Chapter XV: Part 15

The Crown and winged double-thunderbolt must have nerved the arm they came back to. For, on the day of the Battle of Jutland, when a point-blank salvo from an enemy cruiser wrecked the bridge and searchlight platform, carrying away the forward mast and funnel of Macrombie's particular tin-pot, and men in respirators were fighting the smothering fumes of the fire caused by German shells of the incendiary description, a dour, stark man whose clothes were alight and burning on him, stuck grimly to his post among the wreckage of the shattered Wireless room, sending out the message last dictated by the officer who lay dead across the blistering steel plating--for the short circuit set up by the smashed searchlight had created its own separate conflagration, and the electricity was "running out of everything like oil."

When the tin-pot heeled over, and, having duly buried her steel chest and secret documents, went down with colours flying in a smother of oily steam, men who were saved on the rafts told this tale of Macrombie, who sleeps well, after Life's thirsty fever, at his post in the Destroyer's battered Wireless cabin, on the deep-ridged, sandy bottom of the wild, shallow North Sea.

Patrine felt her heart crushed as in the grip of a cold steel gauntlet. Her apprehensions had not been unfounded. She and Alan were to be parted, if not as she had feared.

"I--suppose I ought to congratulate you--" Her unwilling eyes admired the tall manly figure in the plain workmanlike uniform. The buttonless tunic with its Lancer plastron, the riding-breeches of ampler cut than the cavalryman's, the high spurless boots of supple brown leather, and the belt that carried a revolver and no sword. "What--what are you in?" she asked draggingly, and he answered with a smile and a flash of his grey eyes:

"I hope I'm in for some of what's going on!"

"How glad you are!"

"Rather. I should think so! Now that they've let me into the Royal Flying Corps as a T.S.L. Look at my wings!" He touched the white outspread pinions on the tunic-breast with a reverent finger-tip and went on pouring out his story without a break. "It's cost me some badgering of High Officials of Military Aeronautics at Whitehall, and a lot of time wasted in baby tests. Squad drill, Harris tube, bomb-dropping, air-signalling, Webley and Scott practice, and so on. Now I'm teaching trick-flying to Army aviators from 4.30 A.M. till 11 P.M. The Powers that Be have taken over the Flying Schools--Durrant's Cafe is our Officer's Mess now. You should see old Durrant in his glory as Head Waiter. And Mrs. D--" His white teeth flashed as he laughed.

"And they have known of this"--she nodded at the eagle-wings--"while I have been kept in ignorance! How long?"

"Not quite a fortnight. Don't be unreasonable, dear!"

The new tone stung. Did a yellow star upon the cuffs and shoulder-straps and a pair of white wings on the left breast mean so much to him that her just claims upon his confidence seemed wanting in reason now? Anger and resentment choked her as he added:

"I am here now, as it happens, because I'm crossing the Channel to-morrow at peep o' day." Something in her pale face made him add: "Don't worry!--I'm likely to be back again by nightfall. That's what I've rushed in here to tell you, though I've a man in tow, a Wing Commander of the French S. Ae. Hot from the Front and just landed at Hendon. I had to take him in my car to his Embassy, and now I've got to find him a room at an hotel. When I've done it I'm coming back here to talk to you. Where on earth has my man got to? Why, there he is, talking to Lady Norwater. The little chap with the grey moustache and the gold-banded _kepi_."

"I am honoured by Madame's gracious remembrance," the person indicated could be heard protesting, during an instant's lull in the Babel of voices round. "But my own--a thousand pardons! is less accurate."

"Oh!" Margot expostulated, "but you can't have forgotten. That Sunday of the Grande Semaine--when you were in the Bois, timing a Flying Officer who was testing an English invention--a sort of a----"

"But assuredly, Madame!" His quick nod and the gesture of his gloved hand summoned up the scene vividly. "I remember, but perfectly, though much water has rolled under the bridges since that day. And Milord--Madame's husband?"

"He's at the Front," Margot explained, "wherever the Front is!"

"Unfortunately at the moment," returned the suave voice, "the Front is everywhere. It is easy to find without binoculars. _Adieu, Madame_. _Merci bien de la souvenir si gracieuse, dites mes amities a Monsieur._" And in another moment he arrived beside Sherbrand, exclaiming with his vivacious shrug and gesture: "My faith, my friend, your London _Cercle des Dames_ is a veritable Paradise of Mahommed. Now in Paris, at least before the War--instead of ten thousand houris to every true Believer, one counted at least three Adams to every Eve. But I observe your search has been successful. Will you not present me to Mademoiselle your _fiancee_?"

And the dapper middle-aged Wing Commander in the gold-banded _kepi_, whose dark plain uniform displayed the gold badge of the Service Aeronautique under the Cross of the Legion of Honour, was introduced as Captain Raymond by an off-hand young Briton who comprehended not in the least the immense condescension that had prompted the request.

"_Sapristi!_" thought Raymond, as Patrine gave him her large hand and assured him in her big warm voice that she was frightfully pleased to meet a friend of Alan's.--"A magnificent type of the human female animal to have paired with this bluff, simple English boy. Part _femme du monde_, part romping hoyden, part _cabotine_, she should have been a Duchesse of the old Napoleonic regime, or at least the effect that lies behind a _cause celebre_ of the Paris Law Courts of modern days. And she will be expected by this honest fellow to live in a stucco villa at Kensington or the Crystal Palace, and bear and rear his children, and live and die in all the deadly respectability of the British middle-class _milieu_!"

