strangled voice that wasn't like Patrine's. "There were minutes when the
World, and the Flesh, and the Devil were jolly well to the fore. Alan
would marry me to-morrow if I used the power I _could_ use. But I
won't! I won't! It'd not be playing the decent, straight game. So I let
him call me heartless, and piffle like that, and then the game seemed
hardly worth playing. I'd have thrown up my cards--only the Recall
came. And we said good-bye, and I saw him fly away like a great white
bird, over the water. And I'm so strong--so horribly strong--that I
stood it and didn't die.... Even if Alan's killed at the Front I shan't
die.... _Ah-h!_ ... You mustn't touch me!" Her hands plucked
themselves violently from Saxham's that would have enfolded them. "I
could stand anything better than pity. Being pitied would kill
me--though I'm so awfully strong!"
"Then trust us not to pity you--only to love you. That I look upon you
as a daughter is no secret to you, I think?"
"No, dear!" She stroked his sleeve, not lifting her pitifully reddened
eyelids, and then he felt her start. "Uncle Owen!" Her hand clenched
upon his arm, and her tear-blurred eyes sought his. "I must tell
you.... He had news to give me to-day--of Bawne!"
"Nothing worse, thank God!--than what I know already," Saxham commented
when she had told. He stood in silence a moment, mastering himself, and
the electric hall-light showed in his harsh square visage the ravages
that grief had wrought.
"How you have suffered! If only I could do something to comfort you!"
she muttered. "And Lynette. Do you know--there are days"--a sob caught
her breath--"when I daren't even look at Lynette."
"It is so with me!" His voice was deep and quiet and sorrowful. "Old
Webster probed deep with his Elizabethan goose-quill, when he wrote of
the
"Greyfe that wastyth a faire woman
Even as wax doth waste yn flame."
Pray for us both, my dear, and believe that you are a comfort to us."
She said with a laugh that was half a sob: "I might have made a hole in
the water at Seasheere, or jumped out of the train on the way back, I
daresay, but for the thought of you both. Or, if it wasn't that stopped
me, my joss was on the job."
"I had rather say your Guardian Angel."
"Do you think any self-respecting Guardian Angel could possibly bother
about a regular bad egg like me?"
"Mine did--when my wife married me and I was a peculiarly bad egg."
"You, you dear!" She suddenly caught him round the neck and hugged him
strenuously. "Do you think I don't know--haven't always known how my
father and mother treated you!"
"Time heals wounds of that kind," said Saxham, as they turned together
from the foot of the staircase, and, still keeping a protecting arm
about David's daughter, he reached his hat and stick from the
hall-stand, "though you may doubt the statement now."
"I can't. I'd only have to look at mother to----"
"To remember that she is your mother!"
His tone was final in its closure of the subject. But in his heart he
thanked frail Mildred once again for her ancient treachery, as he went
out to the waiting car, and sped through London's murky streets to the
North-West suburb where stands the Hospital.
Patrine went upstairs, holding by the balusters and feeling chilly and
old. In the prettily furnished sitting-room, communicating with her
chintzy bedroom, were her letters, and a deep cardboard box stood upon a
table. It had been sent on to Harley Street from the Club, and bore the
address of a Regent Street florist, whose showy establishment boasted a
German name.
The fragrance of roses with a musky after-tang in their sweetness
permeated the atmosphere. There were no roses amongst the flowers on
the chimney-shelf and cabinets. It occurred to Patrine that there must
be roses in the box.
Her head was throbbing and her eyes smarted. She threw off her hat and
coat, pitched them down upon the chintzy sofa, switched off the electric
lights, let up the blinds, pulled a chair close to the open window, and
sat down, resting her folded arms on the clean, dustless sill.
Sitting there, staring out into the semi-obscurity of Harley Street,
with the late cabs and motors sliding past and the distant roar of
Oxford Street in her ears, she asked herself:
"Have I behaved like an honourable woman or--a blithering idiot? That's
what I want to know?"
She waited. Not one pat on the back was vouchsafed by an approving
Conscience. The indicator of the dial slowly travelled in the direction
of the blitherer. Patrine shut her hot, dry eyes, and began to conjure
up the day that had gone over. Its sweetness was rendered infinitely
sweeter, its bitterness a hundredfold more poignant by the knowledge
that it was the last, the very last.
