interest to give her, his thoughts were only of Griselda and the means
by which she might be found. His plan, so far as it could be called a
plan, was to run from house to house in the village street until he came
to the place where she was captive; but when he stepped into the road it
was to find it impossible of passage by reason of the men and vehicles
that choked the stretch in front of him. Almost opposite the door he
came through, a motor-ambulance, going eastward with its load, had
collided with an ammunition wagon going west, thus bringing to a
standstill more ammunition wagons and a battery of horse-artillery, its
foremost ranks thrown back in confusion by a threatening skid of the
ambulance. There was much whistling, and shouting of orders in the
attempt to reform and clear the road; horses reared from the suddenness
with which they were pulled up and men ran to their heads to steady
them. While the locked wheels were wrestled with, a bandaged bloody
face peered round the tail of the ambulance; the press swayed to and
fro, filling the road from side to side, and William, unable to move,
flattened back against the door from which he had issued, out of reach
of the wicked heels of a restive horse. For the first moment he
expected some one to seize and arrest him, and had he not unthinkingly
closed the door behind him he would have beat a hasty retreat; but there
was bloodier and busier work on hand than the corraling of stray
civilians, and no man touched or questioned him as he pressed himself
against the neat green-painted door. Struggling with their own most
urgent concerns, not a soldier so much as noticed him; and it was borne
in on William that if the wicked heels had caught him and kicked his
life out, not a man would have noticed that either.
Further down the street was a cloud of slowly rising black smoke--and
suddenly through it a banner of flame leaped up and waved triumphantly;
one of the tidy two-storied houses had been set afire by a shell. As
William watched the resplendent flare the crowd round the two vehicles
composed itself into something like order, and the ambulance--its
driver, by the excited movements of his mouth, still shouting out angry
explanations--was backed from the path of the advancing troops and
thrust crippled against the wall. The guns on one side of the road, the
wagons on the other stirred forward--at first slowly, then, as the line
straightened itself out, with a rattle of increasing speed. As they
passed the house afire the smoke rolled down on them and hid them from
William's sight.
*CHAPTER X*
With the conviction that no one was heeding his comings and goings, a
certain amount of assurance came back to William Tully, and as the way
cleared before him he set off down the street without any attempt at
concealment. By house to house visitation he sought for his wife
through the village; it was there she had been taken from him, and he
thrust back the deadly suspicion that she need not have remained in the
place where she had disappeared from his sight.
There was not a closed door in the length of the street, and nowhere was
his entrance barred; the call to arms had temporarily cleared the houses
of the invaders quartered in them, and he ran from one doorway to
another unhindered, calling on Griselda as he entered, looking into
every room, and then out to repeat the process. The two first houses
were empty from garret to cellar, but with signs of having been left,
recently and hurriedly, by the soldiers billeted therein; odds and ends
of military kit were scattered about, chairs overturned and left lying;
and in one room, a kitchen, on a half-extinguished fire, a blackened
frizzle of meat in a frying-pan filled the air with a smell of burning.
The third house he thought likewise empty; downstairs there was the same
litter--overthrown furniture and food half eaten on the table; but
opening the door of an upper room he came on a woman with three
children. The woman started to her feet as the door opened, a child
hugged to her bosom and other two clinging to her skirt; and William had
a passing impression of a plump, pallid face with lips apart and wide,
wet eyes, half-imploring and half-defiant. One of the children was
crying--its mouth was rounded in a roar--but you heard nothing of its
vigorous plaint for the louder din without. William made a gesture that
he meant to be reassuring, shut the door and ran back into the street.
He went in and out desperately, like a creature hunted or hunting; and,
having drawn blank in house after house, the deadly thought refused to
be thrust and kept under. If they had taken her away, she might be ...
anywhere! East or west, gone in any direction, and leaving no clue for
her following. Anywhere in a blind incomprehensible world, where men
killed men and might was right, and life, as he knew it from his
childhood up, had ended in an orgy of devilry! He went on running from
house to house, while shells screamed and burst and guns clattered by,
and no man gave heed to his running or the tumult and torture of his
fears. Upstairs and down and out again--upstairs and down and out.