But he made his beautiful bow and murmured some civil phrases. In the spring, at the Hendon Flying Grounds of M. Fanshaw, he, Raymond, had been interested to meet the friend of Mademoiselle. Had been profoundly impressed by the displayed inventions of a young man so gifted as aviator and engineer. Had had the good fortune subsequently to obtain the consent of his own Chiefs of the S. Ae. F. to a test of an invention--the value of which had been hall-marked by the approbation of Messieurs les Allemands. True, M. Sherbrand had been the victim of their unscrupulosity. But Fortune, who knew? might be kinder in the near future. This War so grievous, so brutal, so deplorable, waged by the Prussian against Civilisation and Progress, would open up not only _le metier des armes_, but countless other avenues of prosperity to thousands of ardent and gifted young men. Like M. Sherbrand. To whom Raymond said with an authoritative glance of his blue eye: "My friend, we keep your auto waiting at the door!"

"Ah, but stay!" Patrine began, with a sense of hatred towards the well-used little Ford runabout standing in much grander company by the kerb outside the Club: "do stay and lunch and smoke and tell us things about the War, won't you?"

"A thousand thanks, but impossible, Mademoiselle!"

Raymond shrugged, conscious that her look of disappointment was for Sherbrand, and pleaded fatigue as an excuse.

"For these are iron times, Mademoiselle," he went on in his smooth, musical accents, "and we who live in them are unfortunately of flesh and blood. When the War is done perhaps there will again be social pleasures like the lunch you were so kind as to offer me. That I am tempted to accept I will not conceal from you. I have not eaten since I flew from France at _la pointe du jour_--one of the smallest of the little hours of this morning, and then I broke fast on two fingers of little red wine, and a hunch of soldier's bread."

"You mean to say you're fresh from flying the Channel?"

"Crossing the Channel came near the end of my journey, Mademoiselle. I should have arrived earlier"--he shrugged indifferently--"had not some German aviators caused delay."

"Oh-h!" Her vexation passed like a breath from a mirror. Her long eyes danced with delight under her hat-brim. Her breath came quick, her red lips curled, and a sweet faint pink showed under her creamy skin. "You're a knight of the skies hot from a fray with two flying dragons--and you were going without saying a word! What do you think we Englishwomen are made of?"

"Very desirable flesh, some of you, at least, Mademoiselle," occurred to Raymond, but he suppressed the equivoque and answered with professional brevity:

"Mademoiselle, I regret there is but little to tell you. The enemy possesses an aerial organisation of great effectiveness which is being chiefly employed in the killing of harmless civilians and the destruction of unfortified towns. But small success has hitherto attended his efforts in the Channel. Your British Expedition was conveyed across the water without the loss of one _piou-piou_, or any damage received by the explosion of a German bomb. As for the German aviators of whom I speak, their attitude towards myself and my pilot was modest. Flying their double-seated military Taubes, of which the wings and tail resemble those of the dove after which they have been named, they pursued our biplane half-way from Calais to Dover before deciding to attack."

"Then--" She hesitated, softly clapping her palms together and dimpling like a big child over the telling of a new fairy tale.

"Then one climbed, possessing the advantage of a powerful engine, and dropped a bomb from a height of some 600 _metres_ which exploded without hitting us and went to the bottom of the sea. While the second aviator, who was armed with a repeating-carbine, wounded my pilot so severely that it was only by a miracle of endurance he preserved consciousness long enough to land without a crash. So I left him at Dover and--with a pilot mechanic from the Air Station, completed my passage, descending at Brooklands at twelve _demie_."

"Was your pilot hurt very badly? Will he be able to fly back to France?"

"Mademoiselle, being a pious Catholic, he has already flown to Heaven."

"He is dead.... And you can joke!" Patrine reproached him. His face was very wrinkled as he smiled.

"Mademoiselle, if a soldier could not jest at Death upon occasion, Life for a soldier would be impossible! Of verity, the loss of a good pilot-_aviateur_ is not a thing to joke about, but fortunately I have your friend to fill his place."

"_Alan_! You must not--I will never consent to it!"

All taken aback, her colour banished, she fixed Sherbrand with blazing imperative eyes. He reddened to the hair and his mouth shut firmly. For the first time there was a clash of wills between the pair.

"Alan, why didn't you ask me?"

He was redder than ever.

"Because it wasn't for you to say. It is an order from my Chiefs--don't you understand?"

She did not care that the French officer was smiling. She would have liked to have struck him in his merrily-crinkled face. Wretch! to have blurted the truth at her that Alan had hidden. What was he saying:

"Permit, Mademoiselle, that I make my _adieux_. I go to secure an apartment where I may repose myself." He looked at Sherbrand, saying in his cool tone of authority: "The Aldebaran,--that is in the next street and a good hotel, is it not so? A little sleep will not come amiss after a cutlet and a _demi-bouteille_. And whilst I eat we will settle our _affaires_. Eh, mon lieutenant?"

His gloved hand took Sherbrand neatly by the elbow. He was skilfully steering him towards the doorway when Patrine, white and flaming, placed herself in their path.

"My affairs come first!" she was beginning.

"_Shut up!_" came from Sherbrand, in an exasperated aside whisper. "My duty comes before you--or anything in the world. It should come first for you if you cared a damn for me!"

No one but Raymond had overheard the curious, fierce colloquy. She felt literally scorched by the hot look of anger. She knew an agony like the tearing of the tissues of the flesh when Sherbrand passed her and went out with that gloved hand of authority upon his arm.

"Women are the devil!" he thought bitterly, as he opened the door of the runabout Ford to admit the French Staff Officer. "She'd had a shock in being told the news so suddenly; but to ballyrag me--to make me look such a thundering idiot before _him_!"

He swung the crank with violence and wrenched angrily at the levers when he took the driving-seat. A gloved hand patted his arm, and Raymond's voice said in his ear:

"Bah! You are chagrined, my friend, because a handsome woman has made you a little drama. Think no more of it! I have forgotten, for my part." He added, as they got out at the Aldebaran: "I propose to detain you but a little while, _mon ami_. When we have completed arrangements for the start to-morrow, you will be free to return and make your peace with Mademoiselle."

"Thank you, sir. She was rattled at my telling her so suddenly about my Commission," said Sherbrand, still beclouded. "Women are all like that, I suppose?"

