Whatever it was she had heard or not heard from Germany, Nan presently
unpacked her trunk and installed herself in a flat in Westminster, with
a servant, two aged Belgian refugee women, and the grand-son of one of
them, a little boy of five.
That for some time was the extent of Napier's knowledge of what was
going on.
For the rest of that bewildering, tormenting autumn he had, with one or
two exceptions, only fleeting and infrequent glimpses of the girl. And
this in spite of the fact that she and Madge had set up an intimate
friendship. Until a certain day in December, the two were often together
both at the Lowndes Square house and at Nan's flat. The Belgian women,
Napier gathered, were a sore trial. But that is another story.
Napier knew quite well he hadn't his lack of sympathy with her Belgian
complications to thank for the sense of _gene_, of being on new and
uncertain ground in such encounters with Nan as the times permitted. Was
it because she knew, and resented, his having prevented her going to
Germany in Greta's wake? Or was it because some inkling had reached her
as to the rifling of Greta's room at Lamborough? Madge couldn't have
resisted the temptation to tell Nan the whole story by now. And why
should Napier alone keep silence? Why, anyway, keep up this fiction of
Greta's impeccability? "I'll have it out with Nan at the very first
opportunity!"
Napier was almost happy, for a time, anticipating his first opportunity.
It came after a highly uncomfortable luncheon at Lowndes Square, the
occasion of Julian's last appearance in that house where, ever since
boyhood, he had been so welcome.
Ten minutes after the older people had sat down, Madge came in, bringing
Julian and Nan Ellis. The girls wore that look of happy responsibility
that had begun to shine on young faces in England.
"I've joined the Emergency Corps," Madge announced.
"Your new excuse for being late for meals," Sir William exclaimed, with
a _brusquerie_ intended to strike a few enlivening sparks out of
Wildfire. And she actually let it pass.
Lady McIntyre, in her fashionable mourning, more shrunken and piteous
than ever, went on addressing to Julian her polite inanities, couched
for the most part in that form of acknowledged intellectual poverty, the
question. How many more months did Julian think this dreadful war was
going to last? "They" couldn't get home by Christmas now, _could_ they?
Wasn't it wicked, after _promising_? And what did Julian think about the
letters in the papers about possible air raids?
"Wildest folly ever talked!" Sir William interjected.
"It's true," said Lady McIntyre, hopefully. "William has never believed
there's the least chance of a Zeppelin reaching England."
"As much as your descending on Berlin out of a parachute. To insure
against air raids is to waste money and cocker up the Germans."
"Do you think so, too?" Lady McIntyre fixed her blue eyes on Julian
Grant's face. "Do you know, in spite of what William says, _I_ can't
help feeling that every one who goes out at night in these dreadful
times ought to take precautions." As no one responded, she strengthened
her point. "I hear the streets grow darker and darker. Every night--yes,
every single night--people are run over. The only way is for everybody
who goes out at night to insure themselves."
Nobody seemed to have the heart to disturb her apparent belief that to
insure against accident meant that a stop would be put to these
regrettable affairs.
"All this talk in the papers," Sir William went on, "is pure concession
to panic. Like the nonsense about what the submarines might do. Nothing
could suit Germany's book better."
"Except, I suppose, sinking our ships." For the first time Julian took
some interest in the conversation.
"Sinking our ships!" quavered Lady McIntyre.
"I should have thought the loss of the _Aboukir_ and _Cressy_ (those
awful casualty-lists!) might have made people a little less ready to
talk about our invulnerable Navy."
"So,"--Sir William laid down his knife and fork and fell to
seal-rattling under the table--"so you've come now to doubt the power of
the British Navy!"
"I've come," said Julian, "to see the danger of not doubting it."
The seals joined the general silence.
"I wonder," Sir William remarked dryly, "what your father would say to
your views."
"I could tell you, sir, if it mattered."
"If it mattered! God bless my soul!" Sir William looked at Julian for
the first time with cold dislike.
* * * * *
After luncheon the younger members of the party still hung aimlessly
about the table in the hall, while Sir William and Lady McIntyre opened
the letters brought by the latest post.
Napier tried in vain, by any of the unmarked means, to detach Nan from
the others. Finally he said, with less indirectness than he often
permitted himself, "I never see you now. Are you still too devoured by
the Belgian locusts to have anything left for your older--friends?"
"Locusts! How _can_ you? I am not at all devoured. Or, if I am, it's by
something _quite_ different." She said it with her air of new
importance.