He was nearing the end of the street when he found her at last; in the
upper back room of a little white house some yards beyond the building
in flames, and not far from the spot where they had seen the hostages
die. She was alone and did not move when he flung the door open;
crouched in a corner with her head on her knees, she neither saw nor
heard him. For an instant it seemed to him that his strength would fail
him for gladness, and he staggered and held to the door; as the
giddiness passed he ran to her, babbling inaudible relief, and pulled
the hands from her face. He had an instant's glimpse of it, white and
tear-marked, with swollen lips and red eyes; then, as his arms went
round her and he had her up from the floor, it went down on his shoulder
and was hidden. He felt her clinging to him, trembling against him,
sobbing against him while he held her--and all his soul was a passion of
endearment and thankfulness.... So for a minute or two--perhaps
longer--they clung to each other, reunited: until William, his sense of
their peril returning, sought to urge his wife to the door.
She came with him for a step or two, her head still on his shoulder;
then, suddenly, she shivered and wrestled in his arms, thrust him from
her, rushed back to the end of the room and leaned against it, shaking
with misery. Her arm was raised over her hidden face and pressed
against the wall; and he saw what he had not seen before, that the
sleeve was torn and the flesh near the wrist bruised and reddened. He
saw also--his eyes being opened--that it was not only her hair that was
tumbled; all her dress was disordered and awry. There was another tear
under the armpit where the sleeve had given way and the white of her
underlinen showed through the gap.... His heart cried out to him that
she had struggled merely as a captive, had been restrained by brute
force from escaping--but his own eyes had seen that she turned from him
as if there was a barrier between them, as if there was something to
hide that yet she wished him to know.... For a moment he fought with the
certainty, and then it came down on him like a storm: for once in his
life his imagination was vivid, and he saw with the eyes of his mind as
clearly as with the eyes of his body. All the details, the animal
details, her cries and her pitiful wrestlings; and the phrase
"licentious soldiery" personified in the face of the man who had been
Griselda's gaoler. Round and roughly good-humoured in repose with black
eyebrows and a blue-black chin.... He caught her by the hands and said
something to her--jerked out words that stammered and questioned--and
she sobbed and turned her face from him again.... After that he could
not remember what he felt or how long he stood in the middle of the
room, oblivious of danger and staring at her heaving shoulders and the
tumbled hair that covered them; but it seemed to him that he talked and
moved his hands and hated--and did not know what to do.
In the end there must have come to him some measure of helpless
acquiescence, or perhaps he was quieted and taken out of himself by the
need of giving help to Griselda. After how long he knew not he found
himself once more with his arms around her; she let him take her hand,
he kissed it and stroked her poor hair. This time she came with him
when he led her to the door, and they went down the stairway together.
Near the street door she hesitated and halted, and he saw she had
something to say.
"Where are we going?" she asked, with her lips to his ear. "Can we get
away?"
He told her he thought so, that now was the time when they might slip
away unnoticed--trying to encourage her by the assumption of a greater
confidence than he felt. Fortune favoured them, however, and the
assumption of confidence was justified; though the bombardment had
slackened as suddenly as it had begun, the remnant of German soldiery
left in the place was still too much occupied with its own concerns to
interfere with a couple of civilians seeking safety in the rear of the
fire-zone, and no one paid any heed to them as they made their way along
the street. They turned inevitably westward--away from the guns--down
the road they had come that morning: two hunted, dishevelled little
figures, keeping well to the wall and glancing over their shoulders.
The crush of wagons, of guns and men, had moved forward and out of the
village, which, for the moment, seemed clear of all but
non-combatants--save for the ubiquitous cyclist who dashed backwards and
forwards in his dust. An ambulance was discharging its load at a
building whence waved the Red Cross, and near at hand, but out of sight,
a battery was thudding regularly; but of the few uniformed figures in
the street itself there was none whose business it was to interest
himself in their movements. They hurried on, clinging to each other and
hugging the wall--except when a heap of fallen brickwork, a derelict
vehicle or other obstacle forced them out into the road.