"Except in France," said the agreeable voice of Raymond, "where the love of Country is stronger in our women than the love of lover or even of child. It was so before 1870. They have remembered through the centuries, as their sisters of Britain have not. They--the women of England are patriotic--oh yes! but patriotism is not yet a religion to them. It will cost millions of lives, and of blood an ocean to kindle that flame within their souls. Then, they also will hold the bayonet to the grindstone with their soft white hands and say: 'Become sharp, to drink the blood of Germans!' And they will mend the soldier's ragged breeches and clean the soldier's dirty rifle, and when they do they will not be less womanly. No, by my faith! nor less beloved by men. Try one of these. You will not find them too bad."

He offered Sherbrand a cigarette and took a light from him as they stood under the Aldebaran's tall Corinthian portico.

"One should always be accurate. When I told you that in France there lived no woman who was not patriotic, I was in error. Such a woman existed since three or four days."

He blew out a puff of smoke and watched its mounting spiral. Then he resumed:

"She was very young, very pretty, the bride of a month, and passionately enamoured. When her husband received orders to proceed with his Regiment of Chasseurs to the Belgian Front, she made him a scene of desperation. She would do this and that mad thing if he did not take her. Then she became calmer. She had exacted a promise from her doting cavalryman. She should visit him at the Front at a suitable opportunity. She chose her own moment, my faith!--and what a moment! She appeared in her husband's quarters in the French cavalry camp near Antoineville when the Germans were attacking Dinant. When the Cavalry Division of the Prussian Guards, and the Cavalry of their First Division, with some infantry battalions and machine-gun companies crossed the Meuse, and we were to attack, she was lying in his arms, the little idiot! He told her to go and she would not. Then he entreated her--a fatal error that!"

The cigarette was burning crookedly, forgotten between Raymond's fingers.

"Then he commanded her. She laughed, and kissed him. He gave back the kiss, drew his revolver and shot her dead. Then he ran out--in time to mount and wheel to his place as second in command of his squadron, before the Regiment swept on to the charge. Fate was kind to him. He charged like a Centaur, and died like a soldier of France the Beloved. Tell the story to Mademoiselle Saxham. She is magnificently handsome, but forgive me! not a patriot. And a woman without patriotism is--an altar without a Sacred Host and a lamp without a flame."

They went into the hotel. When the Frenchman had secured a quiet bedroom on the fourth floor, and intimated that no German was to serve him, they went together into the dining-room.

"_Pfui_! It smells of soot, and petrol, and drainage, this London air of yours," said Raymond, as he chose a table in a quiet corner. "You will eat with me? No! Then smoke and share my wine." He ordered cutlets, _petit pois_, a sweet omelette, and a bottle of Beaujolais, and, filling his own glass and one for Sherbrand, touched brims gaily and said with a smile: "To France and her Allies, Victory! On earth," a clink, "by sea," a clink, "under the sea," another clink, "and in the Air!"

He clinked three times, and emptied the glass thirstily. Sherbrand asked:

"Was the battle near Dinant a big affair?"

"Not big." He broke a roll and munched bread. "Not on the grand scale. A _spectacle tres interessante_, regarded from the--archaic point of view. An example of the ancient _mode de bataille_ that will be dead as the Dodo in three months. _Chasseurs a cheval_ and German Imperial Guard Regiments charging and meeting with shocks like thunder. Much slaughter. So fierce was the onslaught upon our side that the Germans were driven back across the Meuse. Many missed the bridge and were drowned. One French regiment followed them in pursuit for several _kilometres_. They were led by the man of whom I have told you. A glass to his memory--and _hers_!"

They touched full glasses and drank. Raymond went on.

"My Flying Centre was near Maubeuge on the 16th. Some _escadrilles_ of my command were engaged that day near Dinant. My faith! those _cotellettes_ are slow in arriving." He munched more bread, and his blue eyes narrowed smilingly. "We had only the little bombs we used in Morocco, but yes!--we did some good work with the _balles-bon_. Flying low, at ordered distances--for to make War by Air successfully the science of tactics must assist the aviator.... What says your great Field Marshal, who has bent his neck to the collar-work of Administration--who has conjured an Army of trained soldiers out of your shops and counting-houses, and playing-fields,--and will make another and another when the time comes?"

Sherbrand quoted the words uttered by the great voice now quenched for ever in the bitter waters of the North Sea.

"_Until aviators learn to fly, manoeuvre, and attack in regular formation, the Fifth Arm will remain a useless limb._"

"_Tonnerre de Dieu!_ but that goes to the point," said Raymond, "straight and sharp as a thrust from his sword. If we possessed that man we should make use of him. He should be Marshal of France, or President or Emperor--all we should ask of him would be to lead us. _Notr'_ Joffre would not be jealous--they would agree like the hilt and the hand. But I was telling you of an attack by the _flechette_.... You may imagine how the Uhlans loved that rain of steel. It changed the retreat to a rout. Only it spoiled so many German horses. Right through the man, you understand, into the animal! ... Sieves on four legs are useless as Remounts for French Chasseurs."

"And the German Field Flight?" Sherbrand interrogated.

"Their Fifth Arm was represented," said Raymond, sipping his burgundy, "by many Taubes and Aviatiks armed with the machine-gun and some ordinary bombs of _schrapnel_,--also a dirigible of 'Parsifal' type dropping big bombs. We were hampered in our offensive by a prejudice which does not trouble the Germans. To throw bombs upon friend and foe alike--that is not our idea of War. It annoyed me, and I wasted on that flatulent brute of a 'Parsifal' all my remaining _flechettes_ and little Morocco bombs. Aha, the _cotelettes_!"

