THE SIX MILLIONS
But the wound proved “not dangerous,” though “grave,” and though
accompanied in its “history” by some delirium; and meantime the most
detested of men was the dead Alexis, since it never entered any head to
question that it was he who had shot, and then shot himself—though a
divisional surgeon took his oath that the course of that bullet was the
oddest which he had ever beheld in any suicide.
“But why a bullet, and not the Redlike Ray?” the Prince wondered on
that morning four weeks later when he began to get well again: “and
where is the ray now? And Chinnery—where’s _he_? And the Six Millions?
There’s a something somewhere at work....”
From these musings he turned to a heap of newspapers by his bed; and
all that forenoon was reading, reading, feasting his interest....
For during those weeks of his weakness the wheeling of the top had
come to the humming mood, and the humdrum old world was whirling in
a vertigo of the giddiest delirium toward the gulf’s rim. He saw
headlines like “All the World at War, save China,” and even as he
wondered of what vertiginous vintage the children of men had drunk, he
himself was drunken with it.
Austria, it appeared, was no longer in the Triple Alliance! Austria
had broken loose from it in order to fly at the throat of Russia; and
_already_ Russian troops of the Reserve Category were being raised, and
_levées en masse_ of her _voiskos_.
Whereat let Roumania, suspecting that Russia is aiming at nothing but
_her_ destruction, rush thundering round her frontiers; and quick now
let Servia, with her back on Knuzevatz, mass two _corps d’armée_ upon
Nisch and Vranja, to spring upon her Bulgarian victors and allies of
old, and have a bitter draught of sour milk and the bacillus Bulgaricus.
It was as when one planet of a system slips on her course, and two
collide, why, then, the whole thing’s upset, and they all decide to
collide for luck, and it is a case of baking days then, yes, and
of break-neck days, Monday fleeing from the wrath to come through
the middle of Sunday, vast arcs of moons that loom from Arctic to
Antarctic, with scarlet laughter of all the gods and dogs of war.
For the European clock had struck the hour, and it was now or never
for placing on the stage a thousand schemes of greed, aggression, and
revenge.
Therefore let Sweden quickly throw two infantry divisions into
Björneborg, with Helsingfors for their _objectif_, to drag her
Finns from that rigorous grip of Russia, and Sweden is an ally of
England—Sweden and Norway, Denmark and America, Spain, Portugal.
Denmark, the long-suffering, long docked and hedged-in, saw the day of
vengeance dawn, and at the alarm of the first mortar, had darted to
arms, to start for Flensburg; while American squadrons, in a drama of
warfare in the Hwang Hai off Chefoo, had fought in French and English
lines of battle: a drama in which 236,000 had sunk 103,000 tons of
Russo-German metal, with only eight ships remaining to the victors:
upon which injured ships a Japanese squadron had fallen the same
afternoon, and sunk or captured them.
On that same day bombarding battleships of Japan were barking from afar
at San Francisco; and a Japanese squadron was sighted on the horizon by
the Cockatoo Island coastguard (Sydney).
All yonder, too, in Texas, is America crackling, hordes of goat-footed
Mexicans in coloured rags attacking “the Gringoes” in guerilla
brigade-sections, sniping from behind hedge and ditch, peeping along
their Lee Metfords’ sights with a piercing eye. And not far from that
crackling is all the area of Ecuador crackling, ravaged by troops of
Peruvian sharp-shooters.
Everywhere the same frenzy of revelry. _Mobilmachung!_ The agitated
hand snatches the rifle, the wild eye dashes for the ranks. Only where
Li Ku Yu sits sipping buttermilk-tea among lotuses and marvels of
marble serene peace breathes on the breezes.
He makes no sign; he waits; he brazenly smiles; he has a clear clean
block of brain without one hair on it, a rock cut out without hands: he
sits and stimulates it with tea.
