considerable delay was vouchsafed us. Some studiously unenlightening
Field post-cards, some industriously Censored private letters, some
Press narratives and photographs were permitted us, of Highlanders,
Guards, Scots Greys, Middlesex, Worcestershires, Gordons, and others,
brought in upon the midnight tide and debarking from huge transports at
Boulogne and Havre and Rouen, under burning blue skies and a sizzling
sun. The illustrated weeklies and the cinematograph showed them, with
battery after battery of R.F.A. and R.H.A. and R.G.A., Ammunition parks
and columns, and Engineers with pontoons on motor-waggons, and Field
Ambulance units, endlessly streaming into or out of the canvas cities
erected on the sites of the old Napoleonic camps. Showed also Comic
Relief, in the familiar form of British Tommy, grinningly appreciative
of the welcome accorded him by command of the French Republic; meekly
submitting to be plucked bare of buttons and badges, by sirens who
sought these with offerings of chocolate, wine, and fruit. This meagre
pabulum we champed, possessing our souls perforce, in patience; sitting
before the great iron curtain of official reticence that had glided down
into its grooves as though it never meant to go up again.
Then, with the whiffling swoop of the Jabberwock--the Food Scare was
upon us. Letters showered from venerable maiden aunts in remote country
districts, describing economies practised by our great-grandmothers in
1801 and 1814. Hot-eyed friends buttonholed one and whispered of Famine
that was coming, and pressed crumpled pamphlets, dealing with Food
Values, into one's unwilling hand. The Specie Scare came next, rousing
the most phlegmatic to frenzied indignation. What! In lieu of the
smooth plump British sovereign and half-sovereign welcomed in every
corner of the civilised world, must we perforce accept the "magpie," or
One Pound note, and the "pinky" or ten-shilling bill!
People frothed and vituperated. We were all frothing, what time the
stocky Kalmuck-faced von Kluck with 130,000 Germans of the Kaiser's
First Army came rolling down in overwhelming force upon the First and
Second British Army Corps. Eighty thousand men of our blood holding the
line of the canal from Conde to "a place called Mons" with, as the
flanking angle, another place called Binche.
The 5th French Army was in full retreat from Namur and Charleroi; borne
back by the resistless pressure of von Buelow, Chief of the Second Army
of Attila, 250,000 strong. The 4th French Army was retiring before von
Hahsen and a third tidal wave of armed Germanity--humping its huge snaky
columns after the fashion of the looper caterpillar--along the menaced
line of the Meuse.
The Krupp and Skoda motor-howitzers that had crushed Belgian fortresses
like eggshells were coming into position; the circling enemy aeroplanes
were directing with smoke-rockets the uncannily excellent shooting of
the German Artillery. We who thought we had no more than a couple of
Army Corps in front of us, and possibly a Division of Cavalry, were
beginning to realise the ugly truth. As the frightful blizzard of iron
and flame broke upon the British batteries, and the shallow trenches
made in desperate haste and crowded with the flower of the British Army,
began to lose the shape of trenches, to melt--to become mere scratches
in the earth, littered with human scrap....
We did not suspect, we never dreamed of grave disaster to our Forces,
though some of us were strangely haunted by well-loved looks and dear
familiar touches before the Iron Curtain of official silence lifted that
quarter-inch and the thick red stuff oozed slowly underneath.
An hour or two before the Great Awakening, Margot had 'phoned asking
Patrine to come round. Arriving, her friend found Kittums sorely
exercised in spirit. The housekeeper, in tears, had sought an interview
on the Food Question and entreated her lady to lose no time in
provisioning the domestic citadel with Flour, Sugar, Bacon, Tea, Coffee,
Potatoes, Cereals, and tinned meats against the approaching days of
famine. She begged to submit a List. It would be well to lose no time
for all the Banks were breaking. She felt it her duty to mention the
fact.
"And so I told Wallop to dry her poor old eyes," explained Kittums, "and
I'd go and buy up the Army and Navy Stores as soon as I'd had a look in
at what Franky calls the Dross House, just to ask the Manager, as man to
man, if there's any chance of the Bank going biff? Your adorable
Lynette and your Uncle Owen may say that hoarding things to eat isn't
playing the game and all that. Well! When you're too sharp-set to think
Imperially, come round here and I'll grub the lot. How is your Flying
Man?"
"Doing some Army Coaching. Out Farnborough way," said Patrine. "I've
not set eyes on him twice since that Club lunch."
"When Franky cottoned to him so," said Margot. "You've not had a
scrimmage?"
"God forbid!"
"Engaged people always squabble."
