prayed to GOD for guidance among the difficulties that beset the way for
working-women, and weaker souls have been maddened to frenzy and plunged
into unbelief by the intolerance and the injustice, the shrieking wrongs
and the unpurged evils that Man, who enters upon his heritage the world,
by the Gate of Motherhood, has ignorantly accumulated upon the shoulders
of the sex he professes to respect."
There was a murmur of approval at this. She lifted a hand, and they
were silent.
"I say to those who have despaired, 'Despair no longer!' I say to those
who have prayed--'Your prayer is answered!' Take up the work that has
dropped from the hands that are busy with the rifle. Prove your right
to the Parliamentary Franchise. Take your place amongst the World's
Workers, for good and for all. The Vote will be granted: it cannot be
denied! But if you had it now, passionately as you desire it, and the
choice were offered you--Oh! my sisters!--would you not yield it up with
gladness to bring those dead men back to life again?"
And after a pause of unbroken silence she added:
"For they have fought even better than they knew. They have re-conquered
Woman. Freely and willingly as comrade and helper she takes her place
and her share of the burden. Peace is proclaimed. The War between the
sexes is at an end!"
We know how truly the speaker prophesied. Quietly as the vast Atlantic
flows into and fills a labyrinth of empty, echoing, rock-caverns, the
vast body of unemployed women took the places of the male workers called
away to the Front. They had clicked into the slots before the world was
well aware of it, or they themselves understood that a miracle had been
wrought.
Said the breeched and gaitered lady-conductor of a North-West tram the
other day:
"Now the ones that was brought up active has got their chance to do a
bit, and the ones that was brought up idle 'ave found out that they like
work, will they ever be content to sit and twiddle their thumbs again?
I don't think!" She clipped pink tickets with zeal, and when a
red-nosed, watery-eyed elderly man who had offered her a pewter shilling
cursed her venomously as she thrust the coin back on him: "'Ere you! ...
'Op it!" she said to the offender, and caught him neatly by the scruff,
hauled him down the cork-screw stairway, and deposited him in the Camden
Road without turning a hair.
*CHAPTER LXVIII*
*THE DEVIL-EGG*
Von Herrnung had quitted the earth sober, to discover at the height of a
thousand metres that his potations had dulled his brain. As he ceased
to climb and brought down the nose of the Taube to the level, he
realised that he was dizzy, and that at the pit of his stomach squatted
the aviator's deadly foe, the demon of nausea. He pictured it as a
yellow, frog-like thing with frothing leathery lips and green eyes that
squinted. This image vexed him, and would not be driven away.
He switched on the hawk-hoverer and sensed the drag of the twin
horizontal flanged screws against the thrust of the propeller, adding to
its drone the vibration of the endless travelling-chains running in
their sheath of transparent talc. To make room for its long groove in
the floor of the bird-body, the thick glass port beneath the pilot's
feet had been removed by the sergeant-mechanic of the Flight Squadron.
Now there were two ports, one on either side. Through these the German
looked down upon the shell-pounded ruins of the village-town, its
roofless homes and broken enclosures giving the effect of a wild-bees'
nest laid open by the gardener's shovel after the gardener has smoked
out the bees. As von Herrnung located the baker's house by aid of his
recently acquired binoculars, another swirl of sickness took him, and he
shuddered and spat bile over the side.
Those distant voices of guns had not ceased their sullen calling. In
the rose-flushed south towards which the Taube faced as it hovered above
the ruins of the village, black columns of vapour swelled and towered,
and acrid flashes stabbed through the murkiness. One should be there,
his manlier self said to him. Better to be a brave German bird dodging
Death amongst the puffs of shrapnel, dropping devil-eggs on the British
batteries, winning back the forfeited Cross and the lost Imperial
favour, than to be here, hanging like a carrion-vulture over the maimed
body of a dying man.
Perhaps. But one had promised oneself revenge for the scorn that had
stung like fire. And one had bragged to the English boy of what one
meant to do. He looked back, and called through the speaking-tube that
traversed the canvas over-deck between the pilot's seat and the
passenger's:
"Unstrap yourself and come to me and take the control-stick.
_Schnell_--do you hear? What is that you say?" He put the voice-tube
to his ear and heard the shrill pipe answer through it. "You think it
best to tell me that you take back your parole?" The big teeth grinned
under the red moustache. "All right!" said the Enemy. "While we are in
the air, you are free to jump out if you like, and run away. When we
get to the ground again, that is another matter. Come now, sit in front
of me and take over the controls!"