A waiter set them before him. He tucked his napkin under his chin, and helped himself, and said:

"Thus, though I had damaged her steering-gear and riddled her outer envelope, and the Flying Pig wallowed in difficulties below me, I could not pursue the advantage I had got. When the pilot of an Aviatik launched himself to the rescue, all the ammunition of my carabine was exhausted. I had one cartridge left in my automatic revolver, and not a single bomb with which to return the compliments of the German's _mitraille_. My petrol-tank had been perforated. My single bullet missed him. The duel was too unequal, so I withdrew from the field, leaving him to cavalier the Flying Pig. We may meet again upon terms more equal, when French military aviators fight with machine-guns. And now to business. It concerns your gyroscopic stabiliser, the patent of which my Chiefs desired to buy for the use of our _Service Aeronautique_. You demanded, according to M. Jourdain's statement, L8,000 and a royalty for the world-patent. We will buy it of you outright for L12,000. Is it agreed?"

Sherbrand straightened in his chair, and said, looking the other squarely in the eyes:

"No, sir, thank you! You see, though the War Office wouldn't have anything to say to me----"

"It occurs to you that now you may find a market for your invention?" _To the devil with this smug young British tradesman!_ thought Raymond behind his knitted brows. "Come!" he said. "Another proposal. Will you make and supply us with your hawk-hoverer? Or sell us the right to manufacture a thousand for the sole use of the S. Ae.? Name your price--I shall not be frightened. It is not State money, but my private fortune that I draw upon--with the approval of my Chiefs. It has been my whim to lavish on my _escadrille_ what other men hang in jewels upon their mistresses. Efficiency is my vice. I have heard of worse!" He scrawled some invisible figures with a polished finger-nail upon the tablecloth and exclaimed, with a laugh and a shrug: "_Sapristi_! At even a hundred pounds apiece you would soon be a millionaire, even without the fortune you expect from your War Office! Upon occasion it pays to be a patriot. Decide, Monsieur, lest my patience run dry before my purse!"

"I've not asked you a hundred, sir," Sherbrand said with his disarming simplicity. "I can make and sell the hoverers at a profit for L60. It's the cutting and welding of the horizontal flanged screws with the acetylene flame that eats up that money. But for the cost of the process, hang it!--I'd have had more than seventy ready by me now."

"You have seventy, you say, laid by in readiness?"

"Laid by in grease," said Sherbrand, "at the aerodrome."

"Waiting the moment when the authorities at Whitehall awaken to the fact that you are a genius, _mon ami_! _A la bonne heure_! We buy your seventy equilibrisers!"

"I'll sell you ten," said the British tradesman doggedly. "And I'll give the Belgian Government another ten, if you think they'd honour me by accepting them?"

"_Parole d'honneur_! I can guarantee they will. And of the other fifty?"

"They are for England to take or leave," said Sherbrand. "No doubt I'm an ass, but a man must act according to his lights."

"They are stars, your lights," said Raymond with a crackling oath, "and they point the path of Honour!" He pulled a cheque-book and a fountain-pen from a pocket within his tunic and wrote a cheque on the Credit Lyonnais for the price of the ten stabilisers, their packing, carriage and duty, saying as he signed, and tossed the lilac slip of paper across the tablecloth: "Your endorsement is my receipt. For the stabilisers--they must be sent not later than to-morrow. I would give something if I could fly back to France with a couple in my valise. But patience! In a week at most we will give the Germans news of us. Perhaps I shall have the good fortune of a _rencontre_ with my Boche pilot-aviator. For--listen, lieutenant! He too possessed the device that solves for the _avion_ the problem of stability. And--listen well!--he carried a young boy with him in the _nacelle_. It was the man who robbed you. Von Herrnung! Could you not have guessed before?"

It seemed to Sherbrand that he had always guessed. Raymond went on:

"When I read of the finding of the wreck of your 'Bird' in the North Sea, I knew what _coup_ the Prussian and his confederates had carried out. We had met in Berlin, and at the Hanover aerodrome, and at Paris. And--I could have shot him the other day if it had not been for the child. The legions of the modern Attila employ women and babes as bucklers and breastworks, by their Emperor's order. Perhaps he carried the boy for protection!" His moustache bristled like an angry cat's as he added:

"A beastly idea, but the German Idea is bestial. Well, _au 'voir_! To-morrow, six _demie_, we start from the aerodrome!"

He rose, whisked his napkin over his mouth, and said, giving Sherbrand a hearty hand-grip:

"I shall be punctual. Do not forget. My compliments to Mademoiselle!"

But Sherbrand was occupied less by thoughts of his angry love than by Raymond's story of the boy in the German warplane. He telephoned to Sir Roland and to Saxham before he drove back to the Club thinking:

"Bawne!--It must be Bawne!--out there in the midst of all those horrors. If I could only meet that fellow von Herrnung! ... I've owed him no grudge because he robbed me.... But--for this--I could kill him now!"

*CHAPTER LVI*

*LA BRABANCONNE*

"You saint, Pat!" Margot, amidst Raymond's polite excuses, had recognised Sherbrand's hatchet-face under the khaki cap. "You've stolen a whole morning for me from your Flying Man. Why didn't you tell me he'd come back to town? How perfectly tophole he looks in tea-leaves! Franky and I came across that French officer who was with him, last June, in Paris. We're been rubbing noses on the strength of having met before. Is Alan going to the Front? My poor Pattums, it'll be your turn to be haunted. Here's Rhona Helvellyn. Cheer, Rhona! Do tell us why you look so smudgy? Have you been hiding up the chimney of the House of Commons, or bombarding a Minister's front door with coal?"

She beckoned, and Rhona came stalking through the crush of marvellously got-up members, the round, fair, freckled boy-face that topped her long swan-neck and deceptively sloping shoulders pinched with weariness under the wreck of a Heath hat, her usually immaculate tailor-mades covered with the dust of what might have been a Claxton Hall conflict or a Downing Street Demonstration, and strange fires burning in her light-lashed eyes.