"Alan and I don't," asserted Patrine.
The car came round and they drove to the Bank. Most Banks had enjoyed a
Run and a few had experienced the combination of a Run with a Panic.
There had been a severe Run on Margot's bank. Now it was over and a
huge majority among the people who formed queues at the doors and
crowded the counters were paying in the deposits they had nervously
withdrawn. Relieved in mind, Kittums cashed a cheque of magnitude, and
the respectable Williams turned the car in the direction of the Stores.
On this Day of the Great Awakening, Woman stormed the departments.
Kittums and Patrine plunged into the scrum, to emerge after having
achieved a modified success. Lady Norwater's explanation, that she
required provisions in wholesale bulk because of a yachting-trip she
meditated, had been hit upon by several thousands of other
terminological inexactitudinarians. The mounds of bacon, the castled
tins of tea and coffee, the sacks of sugar, rice, and cereals, the
raisins, currants, and tinned comestibles--had been nearly all picked up
by these knowing early risers. Still enough had been secured to relieve
the mind of Mrs. Wallop, and scare the wolf from the threshold of 00,
Cadogan Place.
"Beg pardon, m' lady." The sedate face of the respectable Williams
looked over the last Brobdingnagian parcel transferred to his embrace.
"I think if your ladyship 'as no objection it would be better to close
the car."
"If it will close," began Margot, looking with interested speculation at
the mountainous accumulation of bulky, whitey-brown string-tied bags and
packages upon the front seat.
"FOOD 'OGS!" bellowed a man in a rusty bowler hat and soiled shirt
sleeves, so suddenly and powerfully that Kittums jumped.
"Garn 'ome!" vindictively shrieked a fiery-faced female. "Greedy-guts!
Yah! Git along 'ome!"
"FOOD 'OGS!" reiterated the Stentor in shirt sleeves, backed by an
approving murmur from a crowd of dingily-clad men and women gathered
upon the pavement right and left of the imposing entrance to the Stores.
"Now then, move on 'ere!" came from a policeman, and the crowd began to
dissolve, with lowering glances. Motorcars were moving away, carrying
their owners embedded in groceries. Others were driving up to the door.
"Move on, please!" repeated the Man in Blue.
"Not till I've got rid of these things. Call the Commissionaire. Tell
him my name and number!--say the orders were given by mistake! ..."
Margot went on, when the Alpine range of parcels had melted away under
the combined efforts of chauffeur and Commissionaire: "Poor old Wallop
will wail, but I've purged myself of the contempt of being a Food Hog.
Great Snipe! to think of deserving to be called such an awful name. It
made me feel all of seventeen stone, with a row of chins like
saddle-bags!" She pinched her own dainty chin between a tiny finger and
thumb. "Still, I've enjoyed the scrum," she went on, as the car slid
towards Piccadilly. "It's bucked me splendidly! I shall know what to
do now, when I want to lay my ghosts. You know one of them"--the little
fingers twitched in Patrine's--"what's coming in November. The other
started haunting me only a few days back." All the new-won colour had
died out of the small oval face and the great dark eyes were tragic in
their terror. "You're too good a pal to laugh. Well, then--I'll own
up. Franky's my latest ghost of all!"
"But you have heard? You have had letters?"
The answer was strangled between a laugh and a sob.
"Letters. Three post-cards from Somewhere in France and a queer epistle
all squares of blacking. Not much between--except that he is tophole
and coming Home at Christmas and sends love to us both! That's Franky's
way. He always talks as--" A shudder went through the little figure,
and shadows were about the great wild eyes, and the pale lips quivered:
"Poor little Kittums!" said Patrine's big warm baritone. She slipped an
arm tenderly about the little thing. Who could have dreamed that
Kittums could care so about Franky--or any other man. "Are you worrying
so badly, my dinkie?" she went on, soothingly: "Try not. It isn't
wise!"
"I'm not worrying," came the weary answer. "I'm being haunted--that's
all. Day and night since it started, his hands are on me and his eyes
are looking at me. When I sleep, I'm wandering through desolate places
looking, always looking for him! And thousands of other selfish, silly
women are being haunted in the same way. Oh, Pat, be always kind when
you're married to your Flying Man!"
"_When!_"--Patrine echoed. But what of sorrow or doubt her tone
conveyed was lost upon Margot. She had told her own grief, and the
telling had relieved her. Like the child with the kissed bruise, she
could prattle of other things. She was twittering and chirping in the
gay little voice Franky knew so well, as Williams, the respectable,
turned smoothly into Short Street. There was a dense block at the
corner by the Aldebaran Hotel, and amidst the swishing of the
motor-engines and the fidgeting of plump carriage-horses, loathful of
the sudden release of the pungent exhaust from escape-valves under their
noses--a little piece of dialogue between two Cyprians on the near
sidewalk drove home to both the occupants of the car.
