want waking up. They're kept in cotton-wool. Eyes bunged up and ears
stuffed. What they want is--to see and hear. Well, a few of 'em are
doing it. That," she nodded knowingly at d'Asnay, "is where my
Distinguished Visitors come in."
The lips under the fiercely-waxed moustaches smiled. Margot liked the
look of this officer of the Belgian General Staff, with the savage eyes
and the smooth olive skin, the pointed chestnut beard, fiercely-waxed
moustache, and the cool, polite manner. He wore the uniform of the
Belgian Chasseurs a Cheval, and the vulture-plumes of his high shako
were cut and broken and scorched in places, the gold braiding of his
dark blue tunic was tarnished and weather-beaten, and the grey,
blue-striped overalls and spurred black knee-boots were rusty with old
mud and white with new dust. "You're from the Front?" she queried, as
she moved with Rhona and the Belgian towards the glass swing-doors,
giving access from the vestibule to the Club's big ground-floor
drawing-room.
He answered:
"There are several Fronts--and I have the honour to come from one of
them, Madame."
"With dispatches?"
"Possibly with dispatches, Madame!" He answered with an amused
side-glance at the small, vivacious face. "Though there are swifter
methods of transmitting intelligence than by entrusting letters to a
messenger's hands."
As he moved beside her, courteously replying, she saw the crimson and
green enamelled, purple-ribboned Cross of the Belgian Order of Leopold
shining upon the dark blue tunic-breast.
"How are--things--getting on? Nobody tells us anything," twittered the
humming-bird. "We might live at the North Pole."
"Madame might find even at the North Pole compensations for the low
temperature and the lack of society." The vulture-plumes on the dark
blue shako nodded as he turned his face to her. "In the fact that there
are no Boches there," he added, and the smile that had curved the
soldierly moustache vanished as though the word had wiped it from his
mouth.
"Do tell me what are Boches?" Margot begged, kindling to interest. He
answered with an intensity that dug deep lines at the angles of his
nostrils, and puckered the corners of the eyes that burned under his
frowning brows:
"They are a nation of beings, Madame, that are no longer men!"
"Germans you mean, don't you?" she asked after a little pause of
bewilderment, staring with shocked, dilated eyes at the left side of
d'Asnay's close-cropped head, now revealed to her as he removed his
shako, and standing a little in advance of the two women, held back with
the thrust of his broad shoulders a leaf of the drawing-room
swing-doors. The four-inch square of white surgical plaster adhering to
a place whence the chestnut-brown hair had been shaven, showed the
outline of a deep, jagged gash. "You are hurt! You have had some awful
accident! ... Was it a motor-smash? Doesn't it pain you?" Kittums asked
breathlessly. For d'Asnay had touched the surgical strapping with his
gloved hand, and his smiling face had winced.
"It is nothing, Madame," he assured her, "and it was not caused by an
accident. It is merely a whiff of _schrapnel_--a love-gift from
_Messieurs les Boches_."
"You are _wounded_?"
"Madame, that is what one calls it, when one suffers _a coup d'obus_.
They are common, these little tokens, on our side of the North Sea.
Mine has procured me a visit to London, and the pleasure of meeting
you."
She looked at him like a grieved child, and her lips so quivered that he
softened to her behind the crinkles of his smiling bearded mask.
"You speak like this because you think I am heartless and indifferent.
Perhaps I have been--until to-day! We are so far from things. We see
nothing. And we hear so little about the War!"
"Alas, Madame!" came the answer. "Forgive the cruel prophecy, that the
moment approaches when you will hear too much!"
The swing-doors thudded behind them like guns at a great distance. The
capacious ground-floor drawing-room, not usually crowded before
luncheon, was thronged nearly to the walls. A vacant space in the
centre presumably accommodated the Distinguished Visitors. But between
these and Margot's quickening curiosity intervened a solid wall of
backs.
The Distinguished Visitors must be Royalties, decided Margot, as she
skirted the barrier, looking right and left for a peephole, recognising
the vast back of Sir Thomas Brayham, the skeleton back of the Goblin,
the willowy back of Trixie Wastwood, the backs of Lady Beauvayse,
Cynthia Charterhouse, Tota Stannus, and Patrine Saxham with other backs
pertaining to divers dear friends, consolidated into the rampart of
humanity over which the towering feathers of Vanity Fair nodded and
bobbed and waved.
"They're taking it in," Margot heard Rhona mutter, behind her.
"'_Somebody's playing off a joke on us_,' would be the first thing
that'd come into their blessed heads. Well!--let 'em think what they
choose. Ask me why I did it, Comte, and I swear I couldn't tell you.