And he revels in the revel and frenzy. Nothing escapes his eye, his
meditation. Looking over the sea he can see that America has out
hosts of converted merchant-cruisers furnished with box-batteries
of four and six inchers, fighting, to the astonishment of men, with
battleships—fighting, often conquering. A White Star liner of the San
Francisco-Nagasaki trade-route, meeting two large Japanese cruisers
in Mid-Pacific sank both before she sank; and the _Lusitania_, in
an affray with a troop of sea-keeping sloops and torpedo gunboats,
patrolling the Atlantic for tit-bits, sank half before they fled, and
then kept afloat until within sight of Ireland.
Seeing which, Britain had begun late in the day to accumulate stores of
fittings and armaments at home ports and naval stations for such ships;
some of their crews were complemented from Colonial Naval Reserves; and
they were spurting mirthfully over the oceans, having the highest and
liveliest time.
Thanks in great part to them, our country had not yet begun to starve.
Rich still on paper, her consols still taken up, St Swithin’s Lane and
Wall Street her allies, half the owners of securities all over the
globe hoping for her triumph, she was, nevertheless, in the grip of
want, and already saw a skeleton grin at her from the air.
Protective tariffs in other countries had vanished like chaff two weeks
after the going off of the first gun, so that England’s free trade
no longer made her a magnet for imports; and since supplies were
dodging and fighting their way precariously from Canada, the Government
granaries ran every day lower.
A Russian _ukase_ had prohibited the exportation of wheat—a ridiculous
thing, since no creature in Russia would now have dreamed of exporting
wheat. That immense breadth of empire was already doddering horridly to
its drop.
Hardly a week after the _Mauretania_ battle, Austria, with a heart
fond for Salonica, had flung across the Save a body of Uhlans, who had
coolly occupied Belgrade; and the next morning sections of brigades
bivouacking in the squares, and Austrian officers gossiping on the
boulevards, had met the gaze of the amazed Belgradians.
Whereat the Great White Czar waxed whiter, and Young Turkey grew
tough to the teeth of her eaters, massing regulars and redifs,
green-bannered, class on class, calling “gather, gather, all ye birds
of ravin” to her Berbers, Sanoussis. For see Macedonia broken in a roar
of flame, the Vali of Saloniki assassinated on his doorstep, whereupon
the Great Archimandrite, His Holiness the Patriarch of Jerusalem, was
mutilated in a room of his palace, and that same evening telegraphic
communication was broken between Odessa and Constantinople, and the
Suez Canal blown up.
And now an anarchy of thunder and waltz of all the vortices in the
Near East, thirty thousand Athenians surging across the Thessalian
frontier, Crete bursting into burning with bands of bandits girt with
the dirk and carbine of rapine marauding from end to end, upon all
which the Turkish _Turgut Reis_ is hurling shell-fire, quenching hell
with hell; and at the same time a mob of Turkish gunboats is going
northward through the Bosphorus to watch the (Russian) Black Sea
Squadron (convoying two corps from Odessa), quietly occupy Bulgarian
Bourgas—directly connected by rail with Stamboul.
And still faster spins the dance, like the sand-forms of the sand-storm
that vastly, dartly waltz into conflict. The next day Austria declared
against Russia a war which had begun before the declaration; and on
the third day after the occupation of Bourgas the eastern limb of the
British Mediterranean Fleet steamed through the Bosphorus to seek the
Black Sea Fleet, and bombard Sevastopol.
Russia had enough to do: at the fourth week-end, if she looked south,
south-west, north, west, east, or inward at her own bankruptcy,
she everywhere saw handwriting on her walls. Sweden at Helsingfors
was looking toward Cronstadt; twelve Swedish armoured ships at the
Neva-mouth. The Black Sea littoral was British. The Army of India,
with the Teheran railway in its hands, had scattered at Merv the Army
of Turkestan, and after a four days’ carnival of carnage at Novo
Tcherkask, had marched by road to Kharkov, to turn its face toward the
Kremlin.
Another mixed army of Turks and English had thoroughly crushed the
Russian corps that had advanced from Kars to invest Erzeroun.