"Am I such a sweep? I feel one! But so'd you be grubby if you'd done the crossing from Folkestone to Ostend and back again to London without a dab of a puff. I'd an appointment here at three-thirty." Beyond anything in life Rhona plumed herself on her punctuality. "Mrs. Saxham--_the_ Mrs. Saxham, had promised to meet me in the Chintz Room." The Chintz Room is the first-floor drawing-room securable for private teas and interviews. "We got in too ravenous even to wash for lunch. You should have seen us eat. My hat! the scrum on those boats. And the dirt. Nothing but a Turkish bath will get me clean again. As for Brenda, she's a nigger." Thus Rhona in her loud young accents. "Nobody'd believe she'd been born a white girl!"

"Is she here?"

"My Christmas! I should rather hope so! Upstairs scraping off the top-crust before I take her to Eccleston Square. Don't do to startle the Mater. She's been frightfully off-colour with worry over her precious youngest. You see, Brenda was due home for the Autumn holidays from the Convent of the Dames de l'Annonciation at Huin on the Sambre, when the War broke out. And--Huin's near Charleroi, where they say the Germans are--and we'd nary a letter, and no answer to a hailstorm of wires from the Mater. So I got passes and permits on the Q.T. and skipped over to Ostend--to see what might be done."

"And you got through?"

"Did I? Not much! We don't get things properly rubbed into us--tucked away in our blessed old island. I forgot that Belgian trains wouldn't be running from Ostend to Brussels, now the Germans have got a grab on there.... As for getting South-East by Courtrai and Valenciennes--all trains were required by the Allies for military purposes. Perhaps if I'd been a hefty War Correspondent or an Army Nursing Sister or a V.A.D. in diamond earrings and a Red Cross armlet, I'd have had a chance. But I'm doubtful! Transport officers, English and Belgian, keep their mouths shut--and once they've opened them to say "No!" they never open 'em again. And"--Rhona breathed as though she had been running--"there were Official War News placards stuck up at the Customs Office, and on the quays and at the Prefecture. They said that the Germans under von Buelow have been having a scrap with the 5th French Army on the Sambre--from Namur to Charleroi--and that the French have been beaten back. And the hospitals are crowded with Belgian and German wounded"--she gulped and something twinkled on her pale eyelashes--"and trains crammed with more keep coming in and in. I've seen some sights, I tell you, that gave me horrors. That showed me, even more than those Ostend quays and wharves and squares and Places--packed solid with refugees--Great Christmas!--shall I ever forget 'em!--the devilish, hellish work of War!"

"Refugees.... Common people?" Margot was a little puzzled. Rhona nodded and repeated:

"Refugees. Swells and mechanics, rag-pickers and shopkeepers, sweeps, schoolgirls, lacemakers, and students. Professors, priests, and prostitutes. Madame la Comtesse and her gardener's wife, wheeling the babies in trams and go-carts. Dust-covered, dirty, done up, desperate, with faces that make you think of the damned in the Tartarus scenes of Orpheus and Eurydice. And someone squealed my name, and there was Brenda. Just got in, with three of the Sisters, and a baker's dozen of English pupils and a herd of other miserables, evacuated from Charleroi and Huin. Three-and-a-half days on the journey, travelling by fits and starts on branch-lines--tramping when trains weren't available. Eating whenever anything was to be had, and going without when there wasn't! Sleeping in barns and on the floors of railway-station platforms, or waiting-rooms, when they were lucky--such a pack of tramps you never saw in your life. But Great Scott! how thundering glad I was to get hold of Brenda and whisk her away from that Chorus of the Damned in Orpheus, pent up like cattle behind ropes, and moaning and stretching their arms out to the sea!"

"Why on earth the sea?"

A foreign voice, resonant and rather nasal, startled Margot by answering:

"Pardon, Madame. Because these most unhappy fugitives believe that salvation and safety may be found in England, from whence come those strong brown English soldiers who are fighting in Belgium now."

"Are there--" Margot was beginning. But Rhona was introducing the speaker at length as Comte d'Asnay, Capitaine Commandant and Adjutant of the Belgian General Staff, Attached to the General Staff on the Third Division of the Belgian Army, and d'Asnay was saying with a smile:

"Mademoiselle bestows upon me all my titles, possibly because we Belgians have so little else left."

"Except Honour," snapped Rhona.

"Except our Honour and our self-respect, and a few other non-negotiable securities," he said, "that do not bring us much of credit on the Bourses of Vienna and Berlin. But Madame was asking of the refugees. Many from Liege have escaped to Antwerp or into Holland, thousands are rushing from Namur into the bosom of France. But from Louvain and Brussels and Tirlemont they flock to Ostend. The steamers of the Channel service are crowded with those who have money and can obtain the necessary _laissez-passers_. Your town of Folkestone is encumbered with arrivals. Were stones pillows there would be a head for every stone. But those who have neither money nor passports--and many of these were rich a week ago--remain, as Mademoiselle has told you, to weep, and stretch their arms towards the sea."

"They'd rush the boats," declared Rhona, "only that the Companies keep up the gangways. I suppose," she grimaced, "the authorities at Ostend don't want a scare. They believe--I hope they may get it!--there'll yet be an Autumn Season. Hang these profit-hoggers! If I'd my way I'd lower every blessed gangway and let everyone who wanted walk on board. If Belgium hadn't faced the music there'd be Germans in England now, murdering and burning.... They've a right to come. Let 'em all come! Britain's big enough, I should hope!"

"_Brava, Mademoiselle. Bis!_" d'Asnay applauded noiselessly. "That is what you said to me on the deck of the steamer. Say it again, say it often, and the people will be let come!"

"Oh, I've my plan." Rhona's light eyes sparkled wickedly. "People here want waking up. They're kept in cotton-wool. Eyes bunged up and ears stuffed. What they want is--to see and hear. Well, a few of 'em are doing it. That," she nodded knowingly at d'Asnay, "is where my Distinguished Visitors come in."