One Cyprian was well-to-do, past thirty-five and expensively caparisoned
for conquest, from the tall feather topping her stove-pipe hat and her
burnished wig of Angora goat-hair, to her silk stockings of
liberally-open pattern and the tips of her high-heeled, buckled shoes.
Her hard eyes under their painted brows took critical stock of the
other, younger woman, whose make-up could not hide ill-health, and whose
flaunting fineries were the worse for wear.
Said Hard Eyes, indicating with a jerk of her powdered double chin, a
procession moving down Piccadilly Circus-wards--a publisher's catchpenny
advertisement of "WEEP NO MORE, MOTHERS!" ingenious in its employment of
robust-looking matrons as bearers of the sandwich-boards plastered with
posters of rose-colour and gold:
"You could give some of the swell West End ladies a tip or two, I
reckon, Lallie, about that Purple Dreams dope?"
"Honest to God, I could! But I wouldn't!" The haggard eyes leapt
viciously out of their languor. "Let 'em run up against it--same as me!
Me that went all the way to Brussels to get the new treatment. Great
Scott! When I came to I was black and blue and green all over. And my
face! It was a fair scream!" She threw an appraising side-glance in a
shop window. "No! My skin'll never be what it used, I reckon."
"But the"--the hard eyes between the elder woman's blued lids were
hideously significant--"the Trouble, eh?"
"The Trouble"--Lallie's still girlish shoulders shrugged.--"Oh, that's
all right! I heard no more of it! There's the one comfort. Good-bye,
ducky. I got to meet somebody at the Cri."
"Well, better luck!" And as the block broke and the car moved on, the
women nodded and parted. Margot and her friend Patrine did not look at
each other as the car stopped before the Club.
A glance showed the vestibule crowded, the second pair of swing-doors
thudded momentarily as members and their guests passed on into the Club
rooms, without relieving the congestion that fresh arrivals renewed.
Some doors above, a piano-organ in charge of two men was jolting out the
last bars of the Russian National Anthem. One of the men,
olive-skinned, grey-haired, and dressed in threadbare black, sang the
words with perfunctory fervour in a cracked tenor voice. As the last
chord banged out and the organist jerked the changing-lever over, and
the Marseillaise summoned jangling echoes of its lyrical frenzy from the
pavement and the surrounding walls, Patrine, meeting Sherbrand's eyes
over the crowded heads of people, knew a sudden shock of apprehension in
the strangeness of their regard.
For day and night since that strange, impulsive visit she had made to
the Confessional--"You must tell him. It is your duty to tell him!" had
sounded in her ears. She set her teeth and determined that she would
never tell him, none the less knowing that the revelation would be made.
A Power infinitely stronger than her woman's will was bearing upon it.
Her treasure was in peril, her fairy-gold at any moment might turn to
withered leaves at a breath from her own mouth.
*CHAPTER LV*
*NEWS OF BAWNE*
"Pat!--what luck!"
Sherbrand was standing before her, tall and lean and masterful, saluting
her with the touch of three fingers to a soldierly forage-cap with three
buttons, set jauntily atilt on the broad tanned brow.
Ah! the delight of seeing the cold grey glance warm into sea-blue, the
lean, eagle-face flash into smiles. For a little while yet he was hers,
she told herself, as the hard hand gripped on hers that answered the
swift fierce pressure, and her blood that the sickly chill of fear had
stagnated, whirled on its crimson circle singing for joy. And then--a
second glance, sweeping from the top to the toes of the tall manly
figure, stopped the song.
"Alan! You--in khaki!"
"I suppose so," he said a little clumsily, echoing thousands of other
men. "It's the universal wear just now, isn't it? We fellows must make
good while we can--and we're all of us joining. Even Macrombie--you
can't have forgotten Macrombie--has got his rating, and is acting a
P.O.T. on a Destroyer in the North Sea."
Do you see the dour drunkard standing up, under the eye of the smart
young inspecting Fleet Surgeon, naked save for the leather bootlace that
held a battered silver locket round his harsh and swarthy scrag.
"Your age? ..."
"Ye micht ca' me forty," said the subject, with caution.
"I might, but I'd be a liar!" said the Fleet Surgeon, "so try again, my
man!"
"Ye micht pit twa to the forr-ty," came rumbling from the hairy chest.