And as the boy obeyed, creeping beneath the intervening deck and under
the canvas partition, the Enemy moved back upon the pilot-seat, keeping
his feet on the lower controls, and separating his knees so as to leave
a ledge for Bawne to occupy. Still laughing, he took spare
safety-straps that hung on each side against the bulwarks, and clipped
the patent pneumatic studs to the belt that girt the boy.
It did not do to run risks. Some day, it might occur to the Emperor to
order von Herrnung to deliver up his captive. And--the little devil was
useful--hellishly! He had come into the world, twelve years
ago--possessed of the Flying Gift. He had taken to the air as naturally
as a young crow or pigeon. A tap on the shoulder, a word shouted in his
ear--and he knew what you wanted! He understood now why his overlord
required the unrestricted use of his arms at this moment. The small
hands twitched as they gripped the lever, and shudders convulsed the
slender frame. Noting this von Herrnung grinned. His qualms had left
him for the present, he was once more master of his stomach and lord of
his cool and steady brain. Through the back of his head the boy could
see him--leaning his big body sidewise--craning his neck over the edge
of the fuselage--his hand hovering over the bomb hanging near in its
wire holder, his keen hard eyes calculating distance--his red brows
knitted, his full mouth smiling under its thatch of red hair. The
devil-egg would burst upon its impact with a roof or with the ground, a
thousand metres under the Taube. How many times since the red dawning of
the Aggressor's Day had he, von Herrnung, not plucked out the pin and
lifted the latch, and sent Death and Destruction speeding earthwards!
Why should this particular devil-egg have exploded five seconds after
its release?
The detonating mechanism had been wrongly set, or the explosive had
suffered some chemical deterioration. With the volcanic upburst of
flaming gases and the fierce blizzard of rending steel splinters, the
Taube was shot upwards like the cork from a bottle of champagne. The
Enemy had cut out the hovering-gear when he had dropped the devil-egg,
and the thrust of the tractor had sent the Taube rushing on. Thus,
though she had been bumped about on waves of rising gases--though
daylight shone through holes in her wings and body,--a wheel had dropped
like a stone from her under-carriage--and a piece of her tail had gone
fluttering and swerving earthwards, no serious damage had been done to
the machine.
Bawne's cheek was bleeding from the scratch of a splinter, but he stuck
manfully to the controls. "Steer south," he had been told, "when I
switch off the hoverer," and he had waited, his teeth set, his brows
knitted, his eyes on the compass, and his heart crying out to God to
save his new-found friend.
He knew it was because he had prayed so hard that the bomb had exploded
prematurely. Would the Enemy try again with the one that yet remained?
But the Enemy made no sign. One dared not look round or speak to him.
Was he in a fit, or sick, or merely shamming? One could feel the big
body heaving at one's back as it lay huddled against the canvas
partition, with rolling head and arms spread wide, and knees that
straddled and sagged.
Jerk! The Taube heaved her after-part as a cow gets up, and nose-dived.
Von Herrnung's feet had slipped from the controls, and her rudder was
flapping free. As Bawne toed the bar and gripped the guide-wheel, and
brought the keel to a level, the blood in his veins tingled and he knew
a thrill of joy.
One had borne a lot, but--Man alive!--a moment like this was worth it.
What Boy Scout could deny the greatness of this boy's reward? To be
master of this giant Bird, rushing at the speed of an express-train over
woods and fields and villages, diminished to the patches on a
crazy-quilt by the height at which one sped. To hear the shrill breeze
harping in the wires and the roar of the flashing tractor, and change
the din at a finger-touch to the silence of a glide.
West, where the sun was setting in red fire were signs by now familiar.
Linked specks that were big grey German troop-trains ran over the
shining gossamer-lines of the railways, going south. Where the shining
lines looked like scattered pins, the railways had been blown up by the
Belgians, or the British. Things like caterpillars crawling over the
white ribbons of the highways were German motor-lorries dragging great
howitzers, or Army Supply and Transport, or marching columns of robust,
bullet-headed German infantrymen.
A blot of grey upon a town was where a Division rested. Strings of grey
spiders hurrying south, would be brigades of cyclist telegraphists or
sharpshooters, and processions of drab beetles scuttling along, Field
Ambulances, or Staff motor-cars. One would have said that a green-grey
blight had fallen upon Belgium, swiftly advancing, stayed by nothing,
devouring as it moved.