The lips under the fiercely-waxed moustaches smiled. Margot liked the look of this officer of the Belgian General Staff, with the savage eyes and the smooth olive skin, the pointed chestnut beard, fiercely-waxed moustache, and the cool, polite manner. He wore the uniform of the Belgian Chasseurs a Cheval, and the vulture-plumes of his high shako were cut and broken and scorched in places, the gold braiding of his dark blue tunic was tarnished and weather-beaten, and the grey, blue-striped overalls and spurred black knee-boots were rusty with old mud and white with new dust. "You're from the Front?" she queried, as she moved with Rhona and the Belgian towards the glass swing-doors, giving access from the vestibule to the Club's big ground-floor drawing-room.

He answered:

"There are several Fronts--and I have the honour to come from one of them, Madame."

"With dispatches?"

"Possibly with dispatches, Madame!" He answered with an amused side-glance at the small, vivacious face. "Though there are swifter methods of transmitting intelligence than by entrusting letters to a messenger's hands."

As he moved beside her, courteously replying, she saw the crimson and green enamelled, purple-ribboned Cross of the Belgian Order of Leopold shining upon the dark blue tunic-breast.

"How are--things--getting on? Nobody tells us anything," twittered the humming-bird. "We might live at the North Pole."

"Madame might find even at the North Pole compensations for the low temperature and the lack of society." The vulture-plumes on the dark blue shako nodded as he turned his face to her. "In the fact that there are no Boches there," he added, and the smile that had curved the soldierly moustache vanished as though the word had wiped it from his mouth.

"Do tell me what are Boches?" Margot begged, kindling to interest. He answered with an intensity that dug deep lines at the angles of his nostrils, and puckered the corners of the eyes that burned under his frowning brows:

"They are a nation of beings, Madame, that are no longer men!"

"Germans you mean, don't you?" she asked after a little pause of bewilderment, staring with shocked, dilated eyes at the left side of d'Asnay's close-cropped head, now revealed to her as he removed his shako, and standing a little in advance of the two women, held back with the thrust of his broad shoulders a leaf of the drawing-room swing-doors. The four-inch square of white surgical plaster adhering to a place whence the chestnut-brown hair had been shaven, showed the outline of a deep, jagged gash. "You are hurt! You have had some awful accident! ... Was it a motor-smash? Doesn't it pain you?" Kittums asked breathlessly. For d'Asnay had touched the surgical strapping with his gloved hand, and his smiling face had winced.

"It is nothing, Madame," he assured her, "and it was not caused by an accident. It is merely a whiff of _schrapnel_--a love-gift from _Messieurs les Boches_."

"You are _wounded_?"

"Madame, that is what one calls it, when one suffers _a coup d'obus_. They are common, these little tokens, on our side of the North Sea. Mine has procured me a visit to London, and the pleasure of meeting you."

She looked at him like a grieved child, and her lips so quivered that he softened to her behind the crinkles of his smiling bearded mask.

"You speak like this because you think I am heartless and indifferent. Perhaps I have been--until to-day! We are so far from things. We see nothing. And we hear so little about the War!"

"Alas, Madame!" came the answer. "Forgive the cruel prophecy, that the moment approaches when you will hear too much!"

The swing-doors thudded behind them like guns at a great distance. The capacious ground-floor drawing-room, not usually crowded before luncheon, was thronged nearly to the walls. A vacant space in the centre presumably accommodated the Distinguished Visitors. But between these and Margot's quickening curiosity intervened a solid wall of backs.

The Distinguished Visitors must be Royalties, decided Margot, as she skirted the barrier, looking right and left for a peephole, recognising the vast back of Sir Thomas Brayham, the skeleton back of the Goblin, the willowy back of Trixie Wastwood, the backs of Lady Beauvayse, Cynthia Charterhouse, Tota Stannus, and Patrine Saxham with other backs pertaining to divers dear friends, consolidated into the rampart of humanity over which the towering feathers of Vanity Fair nodded and bobbed and waved.

"They're taking it in," Margot heard Rhona mutter, behind her. "'_Somebody's playing off a joke on us_,' would be the first thing that'd come into their blessed heads. Well!--let 'em think what they choose. Ask me why I did it, Comte, and I swear I couldn't tell you. Blue murder! how my arms ache. But so must yours. You nursed the biggest of the babies all the way from Ostend to Charing Cross."

"Mademoiselle is right!" The swift, fierce undertone was d'Asnay's. "They do not comprehend yet. Not yet!" He breathed hissingly through his nose. "Wait--and presently the Truth will leap at them and strike them _entre les yeux_. But a place must be found for the friend of Mademoiselle!" He came noiselessly to the side of Margot. "A chair, so. A footstool, so. Madame will step on the one and mount to the other. Permit, Madame, that I offer my assistance! Now Madame commands an excellent view of--shall I call it--the spectacle?"

The speaker's voice was drowned in an outburst of strident music. Barely two doors from the Club the piano-organ had broken out with "_La Barbanconne_." And as the walls vibrated to its shrill cries of triumph, and the wild disonances of a joy that touches frenzy, the cracked but vigorous tenor began to sing:

"Apres des siecles, des siecles d'esclavage
Le Beige sortant du tombeau
A reconquis par son courage
Son nom, son droit et son drapeau.
Et ta main souveraine et fiere
Peuple desormais indompte
Grava sur ta vielle banniere
Le roi, la Loi, la Liberte!"

"_Sapristi_! It is strange that!" d'Asnay muttered at the first bars. "Mademoiselle Helvellyn devised the tableau, certainly, but who arranged the _entr'acte_?"

