Chapter XXI: Part 21

The car moved on where the roadway was not broken by trenches, crawling painfully over litter and wreck. In the shadow of the ruined prison, while yet the sun was high, they halted. Their chauffeur nodded to his Belgian compatriot, the Red Cross orderly, interrogated by Monseigneur, pointed to the tall brown figure standing on the grass beside the twisted wreckage of a British aeroplane.

"I will wait here for you, Mademoiselle," said Monseigneur, getting out and assisting his fellow-traveller. She was very tall and of supple figure, and wore a long blue coat with the Red Cross shield-badge, and a felt hat banded with the V.A.D. ribbon, pulled down over luxuriant masses of hair--hair that had been cloudy-black as storm-wrack and had been bleached to the hue of wintry beech-leaves, and now had darkened to the brown of peat-earth, deepening in colour every day.

She gave Monseigneur her hand, thanking him, and suddenly he thought her beautiful, although the tall young woman had not previously appealed to the sense of beauty in Monseigneur. Her long eyes under their widely arching brows were stars, her mouth was smiling. When she moved away over the snow-patched grass, she seemed to tread on air....

Throughout the drive Patrine had been torn with horrible misgivings. "What shall I say or do," she had wondered. "How shall I bear it if the look upon his face should tell me, when Alan first hears my voice--that I was wrong to come?" But the chilly fit had passed with the first glimpse of Sherbrand. The rich, warm flood rising in her veins had swept her doubts away.

Here on this shell-pitted expanse of turf you felt the War-pulse beating. French 75's were putting over a furious barrage from the south. North of the City of the Salient the British guns were slogging, and through the chain-fire of the enemy's 77 mm.'s, his 11.2-in. howitzers bellowed at short intervals, and sent in 600-pound shells.

The smoke of a train rose north-west in the direction of Thourout Junction. That the train was a German train, carrying troops and guns and munitions for War purposes, did not at once occur to Patrine. All was well. Not a doubt remained. She was near her Flying Man again after months of separation. Here at last was food for her hungry eyes and drink for her thirsting soul.

"He has grown thin, poor dear!" she thought, seeing how the war-stained khaki hung in folds on his tall figure. The broad shoulders stooped. The chest had sunken, and he leaned upon a heavy walking-stick. The beloved face was turned away, the line of the cheek was careworn. She choked upon a sob and stopped short, fighting her emotion down.

The song of the soaring lark broke off. The bird dived to earth and hid itself amongst the frosty grasses as the snoring whirr of aircraft came out of the distance high in the sky to the west. Now the shape of a big biplane gleamed pinky-white as a seagull, beating up against the thrust of the snow-tanged easterly breeze.

Nearer and nearer flew the 'plane. Now one could see it distinctly. A French machine by its blue-white-red rings, and a Caudron by its great square tail. A silver-grey monoplane scurried in its wake, a Weiss by the backward curve of its wing-tips. The whirr of its tractor and the blatter of its machine-gun wakened the echoes sleeping among the leprous white ruins of the city. The Caudron wheeled and circled beautifully, and the trac-trac of its mitraille answered the machine-gun, and spent bullets began to patter on the Plaine far below.

Suddenly the Frenchman banked and began to climb. The Weiss, its aluminium sheathing glittering in the sunshine, climbed too, so rapidly that the enemy's purpose was foiled. Then, at a great height they circled round each other, and the crack and flare of explosive revolver-bullets began to mingle with the blatter and trac-trac, and little blobs of something that blazed and sputtered wickedly began to drop with the bullets that tumbled out of the skies. It was the prettiest sight. It suggested the amorous dallying of two big butterflies, the squabble of a pair of hawking swallows, and yet the issues were Life and Death. Suddenly the Weiss took to flight. A second Caudron had showed upon the distance and the Kaiser's flier was not taking any more on. Waiting for his countryman to come abreast, the Frenchman hovered like a kite-hawk. And at the familiar buzz of the horizontal screws a visible thrill went through Sherbrand. He took off the smoked glasses that he wore, and turned his blind eyes upwards towards the sound, and on his haggard face was stamped the anguish of his despair.

"My poor boy!" nearly broke from Patrine, and hot tears scalded her eyelids. He started, though she had uttered no word, and brought down those unseeing eyes. His nostrils expanded as he inhaled the air. His thick fair brows contracted. The first Caudron, exchanging signals with the second, had ceased hovering and floated onwards, but Sherbrand's thoughts had been brought down out of his sky.