East, where the shadow of the Taube raced beside her like a
carriage-dog, black streaks that were barges still crawled on the
canals, and peasants' carts crept over the roads--and there were no
columns of troops in view, nor uglier tokens of the War. Though the red
and brown towns showed scant signs of life, late root-crops were being
harvested; plough-teams were breaking up the stubbles, factory chimneys
were smoking, and acres of linen-web yet spread to bleach along the
river-banks.
Later in the month the grey-green blight was to sweep over all this
region as the Boche retreated before the thrust of the 1st and 4th
British Army Corps, from Houthulst Forest to Menin-on-Lys.
Those voices of the guns were nearer now. They talked on incessantly.
You felt the air that carried you vibrating as you flew. The solid
earth heaved up in waves under the dusty golden smoke-drifts veiling the
south horizon. Black pillars of smoke and _debris_ climbed and collapsed
against the dusty gold. Grey Imperial Staff cars were parked in the
courtyard of a chateau with pepper-box towers. Officers sat at tables on
the vine-covered terrace, while a farm close by was doing duty as a
casualty-clearing station. You could pick out the flutter of the Red
Cross Flag on a broken tree beside the gateway--and the come and go of
the bearers carrying laden or empty stretchers--and the white armlets of
the _Sanitaetskorps_ men who drove the ambulance-cars. To have seen over
and over again what grown folks learned from newspapers was to be a man
seasoned in War, whilst yet one's bones were young. Well worth the
hardships one had borne, this sheaf of ripe experience. Good to know
one had obeyed the Chief who said, "_Quit yourself like a man!_"
So Bawne flew on. The fiery chrism of a strange second baptism was on
his forehead. Gates of wonder seemed opening on the horizon towards
which he hastened, guided by the big broad arrow of the reinforced
compass and the thudding of those nearing guns.
Some perception of great issues at stake and marvellous impending
changes, ushering in the revival of the forgotten days of Chivalry, may
have come at this hour to the child so strangely caught and whirled into
the dizzy circles of the maelstrom of International War. Did a voice
whisper to him that as of old by his Pagan forefathers, babes were
sacrificed to Bel and Odin--so for the cleansing of the sick world of
to-day from the War-madness begotten by greed and materialism a torrent
of rich, warm, generous blood was to be shed from the veins of the
young? Could he dream that the lower mankind sank, the higher men were
to rise--mounting on stepping-stones of obedience and courage, to those
heights where the human may walk with the Divine? That through long
years to come, bright boys in myriads would drain the wine of Death from
the chalice of Self-Sacrifice, and pass to God who kindled in those
clean young souls the fire that made Him burn to die for men.
The Enemy was rousing from his doze or dwam, or swoon, or whatever had
been the matter with him. The big body was heaving into an upright
posture, the big foot was knocking in Morse on the bottom of the
fuselage. The boy looked down and saw blood running there--or was it
the red of the sunset?
"Shut--off--and--look--at me," rapped the foot, and its thrall obeyed
and shrieked at the sight of the horror he was strapped to, glaring with
wild eyes, and spitting unintelligible sentences with bloody splinters
of shattered teeth and red rags of palate and tongue.
"I am damaged, is it not so? Something hit me when the bomb exploded."
Something like this came in strange sounds from that inhuman face. And
the boy shrieked again and again, straining at the belt that bound him
to his terrible companion, conscious of nothing but overmastering fear--
"_Quit yourself like a man!_"
He heard the words through the drumming in his ears and his heart left
off leaping. His brain cleared. He realised that the Taube was diving
to the ground. He switched on power and brought down her tail and
pulled up her nose gamely. They passed through a suffocating mist of
burned chemicals that deposited red powder on your hands and face, and
the glass of your flying-goggles, and parched your lungs like burning
Cayenne pepper--and were over the battle-zone.
As far as the eye could take it in the face of earth was moving. Death,
like a many-handed mole, seemed working underground. Huge geysers of
dirt and mud and stones heaved up in thick black smoke and vapour. The
air shook incessantly with reduplicated concussions. Buildings tottered
and sank away, and railway bridges melted, and spurts of blinding fire
leaped from invisible mouths of guns.