Blue murder! how my arms ache. But so must yours. You nursed the
biggest of the babies all the way from Ostend to Charing Cross."
"Mademoiselle is right!" The swift, fierce undertone was d'Asnay's.
"They do not comprehend yet. Not yet!" He breathed hissingly through
his nose. "Wait--and presently the Truth will leap at them and strike
them _entre les yeux_. But a place must be found for the friend of
Mademoiselle!" He came noiselessly to the side of Margot. "A chair, so.
A footstool, so. Madame will step on the one and mount to the other.
Permit, Madame, that I offer my assistance! Now Madame commands an
excellent view of--shall I call it--the spectacle?"
The speaker's voice was drowned in an outburst of strident music.
Barely two doors from the Club the piano-organ had broken out with "_La
Barbanconne_." And as the walls vibrated to its shrill cries of
triumph, and the wild disonances of a joy that touches frenzy, the
cracked but vigorous tenor began to sing:
"Apres des siecles, des siecles d'esclavage
Le Beige sortant du tombeau
A reconquis par son courage
Son nom, son droit et son drapeau.
Et ta main souveraine et fiere
Peuple desormais indompte
Grava sur ta vielle banniere
Le roi, la Loi, la Liberte!"
"_Sapristi_! It is strange that!" d'Asnay muttered at the first bars.
"Mademoiselle Helvellyn devised the tableau, certainly, but who arranged
the _entr'acte_?"
The shrill, unbearable frenzy of the piano-organ abated, the voice of
the singer was more plainly heard. It chanted in thin nasal tones, with
missed-out notes in each bar that were like gaps where teeth had been in
an old sorrowful singing mouth:
"O Belgique, O mere cherie,
A toi nos coeurs, a tot nos bras,
A toi noire sang, O Patrie----"
While Margot, a-tiptoe en her chair, peered through the screen of
towering feathers at the Club's Distinguished Visitors,--wondering that
within the wall of absorbed faces there should be so little to attract
or interest. Nothing more intriguing than the homely figure of a
Flemish peasant woman, with four young children huddled round her, and a
baby at her breast.
*CHAPTER LVII*
*THE BELGIAN WIFE*
Desolate advance-guard of the vast army so soon to invade the shores of
Britain, how familiar the figure is now that was then so strange to us
in the quaint old-world fashion of its homely garments, the thick white
dust and travel-stains that covered it, from the linen coif to the
wooden shoes.
She was not old, the woman who sat with her little flock gathered about
her, on the Indian stool that had supported the superb person of von
Herrnung, what time he had held forth to Mrs. Charterhouse and Lady
Wastwood upon the loftiness of German Kultur, the perfection of German
female beauty, and the overwhelming mental and bodily superiority of the
German Superman. A Walloon peasant from a village near Jodoigne where
she and her husband had worked upon a tiny farm.
Perhaps a dozen words of French were hers: "_Tout brule!_" and "_En
Angleterre ou il n'y a pas de Boches!_"
We were to learn to reap terrible meanings from that hoarse, faint
parrot-cry. Truths that raised the hairs upon the flesh and chilled the
blood were to be imaged for us in the blank vacuity of her unseeing
stare. We were to learn why all her children squinted, from Vic, the
sturdy man of seven, and Josephine, his junior, possibly by a year, down
to Georgette of the chubby cheeks and crinkly, roguish eyelids, and
Albert, of the round blue stare, the big white-haired head, and the
marvellous bow legs.
In their dull stunned quietude and their clayey pallor, the mark of the
Beast was branded upon them, down to the livid baby in its little cap of
soiled linen, swaddled in the old red shawl, that bound down its arms.
You might have thought it dead, but for the flutter of a muscle in the
cheek, and the faint movement of its lips, feebly sucking at the breast
that had been large and bounteous, and now was lax, and flabby, covered
by a network of darkish violet veins.
"_Who are they? ... What are they? ... Where do they come from? ... Why
were they brought here? ... Does no one know? ... Will no one tell?
..._"
The silence of amazement was now breaking. The mouths belonging to the
faces under the nodding feathers, old and young, handsome and ugly,
vacuous and clever, silly and intellectual, were all prattling
interrogations like the above. Pride of Place and Joy of Life, Thirst
of Pleasure, Lust of Power, Gaiety and Weariness, Wisdom and Folly,
Humbug and Sincerity, Meanness and Generosity, ringed-in the dusty group
of wooden-shod mysteries and most frightfully wanted to know! And
nobody offered any solution of the puzzle. The piano-organ was playing
half a dozen doors below the Club, the cracked old tenor quavering to
its accompaniment:
"_Nous le jurons tu vivras!_
_Tu vivras toujours grande el belle_
_Et ton invincible unite_
_Aura pour devise immortelle----_"
The music suddenly broke off. A policeman had ordered the organ to move
on....