Russia’s 4th with her 8th to her 12th Southern Corps had, indeed,
inflicted annihilation upon the Austrian army massed on the Dneister
in Eastern Galicia; but Austria’s second army on the San, its back on
Przemsyl (the bulwark of Middle Galicia), and her third based on Cracow
(the key of Western Galicia), had followed the Moltke maxim of marching
apart and fighting together, and after a tug-of-war only surpassed for
carnage by that drama of gore transacting itself over Northern France,
had made Poland Austrian, and crossed the sources of the Niemen.
Add to this that Vladivostock was even now cracking and nodding under
rollicking cataracts of Japanese thunder; and thundering multitudes of
puny Japanese troops, amusing themselves with butchery, were intruding
and intruding through Manchuria, reeling up as on a reel the Siberian
railway.
And France, _la belle_, was unwell of her _règles_, and blanched; and
Max had a malady and chancre from intercourse with her.
In Eastern Germany the Army of the Vistula was at grips with the
gallantry and zeal of the Swedish levies, who with astonishing dash
had advanced far through the great military _dépôts_ of the north-east,
and after capturing the Thorn-Posen railway, had drawn a ring of
earthworks and Schumann gun-turrets round Posen, in the teeth of the
teeming legions of that Eastern region—Royal Saxon Corps, draughts from
Thorn, that Metz of the East, from Königsberg—who in vain had flung
themselves in wave on wave upon these unexpected fairheads.
And northward, with a display of hardly less audacity and energy,
Denmark was campaigning in Schleswig-Holstein, and had sat down before
Kiel; while south-westward on the French frontier the two great
branches of the Teutonic race had dashed together shockingly: so that
eighteen of the twenty German corps were already in the field, her
burghers and shopkeepers now girding on the bandolier, and now was the
winter of her Bourse’s discontent.
As for France, the Light of the world was like a candle flickering in a
draught.
See Italy southward redeeming now her “unredeemed” territories, her
Haute Savoy, Alpes Hautes, for now is the day, and Frenchmen and
vermicelli never yet went well together.
Therefore what is left of the Italian navy (it had been smashed, and
had smashed, in a battle off Cape Spartivento) shall bombard three days
the Riviera batteries, while swarms of Bersaglieri, Alpini, Carabinieri
shall clamber like chamois among the Alp passes under a shadow of
aeroplane-wings, their cannons carried on active-footed mules, pushing
their advance against troops of dragoons and mountain-chasseurs,
swaggering black rascals of Spahis, Zouaves, garbed in gaudy cloths;
and in the European hotchpotch some cynic camels shall sulk and snarl,
and die with a repining eye.
And when the Italian 2nd, 4th and 6th have effected a landing near
Nice, has broken bloodily through the French 7th, 14th and 15th, have
crossed the Isère, then Paris knows panic and _émeute_.
And under the double tonnage of Russia and Germany France must already
have suffocated, but for the rescuing strength of Britain.
Britain, with a slow but increasing heat, was becoming a recruiting
_dépôt_, her Lancashire blackamoors, her Cockney bits of boys, her
Scottish bodies, her Irish devils ever steadier, keener, streaming to
see to it—nimbly! soldiers in a week, warriors in a fortnight, veterans
in a month: for, as things now were, if France went down, Britain, too,
foundered like a ship in the sea: and British men said “not yet.”
There, therefore, all along that north-eastern frontier of France
backed by the charming land of Champagne, the fire was hell-fire, and
the rigour of the game pretty grim—the men of England coming, pressing,
checked, beaten back, defeated, hampered, badgered, butchered, fretted,
pestered, but still coming, pressing, getting every day their dreadful
pecker up, struggling like tunnel-diggers grinning at the ruggedness of
granite, winning an inch, and still an inch, and an inch, until that
momentous December midnight when the men of Mars must have marked the
carmine of the fall of Metz, and have heard some murmur of that turmoil
on earth.
Of it Eulalia wrote to her mother: “I should not care to live through
such a thing again, though not for anything should I like to have lived
without having once lived through it.”
And again nine days later: “I am not well, and even if I be everything
that’s bad, daddy might let you write to say if you are alive, and wish
one a happy Christmas. Perhaps some day twenty years hence you may hear
more than whatever it is you have heard, and may think then of me more
forgivingly.