"But in the midst of it all,"--she lowered her voice and spoke now as
one positively beset by weighty affairs--"I keep worrying about Julian.
Just because,"--she glanced back at him as he stood talking "Emergency
Corps" with Madge--"just because he doesn't in the least worry about
himself. Have you heard about the way his relations are behaving?"
"No," said Napier, disingenuously. "How are they behaving?"
"Simply abominably. Some of his friends, too. They cold-shoulder him in
private; and in public--they cut him!" Her eyes gleamed with anger. "If
they think that's the way to discourage Julian, they know very little!"
"I wish some one would discourage him from rubbing my old man the wrong
way."
"He doesn't mean to," she said, with a proprietary air that haunted
Gavan afterwards, "but, you see, Sir William and Julian approach
everything from opposite poles."
Behind his soreness and annoyance, Napier was secretly amused at "the
child's judicial air," as he characterized it to himself. "At opposite
poles, are they? It would be interesting to know what they were--those
'poles.'"
"Oh, you think I don't know? Well, I do. Sir William's idea of the
problem of government is the same as his idea of the problem of the
individual. To acquire. Julian's is to apportion. To administer."
"Who told you all that?" he inquired gently.
She reddened. "You can't say it isn't so. To take care of other people's
interests," repeated the parrot, "is the only way to take care of your
own."
"Does Julian find the axiom work in his case?"
She reflected a trifle anxiously. "You've heard then?"
"Heard--?"
"His father has cut down Julian's income."
No, Napier hadn't heard that, but he wasn't surprised. Nan looked at
him, indignant.
"You aren't surprised? You take it as a matter of course!" She turned
away her head as she said, "Oh! I wish I could just once see his
mother--" She stopped short. After considering an instant, "You couldn't
manage it, I suppose?"
No, _that_ wasn't a thing Napier could manage. He positively welcomed
the exclamation from Lady McIntyre which cut the colloquy short.
"Another--_upon_ my word!" An envelope fluttered to the waste-paper
basket. She held an open paper in her hand.
"Another what, mum?" Madge left Julian to lean over her mother's
shoulder. "Oh!" One glance was enough for Madge. She turned away. But
one glance didn't suffice for Lady McIntyre. "It's too, _too_ much!" She
went over to Sir William, who had withdrawn with his letters to the
window. They stood talking in lowered voices.
Nan's inquiring look met Madge's offhand explanation: "Another of
Greta's bills. That makes L160, just for furs."
"Oh!" Nan stood up, then, in an access of shyness, "Just go and ask your
mother to let me have it."
"No good!" Wildfire shook her mane. "She won't. She thinks you've had
enough of 'em sent direct to you."
"Your mother doesn't understand. It's all right. I'm taking care of
these things for Greta."
"Have you had another letter?" Wildfire demanded.
"No. I told you she's nursing her father day and night. She hasn't time
to; besides, it's understood."
"Why do some of the bills come to us and some to you?"
Nan stood nonplussed an instant and then said:
"It's all right, I tell you."
"You mean you think she's going to pay you back?"
"Well, of course." Nan crossed the room and stood a moment in front of
Lady McIntyre, with hand extended and speaking in an undertone.
"You may take it from me"--Sir William didn't moderate his tone--"Miss
von Schwarzenberg _won't_ pay the money back." His voice rose higher
over the low protest. "For one thing, she can't."
"You think she hasn't got it?" Nan inquired.
"Oh, I haven't much doubt she's _got_ it; but even if she wanted to
repay you, she won't be allowed to send money out of Germany."
"Surely she'll be allowed to pay her debts?"
"Miss Greta would tell you, 'No trading allowed with the enemy.'" Sir
William dismissed the matter with decision.
"You hear that, Julian? Not _allowed_ to pay her debts!"
Nan's instinctive turning to Julian for sympathy and understanding was
no more lost on Napier than Julian's comment, "There's no end to the
little wickednesses of war as well as the great central one." He threw
down the illustrated paper he'd been glancing at and took his hat. "Come
along," he said to Nan under his breath. "Let's get out of this."
"Good-by." She held out her hand to Napier as he stood looking at the
paper Sir William had given him. "_I'm_ sure, if you aren't, Greta
didn't know that horrid new rule."
"Good-by," was all Napier said.
"Of course she didn't know!" Julian atoned for the other's omission.
"Come," he repeated impatiently, as Nan stood saying last things to
Madge. "They're expecting us."
She started. "Expecting me too?"
"Yes, expecting you."
The girl glowed. No more urging needed.