"_Tout brule!_"
Hitherto the Belgian woman had not looked up, nor changed her listless
attitude. Now she lifted her empty expressionless eyes, and hoarsely
iterated her parrot-cry. The suckling at her breast whimpered and let go
the nipple. She glanced at it, saying in her own thick Flemish tongue:
"_Daar is geen melk._"[1]
[1] "There is no milk."
She rocked the baby for whom she had no milk. Its feeble whimper was
not stilled. She went on to that accompaniment:
"_De Duischer kwamen. Zy hebben alles gebrand! De geburen,--mijn
voder--mijn man is gedood! Zy hebben hem in het vuur geworpen!_"[2]
[2] "The Germans came. They burned everything. The neighbours, and my
father, and my husband are dead. They threw them into the fire."
The baby's whimper became a wail of feeble protest. It fought and
struggled frantically under the old red swathing shawl. The shawl
loosened, slid to the floor, and the wizened arms rose free and jerking.
One arm, tightly bandaged below the elbow, ended in a raw and bloody
stump. She regarded it with her drained-out stare, not trying to
replace the strappings that had bound it, saying in the heavy voice of a
sleep-walker:
"_Dees ook hebben ze gedaan. God sta ons bij!_"[3]
[3] "This too they did. God help us!"
And sobs and weeping broke out around her, as though that little
handless arm had been a veritable rod of Moses bringing water from the
living rock. But no sigh lifted her bosom, nor were her dry eyelids
moistened with the dew of tears. Prussian militarism had wrought its
work upon her. She and hers had been trodden as grapes in the
Hohenzollern Winepress. Those emptied eyes had seen things done that
might well make devils laugh in Hell.
The Club walls vanished away as we looked, and behind that stricken
figure spread the devastated plains of Belgium, the Sorrowful, the
Glorious, who has endured agony and shame unutterable, that her
neighbours might go free. We had a vision of the Son of Man descending
in a blood-red, rainy dawning, and heard Him saying to the apostles of
German Kultur:
"_Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of these ... ye have done
it unto Me!_"
And not a woman among us who had a man with the British Expedition, but
prayed in her soul, fervently:
"Vengeance is Thine, for Thou hast said it. But make _him_ Thy scourge,
O Lord!"
*CHAPTER LVIII*
*SHERBRAND BUYS THE LICENCE*
The spell of silence was broken. Excitement seethed as Patrine escaped
out of the crush in the drawing-room and returned to the vestibule.
There, subsiding into one of the tall-backed chairs beside the table
that held the Members' Register and Visitors' Book, she waited, hoping
against hope that the tall figure in khaki might reappear under the Club
portico.
"Patrine!"
"Oh, Alan!--you came back after all!"
Her gloom changed to radiancy. She rose up as the tall figure of
Sherbrand passed under the portico, and hurried to him, emptying her
budget of regrets. "I've behaved like a cad. Do forgive me! Don't be
wrathy. But you can't be--or you'd never have come back."
"You dear, it's all right!" He caught the outstretched hands in both
his and wrung them. "Forget--and let's be happy." The truth about
Bawne tugged at him as he said the words, but he had determined not to
torture her with that horror. He went on, with the frankness that she
found so lovable, "I was vexed, but it was idiotic of me not to have
told you about the Commission before."
"And the man. Your French sossifer," she went on, "who looked at me as
though I ought to live in a cage at the Zoo? What must he have thought
of your taste in young women? What mustn't he have said when he got you
out of the way?"
"Oh, not much!"
"Go on. Rub it in!"
"Well then"--Sherbrand's mouth was steady, but the laughter in his eyes
was not to be controlled--"he saw I was fearfully sick at your having
shown temper before him. And he told me not to be chagrined because a
handsome woman had made me a little drama."
"F'ff!" She winced and set her teeth on her crimson underlip. "He knew
I'd ask and you'd tell me. He saw me--squirming--in his mind's eye.
Oh! and how he's hit me off. For I _was_ awfully like the heavy leading
lady of a tin travelling theatre-company. Aren't you ashamed of me?
Don't you loathe me?" she wooed with entreating eyes.
"Frightfully. Tell me--where can we have a cosy talk together? I've
got a whole hour before I'm due at Hendon," he said.