If she lived to be old, old, old, she knew she would never live to
forget Seasheere. The smell of the hot thyme and sun-baked grasses of
the cliffs, the rhythmic _frrsh!_ of the salt waves upon its shingle,
the shrill piping of its gulls, and pale blue of its skies would never
fade, never cease, never be silent, never alter.... For on Seasheere
cliffs her Wind of Joy had blown for the last time.
*CHAPTER LXIII*
*BAWNE FINDS A FRIEND*
The machine that could hover like Sherbrand's "Bird of War" had come
down in the Market Place. A big grey two-seater monoplane, with the
rounded cleft bird-tail and wings of the German Taube type. You could
see a number on its side and three big black Maltese crosses, and the
profile heads of pilot and passenger showing up in strong relief against
the blackened ruins of the Town Hall.
A bomb hung in its wire cage-holder on the visible side of the fuselage.
It struck Franky that the airman must be profoundly sure of himself, or
culpably reckless to have come down before getting rid of the thing. A
swivel-mounting like a barless capital A supported a machine-gun above
the radius of the tractor, and well within reach of the pilot's hand.
The pilot got down. He was tall and big, with a red moustache; a man
whose natural height and bulk were so augmented by the padded helmet
topped with the now-raised goggles, the pneumatic jacket girt in by a
broad band of webbing, supporting a brace of large revolvers, and the
heavy bandolier he carried, that the figure of his companion, scrambling
after him, seemed that of a mere dwarf.
The man who saw, _per_ medium of the rakishly-angled looking-glass yet
hanging on the wall of the wrecked parlour, conceived a horror of the
Troll-like creature in its big helmet, and the full-sized oilskins that
hung in folds about its diminutive body, the skirts reaching nearly to
the ground. When the two passed beyond the mirror's area of reflection,
the doubt whether they might not have discovered his whereabouts and be
stealthily creeping up from the rear to attack him, made him shudder,
and brought the perspiration starting in the hollows of his sunken
temples and cheeks.
Minutes passed. He waited with his eyes upon the mirror. Someone was
approaching from the direction of the Market Place, keeping well under
the broken walls of the houses fringing the narrow _trottoir_. Where an
avalanche of tiles and brickwork had fallen, he must perforce skirt the
obstacle, and thus for an instant be reflected in the glass. Meanwhile
the sound of nearing footsteps--sometimes muffled in thick dust, or
clicking over cobblestones, or tripping and stumbling among bricks and
rubble--grew more distinct. The red-moustached giant could not walk so
lightly. It must be the Troll--could be no one but the Troll! The
suspense of waiting had tensed into unbearable agony when the sound of a
voice crying broke out in the deathly silence of the place.
"Oh, oh!" Like a woman or a child's uncontrolled wailing. "Oh--the
poor men! Oh, the poor women and the li-ittle ch-ildren! Oh!" and _da
capo_, working up to a crescendo of agony, and dying away in
heartbreaking sobs. It was so strange--not that there should be weeping
in these razed and ravaged streets, but that the voice that wept should
be a voice of England--that it begot in the helpless man who heard
doubts of his own sanity, and a reckless desire to dissipate such
doubts. He heard himself call out: "Who is crying there?"
And a treble voice piped back, and stumbling over the moraine of
_debris_ tongueing from the avalanche of broken tiles and masonry,
came--not the Troll-dwarf in his huge disguising helmet and outsized
pneumatic jacket--but an urchin of twelve or thirteen--in the familiar
dress of a Boy Scout--minus the smasher hat and staff.
"Me for the gay old life!" meditated Franky. "Thought I was getting
groggy in the upper works--and now I know it! A British Boy Scout in
his little khaki shirt, with a row of gadgets on his left sleeve, and
ribbon tags to his little garters, all on his little lone in the middle
of this--Gehenna!" He spoke to the fever that galloped through his
veins in the tone of a patron presiding at the test-display of a Cinema
Film Company: "Pretty good, but you can do better. Roll along with a
troop of blue-eyed Girl Guides, old Touch-and-Go!"
The Scout's figure vanished out of the glass. There was a sound of
scratching and scrambling. The broken floor jarred to the impact of a
light body, and a boyish treble called:
"Is--is anybody here? Anybody--English?"
The voice quavered on the last word. Franky knew that this was
delirium. He grinned under his four-days' beard, and the grime and soot
and plaster that masked him, and answered in a series of Bantu clicks,
so leather-dry was his tongue:
"Me as per descrip: to fol: Young British sossifer of good fam: irrepro:
ref: and tophole edu: badly dam: by Hun shell! Greatly in need of the
com: of a ref: Chris: ho: Mus: in the eve: and intell: conver: greatly
appre:" He shut his stiff eyelids and opened them again, but the
imaginary Scout had not gone.