"What is it? ... Why?" said the intent and frowning look. He snuffed the air again and pondered still, and suddenly Patrine comprehended. Some waft of perfume from her hair or clothes had reached the sense made keener by his blindness, evoked some once-loved image, roused some memory of her.

She crouched low, and looked up at the lean, lined visage yearningly. Dear heart! how changed he was to-day from her young Mercury of the Milles Plaisirs. And yet this altered face of his, marred by the broad, new-healed scar that traversed the left cheek and temple, and the cloudy look of suffering in the prominent grey-blue eyes, was dearer than ever to Patrine.

How bravely the ribbon of the Croix de Guerre and the purple, green, and silver of the Belgian Order showed against the war-stained khaki. What woman living would not glory in such a lover, welcome the sacred charge, rejoice to be his guide and minister! ... "Oh, my blind eagle, to sit mateless in the darkness shall not be your fate, God being good to me!" Some words like these were on the lips of Patrine.

But the words were unspoken. He was turning those cloudy, troubled eyes towards his unseen sky again as though trying to project the vision of his soul through the depths of aerial distance. Then he desisted as though wearied by the effort. His stern face softened to dreamy tenderness. His lips moved. Very quietly, but with infinite wistfulness, he uttered her own name:

"Patrine! Patrine!"

He was thinking of her--he was dreaming of her--he was still her lover. She knew a joyful shock, a checking of the pulses.... Then her blood whirled on its crimson circle as though arteries and veins were brimmed with wine. Her bosom heaved, her eyes were misty jewels, and out of the wonderful silence about them came to her the low, sweet soughing of her long-lost Wind of Joy.

She moved to Sherbrand, kissed him full upon the mouth, and called him: "Alan!" And a great cry broke from him--a cry of wonder, triumph, and joy. As his arms swept out to enfold her she knew that she had conquered. She had not been deceived in reading love between the formal lines.

"Life has nothing more to give!" was Patrine's thought as his arms held her. It seemed that Death would be a tiny price to pay for such a wonderful moment as this.

"My love, my love! Did you really think we could live without each other?" she stammered through his eager kisses. "Didn't you know I would have to come and carry you back home by the hair of your head? Did you dare to dream that I or any of the people who love you could get on without you? Your mother, and Aunt Lynette--and Bawne and Uncle Owen--and Sir Roland--who managed things for me to come to you!--and Margot and her boy ... for there is a boy--a regular topper--born last November--with eyes just like poor Franky's! And you're to come back and be kind to him and his mother--because you promised Franky you would! So that old ghost of your succession to the Viscounty is laid--and I'm glad of it! Another stone heaved out of the way that leads me back to you!"

She went on, holding him as he held her embraced, pouring herself out in a swift rush of eager utterance:

"Come back and help us readjust values. Everything's changed--everything's altered--since the beginning of the War. We women have found out--even the idlest and the vainest of us--that the things we used to live for really meant nothing! What we have called Society is a box of broken toys. The plays we have laughed or cried at--the books we have read--the music we have gone rabid over--the frocks we have sported--the flirtations we have revelled in--the scandals we have discussed--none of these mean anything, count for anything--weigh anything! Nothing is real but Life--and Love--and Death. Not life like the life we used to know--nor love like the love we talked of. A life of work, and help, and prayer, and hope--and courage--and the kind of love that has wings and doesn't crawl in the mud. Nothing like the Death we used to dodge and blink and dread so, but something nobler. Something that leads through the Gate of the Grave--to God! Don't you see that the War was sent to change us?--don't you see----"

He cried out:

"I shall never see again!" An ugly spasm wrenched his jaw aside. "They think I take it pluckily. But every night I dream it over once more--and the sky is rushing back, and the ground is swirling up--and the Bird is toppling, spinning downwards, in a trail of smoke and fire. I can hear my observer screaming, poor, poor fellow! How I escaped burning I don't know. Then comes the crash!--and the grey void of Nothingness out of which, aeons later, I crawl into a blind man's dreadful world. A world that is all sounds and voices and sounds and touches. A world where I must live--and die--in the dark!"

She said in her deep sweet voice, with her velvet cheek pressed against Sherbrand's:

"With me. And suppose you saw me, and could not feel nor hear me?"

She felt him shudder as he answered:

"The thing would be Hell!"