“It is hard to say quite what is wrong, but I am pretty sickified.
Yesterday Surgeon-Major Burke peeped under my eyelids, felt my pulse,
and said: ‘It is the heart’—wonderful discovery! Doctors amuse me.
“But some of the nursing-staff are beginning to look rather askance at
me, I fancy, for the two company-waggons are pretty full of sick, one
of the junior dressers died of typhoid three days ago, and one, of
course, ought to be ‘all there.’ But I forget things, I am very remiss
really—I can no more help it than be the bedmate of a Long Tom; all
I want to do now is to lie alone in woods, and give myself up, and I
dream such things, that I want to be always asleep. Of course, I make a
good old struggle.
“Early on the morning of the 21st I started out from our sycamore-tree
to go into Nürnfeld—I told you, did I, that the 2nd and 3rd companies
have been billeted on Nürnfeld village after a good deal of hardships
and marching to come up with our brigade? Well, our junior surgeon had
got a permit from Captain Hardinge for one of the six stretcher-bearers
of the 2nd to take the place of Davis, the dresser, who is dead, so I
was going to get the man, when, just as I had passed the baggage-park
sentries, something very strange came over me. There lay the village
before me, the lantern still burning before the senior officer’s
cottage-door, a few Tommies yawning in the dawn at doorways where they
stood sentry over their squads: but I seemed to see it in a dream
somehow. After passing the outlying sentry, I walked on to a cottage
which they call the alarm-quarter, where an inlying picket of six have
to keep awake all night, and I remember seeing the six fellows playing
cards in a room, with their belts loose, round a lantern on a box; but
there I seem to have stopped to lean on the window, and—they _say_ that
I fainted, though I don’t think that I fainted.
“Anyway, I was there so long, that Sister Darling had to come to look
for me, found me sitting in the alarm-quarter, and then—she is such an
angel, always—would not let me go back to the field-hospital, but said
I must wander about all day, and take a good rest.
“Well, I did; and it was a day of destiny to me: for at four in the
afternoon the most marvellous thing that you ever could fancy happened
to me.
“I took something to eat in my knapsack, and in passing beyond the
canteen met a Lieutenant Pierce, who told me that there was a rumour
that fighting was probable that day between our outpost garrison and
an advanced detail of the enemy. Our brigade, you must understand,
is said to be now diamond-shaped, the 2nd and 3rd forming the south
corner of the diamond, we being in the far north wing of our army,
which is now facing the enemy on a front of some seventy-five miles, by
report; and everyone is saying that the two hosts are getting well into
touch, so you can look out for more things happening before you lose
your next tooth. Oh, it is a big business this. On the night of the
12th, the fourth night before the fall of Metz, my company was camped
on an incline, and before I went to sleep I could see the fires of a
whole division in the snows at my feet reaching far into the darkness,
battalion after battalion, with their batteries and their sentries in
great-coats, seeming a scene in some great dream. And this mass of man,
animal, cannon and baggage was but the advance-guard of a far vaster
war-host which occupied the North; and hidden away in the dark was the
still vaster war-host of the enemy.
“Well, after hearing that that advanced corner of our diamond might be
fighting, I thought that I had had enough of bow-wow, and would keep
clear of it. But I must have soon forgotten where I was going, and, as
a matter of fact, put my little shoe into the thick of it, for near two
o’clock, when I must have walked seven or eight miles, I twice heard
band-music going, then a bugle somewhere calling form-company-columns,
and presently I saw a train of artillery-horses straining uphill to my
left, for the country just here is very broken.
“After this I came to a village as big as Holmend, in which I saw not
one living thing but a dog that skedaddled on seeing me. There were
bits of shell about, the houses in ruin, and in front of a school a
little outside the village were two mountain gun-carriages with their
guns and artillery waggons wrecked, and a gunner stretched on the
ground under one of the waggons, with his dragoon-sword and revolvers
still at his belt, poor boy. You wouldn’t think how lonely and
consoling it was there, and I sat a long time on one of the scorched
cottage-steps. The afternoon was quite warm, though there are patches
of snow over the hillsides.