* * * * *
Napier had, even then, a fairly shrewd idea of who was expecting them.
And he had let her go without asking her the question he meant to ask!
Was it worth while, after all? Wasn't it enough to know that since Greta
von Schwarzenberg had left bills for furs, and trunks, and clothing to
be paid for by her friends, she would inevitably leave a still heavier
account to be paid for by her enemy? Napier "paid" every time he met Nan
Ellis, and he knew he paid.
A deep disheartenment laid hold of him. His only escape from it was
work. Enough of that and to spare. He had difficulty in finding time for
drill, even at "the oddest hours"--odd for a young gentleman of his
habits. Yet for the work that lay closest to his heart odd hours were
all that Gavan had. This came about partly by reason of Sir William's
increased need for, and increased dependence on, his secretary, partly
because of his impatience with the desire of men like Gavan to join
their university corps, or some other O. T. C. "and waste their time
playing at soldiers." It was no good for Gavan to remind Sir William of
the lack of officers to fill the gaps abroad, and the lack of
instructors at home. "By the time you'd be able to instruct anybody the
war'll be over!"
And still Gavan managed double duty during the last weeks of the
fateful old year and the early days of the problematic new. The thoughts
of people at home, after following day by day, hour by hour, the bloody
November struggle for Ypres, settled now on those survivors who were
making their first acquaintance with the stark misery of winter in the
trenches. It stood to reason this sort of thing _couldn't_ go on.
The next thing would be peace.
Those who believed in Kitchener agreed that no man as shrewd as K. of K.
had ever made a prophecy so absurd on the face of it as that alleged
dictum of his, "The war will last three years." The only way of
understanding it was to interpret it as a recruiting call, and a final
flourish in the face of the Teuton. K. of K. must have 100,000 men. Have
'em at once, too. Let the Germans put _that_ in their pipes and smoke
it!
Meanwhile the Germans were struggling for Calais and bombarding Rheims,
and over on the other side of the world President Wilson talked peace.
Napier watched the gradual khaki-ing that came over the male population
of the United Kingdom; watched regiments marching by day to the tune of
"Tipperary," marching by night very quietly, on each man's shoulder a
long white bundle, like little canvas bolsters--men on their way to
entrain for the front, following in the wake of that fourth of the
Expeditionary Army which had already fallen. With as little publicity as
possible, hospitals multiplied. People began to look upon wounded
soldiers in the streets without that shuddering, first passion of pity,
that mingled gratitude and anger at the price exacted of those maimed
men. "The price of our present, and our children's future safety," said
the many. "The price of our past blundering," said the few. Of these,
Julian, in season and out of season, rubbed in the unwelcome truth.
Napier was seeing nearly as little in these days of Julian as of Nan.
They had had high words over the development and intensification of
Julian's opposition to the war, and in particular over his strictures on
the Government. Napier had studiously avoided all reference to Nan
Ellis. Such efforts as had been possible to keep in touch with her were
mainly unsuccessful. He had a minimum of time he could call his own, and
she apparently had none at all. She was never at the little flat in
Westminster except late at night, and she was seldom in Lowndes Square.
Madge, too, resented this preoccupation on the part of her new ally.
"Oh, don't ask _me_ where she is. Gone to see some of Mr. Grant's queer
friends, I suppose."
By this side wind and that, he gathered that Nan was being swept into
the little pacifico-philosophic group and was thick as thieves with
certain men and women whose names were beginning to be anathema to the
general public. Gradually, in Napier's mind, the conviction tightened.
If something isn't done, they'll not only have made a convert of that
girl, they'll be making use of her--some use or other, God knew
what!--for their nefarious ends.
Instead of Julian's protecting her, he'd likely as not do the other
thing. All from the loftiest motives!
And upon that, Napier's first motion of enmity toward the man who had
been his closest friend. Strangely to his own sense, with far more
bitterness than he resented Julian's notorious anti-war work, Napier
would, as he knew now, resent the harnessing of the airy spirit of the
girl to that lumbering and ill-looked-on car.
What was to be done?
He had stood aside out of loyalty to his friend, who was also (as he
reminded himself a thousand times) the first comer in the field. The
field of private feeling. Yes. But there was no obligation upon Napier
to stand aside while the girl he loved was swamped in a bog of
disloyalty to the country, and of personal reprobation. Worse. Of
personal danger.
No! he wasn't going to look on at that and not raise a hand. The old
struggle which he thought he had abandoned, wearing this new face,
became possible once more. Possible? It became inevitable. For it had
become a duty. So he told himself.