They were almost at the entry of the village when they came upon such an
obstacle: the upper part of one of the endmost houses had evidently been
struck by a shell, for a large slice of roof and outside wall had
crumbled to the pathway below. It had crumbled but recently, since the
dust was still clouding thickly above the ruin and veiling the roadway
beyond it; hence, as they skirted its borders, it was not until he was
actually upon them that they were aware of a motor-cyclist speeding
furiously out of the dusk. The roar of the battery a few yards away had
drowned the whirr of his machine, and Griselda was almost under it
before she had warning of its coming. The stooping rider yelled and
swerved, but not enough to avoid her; she went down, flung sideways,
while the cyclist almost ran on to the heap of rubble on his
right--then, recovering his balance, dashed forward and was lost in the
dusk. Save for that momentary swerve and stagger, he had passed like a
bolt on his errand, leaving Griselda crumpled in the road at William's
feet. To his mind, no doubt, a mishap most luckily avoided. Griselda
lay without moving, her face to the dust, and for one tortured moment
William thought the life beaten out of her; but when he raised her, her
lips moved, as if in a moan, and as he dragged her for safety to the
side of the road she turned her head on his arm. He laid her down while
he ran for water from the river; panted to its brim, soaked his
handkerchief for lack of a cup, brought it back and pressed it to her
forehead. Her eyes, when she opened them, were glazed with pain and her
lips drawn tightly to her teeth; when he wanted to raise her to a
sitting position she caught his hand thrust it from her and lay with her
white face working. So she lay, for minutes that seemed hours, with her
husband kneeling beside her.... Men passed them but stayed not; and
once, when William looked up, a car was speeding by with helmeted
officers inside it--too intent on their own hasty business of death to
have so much as a glance to spare for a woman in agony of bodily pain
and a man in agony of mind.
The night had come down before Griselda was able to move. With its fall
the near-by battery was silenced and the distant thunder less frequent;
so that William was able to hear her when she spoke and asked him to
lift her. He sobbed for joy as he lifted her, gently and trembling lest
he hurt her; she sat leaning on his arm, breathing painfully and telling
him in jerks that it was her side that pained her most--her left side
and her left arm, but most of all her side. At first she seemed dazed
and conscious only of her sufferings--whimpered about them pitifully
with intervals of silence--but after ten minutes or so she caught his
sleeve and tugged it.
"Let's get away. Help me up!"
He suggested that she should rest a little longer, but she urged him
with trembling, "Let's get away!" and he had perforce to raise her. In
spite of the fever for flight that had taken possession of her she cried
out as he helped her to her feet and stood swaying with her eyes shut
and her teeth bitten hard together. He would have lain her down again,
but she signed a "No, no!" at the attempt and gripped at his shoulder to
steady herself; then, after a moment, guided his arm round her body, so
that he could hold her without giving unnecessary pain.
"You mustn't press my side--I can't bear it. But if you put your hand on
my shoulder----"
They moved away from the village at a snail's pace, Griselda leaning
heavily on her husband. Behind them at first was the red light from
burning houses; but as they crawled onwards the darkness of the valley
closed in on them until, in the sombre shadow of the cliff, William
could only distinguish his wife's face as a whitish patch upon his
shoulder. When she groaned, as she did from time to time, he halted to
give her relief, but she would never allow him to stand for more than a
minute or two; after a few painful breaths there would come the tug of
her fingers at his coat that was the sign to move forward again. Once
or twice she whispered to know if any one were coming after them, and he
could feel her whole body a-quiver with fear at the thought.