“Then a sound of big guns roused me, and, as it always does, drew me,
for it’s in the creature’s breed, no doubt. So I set out eastward down
some steep fields, and half-way down could see through trees a company
of Greys in column of squads stepping with their swinging kilts, the
gallant laddies, their marker galivanting in advance with the flag like
a man gone dancing and dotty with arrogance, a couple of field-guns
and an _échelon_ of baggage coming in their rear, and in front their
screaming bagpipes that craze men’s brains with bravery. Really, men
are dear creatures, the good-hearted, simple, strong dears. I vow I’d
rather a man than one of those angels that ‘went in to the daughters
of men.’ Perhaps you will say, ‘Yes, that’s why your father has had to
turn you from home.’ Well, perhaps. You must think as you will, mother.
God made us.
“So I went on making my way by fields and paths, the row growing, till
I got in sight of a mountain, beyond the brow of which I saw a haze,
for smokeless powder still makes a haze and a smell when lots of it
are fired by troops in close order; and on the mountain’s slope, near
the top, my fieldglass soon spied a supply-store and headquarters
signalling station, with gun-emplacements, and a dressing-station
lower down, and at the bottom under cover of a crag a group of
ammunition-carts and ambulance-waggons with flags on them.
“Lying down near the top was a line of Inniskillings, forming the
reserve of the firing-line on the farther slope, and two hundred yards
or so below stood the Greys on a road. I was astonished when I got
on the upper ground that the Inniskillings were not touched, for it
looked to me as if small pompom shrapnel was spattering all about the
mountain-top, and the battle was going on with the din of an engine
which roars, groans, whizzes and horridly rattles.
“I wanted to go up to the Inniskillings to see, for that might do me
good to get some lead in me, but a lance-corporal of the Greys shook
his finger furiously at me, so I walked aside till I got to a crag
where I scrambled down with some skirt-dance adventures, for I seem
to be quite strong and active, really, but ‘it’s the heart’; and I got
in the end to a mounting meadow, like the Tump at home, a quarter of
a mile or so to the left front of the mountain, and in it I found a
waterworks reservoir in a mound, and on the reservoir two German girls
lying quite silent with their chins on their fists.
“We were not very safe there, some of the enemy’s shells dropping
pretty near at the bottom of our meadow, but, then, we could see,
though the smoke blown from four cottages and a wood burning on the
slope bothered one’s vision.
“Our men were in four shelter-pits with loopholes, or rather in three,
for I could spy that one was full of nothing but forage-caps stuck on
sticks to draw the enemy’s fire; and there was a covered retreat in the
rear of them out of which I saw three wounded carried up.
“At the moment when I lay down the enemy were pretty near the mountain:
I could spy them like mice in a line darting out of one bit of cover
into another bit, like one in a bitter wind winning one’s way, their
artillery from somewhere miles away still pounding our mountain with
mortar and pompom, having the range exactly apparently, and ours
mouthing back across heaven from the mountain-top.
“Then I could see the enemy’s firing-line running from behind three
houses, then jumping a stone hedge, and their cheer for the charge
reached me faintly; the next minute they were on the hill-slope; and I
pitied them, they looked so little running up there in comparison with
the mountain and with the amount of sound around them that they were
foundering in, for they had hardly advanced ten yards when they broke
like thread before our thundering trenches, upon which our firing line
leapt the trenches to chase them, the reserve Inniskillings ran down to
help, and the signalling-station signalled the Greys, who ran up and
then down to pelt pell-mell into the trenches.
“I think, though, that the enemy’s ranks soon rallied, though I could
hardly tell what was happening for the hazes of smoke that smudged
the valley in patches; moreover, a country house that had broken into
smouldering rolled most of it in smoke.
“In the midst of it a sound made me glance to my left—cavalry!
