddenly overflow with bronzed
and sturdy warriors of the Regular Forces, and as suddenly empty again.
The platforms of railway termini, closely guarded and barred from the
public, would be dotted with neat stacks of Lee Enfield rifles, while
regularly-breathing sleepers in khaki pillowed on their packs, shielded
by the peaks of their tilted caps from the blue-white electric glare, or
the yellow dazzle of the morning sun. A whistle--a snort and clank of
two big locomotives--and the platforms under the reverberating glass
roofs would be empty again, under the dusty yellow sunshine, or the
blue-white electric glare.
Remember all this to the daily accompaniment of those huge shrieking
headlines, the trotting of innumerable iron-shod hoofs, the ceaseless
rolling of iron-shod wheels, the clatter and vibration of huge
motor-lorries, vans, and waggons commandeered for the use of the
Auxiliary Transport (brilliantly painted in thousands of instances, and
proclaiming in foot-long capitals the virtues of Crump's Curative
Saline, or Bango's Extract of Beef), mingled with the steady tramp of
marching men, all through the days and nights. By night you lay and
listened to these sounds, mingled with the bleating of flocks of sheep,
and the bellowing of herds of cattle, until the hoofs and wheels and
marching boots mingled into the roar of one great ink-black, awful
River, whose ice-cold woe-waters--sprung from some mysterious
source--swept through our villages and towns and cities, carrying with
them millions of lives, brute and human, towards the blood-red dawn of
Death.
*CHAPTER LIII*
*FRANKY GOES TO THE FRONT!*
With the First Infantry Brigade of the First British Expeditionary Force
went the First Battalion of the Bearskins Plain.
Exchanging with Ackroyd, "too sick a man for fighting" (who parted with
several superfluous inches of appendix and convalesced in time to go out
with the Second Battalion and meet a glorious end at Ypres), Franky was
swallowed up in the vortex of Aldershot. 000, Cadogan Place saw him but
once more before the roaring flood whirled him away, like a slim brown
autumn leaf, to the Unknown.
His gift to Margot on the night of their parting was a silver elephant
of truculent aspect, having ruby eyes and mother-o'-pearl tusks and a
howdah on its back, accommodating a "Gladsome Days" pull-off kalendar.
"You're such nuts on mascots and gadgets, best childie, I thought I'd
get you this beggar for a keepsake. Saw it in a shop in Bond Street.
It goes like so!"--Franky demonstrated by sticking a penknife-blade
under the liberal whack of leaves that had become obsolete since the
First of January. "Rather a neat notion. Something appropriate for
every day o' the week," he continued, indicating a rhymed distich
appearing beneath the current date. This, the first of many utterances
on the part of the Silver Elephant, ranging from the idiotically
inappropriate to the appositely malign, ran as follows:
"_Be very kind to Pussy-cat_
_And handle her with care:_
_You would not pull her by the tail_
_If her claws grew out of there!_"
"Well, if that's the best this beast can do--" began Margot, sternly
surveying the proboscidean. Then she softened, meeting Franky's
disappointed eyes, and said it was a lovely present and she would always
keep it on the table by her bedside. She and Franky were almost lovers
again for the brief time that yet remained to them. She even endured
without open resentment his continual references to the child.
"Take care of you both for my sake, won't you, Kittums? Of course, long
before Christmas I hope to be back with you! But"--he tenderly crushed
the little figure to him as he sat on the bedside holding it
embraced--"but if by any old chance I get sent in--remember what kind of
man I'd like my boy to be. Sanguine, ain't I?--on the point of his
being a boy--putting a pink geranium in the front window before the
house is built, but still----"
He laughed awkwardly, and brushed off a shining drop of moisture that
splashed on the slender brown leather strap that marks the officer's
caste. A third star showed on his khaki sleeve, but he had made no
reference to it, and Kittums omitted to ask what it meant. He kissed
her gravely on the eyes and lips and forehead, unwound the slender arms
that clasped his neck, and gently laid her back upon the pillows. Then
with: "Good-night and God bless you!" he went quietly out of the room.
The hall-door shut and a servant put the chain up, and the waiting car
slid away to the Tower. For "I'm to kip down at the old shop for
to-night," Franky had explained, "and shepherd five hundred strengthy
foot-sloggers--fat as prize bullocks every one of 'em!--to Nowhere in
Particular in the morning."
Margot cried a little when the hall-door shut, and then fell soundly
asleep among her big pillows. Waking as a ray of five o'clock sunshine
penetrated between the blue-green silk blinds and the lacy curtains, to
realise that Something had gone out of her life.
Something wilful, petulant Kittums had not valued until the hall-door
had shut behind it. Something that--crawling, shuddering
thought!--might never return. She sat up in bed, hugging her knees and
staring into a Future without any Franky in it, a tragic little picture
against the background of the big frilled pillows, her great dark eyes
wide and wild under her tumbled gold brown hair-waves, her paleness
enhanced by the rose-silk night-sheath, a maelstrom of thought,
emotions, apprehensions, terrors, whirling in the humming-bird brain.
The ray of sunshine presently touched the face of the electric clock and
elicited a malicious twinkle from the ruby eyes of the Silver Elephant.
Remembering her promise, Kittums put out a hand, pulled off the
paper-slip bearing the date of the previous day and read:
"_May All Your Hours_
_Be Bright As This!_"
*CHAPTER LIV*
*OFFICIAL RETICENCE*