Barred in by cliff to right and river to left, they kept perforce to the
road--or, rather, to the turf that bordered it. The traffic on the road
itself had not ceased with the falling of night; cars were coming up and
guns were coming up and the valley was alive with their rumble--and at
every passing Griselda shrank and her fingers shivered in their grip
upon William's sleeve.
"Can't we get away from them?" she whispered at last. "Right away and
hide--can't we turn off the road?"
He said helplessly that he did not know where, until they reached the
entrance to their valley. "It's all cliff--and the river on the other
side."
She had known it without asking; there was nothing for it but to drag
herself along. To both the distance was never-ending; Griselda's terror
of recapture communicated itself to her husband, and he shivered even as
she did at the rattle of a passing car. Instinctively they kept to the
shadow, stumbling in its blackness over the uneven ground below the
cliff. Once, when a couple of patrolling horsemen halted near them in
the roadway, they crouched and held their breath during an eternity of
dreadful seconds while they prayed that they had not been noticed. It
seemed to William that his heart stopped beating when one of the
horsemen walked his beast a yard or two nearer and flashed a light into
their faces; but the man, having surveyed them, turned away
indifferently and followed his comrade down the road. That was just
before they came to the gap in the heights that led into the valley of
silence.
As they entered it for the last time, in both their minds was the
thought that they might find it barred to them; and the beating of their
hearts was loud in their ears as they crept into its friendly shadow.
"The woods," Griselda whispered.
They turned into the woods and took cover; and, with a yard or two, the
blackness under the trees had closed in on them, blotting out all things
from sight. They halted because they could see to walk no further.
"Let me down," Griselda said--and her husband knew by the gasp in her
voice that she was at the end of her powers of endurance. He explored
with an outstretched hand for a tree trunk and lowered her gently to the
ground with her back supported against it; she panted relief as he sat
down beside her and groped for her fingers in the darkness.... So they
sat holding to each other and enveloped in thickest night.
The guns had died down altogether, and the rumble from the road, though
almost continuous was dulled--so that William could hear his wife's
uneven breathing and the stealthy whisper of the trees. He sat holding
Griselda's hand and staring into the blackness, a man dazed and
confounded; who yesterday was happy lover and self-respecting citizen
and to-day had suffered stripes, been slave and fugitive, learned the
evil wrought on his wife.
Thinking on it afterwards, he wondered that he had closed an eye; yet he
had sat in the darkness but a very few minutes when, swiftly and without
warning, he fell into a heavy sleep.
*CHAPTER XI*
He woke with the blaze of the eastern sun in his eyes, and on the first
sensation of bewilderment at finding his bed was moss, came a rush of
remembrance and with it self-reproach--he had slept while Griselda
suffered. He knelt and bent over her as she lay still asleep, huddled
on her right side; her face was flushed, her lips were cracked, and she
was breathing in heavy little snorts. As he knelt and gazed the thunder
of yesterday broke out in the distance, and Griselda stirred and woke
moaning.
Her first cry was for water, and in the insistence of her thirst she was
oblivious of everything but her burning need to slake it; he broke cover
and ran to the stream, some fifty yards away, soaked his handkerchief
and made a tight cup of his hands. The cup was a failure, and the little
that was left in it when he reached Griselda was spilled when she tried
to drink; but the dripping handkerchief she sucked at eagerly and gave
back for another soaking. He was about to break cover to wet it again
when he caught sight first of one, then of half-a-dozen horsemen
entering the valley by the gap; and shrank back, cowering, into the
friendly shelter of the tree-trunks--sick with uncertainty as to whether
or no they had seen him. He judged not when he saw them dismount and
picket their horses; and having watched them long enough to see that
they were making preparations for a meal, he turned and crept back to
Griselda.
The terror of yesterday came down on her when she heard his whispered
news. A moment before she had seemed incapable of movement, lain
crumpled on her side and repulsed, with a feverish pettishness, his
efforts to stir and raise her; now she clung to him and struggled to her
feet, even pain forgotten in the passion for instant flight. So,
holding together, they fled again: fled crawling, they knew not whither.