"You're dreadfully--hurt. Couldn't I do--something?" the treble voice
piped. Its owner was now squatting on his heels in the shade of
Franky's penthouse of planks. The knuckles he rested on the floor were
cracked and grimy, and his deeply-freckled, fair-complexioncd face was
lined, and anxious and thin. His blue eyes were swollen with crying,
though his sensitive lips wore a wistful, crooked smile. "You _are_
real?" he asked wistfully, and Franky answered, huskily:
"Rather! In fact, I'm a lot more real than you. Who are you, since
we're gettin' personal?" He repeated slowly after the boy:
"'Bawne Mildare Saxham, Scout No. 22. Fox Patrol, 331st London W.'
Seems good enough." He shut his hot eyes wearily. "But if you're
solid--you'd get me a drink!"
There was a little stir. The Scout had gone. Franky knew it without
opening his eyes, yielding to the deadly sinking faintness engendered by
the effort of speech. A mountainous weight crushed his chest, and his
legs were cold and heavy as ingots of pig-iron. It occurred to him that
at this rate the--wind-up--could not be far off. And a great horror
fell upon him like a pall, and cold sweat broke forth and streamed upon
his haggard face and broken body. Death for one who so loved Life and
the pleasant things of a commonplace existence.... A cricket-match, a
day with the hounds, a funny _revue_, a game of polo, a break at
billiards, a clinking run with the car, a fine cigar. Mess in camp
after the hard day's march, long, cool drinks with bits of ice tinkling
in the tumbler. That new, fierce pleasure tasted in his first
experience of real fighting.... And oh! how much sweeter than these the
scent of Margot's hair, the light of Margot's eyes, the clasp of her
arms about his neck, the hope of fatherhood, never now to be
realised....
"My little chap!" he muttered, and his heart wept, but no tears came to
his arid eyes. Then something cold touched his mouth. The rim of a cup
with water in it. "Thank you!" he said, after a gulping draught, opening
his eyes with the sense of reviving coolness stealing through his
parched vitals. "That's--absolutely IT!"
The boyish treble said with a quaver in it:
"If I set this can beside you--I got the water from the pipe that is
running--and the broken cup near it, could you manage to dip it in? Are
you able to move this hand?"
"First class!" whispered Franky, lifting the member a very little way
and dropping it again. "The--the other arm came in for it when the
shrapper hit me in the ribs.... Halloa! Chocolate," for a bit touched
his lips and was gently pushed between them. "That reminds me. I've an
iron ration somewhere about me. No--they took my pack off when I got
crumped up." It had seemed only--decent to Franky in those days of
endless foot-slogging, to carry a pack and a Lee-Enfield and fare no
better than his men. "Frightfully obliged. But I won't take this."
This being another scrap of chocolate. "Is thy servant a Boche that he
should stodge kid's grub?"
"You're English!" The blue eyes were full of hungry worship. "Man
alive!" quavered the boyish treble, "you don't know how I've wanted to
hear an English voice again. Tell me"--he panted and was pale under his
multitudinous freckles, and the beating of the childish heart shook the
thin young frame--"the Germans haven't beaten England--and sunk our
Navy, and wiped out our Army--and killed the King, and Lord Roberts, and
the Chief Scout, and Lord Kitchener, and--and my father and mother and
everyone?"
"No!" said the wounded man, and his faint whisper was as convincing as
though the negative had been shouted with the full strength of vigorous
lungs. "Is that the kind of lie they've been pitching you? Perhaps it
does 'em good to believe it! Let 'em, if they like. It'll never be
true!"
"I knew it couldn't!" The clear treble had lost its quaver. "And yet
there were times when I was funky. _He_ seemed so awfully sure at--the
beginning! And--the Enemy never stops--rubbing it in!"
"Who is the Enemy?"
"His name is von Herrnung. And--and I must go now, for--for your sake."
The eyes flickered, and their pupils dilated to wide circles of
frightened blackness. "He might wake up--and come--and find you. And
if he found you----"
When the arteries have been almost depleted by haemorrhage, and the
strength of the body has ebbed to vanishing point, the brain is
sometimes dazzlingly clear. Thus, though the faint whisper barely
reached the ear of the other, the haggard eyes looking out of the
begrimed and unshaven face of the man lying in the blood-soaked
stretcher were alert and observant. He said reassuringly:
"He won't come just yet. Tell me more about him, and all about
yourself."