The trouble was that on the rare occasions when he was with her,
something in the new post-Greta manner of the girl--an intangible but
effectual barrier--so barred the way to even the beginning of renewed
confidence, that Napier, over-worked, over-anxious, found the edge of
his impulse turned. He would leave her, saying to himself, "I'll have
this out with Julian." And when he found himself with Julian for a few
hasty minutes, "having it out" proved so baulked and inconclusive a
business, "I must tackle Nan," Napier would say to himself.
Not that he failed altogether to tackle Julian, nor to tackle him on the
admittedly burning questions: such as Julian's speech introducing a
deputation to the Prime Minister, or that highly provocative letter
assailing British pre-war diplomacy, the letter rejected by the "Times"
and "accepted, of course, by the dingiest radical rag in the kingdom."
"They are using you!" Napier had burst out.
"I am content to be used. I ask nothing better."
More quietly, more gravely, Napier agreed it was a thing about which a
man must be his own judge. But _by so much_ he must hesitate to judge
for others. "The Pacifists are making a cat's-paw of you, I tell you. If
you like that for yourself ..." he shrugged. Then, abandoning his
momentary return to the _laissez-aller_ form of other days, he looked
straight into Julian's eyes and with an earnestness that would have
enlightened any one but Grant, "I don't know how you reconcile it to
your conscience to involve a girl in such ..." he broke off. As Julian
stood waiting serenely: "A girl as young and as far away from home--"
"Nan! Oh, you don't know Nan!"
* * * * *
Another time: "Why drag her into--all this?" Gavan demanded. "It isn't
as if she could do anything."
"Oh, can't she!"
"_What_, in the name of--"
* * * * *
Although Julian wouldn't answer, an opportunity came to put the question
to Nan. Napier found himself sitting opposite her at dinner in Lowndes
Square on the night following the House of Commons debate on German
spies. That topic, in the forefront of every mind, was ignored by tacit
consent. Conversation fell for a few memorable minutes on the appalling
statement, just issued officially, that there had been 57,000 casualties
in the British Expeditionary Force up to the end of October. How many
had fallen since in the bloody struggle about Ypres, fiercest of the
war, and how many on either side would survive the stark misery of that
first little-prepared-for winter in the trenches, no one present had
heart to ask. But the question, urged in print and cried from platforms
by Julian and his friends, was there in the girl's face.
Sir William seemed to answer by saying the one redeeming feature of the
business was that it was too awful to last. The Germans must see they
have failed.
"Why," the girl asked, with her candid eyes on her host, "if the
Government believed that, why was Lord Kitchener calling for a hundred
thousand men?"
"Oh, _that_--that was to show the Germans what they had to expect if
they _didn't_ come to their senses."
While the dessert was going round, she got up, with a look at the clock
and an apology. It was understood that she had an engagement.
"Always an emergency in these days," Sir William mocked pleasantly at
the Women's Corps. "Gavan, see they get her a taxi, will you?"
The footman's whistle grew fainter as Napier helped her into her coat.
They hadn't been alone since those hurried moments on the platform after
Greta had gone. Something now in her slight awkwardness as she struggled
with her coat, her increased anxiety to be off ("I ought to have gone
ten minutes ago. I can always find a cab quicker than a footman") gave
Napier a feeling that he had misinterpreted her avoidance. Not the new
Greta-born distrust of him, but distrust of herself. His heart rose at
that quick conviction. Rogers wouldn't be long, he reassured her, and
then: "I wish he might, or, rather, I wish I hadn't to go back to the
House with Sir William. I'd take you wherever it is you are going." He
stopped suddenly.
"Would you? Would you really? That's what I've been longing to ask.
_You_ wouldn't sit dumb, helpless, like me if once you'd heard Julian--"
"I'm under the impression that I _have_ 'heard Julian.'"
"No! no! not just arguing with you. I mean at one of the meetings."
"I see. Where I can't answer back."
"And now you're looking like that!" She turned away with nervous
abruptness, but he had interposed between her and the doorknob.
"And you--have you any idea how unhappy _you_ are looking?"
"Well, why not?--if it is, as Julian says, 'such a brute of a world.'"
"_Julian_ oughtn't to think so," Napier said bitterly. "Julian has
you--"
"Oh, has he! Poor Julian!"
"Do you mean he hasn't?" They were both trembling.
"I mean, whether he has or hasn't, we aren't rid of the miserableness.