The revolutions were slowing down. The Taube travelled painfully.
Beneath her bobbed a row of sausage-shaped observation-balloons
straining at their spidery cables, beyond these were the third and
second German lines--whitish furrows stretching East and West, with
little zig-zags, that were communicating-trenches, between. A thin blue
haze of rifle and machine-gun fire hung over the pitted ground. The
Advanced lines behind their smear of rust-red barbed wire might have
been sixty yards from the parapet of the British trenches. Friend and
foe were dying there--and over the hurly-burly, dodging Death in puffs
of woolly vapour, belched from vertical mobile muzzles, directing fire,
signalling, wirelessing, scouting, fighting others who assailed
signallers or scouters--wheeled and circled the Birds of War. Their
sharp eyes picked him out flying far down beneath them.
"There goes a Hun somebody's shrapbozzled!" said the pilot of a
R.A.F.B.E., shutting off to speak to his observer.
"Going to crash in a minute," said the observer of the Bleriot
Experimental. "Where, do you suppose?"
"If he keeps on at that angle," said the pilot from behind his glasses,
"he'll pass over that nest of Hun machine-guns in the big shell-pit
behind the German Advanced Line, at about a hundred and fifty--and pile
in that ploughfield behind our Gunners."
The Taube was flying low and crookedly--the high crescendo whine of
shell passed over it--heavy metal sent from German batteries--and other
shells from British guns were crashing and bursting near. The wind was
getting up in the west, and the drift of the machine was trending
eastwards, in spite of anything Bawne could do. Could one keep flying
long enough to pass the first line of British trenches? And how would
one come to the ground, knowing nothing about landing--and with a bomb
on board!
One must get rid of the devil-egg. Should one drop it on the enemy's
trenches? As he flew towards them a rag of white fluttered, and Bawne
caught his breath. A long line of grey-green men were jumping like
grasshoppers over the parapet. They went forwards with their hands up,
waving a White Flag, and from the British trenches came men in khaki
doubling out to take their prisoners....
_Rat-tat-tatt!_
The khaki figures began to fall. The grey men were cheering.... The
_rat-tatt_--came from the German machine-guns, pumping out jets of
murderous lead. Then in a flash Bawne understood, leaned to the right,
and seeing the machine-gun pit beneath him--pulled out the pin, jerked
up the latch, and dropped the devil-egg. Horrible to think, it would
kill Germans!--but then--to save one's own dear Englishmen----
"Good Night! Did you see that?" asked the pilot of the R.A.F.B.E.,
shutting off to address his observer, and immediately switching on
again, for a geyser of earth and stones and fire, and bits of things
that had been men and guns had spurted up from the spot where a moment
since had been the gun-pit, and troubled waves of heated air reached
them at 5000.
"He knows he's got to come down crash, and jettisoned the lollipop to
improve his chances! ... Civil of him to drop it just when the
Deershires were getting it hot and hot! ... Deserves thanks from the
British C. in C., though his Kaiser won't be particularly pleased with
him," reflected the R.F.C. observer, as the Taube, flying like a bird
with a wounded wing, crossed the lines of the British trenches, dived
staggeringly, and crashed down in the ploughed field behind the slogging
guns.
*CHAPTER LXIX*
*A MENACE; AND GOOD NEWS*
_Drip, drip!_ ...
The slow dropping of water on the carpet and the sweet, heavy fragrance
of roses, brings me back as it brought Patrine. She got up and pulled
down the dark blue blinds with the precaution that was becoming habitude
with us at this date, in view of that often bragged-of menace from the
sky. She switched up the lights and moved to the table, roughly pulled
off the string that tied, and lifted the lid of the cardboard box.
A rich, sweet fragrance that was almost musky enveloped her as she
lifted the thin paper. A sheaf of roses of flaming sanguine crimson,
tied with black-and-white striped ribbon lay beneath. Black and white
are the Prussian colours. Black, white, and red the standard of the
Hohenzollern. Patrine knew that von Herrnung had sent the roses, even
before she recognised his writing on a thick white envelope pinned to
the ribbon binding the flowers.
"_If Isis desires news of 'her dearest', she will open and read the
letter. From one who does not desire to forget._"
The letter contained a lock of hair, jaggedly cut--she knew from whose
sweet head. Half blind with tears, she lifted the lock to her lips and
kissed it passionately, before she bent herself to read the careful
English sentences that revealed the man in all his vanity and
lustfulness, insolence, and tyranny, as though the burin of Strang or
the brush of Sargent had etched him upon copper or limned him upon
canvas, to show the world what depths of infamy can be plumbed by the
Superman.