How strangely lined and pinched and puckered was the young face with its
clear red-and-white sprinkled over with brown freckles. Fine dust of
dew-beads started upon forehead and temples and cheeks, the half-opened
mouth twitched nervously, though he thrust out his under-jaw and knitted
his reddish brows in a gallant effort of self-control.
"His name is von Herrnung. He is the German Field Flight officer who
took me away from England. I wrote down the date in my Scout's
pocket-book so that I mightn't forget. It was July 18th. He was trying
Mr. Sherbrand's hawk-hoverer at Hendon. He asked me to go up with
him----"
"Great Snipe!" panted Franky weakly. "Are YOU the boy who dropped the
wallet with the Clanronald Papers and the scratched message in the North
Sea?"
The blue eyes understood. "There was a wallet," said their owner. "I
don't know what was inside, of course. But he----"
A spasm of trembling went through the slender body. He bent his head,
and blinked his eyes, and the muscles of his throat and jaw worked as
though he fought down an hysterical access of tears. And a broad shaft
of golden light, falling on the young bare head, showed how the shining
red-brown hair had been roughly clipped in ridges, leaving a
forehead-tuft oddly streaked with white. Amongst the crowds of homeless
exiles endlessly streaming along the roads of this scourged and tortured
country, or crouching amongst the wreckage of its ruined villages and
battered towns, heads even younger than this boy's had displayed the
tragic sign.
"Poor kid!" Franky muttered, recognising it as the result of
overwhelming physical shock and unnatural mental strain. "He knew what
was inside? ..."
"I don't think so! If he had known when the submarine picked us up in
the North Sea--I think he would have killed me! He would like to kill
me now, he says"--the apple in the boy's throat jerked--"because through
me he has been _degradiren_--reduced from Captain to Supernumerary
Officer Pilot--and has had his Third Class of the Red Eagle taken away!
That was done at the big Wireless Station--Nordeich, they called it----"
"Nordeich.... Of course ... in German West Friesland. Thrash along--I'm
following you. Did they Court Martial the Flying Man?" Franky
whispered; and Bawne whispered back:
"The Emperor punished him! ..."
"The Emperor, did you say? ..."
"Yes. He came to Nordeich--in--I've forgotten what they call it when
great people want to move about without red carpets and lots of fuss."
"Incognito."
"Incognito. He'd broken off his yachting-trip in Norwegian waters--and
landed at Kiel only that day. I heard men whisper it.... He was
dressed in the field-grey, like his War Minister von Falkenhayn---and
his generals of the Imperial Staff--and all the other officers and men.
But he 'stripped off the War-harness,'--that's what they called
it!--before he got into the Potsdam train."
"Go on! ... What did he look like? ... They say he has changed a lot o'
late."
"I couldn't tell. I'd only seen photos that made him look younger and
hid his short arm. But even if he hadn't sat while the others
stood--and worn the Iron Cross, Grand Class--and the Black Eagle with
diamond swords and a Crown Imperial--I'd have known it was the Emperor,
by his eyes."
"By his eyes, you say! ..."
The boy's heart throbbed visibly, the breath came in short puffs through
his nostrils, and his lips were twisted awry as he smiled. The smile
stiffened out as he nodded. "By his awful eyes! ... When they looked at
you they made you feel tired, and empty, and--queer. But when they got
angry--you were reminded of--of a tiger lurking to spring out of a cave
of ice!"
"Ah! So he got angry, did he?"
Bawne nodded.
"When I wouldn't answer the questions he asked me--he talked
English--about how the brown satchel had come unstrapped and tumbled
into the sea. And he said to an officer: 'Show him your whip!'--and he
did--and it was short-stocked and covered with leather, like a
dog-whip--with three thongs strung with little balls of lead. Man
alive! you ought to see my back. Though they only hit me once!" He
winced, and flushed, and paled. "I was a coward to squeal--though when
they asked: 'Will you tell now?' I _did_ say: 'Not to stop you from
killing me!'"
"Good egg you! Great Snipe!--if I'd been there. With a Service
Revolver--! Never mind.... Go on!"
"I forget.... Oh!--they pulled on my shirt and gave me some strong
stuff to drink. Corn brandy, I think it was--and then He got up and
came round the table and began to talk to me. He said I must not be an
obstinate boy, for in another few days there would be War. Our pitiful
little Army'd be wiped out and our Fleet sent to the bottom of the sea.