Once you are started wrong, you can't get right, it seems. Not
without--" Suddenly her eyes filled. A shower of words tumbled out in a
shaken whisper: "At first--oh, for long, I thought you hardly knew I was
there, at Kirklamont, in the world! Then, when you began to notice me,
it was only to criticize me. Oh, I used to see you laughing; not with
your mouth, with your eyes. You laughed at Julian, too, for thinking I
was all right." She broke in upon his protest, which was none the less
horrified for being self-convicted.
"Yes, yes; you tried to prevent Julian from caring. I could have
forgiven you that," she said, with her look of indignant candor; "yes, I
could _easily_ have forgiven you if you'd done it from any _nice_
reason, like jealousy. You _didn't_ do it from a nice reason." Still
under her breath, she hurled it at him.
"Hush! They might--" he glanced at the dining-room door.
"You thought I shouldn't 'do.' Julian--well, maybe you know what he
thought. So I let him try to make up to me. He couldn't, but I let him
try. And what's come out of it all is that Julian--"
"Yes, yes; I know, I know."
"I've made him care! I've made him build on me! And can't you see"--she
seemed to arraign Napier's own loyalty as she stood there under the hall
light, vehement, unhappy--"can't you see Julian needs his friends now as
he never did before?" In the little pause her excitement mounted. "And
besides that, Julian's right about the war. And you are wrong. Oh, why
_are_ you!" she cried out of the aching that comes of conflict between
love of a person and hate of his creed.
They heard a taxi stop. She caught up her gloves. "Do you know what I
kept thinking at dinner? It's what I always think when people talk like
Sir William, about letting the war go on for Kitchener's three mortal
years. I kept thinking that Julian won't ever come here again. And what
a pity it was! Unless you--_do_ come and hear him, Gavan, with me!
To-morrow afternoon. _Please!_"
"I'd do most things for you," he said; "not that."
* * * * *
And then he went and did it. At least, he went alone.
Had the authorities not believed that outside the narrow--so narrow as
to be negligible--limits of the League for a Negotiated Peace, no
general notice would be taken of so unpopular an enterprise, the
open-air meeting would have been interdicted. The authorities had not
reflected that unpopularity, if only it is great enough, is as sure a
draw as its opposite.
Napier left the taxi and let himself be carried along in the human
current to a place opposite that part of the improvised platform where a
speaker stood facing the people. The thick-set figure of the ex-member
of Parliament stood in a storm of booing, of derisive shouts and groans
that ultimately drowned his appeal.
No sooner had they howled him down than a much younger man stood up
there facing the crowd. Julian. He spoke for a good twenty minutes. His
boyishness, and that something of moral passion that compelled you to
listen to Julian, held the people quiet through the earlier minutes, and
held them muttering and threatening up to the bursting of the storm.
His voice reached Napier tired and hoarse:
"You don't believe the Germans were encircled in a band of iron? You
don't believe they hadn't sufficient outlet for their immense
capacities? Oh, no; the commercial greed of other nations didn't hem
them in! Tell me, then, what's behind this vast discovery of German
activity in lands not their own? What about the difficulty even in
England of combing them out of commerce, out of clubs, even out of
Parliament? What about the hold they have in Sweden and Holland; in
Genoa; in South America, not to speak of the United States? Now, notice.
No other nation has so disseminated itself about the globe in practical
activities. What's the reason? Can you answer that? Wrong. The reason is
that energy must go somewhere. The Germans weren't to have colonies;
they weren't to have seaports, not openly. So they took them in the only
way left. They took them by a vast, silent effort that has sown the
German broadcast over the world."
Agreement as to that exploded in every direction. The speaker strained
his voice to dominate the din:
"They didn't specially love us--the Germans. No; nor we them, perhaps."
He was forced to wait till the enthusiasm which greeted that view had
spent itself.
"Now, just think a moment. The Germans--I'm speaking of before the war,
remember--they believed theirs was the only true civilization."
Wild derision from the English cockneys. The few soldiers scattered
through the crowd appeared to have less emotion to expend than did the
civilians. They listened stolidly. In the first lull the speaker went
on:
"Now, why--why did these notorious home-lovers turn their backs on what
for them was the only true civilization? Why did they come here in such
numbers?"
"To spy!"
"To steal our jobs!"
"'Peaceful penetration' for the ends of war!"
"Listen! They overran us and other countries because we prevented the
legitimate expansion of the German Empire."
High and clear over the confused shouting, "That's a lie!" a voice cried
angrily. The direct charge acted like a stimulant. The word "lie" was
caught up by a score of throats.
"An' why ain't '_e_ at the front?"