The shrill, unbearable frenzy of the piano-organ abated, the voice of the singer was more plainly heard. It chanted in thin nasal tones, with missed-out notes in each bar that were like gaps where teeth had been in an old sorrowful singing mouth:

"O Belgique, O mere cherie,
A toi nos coeurs, a tot nos bras,
A toi noire sang, O Patrie----"

While Margot, a-tiptoe en her chair, peered through the screen of towering feathers at the Club's Distinguished Visitors,--wondering that within the wall of absorbed faces there should be so little to attract or interest. Nothing more intriguing than the homely figure of a Flemish peasant woman, with four young children huddled round her, and a baby at her breast.

*CHAPTER LVII*

*THE BELGIAN WIFE*

Desolate advance-guard of the vast army so soon to invade the shores of Britain, how familiar the figure is now that was then so strange to us in the quaint old-world fashion of its homely garments, the thick white dust and travel-stains that covered it, from the linen coif to the wooden shoes.

She was not old, the woman who sat with her little flock gathered about her, on the Indian stool that had supported the superb person of von Herrnung, what time he had held forth to Mrs. Charterhouse and Lady Wastwood upon the loftiness of German Kultur, the perfection of German female beauty, and the overwhelming mental and bodily superiority of the German Superman. A Walloon peasant from a village near Jodoigne where she and her husband had worked upon a tiny farm.

Perhaps a dozen words of French were hers: "_Tout brule!_" and "_En Angleterre ou il n'y a pas de Boches!_"

We were to learn to reap terrible meanings from that hoarse, faint parrot-cry. Truths that raised the hairs upon the flesh and chilled the blood were to be imaged for us in the blank vacuity of her unseeing stare. We were to learn why all her children squinted, from Vic, the sturdy man of seven, and Josephine, his junior, possibly by a year, down to Georgette of the chubby cheeks and crinkly, roguish eyelids, and Albert, of the round blue stare, the big white-haired head, and the marvellous bow legs.

In their dull stunned quietude and their clayey pallor, the mark of the Beast was branded upon them, down to the livid baby in its little cap of soiled linen, swaddled in the old red shawl, that bound down its arms. You might have thought it dead, but for the flutter of a muscle in the cheek, and the faint movement of its lips, feebly sucking at the breast that had been large and bounteous, and now was lax, and flabby, covered by a network of darkish violet veins.

"_Who are they? ... What are they? ... Where do they come from? ... Why were they brought here? ... Does no one know? ... Will no one tell? ..._"

The silence of amazement was now breaking. The mouths belonging to the faces under the nodding feathers, old and young, handsome and ugly, vacuous and clever, silly and intellectual, were all prattling interrogations like the above. Pride of Place and Joy of Life, Thirst of Pleasure, Lust of Power, Gaiety and Weariness, Wisdom and Folly, Humbug and Sincerity, Meanness and Generosity, ringed-in the dusty group of wooden-shod mysteries and most frightfully wanted to know! And nobody offered any solution of the puzzle. The piano-organ was playing half a dozen doors below the Club, the cracked old tenor quavering to its accompaniment:

"_Nous le jurons tu vivras!_
_Tu vivras toujours grande el belle_
_Et ton invincible unite_
_Aura pour devise immortelle----_"

The music suddenly broke off. A policeman had ordered the organ to move on....

"_Tout brule!_"

Hitherto the Belgian woman had not looked up, nor changed her listless attitude. Now she lifted her empty expressionless eyes, and hoarsely iterated her parrot-cry. The suckling at her breast whimpered and let go the nipple. She glanced at it, saying in her own thick Flemish tongue:

"_Daar is geen melk._"[1]

[1] "There is no milk."

She rocked the baby for whom she had no milk. Its feeble whimper was not stilled. She went on to that accompaniment:

"_De Duischer kwamen. Zy hebben alles gebrand! De geburen,--mijn voder--mijn man is gedood! Zy hebben hem in het vuur geworpen!_"[2]

[2] "The Germans came. They burned everything. The neighbours, and my father, and my husband are dead. They threw them into the fire."

The baby's whimper became a wail of feeble protest. It fought and struggled frantically under the old red swathing shawl. The shawl loosened, slid to the floor, and the wizened arms rose free and jerking. One arm, tightly bandaged below the elbow, ended in a raw and bloody stump. She regarded it with her drained-out stare, not trying to replace the strappings that had bound it, saying in the heavy voice of a sleep-walker:

"_Dees ook hebben ze gedaan. God sta ons bij!_"[3]

[3] "This too they did. God help us!"

And sobs and weeping broke out around her, as though that little handless arm had been a veritable rod of Moses bringing water from the living rock. But no sigh lifted her bosom, nor were her dry eyelids moistened with the dew of tears. Prussian militarism had wrought its work upon her. She and hers had been trodden as grapes in the Hohenzollern Winepress. Those emptied eyes had seen things done that might well make devils laugh in Hell.

The Club walls vanished away as we looked, and behind that stricken figure spread the devastated plains of Belgium, the Sorrowful, the Glorious, who has endured agony and shame unutterable, that her neighbours might go free. We had a vision of the Son of Man descending in a blood-red, rainy dawning, and heard Him saying to the apostles of German Kultur:

"_Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of these ... ye have done it unto Me!_"

And not a woman among us who had a man with the British Expedition, but prayed in her soul, fervently:

"Vengeance is Thine, for Thou hast said it. But make _him_ Thy scourge, O Lord!"

*CHAPTER LVIII*

*SHERBRAND BUYS THE LICENCE*

The spell of silence was broken. Excitement seethed as Patrine escaped out of the crush in the drawing-room and returned to the vestibule. There, subsiding into one of the tall-backed chairs beside the table that held the Members' Register and Visitors' Book, she waited, hoping against hope that the tall figure in khaki might reappear under the Club portico.

"Patrine!"

"Oh, Alan!--you came back after all!"

Her gloom changed to radiancy. She rose up as the tall figure of Sherbrand passed under the portico, and hurried to him, emptying her budget of regrets. "I've behaved like a cad. Do forgive me! Don't be wrathy. But you can't be--or you'd never have come back."