"And tack eight on to that," thus the Fleet Surgeon, tucking the hooked
ends of the stethoscope into his ears, and deftly applying the
microphone. "And then I'd be wide of the actual! Breathe deeply, will
you!" The effort provoked a volley of coughs sounding like half-bricks
pitched against the sides of an empty cistern and the Fleet Surgeon
shook his head.
"_Hough--hough--hough!_--why didna' ye--hough! lat weel alane?" gasped
Macrombie, with eyes blazing hell-fire through the moisture engendered
by the cough. "Dinna ye ken I'll never no' be wanting to breathe deeply
whaur ye're needing to send me? There is nae room whatever for
lung-play oot o' the ordinar'," he added scornfully, "aboard ane o' thae
kittle, cranky, tinpot Destroyers!"
"Hold out your hand!" commanded the arbiter of Destinies. He
contemplated the extended member, wavering and fluttering like the
indicator-needle on the dial of an atmospheric pressure-gauge. "Pretty
wobbly, what?" he commented to the owner with the sarcastic inflection
that advertised a keen advocate of Temperance.
"Man, O! man!" broke from Macrombie in a harsh rattling whisper,
desperate appeal flashing in his burnt-out eyes, "you that are young
enough to be my son, tak' me or leave me, ane or the tither--but shame
me nae mair!"
Telegraphists were sorely needed, so Macrombie of the racking hoast and
the shaky hand was passed as fit for Service, and duty rated as Petty
Officer Telegraphist aboard one of the contemned tin-pots.
The Crown and winged double-thunderbolt must have nerved the arm they
came back to. For, on the day of the Battle of Jutland, when a
point-blank salvo from an enemy cruiser wrecked the bridge and
searchlight platform, carrying away the forward mast and funnel of
Macrombie's particular tin-pot, and men in respirators were fighting the
smothering fumes of the fire caused by German shells of the incendiary
description, a dour, stark man whose clothes were alight and burning on
him, stuck grimly to his post among the wreckage of the shattered
Wireless room, sending out the message last dictated by the officer who
lay dead across the blistering steel plating--for the short circuit set
up by the smashed searchlight had created its own separate
conflagration, and the electricity was "running out of everything like
oil."
When the tin-pot heeled over, and, having duly buried her steel chest
and secret documents, went down with colours flying in a smother of oily
steam, men who were saved on the rafts told this tale of Macrombie, who
sleeps well, after Life's thirsty fever, at his post in the Destroyer's
battered Wireless cabin, on the deep-ridged, sandy bottom of the wild,
shallow North Sea.
Patrine felt her heart crushed as in the grip of a cold steel gauntlet.
Her apprehensions had not been unfounded. She and Alan were to be
parted, if not as she had feared.
"I--suppose I ought to congratulate you--" Her unwilling eyes admired
the tall manly figure in the plain workmanlike uniform. The buttonless
tunic with its Lancer plastron, the riding-breeches of ampler cut than
the cavalryman's, the high spurless boots of supple brown leather, and
the belt that carried a revolver and no sword. "What--what are you in?"
she asked draggingly, and he answered with a smile and a flash of his
grey eyes:
"I hope I'm in for some of what's going on!"
"How glad you are!"
"Rather. I should think so! Now that they've let me into the Royal
Flying Corps as a T.S.L. Look at my wings!" He touched the white
outspread pinions on the tunic-breast with a reverent finger-tip and
went on pouring out his story without a break. "It's cost me some
badgering of High Officials of Military Aeronautics at Whitehall, and a
lot of time wasted in baby tests. Squad drill, Harris tube,
bomb-dropping, air-signalling, Webley and Scott practice, and so on.
Now I'm teaching trick-flying to Army aviators from 4.30 A.M. till 11
P.M. The Powers that Be have taken over the Flying Schools--Durrant's
Cafe is our Officer's Mess now. You should see old Durrant in his glory
as Head Waiter. And Mrs. D--" His white teeth flashed as he laughed.
"And they have known of this"--she nodded at the eagle-wings--"while I
have been kept in ignorance! How long?"
"Not quite a fortnight. Don't be unreasonable, dear!"
The new tone stung. Did a yellow star upon the cuffs and
shoulder-straps and a pair of white wings on the left breast mean so
much to him that her just claims upon his confidence seemed wanting in
reason now? Anger and resentment choked her as he added:
"I am here now, as it happens, because I'm crossing the Channel
to-morrow at peep o' day." Something in her pale face made him add:
"Don't worry!--I'm likely to be back again by nightfall. That's what
I've rushed in here to tell you, though I've a man in tow, a Wing
Commander of the French S. Ae. Hot from the Front and just landed at
Hendon. I had to take him in my car to his Embassy, and now I've got to
find him a room at an hotel. When I've done it I'm coming back here to
talk to you. Where on earth has my man got to? Why, there he is,
talking to Lady Norwater. The little chap with the grey moustache and
the gold-banded _kepi_."