"The Rose-and-Green Divan--but there are sure to be people smoking
there. Oh!--I know. The Little Library. Nobody ever goes in, and it's
got a door opening into the Divan. Friends of Members aren't admitted
into the Library--but if you're caught there--you say you were coming
out of the Divan, where outsiders are allowed--and opened the wrong
door--do you switch on?"
He nodded, repressing the desire to ask in whose company she had been
caught there, and followed the tall lithe figure down a short corridor
leading to the back of the ground-floor. The corridor ended in the
Little Library, a studious apartment of bathing-machine dimensions,
walled with curiously new-appearing books of information and reference,
and containing two small writing-tables, each supported by a
rosewood-stained Windsor, a brace of baskets, and two deep, cushiony,
Rothmore chairs. A Member of mature years and mountainous proportions
slept placidly in one of these, with Whitaker's Peerage balanced at a
perilous angle on the vanishing indications of what must once have been
her lap. The subdued murmur of voices trickled in from the adjoining
smoking-room with vaporous wisps of Turkish and Virginia. Save for the
stout slumbering Member the lovers were beautifully alone.
"Good! Oh, boy!--to have got you back again," Patrine said breathlessly
after their kiss. She dropped down noiselessly into the springy
embraces of the vacant Rothmore, and Sherbrand smiling, perched upon the
chair's broad arm.
"This is an unbecoming contrast--isn't it?" She leaned her beech-leaf
tinted head against the plastron of the khaki tunic as his strong hand
crept behind her supple waist. "But I don't care, I can't think of
anything but you, Alan. When do you start to-morrow, and from where? I
suppose you mustn't tell me?" She sighed, rubbing her cheek against him
as the strong arm embraced and held her. "Oh me! What it is to be the
sweetheart of a soldier. Why--Alan!"
She lifted her head and looked at him, frowning, and her long eyes were
black between the narrowed lids. "Do you know how your heart jumped
when I said 'soldier'? Does it mean as much to you as all that?"
He began to stammer a little.
"Oh--well!--you see--we Sherbrands have worn the King's coat for ages.
Ever since there were any Sherbrands--going by the portraits in the
gallery at Whins--where my father lived when he was a boy. He used to
describe them to me until I knew them as well as he did from the Sir
Alan who fought with Talbot against the French at Castillan Chatillon as
a boy, and got killed at Bannockburn thirty-five years later, down to
the jolly old Sir Roger, who fought like a Trojan at Badajoz. He was my
great-grandfather, so I suppose I've always had a secret hankering for
the Service. Like the inherited nostalgia Hillmen's children have for
the mountains, or sailors' for the sea. The kind of feeling that sets
the little Arctic foxes in the Zoo howling at the first sprinkle of snow
in December. Only I knew I mustn't yield to it. You know the reason
why!"
"You told me, and I answered that that kind of reason couldn't affect
you."
"Now you shall hear a plan I've been nursing." His arm again engirdled
her. "Do you know Seasheere? It's a little grassy, cliffy, shingly
village on the South-East coast, three-hours' journey from Charing
Cross. There's a Naval Air Station there that was a Seaplane School not
long ago. We used to send 'em pupils from Hendon: there's a cottage
where they take lodgers not far off. I spent three weeks there last
summer, fishing and motor-boating when I wasn't making friends with
Goody Two Shoes----"
"Who's Goody Two Shoes?"
"The hydroplane!" His voice broke in laughter. "Did you think I meant
a girl?"
"I'm an idiot. Go on about your plan, dear."
"Oh--well! The cottage I stayed at was jolly comfortable, and the
landlady the tidiest old woman that ever grilled a chop. Now
suppose--to-morrow, or a week, or two months hence you got a wire from
Somewhere in France or Belgium saying:
'_Seasheere--such-a-day-and-such-an-hour--Alan_'--would you pack your
kit for a week-end and hop into the train, and come?"
"Without asking--without telling--Aunt Lynette or Uncle Owen?" She
asked the question breathlessly.
"We'll tell the Doctor and Mrs. Saxham directly afterwards." He leaned
his cheek on the beech-leaf hair and his arm tightened about her waist
possessively. "You said my heart jumped just now when you called me a
soldier. How it will jump when I pick you out with the glasses, a tiny
black speck on the cliffs at Seasheere, waiting with the sunset behind
you, or the dawn in your eyes to welcome me back from over the sea. Oh,
my girl!"--his voice wooed her irresistibly--"I've dreamed wide awake of
the joy of such a greeting.... It's up to you to make my dream come
true!" He kissed her hair. "And we'll watch the day die, and sup
together, and you'll sleep at my nice old woman's cottage. And I'll
turn in at the Air Station--and next morning we'll be married at
Seasheere Catholic Church!"