The British Isles would be _Deutsch Brittanien_--and English people who
would not swear to be good Brito-German subjects of their new Emperor
and Overlord would be instantly put to death. But if I told up about
the brown satchel I would be permitted to live, and possibly my parents
also. If I said No!--nothing would be left but to call back the officer
with the whip."
"Coaxin', wasn't he? And what did you tell him?"
"I said: 'You've only said you're going to conquer England, Sir. You
haven't done it yet!"
It was not merely the treble voice of a courageous child answering. It
was the utterance of a race untamable and indomitable. Franky could
hear the metal balls on the whip clink one against another as the loaded
thongs were shaken out.... He whispered with dry lips:
"Then----?"
"Then I don't quite know. I was sick and sleepy, and the blood was
running down my back under my shirt. If they had killed me I wouldn't
have cared much. Perhaps he saw that, for he called up von Herrnung.
He was not to be dismissed from the Field Flying Service--because of the
War that was coming!--but he was to forfeit his Order of the Red Eagle
and rank as a Supernumerary Officer Pilot. Man alive!--you should have
seen how that big man squirmed and crawled and blubbered." The young
lips curled, and the jaw thrust out contemptuously. "'Thanks!
Gratitude! ... My blood to prove devotion! ... All I ask--the service of
danger--the reconnaissance under enemy fire!' And the Emperor----"
"Kicked him, I hope!"
"No, he said: 'Supernumerary Officer Pilot von Herrnung you will now to
your Flying Headquarters return. Let it be your task to win back at the
cost of a thousand lives--if you had them--the lost esteem of your
Emperor. Take this boy with you. Make of him a decent German. It is
"up to you," as the English say.' And then the Wireless went '_S'ss!
Crackle! Pzz!_' and the telephone-bell said '_Pr'rr!_' and the room was
cleared--they said because of a Call from the Winter Palace at
Petersburg."
"And where did they take you after you left the Wireless Station? Go
on--I'd like to hear you tell!"
The boy glanced round uneasily and then mastered his apprehensions. The
grimed hands went to his stocking-top and pulled out a squat little
book. The coloured presentment of a Boy Scout adorned its soiled
leather cover, and the thumbed leaves of the diary within were pencilled
from end to end. The Odyssey of a Saxham Pup, one might have called the
story whispered into the ear of the wounded man by the boy squatting at
his side.
One had been taken by train to Bremen and thence to a place called
Taubefeld, in West Hessen. Flight Station XXX was here on a vast
stretch of heath. There were rows of great hangars, and a vast army of
motor floats and lorries, upon which machines, hangars,
telegraph-installations, workshops, mess-houses, and quarters for
officers and mechanics, could be placed when the mobilisation-order came
and transported by road or rail.
One had fallen sick at Taubefeld--the effects of that North Sea ducking.
One had waked up with a skin-cropped head wondering where one was. A
woman who helped in the cookhouse had given one broth and gruel and the
medicine prescribed by the doctor. One had crawled off one's straw
palliasse weakly and shakily, and so won forth into a new, unfriendly
world.
One's parole had been taken--and one was thenceforth free to move about
and see things--when one was not wanted to help oil or clean wires or
sweep up the hangars. There was grub enough: bacon-soup, potato-salad,
and sausage, queer but not uneatable. Nobody was really brutal as long
as one didn't speak English, or even German with a British accent, too
much at one time. _Keine Unterhaltung da!_ ("No conversation there!")
some officer or N.C. would yell at one, and the rebuke was generally
accompanied by the swishing cut of a cane.
Consequently the Saxham Pup had bent himself to acquire German, as
spoken by Germans, and schooled himself to employ his eyes and ears
while maintaining economy in the use of his tongue. He had found out
his whereabouts from an envelope he had picked up, and other things from
listening to the officers' conversation, and the talk of the mechanics
in the big hangars.
War was the thing everybody talked about. There was going to be bloody
War in a twinkling. The German Navy was going to smash the British Navy
into matchwood, everybody was quite sure. The German Army was going to
walk over the miserable little British Army--and then would be expiated
the sins of the British Government and the diabolical plottings of Sir
Edward Grey. Throat-cuttings, shootings, and hangings were mentioned in
connection with the above, and other personages whom British Boy Scouts
hold in reverence. But one had had to bear it and hold one's tongue,
and keep smiling. That was the method of the Chief who had said to one:
"Quit yourself like a man."