"Well, then, let me try and make the best of it! For both of us, my dear one!" She pressed closer to his breast, magnetising him with her touch, her breath, her presence, summoning all her forces of womanly allurements to charm him from despair. "Couldn't I reconcile my lover to the dark?" she whispered.

"Are you cold, dearest?" he asked. For as the last words left her lips a sharp vibration had passed through her. "You shivered as though you were."

"Perhaps? ... I hardly know," said Patrine, thrusting away the loathed memory of the Upas. "Perhaps the wind has shifted--or a goose walked over my grave."

She changed her tone and began to tell him how Margot had evicted her Uncle Derek and his Lepidopthingambobs and handed over the caravanserai in Hanover Square to the Red Cross people for a Hospital--and how all the wards were to be covered with vulcanised rubber--not a corner to catch a dust-speck anywhere. And she went on to describe her journey in search of Sherbrand, and her disappointment at finding him absent from the Hospital at Pophereele--and the kindness shown her by the Monseigneur who had escorted her from St. O--, and subsequently insisted on accompanying her here.

"For it's supposed to be risky," she ended, smiling. "He says--to me it seems like spitting in the face of a dead body!--that the Germans shell the poor place nearly every day."

"It's true. They've pitched High Explosive in once already this morning--and as I mean to marry you to-morrow," said Sherbrand, "we had better be off out of it before they repeat the dose." He added: "There's an English Catholic priest at the Hospital--and I've my Special Licence still tucked away in a pocket!"

She exclaimed in delight:

"Then you never meant to give me up? Own it--you didn't!"

"It was you who took your solid oath you wouldn't marry me."

"Unless you were poor and ill--and wanted a woman to nurse you and look after you"--her voice broke--"and work for you! Oh, Boy!--no, not boy any more! My man of all the men that ever were or will be! Don't refuse me the right my love gives me--of working for you!" she urged.

"Such true love. Such fine love. Pat, you're a glory of a woman. And you shall work--I'll give you lots of work," he promised her. "But--my sweet girl, I'm not poor."

She asked him in her deep sweet voice:

"Do you think you'd be poor to me--if you hadn't a copper halfpenny?" And with his arm about her still, and her heart beating against his hand, as they moved over the grass together, she began to describe their home. Quite a small, unpretending, but comfortable home. The home of two people who adored each other, and wanted nothing better than to go on doing it up to the last day of their lives.

"We'll have children--stacks!" she assured him. "Long-legged boys with beaky, hatchet faces--boys who'll invent and build aeroplanes and fly them too, you bet!"

"And girls," put in Sherbrand, tightening his clasp about the supple womanly body, "great big galumphing girls, like their mother!"

"The sweets!" she sighed. "I can see them now!"

"Ah, that's what I shan't do ever," said Sherbrand. "Don't you think they'll be bored with their blind father, sometimes, Pat?"

"Just let them dare! Let them--that's all!" She winked away the tears crowding to her eyelashes. "Besides you mayn't be always blind--I'll never give up praying! Didn't that American surgeon at the Hospital say that cases of functional blindness from shock--like yours--supposing there is no serious lesion in the brain--have been known to recover sight suddenly and completely? Don't shake your head! Isn't there a chance--a blessed possibility--to cling to, and fight for? Ah! if you were cured, don't you know I'd send you back to the Front next day? Don't you, Alan? Yes!--yes! you do!" The bright drops rushed in spate over her underlids, and hopped over the front of her long blue coat, to lose themselves among the frosted grasses as she went hotly on:

"Don't you believe--you must believe--I'd lay down my life--just for the glory of doing that! Perhaps I usedn't to care much about England--before the War. But now I've found out what it means to be a pup of the old bull-mother,--I'd meet Death jumping--rather than fail cf doing my bit. What's up?"

Someone had whistled shrilly behind them, and she wheeled, to see Monseigneur and a Red Cross orderly beckoning and signalling, standing on a heap of rubbish on the outskirts of the Plaine. Sherbrand, for whom the call was meant, waved his stick and whistled in answer. The orderly, at a gesture from Monseigneur, got nimbly down from the rubbish-heap and started to cross the intervening stretch of grass.

"Why is he coming?" began Patrine, vexedly.

"To fetch the blind man, I suppose."

"Ah-h!" Her long eyes blazed resentment. "If anyone but yourself had called you that! ... Send him back!" she pleaded, jealously. "From henceforward nobody is to fetch you--or carry you either, except Me!"