"_Strong Woman of the race of moral weaklings, have you not yet learned
to be proud that a Prussian soldier prized your beauty, and took it for
his own? When the fierce men in the proud German Field-grey have
swarmed over the soil of England,--when, amidst the squadron of
night-birds whose feathers gleam mysteriously in the pale moonlight, thy
lover flies onward, singing his war-song, laden with his cargo of
explosives--when the Red Cock crows on the roof-trees of London's
wilderness of houses and London's fire-bells, amidst terrific
explosions, ring out the last battle of the century, will Isis then
think of me? Revolvers, carbines, bombs, and poisoned arrows are among
the gifts I shall bring thee in the hand that wears the mascot pearl of
black and white. Coloured signalling-balls set in the silver of the
searchlight, shall be thy tiara; for thy arms and thy white bosom there
will be strings of rubies outpoured from the broken coffers of the House
of Life. Our second nuptials will be celebrated by a mitred Death,
amidst the smoking ruins of Westminster Abbey, to the roaring strains of
the German Anthem, 'Now Praise Ye the Lord.' Till then au revoir! shall
one perhaps say?_
"_Ah, were Isis of the burning beech-leaf tresses not only beautiful but
wise, she would place her hand in the hand that stretches yearningly
over the North Sea. I wish love more than vengeance; is not that
unnatural for a Hun? A golden consciousness of happiness yet to come
wells up within me. Would Isis taste that happiness, let her go to her
window and open it on the night of the day that brings this letter.
There are no Germans in England who are not in prison or under
espionage. No, possibly! yet go to thy window! A word to him who waits
there, and Isis is once more mine. But beware of turning my tenderness
by scornful rejection to hatred. Cold devil!--I should then strike, and
frightfully, at the head whence came this hair. Look at it well and
answer. T.v.H._"
She could turn no paler, her hue was that of death already. She dropped
the loathsome letter from her hand upon the roses and thrust the lock of
hair into her bosom, and went to a window and touched the spring of the
blind. It flew up and revealed her tall shape standing there
silhouetted against the electric radiance in defiance of that boasted
menace from the sky.
The street seemed empty, within the radius of her vision, save for the
dark bulk of a motor-car, standing before a house on the same side some
way down. Its headlights flashed, once, twice, and again, as though in
answer. It slid forwards with a low hissing sound: "_Ss'sh!_" it said,
as if in gluttonous anticipation, and stopped opposite the hall-door.
Again the headlights flashed, there was a gleam of yellow enamel. She
recognised the Darracq car in which von Herrnung had driven her to
Fanshaw's Flying Ground on that unforgettable eighteenth of July.
Holding her breath, narrowing her long-sighted eyes for better focus,
she scrutinised the driver, recognising in the thick-set figure hunched
over the steering-wheel, wearing a peaked cap pulled low over his
forehead, and a wide white muffler twisted round his throat, the German
who had brought the message from the Three in the blue F.I.A.T. car. She
was sure of him when he touched his cap, looking furtively up at the
window, and switched on a small electric bulb, illuminating the clock
upon the dashboard as though to afford her a view of his face. Its
bloodshot pale eyes, thick broad nose, and the unwholesome, purplish
colour of the complexion, barred with a big light yellowish moustache
with waxed ends, had stuck in her memory as ugly personal traits will
stick. Of the slenderer man beside him she had no recollection. He was
buttoned up in an overcoat with a fur collar, and wore a soft felt hat.
She felt the eyes it shadowed were fastened on her, and recoiled as
though from the touch of something unclean and horrible, roughly
dragging down the blind.
She was brave, but the sense of being almost alone in the house with
those alert, observant eyes outside, spying upon her movements, made her
heart beat suffocatingly, and brought chill damps of deadly terror to
the surface of her skin. She moved to a chair with a clogging sense of
ultimate effort--the nightmare feeling of striving against a powerful
hypnotic influence, bidding her creep downstairs and open the
street-door, step into the car waiting at the kerbstone, and be borne
away by rushing wheels and whirling screws, or even swifter wings,
perhaps, to that War-torn land where von Herrnung was waiting to exact
his price for sparing the beloved head.