Above the increasing disorder Napier caught fragments from the platform:
"Waste places of the earth, crying out for labor and development. Yes,
in bitter _need_ of something the German could give, _wanted_ to give--"
But pandemonium had broken loose, and reigned irresistible for some
moments. As the wave of sound ebbed, those high, fife-like notes,
conquering hoarseness for a moment, soared above the din and over the
bobbing heads of the multitude:
"_Waste_ places! Yet we grudged even the waste places to that supremely
hard-working people. Why?"
A hail of answers, every one a stone of scorn.
"As you don't seem to know why it was we grudged these places to the
Germans, you'd better let me tell you. We grudged them to an industrious
people because the people weren't British people. What happened? No! no!
_no!_ Listen! The Germans--the Germans--"
Cries of "Belgium!" mixed with booing and cursing, drowned the voice
again and again till the moment when it rose with "they" in lieu of the
word intolerable.
"They have done what you say. I'm not here to deny it. They've turned
the most fertile lands of Europe into wastes. Why? Because we refused
them the places that were already waste. Energy must go somewhere.
Energy that could have helped to save the world has gone to the
devastation of Belgium, to the ruin of France. Gone to the torture and
death of tens of thousands of British men. Whose fault? Ours, _ours_, I
tell you!"
A roar went up as the crowd surged forward. Napier, carried with it, saw
men near the foot of the platform gesticulating wildly with clenched
fists above their heads:
"Liar! Pro-German!"
And still the penny-whistle voice shrilled clear a moment over the
turgid outpouring of muddy minds:
"The vast crime, the unparalleled lunacy of war! If I have a private
quarrel and I kill my opponent, I am hanged for a felon. If the
Government I live under has a public quarrel, and at their bidding I
kill some man I never saw before, I am a patriot. _No!_ I am a
murderer."
That was more than the soldiers could stand. They joined in the rush for
the column. Yet, as Napier remembered afterward, the soldiers who by
implication had been called murderers were less like wild beasts in
their fury than the men who had stayed at home. The men weren't in khaki
who strove, vainly at the first essay, by dint of climbing on other
men's shoulders, to storm the platform.
As for Napier, he would never have been able to get anywhere near the
speaker but that his precipitation was taken by those about him for
uncontrollable rage. Even with the aid of hatred to forge him a way, he
found getting to the front a cursedly impeded business. Then came that
moment of sheer physical sickness at his closer vision of the pack of
wolves ravening below the unfriended figure. Julian, facing the onset,
facing the hate-inflamed eyes in heads just appearing above the
platform; Julian still crying peace in that appalling loneliness which
typified his yet greater loneliness in a nation and a time given up to
war.
Ruffians with villainous faces, and simpletons fired with the
responsibility of standing up for England, doing it so safely, too, by
means of breaking the head of one young gentleman--up the platform they
scrambled after their ringleaders and closed round the speaker.
In those last few hard-won yards Napier had collected a policeman. But
above the attackers had fought Julian, to the edge of the platform.
Napier had an instant's glimpse of him with a splash of scarlet down his
face before they threw him over.
Upon that, a new emotion seized the crowd--a panic born of the
consciousness of limits to police indifference. The mass swayed and
broke away from where the figure had fallen. There were plenty of
policemen, now that the need for their intervention was past.
Napier shouted to them for an ambulance, as he ran forward. Of the faces
bent over the figure lying limp at the foot of the platform, one was
lifted--Nan Ellis's.
"Wait!" Napier called to one of the policemen. "Get that lady out of
this, will you?"
But the lady would come when she could take "him" along. "A taxi,
please."
Some one had given her a large-sized pocket-handkerchief. She made a
bandage and tied it round the bleeding head. Some one else fetched a cab
for the lady. And the ambulance would be there in a minute.
"Oh, he'll hate the ambulance! Help me to get him to the cab!" she
besought.
His eyelids opened, and he moaned a little as, between Napier and one of
the policemen, Julian was carried through the alley which had been
opened in the crowd. As the limp figure was borne past, they muttered
and jeered.
"Oh, _hush_!" cried a voice. "Isn't it enough to have nearly killed
him?" Nan's question cut its way through the muttering and hate; it
startled the people into momentary silence. But when the little
procession had gained the cab and were driving off, the anger of the
disintegrated mob broke out afresh. The air was filled with cries, and
for several hundred yards men and boys ran along by the taxi, shouting
insult and imprecation through the window.
Napier looked out. Not one of those foul-mouthed pursuers wore khaki or
sailor's blue.
That was something.