"You dear, it's all right!" He caught the outstretched hands in both his and wrung them. "Forget--and let's be happy." The truth about Bawne tugged at him as he said the words, but he had determined not to torture her with that horror. He went on, with the frankness that she found so lovable, "I was vexed, but it was idiotic of me not to have told you about the Commission before."

"And the man. Your French sossifer," she went on, "who looked at me as though I ought to live in a cage at the Zoo? What must he have thought of your taste in young women? What mustn't he have said when he got you out of the way?"

"Oh, not much!"

"Go on. Rub it in!"

"Well then"--Sherbrand's mouth was steady, but the laughter in his eyes was not to be controlled--"he saw I was fearfully sick at your having shown temper before him. And he told me not to be chagrined because a handsome woman had made me a little drama."

"F'ff!" She winced and set her teeth on her crimson underlip. "He knew I'd ask and you'd tell me. He saw me--squirming--in his mind's eye. Oh! and how he's hit me off. For I _was_ awfully like the heavy leading lady of a tin travelling theatre-company. Aren't you ashamed of me? Don't you loathe me?" she wooed with entreating eyes.

"Frightfully. Tell me--where can we have a cosy talk together? I've got a whole hour before I'm due at Hendon," he said.

"The Rose-and-Green Divan--but there are sure to be people smoking there. Oh!--I know. The Little Library. Nobody ever goes in, and it's got a door opening into the Divan. Friends of Members aren't admitted into the Library--but if you're caught there--you say you were coming out of the Divan, where outsiders are allowed--and opened the wrong door--do you switch on?"

He nodded, repressing the desire to ask in whose company she had been caught there, and followed the tall lithe figure down a short corridor leading to the back of the ground-floor. The corridor ended in the Little Library, a studious apartment of bathing-machine dimensions, walled with curiously new-appearing books of information and reference, and containing two small writing-tables, each supported by a rosewood-stained Windsor, a brace of baskets, and two deep, cushiony, Rothmore chairs. A Member of mature years and mountainous proportions slept placidly in one of these, with Whitaker's Peerage balanced at a perilous angle on the vanishing indications of what must once have been her lap. The subdued murmur of voices trickled in from the adjoining smoking-room with vaporous wisps of Turkish and Virginia. Save for the stout slumbering Member the lovers were beautifully alone.

"Good! Oh, boy!--to have got you back again," Patrine said breathlessly after their kiss. She dropped down noiselessly into the springy embraces of the vacant Rothmore, and Sherbrand smiling, perched upon the chair's broad arm.

"This is an unbecoming contrast--isn't it?" She leaned her beech-leaf tinted head against the plastron of the khaki tunic as his strong hand crept behind her supple waist. "But I don't care, I can't think of anything but you, Alan. When do you start to-morrow, and from where? I suppose you mustn't tell me?" She sighed, rubbing her cheek against him as the strong arm embraced and held her. "Oh me! What it is to be the sweetheart of a soldier. Why--Alan!"

She lifted her head and looked at him, frowning, and her long eyes were black between the narrowed lids. "Do you know how your heart jumped when I said 'soldier'? Does it mean as much to you as all that?"

He began to stammer a little.

"Oh--well!--you see--we Sherbrands have worn the King's coat for ages. Ever since there were any Sherbrands--going by the portraits in the gallery at Whins--where my father lived when he was a boy. He used to describe them to me until I knew them as well as he did from the Sir Alan who fought with Talbot against the French at Castillan Chatillon as a boy, and got killed at Bannockburn thirty-five years later, down to the jolly old Sir Roger, who fought like a Trojan at Badajoz. He was my great-grandfather, so I suppose I've always had a secret hankering for the Service. Like the inherited nostalgia Hillmen's children have for the mountains, or sailors' for the sea. The kind of feeling that sets the little Arctic foxes in the Zoo howling at the first sprinkle of snow in December. Only I knew I mustn't yield to it. You know the reason why!"

"You told me, and I answered that that kind of reason couldn't affect you."

"Now you shall hear a plan I've been nursing." His arm again engirdled her. "Do you know Seasheere? It's a little grassy, cliffy, shingly village on the South-East coast, three-hours' journey from Charing Cross. There's a Naval Air Station there that was a Seaplane School not long ago. We used to send 'em pupils from Hendon: there's a cottage where they take lodgers not far off. I spent three weeks there last summer, fishing and motor-boating when I wasn't making friends with Goody Two Shoes----"

"Who's Goody Two Shoes?"

"The hydroplane!" His voice broke in laughter. "Did you think I meant a girl?"

"I'm an idiot. Go on about your plan, dear."

"Oh--well! The cottage I stayed at was jolly comfortable, and the landlady the tidiest old woman that ever grilled a chop. Now suppose--to-morrow, or a week, or two months hence you got a wire from Somewhere in France or Belgium saying: '_Seasheere--such-a-day-and-such-an-hour--Alan_'--would you pack your kit for a week-end and hop into the train, and come?"

"Without asking--without telling--Aunt Lynette or Uncle Owen?" She asked the question breathlessly.

"We'll tell the Doctor and Mrs. Saxham directly afterwards." He leaned his cheek on the beech-leaf hair and his arm tightened about her waist possessively. "You said my heart jumped just now when you called me a soldier. How it will jump when I pick you out with the glasses, a tiny black speck on the cliffs at Seasheere, waiting with the sunset behind you, or the dawn in your eyes to welcome me back from over the sea. Oh, my girl!"--his voice wooed her irresistibly--"I've dreamed wide awake of the joy of such a greeting.... It's up to you to make my dream come true!" He kissed her hair. "And we'll watch the day die, and sup together, and you'll sleep at my nice old woman's cottage. And I'll turn in at the Air Station--and next morning we'll be married at Seasheere Catholic Church!"

"Married--that's your plan? Ah, Alan! shall we ever be married?" she sighed.

He laughed softly, pressing her against him.