So Sherbrand laughed in his companioned darkness, waved again, and shouted to the orderly to go back. What he said was lost in the racket accompanying the arrival of a German H.E. shell.

For still at intervals during each day and sometimes at night-time the sad dignity of the deserted City of the Salient was outraged by these monstrous messengers of hate. The thing came from the enemy's position east of the city, and fell with a hideous droning note in the wooded park by the Dixmude Gate.

A shattering crash followed--as though the roof of the world were tumbling in. The green park of budding trees was rent and splintered, cratered and riven as though a Dinosaur had died there of acute rabies, biting and tearing and howking up the earth.

Love is a wonderful wit-quickener in necessity. It taught Patrine Saxham, the woman of limitations, exactly what to do at the moment when the great shell droned down to ground. Irresistible as a mountain torrent, she leaped straight for the blind man before her, hurling him backwards by the sudden impact, over-balancing and bearing him down. Pinning him with the sheer weight of her vigorous young body--covering him as Nature teaches a tigress to cover her menaced cub, whilst their ears were deafened with the appalling detonation, the solid earth heaved and billowed under their prone, locked bodies, and the air surged and winnowed about them as though beaten by the passage of huge invisible wings.

"Is this Death?" she asked herself. "Then--for both!" was her half-conscious prayer. But Death passed by in a blizzard of scorching gases, splinters of rending steel, gravel, and stones, splintered timber and pulverised soil, leaving a huge cloud of reddish-yellow billowing over the Plaine d'Amour. A brown powder that stank of verbena, thickly coated all visible objects. Hair, skin, and clothes were tinted to uniformity, and a smothering oppression burdened the lungs. Yet as Patrine lay gasping, nerveless, beaten, that fierce new-kindled instinct of protection lived in her, potent, vital with possibilities as the spark in the battery or the germ in the cell.

The Great Test had found her not wanting nor unready. The dross of self had been burned away in the flame of a passion high and pure. The Crown of a noble womanhood was hers in that great moment when her body had made a rampart for the shielding of her love.

Under the heave of her bosom Sherbrand's broad chest panted. He lived--and her heart went up in a rush of passionate thanks to Heaven. She moved from him, quaking in every nerve and fibre, crouched beside him, found her handkerchief, and wiped the pungent dust from his face. It was pale, the mouth and eyes were closed, the nostrils fluttered with quick panting. His head had struck against the ground when her leap had hurled him backwards. He had been stunned, she told herself. He would revive soon.

"Patrine!" he choked out, opening his eyes.

"Pat's here by you, my darling!" She slipped her strong arm under his neck and helped him to sit up:

"You're not hurt?" His lungs pumped hard, and his reddened eyes ran water. He blinked it away and caught her hands, crushing them in his grip. "You're sure you're not?"

"Quite, quite sure! And you're all right, aren't you?"

"As right as rain, except for a bump on the head!" He freed a hand and rubbed it. "When the shell came over--and the ground rose up and hit me. How did it happen?"

"I--hardly know. Oh, Alan! God has been good to us! Hasn't He?"

There was no immediate response. Sherbrand's lean face was working. He rose to his knees and thus remained an instant, in silence that gave thanks. Then he got lightly on his feet, reached down and lifted Patrine. And thus they stood, the girl clinging to the young man's broad shoulders as he held her, the tears from her own still smarting eyes tracing white channels in the dust that masked her quivering face.

"You and I! ... My hat!--" she gasped--"what a precious pair of scallawags! You lose nothing in not being able to see, my Flying Man!--just now. Oh! but the station! And the park----"

She stopped in sheer astonishment. For the deadliest fury of the High Explosive had wreaked itself on the bit of municipal woodland. With the electric train-station that had neighboured it, and the _abattoirs_ in its vicinity, it had been clean wiped out.

"Come," said Sherbrand, tightening his clasp as he felt her sway against him. He was supporting--he was guiding as they turned their faces south.

Here the Death that had passed by had left more traces of its passage. The rent carcase of a gaunt cow that had grazed upon the Plaine d'Amour, lay in a steaming crimson pool among the frosty grasses; and beyond, some thirty paces from the Rue d'Elverdinghe, where the automobiles waited near the ruins of the prison, Monseigneur in his flowing black cloak knelt over a stained bundle of ragged blue clothing and shattered humanity, and the Belgian and his fellow-chauffeur were bringing a stretcher from the Red Cross car....