“The road that runs north and south along the bottom of the mountain
winds eastward at the north end of the meadow where the reservoir is;
and on that east part of it I saw a squadron in column of sixes ride
out from behind a rise on tall white horses. At the same time I was
startled by the two German girls, who sprang wildly up, clapping their
hands and laughing, crying out “Cossacks! Cossacks!”—and no doubt they
were Cossacks, but they were certainly captained by a German, for I
soon heard his frantic howling—they howl ‘_Charge! Double! Hurrah!_’
at a charge—or they may have been a mixed body. Anyway, on they came
straight toward me with their busbies, dark-green knickerbockers and
top-boots, from slow to fast, the white horses fretting wildly neck to
neck, with their wild captain waving his sabre some yards in front of
all, calling them, while quicker and quicker the hundreds of their legs
drummed the ground with a steady growth of passion from a hand-gallop
to a field-gallop and from a field-gallop to an avalanche. It was
frightful, but nice.
“Meantime, they were being knocked over, man and animal, by the Greys,
and trampled, though I don’t think the Greys could see them yet for the
trees: so no wonder they made haste.
“Their aim was to take the mountain while our main body was engaged
away to the east with theirs, and I thought they were going to gallop
and sabre our position; but when they got under the north end of my
meadow, where they were in dead ground from the mountain, two-thirds of
them sprang off, without stopping, every first and third man tossing
their reins to every second man, as I could see by standing up and
peering; and in a moment these two-thirds were jumping the stone hedge
on the farther side of the road, leaving three dead there at the
corner, and I lost sight of them for a minute, till I saw them again
jumping the stone hedge, well spread out now, opposite the mountain:
and they charged.
“There seemed to me to be precious little cover for them on the slope,
for our men must have burnt off much of the bush before occupying it,
so these poor cavalrymen got it hot enough on those lower slopes from
the grim Greys, the row rolling without an instant’s interval for
minutes together, like ten million motor-bicycles going bang-bang,
strong stuff. I saw lots of them catch at imaginary balls, as they
dodged up from point to point; but they did not break; on they
struggled; and suddenly it struck me that the Greys’ fire was growing
slack, and then I was sure, and then it stopped, and my heart sank.
Why they had given in so soon I could not understand, and could have
cried. The two German girls were standing, grinning, on the very brink
of the reservoir, white as milk with excitement, and in another minute
they were screaming, clapping, ‘Victory! The Cossacks! Hurrah!’ Really,
Germans have very offensive manners, and nobody can possibly be more
excitable.
“Well, what followed I would not see the end of, it was too painful.
The Cossacks, or whatever they were, leapt clamouring upon our
trenches, and even as they leapt, poor dears, they were perishing
like sheep. I never saw such a thing—I would not see it. When they
leapt upon the trenches it was to find them empty, since the Greys had
retired secretly by covered retreats to other trenches hidden in some
fold of the hillside, and from that second position, even as the hot
Cossacks cheered in victory, came the withering shock of the Greys’
volley at horridly close quarters. Think of it, their tragic fix, the
mantrap, the massacre. The Cossacks skedaddled like a flock of cats
scattering from dogs, those Greys raining a purgatory of curses after
them, and I scattered also, getting over a gate into the road where a
third of the Cossacks were, holding the others’ horses, and I walked
along it some way, until I came to a wood, where I lay down....
“But no, I am not going to tell even you—not yet, anyway—what befell
me there. I will send you this lot by our post to-night. It is already
a long lot, and has taken me three afternoons, for I like, I suppose,
to talk of it all to you. You might write once: you could, secretly, if
you tried. Remember that I am sick, and even if I am a sinner, though I
do not admit that I am particularly, suffering atones for things. I’ll
think of you all on Christmas Day, for I don’t bear Alice any malice,
tell her, if you will of me, and will write, for I love you more than
any of you know. And will you send any news, and if you see any bits
about the Prince of Wales, will you send, as Sister Darling is madly in
love with him, poor girl, and I, too, I’m afraid. I wonder if any more
girls have gone sillified for him, the sillies?