"I am honoured by Madame's gracious remembrance," the person indicated
could be heard protesting, during an instant's lull in the Babel of
voices round. "But my own--a thousand pardons! is less accurate."
"Oh!" Margot expostulated, "but you can't have forgotten. That Sunday
of the Grande Semaine--when you were in the Bois, timing a Flying
Officer who was testing an English invention--a sort of a----"
"But assuredly, Madame!" His quick nod and the gesture of his gloved
hand summoned up the scene vividly. "I remember, but perfectly, though
much water has rolled under the bridges since that day. And
Milord--Madame's husband?"
"He's at the Front," Margot explained, "wherever the Front is!"
"Unfortunately at the moment," returned the suave voice, "the Front is
everywhere. It is easy to find without binoculars. _Adieu, Madame_.
_Merci bien de la souvenir si gracieuse, dites mes amities a Monsieur._"
And in another moment he arrived beside Sherbrand, exclaiming with his
vivacious shrug and gesture: "My faith, my friend, your London _Cercle
des Dames_ is a veritable Paradise of Mahommed. Now in Paris, at least
before the War--instead of ten thousand houris to every true Believer,
one counted at least three Adams to every Eve. But I observe your
search has been successful. Will you not present me to Mademoiselle
your _fiancee_?"
And the dapper middle-aged Wing Commander in the gold-banded _kepi_,
whose dark plain uniform displayed the gold badge of the Service
Aeronautique under the Cross of the Legion of Honour, was introduced as
Captain Raymond by an off-hand young Briton who comprehended not in the
least the immense condescension that had prompted the request.
"_Sapristi!_" thought Raymond, as Patrine gave him her large hand and
assured him in her big warm voice that she was frightfully pleased to
meet a friend of Alan's.--"A magnificent type of the human female animal
to have paired with this bluff, simple English boy. Part _femme du
monde_, part romping hoyden, part _cabotine_, she should have been a
Duchesse of the old Napoleonic regime, or at least the effect that lies
behind a _cause celebre_ of the Paris Law Courts of modern days. And
she will be expected by this honest fellow to live in a stucco villa at
Kensington or the Crystal Palace, and bear and rear his children, and
live and die in all the deadly respectability of the British
middle-class _milieu_!"
But he made his beautiful bow and murmured some civil phrases. In the
spring, at the Hendon Flying Grounds of M. Fanshaw, he, Raymond, had
been interested to meet the friend of Mademoiselle. Had been profoundly
impressed by the displayed inventions of a young man so gifted as
aviator and engineer. Had had the good fortune subsequently to obtain
the consent of his own Chiefs of the S. Ae. F. to a test of an
invention--the value of which had been hall-marked by the approbation of
Messieurs les Allemands. True, M. Sherbrand had been the victim of
their unscrupulosity. But Fortune, who knew? might be kinder in the
near future. This War so grievous, so brutal, so deplorable, waged by
the Prussian against Civilisation and Progress, would open up not only
_le metier des armes_, but countless other avenues of prosperity to
thousands of ardent and gifted young men. Like M. Sherbrand. To whom
Raymond said with an authoritative glance of his blue eye: "My friend,
we keep your auto waiting at the door!"
"Ah, but stay!" Patrine began, with a sense of hatred towards the
well-used little Ford runabout standing in much grander company by the
kerb outside the Club: "do stay and lunch and smoke and tell us things
about the War, won't you?"
"A thousand thanks, but impossible, Mademoiselle!"
Raymond shrugged, conscious that her look of disappointment was for
Sherbrand, and pleaded fatigue as an excuse.
"For these are iron times, Mademoiselle," he went on in his smooth,
musical accents, "and we who live in them are unfortunately of flesh and
blood. When the War is done perhaps there will again be social
pleasures like the lunch you were so kind as to offer me. That I am
tempted to accept I will not conceal from you. I have not eaten since I
flew from France at _la pointe du jour_--one of the smallest of the
little hours of this morning, and then I broke fast on two fingers of
little red wine, and a hunch of soldier's bread."
"You mean to say you're fresh from flying the Channel?"
"Crossing the Channel came near the end of my journey, Mademoiselle. I
should have arrived earlier"--he shrugged indifferently--"had not some
German aviators caused delay."