"The poor orderly has been wounded ... No! ... killed!" flashed through Patrine's mind as Monseigneur glanced towards her, gesturing with a supple hand in a swift expressive way. "I must go over there--I may be wanted," she mentally added, controlling her sick shudder and reached back to take again the hand of her blind man. But a sudden exclamation from Sherbrand brought round her head, and the strange look stamped upon the face she loved, arrested movement and checked utterance.

"What is it? What has happened?" she forced her stiffened tongue to ask him. "Oh, Alan! tell me! You are not ill----"

"Not ill!" came from the twisted mouth, wrung and convulsed with--was it joy or anguish? He shut his eyes, striving for calmness and coherent speech and wrestling with a fierce emotion that made him sway and totter like a drunken man. "Give me your hand--both your dear hands! Don't mind my shutting my eyes--it'll steady me to tell you! ... Just now--when you let go of me--something happened--and I--_saw_!"

He choked upon the last word. She faced him, white and wild and desperate, and cried in a voice quite strange to Sherbrand's ears:

"You saw! ... My God!--do you want to drive me crazy? Do you mean--you can't mean----"

"Does the truth sound so insane?" His voice broke in a sob. He opened the shut, quivering lids through which the tears were streaming, and the grey-blue eyes that looked at her were no longer the dead orbs of one blind. Life and light throbbed in their depths, they glowed with such a radiance as the eyes of the First Lover may have shed on the face of the new-made Eve. What was he saying in shaken tones of mingled awe and rapture:

"I saw what I am seeing now. Trees--and green grass, and blue sky--and your face! Your dear face that stayed with me when the Big Dark blotted out the rest.... More loving--more lovely than ever I have dreamed it. Oh! Pat, did ever any man get such a wedding-present?" His tone changed: "My sight for me--and death for that poor chap there! Can it be Carpenter--the American who's been so good to me! ... And the priest helping to lift him--the old man with the noble face? ... Not Monseigneur--our Chaplain at the Hospital! He's beckoning! Come! Let's run!"

So these happy lovers with Death as travelling-companion drove away from the City of the Salient. There was a wedding next morning at the Hospital of Pophereele. And twenty-four hours later, the big black-capitalled broadsheets bellowed from Ludgate Hill up Fleet Street and along the Strand to Charing Cross, and all through the West End:

ROMANTIC SEQUEL TO FAMOUS AVIATOR'S STORY. SHERBRAND OF THE R.F.C., BLINDED IN AIR-BATTLE, RECOVERS SIGHT THROUGH SHELL-SHOCK. MARRIED YESTERDAY. RETURNS WITH BRIDE. CAPTAINCY AND D.S.O."

A closing picture of a young couple sitting very close together on a rustic seat in the garden of a cottage on Seasheere Downs, where hyacinths bloom, and clumps of pink-white peonies, and the Birds of War whirr overhead in a June's sky of speedwell-blue.

Patrine Sherbrand says to her husband, as the smoke of British transports and heavily-laden supply-steamers slants against the east horizon, and the knife-sharp bows of shepherding Destroyers cleave the grey-green waters of the North Sea:

"If without dishonour to your dear name it lay in my power to keep you with me, do you think I'd have it so? Not I! I'll have you carry on as though I'd never even existed. For me--the work that lies at hand. When that's done--dreams of you. If you were killed you'd live for me--my man I gave for England! Our England that they'll never beat--not even if they win!"

"Thanks, my sweet wife! Then when I say--our honeymoon is over----?"

"Ah, well! ... How soon? ..."

He told her, looking in her eyes, that did not flinch beneath his:

"In four days! The Medical Board finds me quite fit--and there's a Flying billet waiting. Our Western Front...."

She said, as her heart beat on his and their mouths met in a kiss:

"Then--four more days of love with me, and fly, my Bird of War!"

The Chief Scout had said to Sherbrand in those days of July, 1914: "The Saxham breed's a stark breed--hard as granite, supple as incandescent lava, with a strain of Berserk madness, and a dash of Oriental fatalism. They can hate magnificently and forgive grandly, and love to the very verge of Death."

Sherbrand had found it so. He thanked God that this heart that he had won would never change nor fail him. He knew that he could call his own the love that reaches living hands to Love beyond the grave.

THE END