“‘For her skipper was Ted,
And Teddy’s a bear....’
so don’t forget this, and think kindly of your own, and good-bye, God
bless you.
“+Eulalia.+”
As to “what befell” her in that wood where she “lay down,” it is soon
told.
In the wood she spied a church ruin, which was like a solitude within a
solitude, and, in love with solitude, she went into it, and lay within
a mass of bramble and bracken at its west end, which was a solitude
within a solitude within a solitude.
Indeed, her mind and body were now in a sicklier way than her letter
quite exhibits, so sick now, so afflicted and down with love, that only
a don of Cupid College could have shrewdly construed and doctored her.
It was the air-disease, nameless! Her bosom seemed to yearn for the
moon to nurse, and if this had been given her, she would have hungered
for the sun to hug. As she lay there within the bush, her lids shut,
her hands under her head, crushing her four-penny loaf of gold-hair,
there were moments when the Prince’s face appeared quite visibly to
her, like a vision just over her nose, staring eye to eye at her stare;
and she smiled then at peace, and then it was gone, and her body
tossed for ease, all sighs and pining, pallor and languishment.
Though she had been so very nigh to his life—and few men are fairies to
their wives—he was now quite a Fairy Prince in her brain, the shout of
the world about him perhaps girding him in purple glamours for her; and
since their married intimacy seemed not less than a hundred centuries
ago, she was as fresh and flushed with love as if she had never had
him: for it was necessary to her to look at the ring and reread his
letters, in order to realise that her once nearness to him was not
a dream. So with jealous shoots of pain she pictured him living and
moving among Mohammedan heavens set immensely above her, forgetting her
and her century-old caresses; and stodgy old Buckingham Palace, guarded
by stodgy bobbies, became to her fantasy an achingly enchanted fabric
of romance.
And the thought that it was she herself who had cast it all from her
with her own hand caused her to moan. But the notion of breaking down
in her undertaking does not seem ever now to have entered her head
even, stronger than all tugs and gusts in the gale of her nature being
self-respect; and still her word was, “if I’m a Princess, I’ll be
Princess-like.”
She was no longer conscious of the firing, which continued some twenty
minutes more, nor of its stoppage; what shocked her into consciousness
was a sense that _someone else_ was there in the ruins: she raised her
head; saw “Mademoiselle Oyone”; and in the very thick of her wonder
sucked in her breath, with “How truly lovely she is!”
There stood Oyone in the nave, at the middle, with that lissom hint of
her hips and waist, dressed as ever in reds and splendours, a bag in
her hand, a swath of veil across her forehead, and she was moving her
eyes warily round in such a way, that at once Eulalia was aware that
her visit here was secret.
But before ever Eulalia could reveal herself, Oyone was moving swiftly
into the chancel-part, and Eulalia was so astonished to see her move
her eyes slowly round once more, and then rapidly lift a slab by a
ring, and vanish down a hole, that she had sat hushed.
Now, however, she thought that she hardly ought to watch, so she
gingerly got up to go slipping on tiptoe away; but chanced to step on
some loose stones which rolled; stumbled: and Oyone heard it.
Oyone spurted like a bird to peer at the brink, but a little late to
see Eulalia, who had that instant slipped out. She thought, though,
that she could catch sounds out in the coppice, and made haste to
follow, prepared to slay.
She had already in her bag what she had come for, a bar of gold: the
fact being that the old woman, A-lu-te, was then dying, in consequence
of which there had been some difficulty as to the signature on cheques,
so the Chinese household was in straits for ready money, and Oyone had
come and stolen a bar of Li Ku Yu’s hoard, to break up.
And the question was: _had she been seen_?
She had more sense of ownership in this hoard than labourers in
their honest wage; she had more pride in it than scientists in their
conquests; and the mere thought that any god, or man, or fiend, should
ever dare to ferret it out and drag it from her grasp roused in her
that same gasping, arrogant rancour with which aristocracies resent
any attempt to wrest from their maw the rents of their atrocity and
dishonour. “Have I not _been seen_?” she asked Heaven; and _soft,
soft_, she dropped back the slab, and went peering through the forest,
but she was now well weighted with the bar in the bag, and before she
came to a sight of Eulalia, Eulalia was out on the road.