Two instincts guided them and directed their stumbling footsteps: the
instinct to leave far behind them the threat of the guns and the
instinct to keep out of sight. Thus they held to the woods above the
valley of silence, avoiding all paths that led out into the open; their
direction, roughly, was southward--though they did not know it--and they
dragged a mile, or even less, where a man in health might make five.
When they had gone some few hundred yards they struck the trickle of a
hill-side rivulet on its way to join the stream in the valley. At the
sound of its babble Griselda cried out and tried to hasten, and, when
they came to it, slipped down till she could thrust her face into the
water and drink like the sun-parched Israelites who marched with Gideon.
They drank, they dabbled in it, bathed hands and feet, and Griselda
washed her broken side--touching it gingerly and not daring to pull away
the linen that the blood had caked to the flesh. After that William
helped her to her feet and they dragged on further.
If they found water in abundance, they found but little to eat; and
though Griselda made no complaint of hunger, as the hours went by it
gnawed at her husband's vitals. At first their path lay chiefly through
beechwoods bare of undergrowth, and they had been an hour or two on
their way before they came to blackberry bushes. Upon these William
fell, tearing his hands on the thorns by his eager stripping of the
bushes; Griselda would hardly touch them, but he shovelled them into his
mouth and ate long and voraciously. He had toiled much the day before
and eaten little--a scanty breakfast and the scraps of bread and meat
allotted by his captors at midday--and, shovel as he might, the berries
were a poor substitute for the meal he craved and dreamed of. That was
a meal which floated before the eye of his mind as phantom ham and eggs,
phantom cuts from the joint, thick slabs of well-buttered bread;
something solid that a man could set his teeth in and gnaw till his
stomach was satisfied. He was ashamed of the way in which food and the
longing for food possessed him--so that there were moments when the
phantom joint was more present to his mind than Griselda or the fear of
death itself.
To the phase of violent and savage hunger succeeded, with hours, a giddy
dreaminess, the result of growing exhaustion. As the day wore on and
exhaustion increased, his mind, like his body, refused to work
connectedly; his feet often stumbled and he was incapable of consecutive
thought. Once he found himself sitting with Griselda under a
beech-tree, holding her fingers and considering how they had come there
and why they had got to go on; and wandering off into vague recollection
of the story of a knightly lover who had carried his mistress long miles
through a forest in his arms. The details of the story escaped his
memory and he sought for them with pettish insistence; with perhaps at
the back of his mind some idea, born of brain-fag, that, did he but
remember them, he could do the same service for Griselda.
He had soon lost all sense of direction; but the instinct to hide never
left him, and once or twice, when the wood seemed to be opening out, he
drew his wife back to the solitude under the trees. With the passing of
the hours their rests by the way grew longer; Griselda was able to keep
her feet for a few minutes only before she muttered or signed a request
for another halt. Whereat William would lower her to the ground where
she propped herself against a tree-trunk or lay huddled and silent with
closed eyes.
At one such halt he fell suddenly and helplessly asleep; perhaps
Griselda did the same, for though the sun was high when he sat him down
the woods were heavy with blue dusk when she roused him by a tugging at
his sleeve. She was craving again for water; her lips were cracked for
the want of it. They rose and went blindly in search--halting every few
minutes as much to strain their ears for the longed-for ripple as to
give Griselda strength. More than once she was at failing point; so much
so that he suggested she should lie down while he hunted further for a
stream. She refused, trembling at the idea of being left
alone--unreasonably, but perhaps wisely, since William, astray in the
darkening woods, might well have had difficulty in finding his way to
her again.
The dusk was more than dusk before they found what they sought; it was
actual darkness of night descending to cover the earth. They had halted
perforce more than once when Griselda could go no further; but always
her thirst burned her, and she rose and struggled forward again. She
was past speaking when they came on a clearing, and then on a stream
that ran through it, of which they were only aware when they trod into
the marshy ground at its brim. She drank heavily, lay inert and seemed
to sleep.