"Married--that's your plan? Ah, Alan! shall we ever be married?" she
sighed.
He laughed softly, pressing her against him.
"The little Catholic Church I've mentioned was built for the very
purpose. Perched on the cliffs as though it might spread its rafters
any minute and flap away to sea." He kissed her hair again. "Don't
think I'm spinning fairy-tales. I've got a Special Licence, so there's
no need to bother about time, or previous residence in the district, or
anything stuffy. Nothing's wanted but Opportunity, the church, and the
priest. And that the local Registrar should put in an appearance.
That's necessary, as we're not of the same faith--yet!"
She freed herself from his embrace, rose to her superb height, and stood
over him.
"You've arranged all this--without consulting me for a minute. You and
your landlady--and your Licence and your Registrar! Boy, I am sensible
of a great desire to box your ears soundly for this!"
"I'd rather take a clout from you than a kiss from any other woman."
She tapped him lightly on both ears, and said, putting a butterfly touch
of lips in the middle of the broad, tanned brow:
"There are both clout and kiss. Now show me the Special Licence."
He thrust his hand into a pocket behind the plastron of the khaki tunic
and pulled out a note-case she had bought and given him. The shiny
square of parchment-paper bearing the signature of his Grace the
Archbishop of Canterbury drew both their heads together over it. In a
compartment meant for stamps was a hard, thin, metallic circle, shining
yellow through tissue paper folds.
"The--Ring?" she whispered.
"The Ring!" He nodded, smiling, as she bent her face over it, kissed
the tissue paper reverently, stuck the Licence back in its compartment,
and gave him back the case.
"And you had these in your pocket this afternoon when I was such a
horrid beast to you?"
"They were burning a hole right into my chest. Why, Pat,
you're--crying!"
She half turned away, mopping her wet eyes with her flimsy little
handkerchief.
"Because--because--it's so blessedly sweet and dear of you to have
planned this. Do you--do you really want it so much?"
"More than anything under the sky," said Sherbrand. "And, don't you see,
it settles the question of providing for you, splendidly! If we're
married, and I get--pipped--Somewhere at the Front--" He stopped short,
for one of her large hands firmly covered his mouth.
"I won't have it. You're not to speak like that, ever!" said a muffled
voice above his head. "If you were killed--don't you
understand--everything'd be over for me! It's a kind of nasty little
Death--only to have you hint at it."
"All right!" he mumbled penitently, and kissed the hand. It was
withdrawn, and he went on:
"I have my little fortune, though Flying has made a hole in it. And I'd
naturally like--as my mother is provided for--the stuff to go to my
wife."
"Oh! if I only were--good enough, I would be your wife to-morrow!" she
groaned.
He got up and took her masterfully in his arms.
"No more of that. I can't stick being made out a--bally pattern. You
are a hundred times too good for me!"
"_But not at all patriotic_," came drifting back upon him in the voice
of Raymond. His embrace never slackened, but he asked of her a
question, looking for the answer to lighten in her eyes: "Pat--you've
not said yet that you're glad they've given me my Flying
Commission!--that you're British enough to give your man, if it came to
giving--for the Old Shop! I know you are!--of course you are!--but say
it--I'd like to hear you."
"I--I----" She caught her breath and her eyes wavered miserably under
his steady gaze. "I'm not a little bit o' good at telling decent proper
lies. I love England--but I love you heaps, heaps, _heaps_ best!" He
felt her pant between his arms.... She writhed her long white neck like
a creature in desperate agony. "I want to eat my cake and have it!" she
wailed, evading his eyes. "Now you know me, you'll despise me. But
it's the truth--anyway! I'd like a man to send to the War--and a man to
keep for myself!"
His arms wrapped her closely and his heart plunged madly against her
bosom. He kissed her on her yielded mouth, and the kiss was a living
flame.
"That will be when we are married and you have a son!" he whispered, and
a drowning horror enveloped her. She cried out and thrust him back, and
might have sunk down at his feet and told her dreadful story then....
Whitaker's Peerage intervened, sliding from the lap of the obese,
reposeful Member, and falling to the carpet with a resounding thump.
The indignant eyes of the awakened lady glared at Sherbrand over her
gold-rimmed spectacles. She demanded, snorting:
"Since when has this room--_hr'runk!_--been thrown open to visitors?"
"I'll inquire," Sherbrand stammered, and the guilty couple fled. That
night Patrine wrote on a card "Seasheere," and thenceafter wore it in
her bosom. But many weeks were over her head before the Call came.
*CHAPTER LIX*
*THE WOE-WAVE BREAKS*