And now Oyone was left uncertain; but the mere suspicion that she
_might have been seen_ inflamed her to a hissing hate, and was quite
sufficient to be fatal to Eulalia. She had both dagger and fire-arm;
and she suddenly ran out to Eulalia, who was now moving westward toward
a main-station which the Germans had just set up at the roadside; and
she called to Eulalia: “What, Miss Bayley!”
“Think of our meeting!” she said, when Eulalia turned, bowed, and met
her: “You are in the army, then? To what part do you belong?”
“The 2nd Somersetshires.”
“And _I_ have been with an old friend at St Pierre-les-Sapins, and now
have lost my way in woods, looking for the station.”
Saying which, she kept her eyes on Eulalia’s face, and when Eulalia
faintly blushed at the lie, this infuriated Oyone. Her next words were:
“I can’t bear to see those men: will you walk a little this way with
me?”—she pointed eastward, for a little westward were two tents with
lanterns and flags at their doors, and operating-tables within, and
before them a throng of ambulance-waggons and stretchers with gashed
men on them, who gave out a sound of lamentation, and within the tents
two surgeons and their helps, as busily working, and as coolly, as
butchers.
Before these witnesses nothing was to be done by Oyone; and by a
blessed inspiration Eulalia replied to her invitation that she had to
go back to her post.
At this refusal Oyone’s eyes lightened with spite.
“But it is droll,” she grossly said, looking Eulalia straight in the
face, “that you, a Prince’s honey, should be here slaving! Or has he
tired of you?—you look a little ill. I hope _I_ am not the cause, for
His Royal Highness is always teasing me lately.”
Up went the other’s chin; and loftily she uttered a word and a letter:
“My h——!” then turned and went on her way westward, with a hotter wound
in her than those wounded.
Oyone, for her part, glanced at her watch, and went eastward, past the
wood of the ruin; but threw herself on a grass bank beyond a winding
of the road, writhing, wringing her hands, thinking: “I think she
did—I’ll see her dead, I must! or I’ll know no peace.... She said the
2nd Somersetshires....”
Meantime, Eulalia had turned back, to see what was under that slab
with the ring: for now rancour was in her, too; and she thought: “I
will.”
So, after passing the scene of stretchers and shrieks westward, she
passed it eastward again, saw no one on the road before her, ran into
the wood, the ruin, raised the flag, and not without some ghostly
tremors, for now it was growing dark, went down the steps.
Down there it was already black, but she struck a match from her
knapsack: and there before her against a broken wall stood a great cube
of gold bars glowing....
The weight of one that she lifted amazed her....
Now she sat on a step, considering it. And suddenly her hands started
up. “_This is the Six Millions...._”
_Yes!_ There was the “_Reichskriegs-schatz_” stamped in the bars—the
Six Millions found—and by her.
She laughed a little sillily, all in Aladdin-land, dazzled. But after a
time she laughed again not sillily, understanding much.
She saw now that she had long been sub-jealous of the half-caste;
and now that pang was over for ever. “_It was she_ who destroyed the
air-boats, she and Chinnery,” Eulalia was soon saying; “and she was
near to where he was shot in the Strand, for I saw her; it is she who
is at the bottom of everything; and it is not love, but hatred that is
between them!” Then she laughed.
But what now to do? She was there in the dark a long time meditating
it. To tell? To keep it dark? It occurred to her that six million
pounds might well buy her the right and title of Princess of Wales.
To whom, though, did this treasure rightfully belong? Not to Germany,
surely: it had been taken in war-time. Not to England: it had been
taken by private enterprise. Not, of course, to Oyone. It belonged to
“Teddy”! and, if to “Teddy,” then, to “Teddy’s” wife: it was _hers_!
And multimillionairesses can buy many things!
She would wait and see what she would do....
Meantime, Oyone had started to come back to the wood under an impulse
of vague disquiet; but then had been pulled the other way by having to
catch her train.