Chapter I

Weeks after John Hazel had sailed with a draft of leave-expired "Fenchurch Streets,"--to join the Division to which that gallant London regiment was attached--with the British Mediterranean Expeditionary Forces at Salonika--and while brave British men in Palestine were cracking their teeth on that hard nut of Gaza--H.M. Transport _Loyalty_, (an ex-Austrian Lloyd Liner captured at the beginning of the War, and converted into a Mediterranean Hospital ship), sailed for Egypt,--and in the _Photographic Puff_ of the week's issue appeared--under an enlarged snapshot of the pre-War departure of the ex-Austrian Lloyd from Southampton Docks--this announcement:

"POPULAR SOCIETY PEERESS, COMMANDANT OF L.L.W.S.L.,
SAILS FOR EASTERN THEATRE OF WAR."

Another periodical of the type that daily caters for readers of another order, published, under a portrait of Lady Wastwood in exiguous dinner dress:

"TRIXIE MAKES TRACKS FOR EGYPT TO FIND OUT WHY
SPHINX SMILES."

While in the _Daily Wire_ of a few days' later issue was published a brief paragraph to the effect that H.M. Transport _Loyalty_ had been torpedoed on the fifth day of her voyage out to Alexandria; carrying some officers and men of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force returning from sick-leave; a detachment of Military Nurses and fourteen brand-new ambulance-cars; many War Hospital stores and comforts destined for our wounded, together with a complete unit of the British Red Cross.

"Miss Forbis, V.A.D., of Kerr's Arbour, N.B., is included in the list of the rescued, as also Trixie, Lady Wastwood, O.B.E., Commandant L.L.W.S.L., who was on her way to the East to employ her well-known powers of organisation in the establishment of a Hostel for Convalescent Officers (Auxiliary) in the neighbourhood of Alexandria." The famous motto of the Legion is, doubtless, familiar to our readers: "Do Anything, Go Anywhere, Stick At Nothing, and Never Grouse."

The usual boat-drill had not been neglected, and when the alarm had once been sounded, everybody had dutifully turned up at his or her allotted station in overcoat and cork lifebelt, to be not at all astonished by the intelligence that the scare was simply a dud.... No attack upon the part of enemy submarines had been anticipated.... The _Loyalty_, with her three vast squares of green paint bounding a white-edged Red Cross (outlined at night by brilliant electric lights)--amidships on each side, ought to be regarded as sacrosanct by German submarines.... But of course people understood there were loose mines in the Mediterranean, though the minefields were all known.

Lady Wastwood had rather ruffled the good-humour of the Captain by constantly asking him how he could be Certain of this? But after he had personally conducted the Commandant, life-belt and all--for from this practical insurance Trixie never separated--to his chart-house on the Lower Bridge, and displayed before her green eyes a chart of the Mediterranean, ornamented with designs in coloured inks by the Navigating; Lieutenant--indicating areas strewn with floating mines by the Kaiser and the Sublime Porte, "G.M. at such-and-such a depth, and T.M. at such-and-such another," and illustrated the uses of the telephones between the Wireless Room and the chart-house, and the telegraphs linking the officer on the bridge with the engine-room, and the speaking-tubes communicating with the batteries of quick-firing guns fore and aft,--Trixie's anxieties were completely laid to rest. She thanked the Captain effusively, and with a gracious smile and bow to the Navigating Lieutenant, descended to the saloon-deck cabin,--which she shared with Miss Forbis--to renew her complexion for the 12.30 lunch.

To wash your hands, arrange your hair and refresh your complexion while arrayed in a life-belt being impossible, Trixie removed her practical insurance, hanging it on the cabin sofa-end while she monopolised the looking-glass.

"Of course I am a grouse--and a disgrace to the Legion, I know it too well!" she owned to Katharine, as she intensified her V-shaped Pierrot smile with a stick of scarlet paste, "and instead of playing rounders and quoits and clock-golf--which is exactly the same kind of thing as playing water polo in a wash-hand basin--what I really long to do is to huddle in a deck-chair, and look out for oily streaks and white breaks in the water. But I am the victim of a morbid imagination--that keeps telling me what happens to you when you get wrecked at sea. You go down and come up three times--and see all the events of your past life processioning before you. That must be horrible! And they say it always happens--the people, I mean, who have nearly been drowned--and were only just saved in time!"

"But nobody who has been quite drowned has ever given an account of it," said Katharine, with her wholesome, heartening laugh.

Sea and sunshine had done much for Miss Forbis. Private Abrahams would have recognised her for the bright-eyed, smiling woman he had met that day on the Menin Road.... We cannot always mourn the dead, or bewail the lost that are living; though often her heart cried out in anguish for her dear ones; and waking of nights upon the shallow pillow of the upper bunk in the suffocating cabin, she would feel for a silver whistle she carried in her bosom--and kiss it--and cry herself to sleep again.... Or lie sleepless amidst the creakings, the overhead tramplings and shoutings; the snorting of electrically-driven ventilators; the occasional thump! of a bigger sea than usual upon the bows of the _Loyalty_, and the dismal sounds emitted by sufferers from the malady of the sea....

"How sensibly you look at things, Kathy dear," said Lady Wastwood, putting the final touch to her Pierrot smile....

Friendly and even affectionate as were the relations between these two women,--no reference had ever been made by one or the other to that February day of Trixie's encounter with Edward Yaill on board the Scotch Express. But the subject was in the air, and both felt it,--and possibly because of this, their conversation was elaborately casual....

Trixie added, as she intensified the eyebrows that resembled musical slurs, with a black pencil: "But really, my stupid nerves are quieting down! The skipper has cheered me wonderfully. There's something so refreshingly bluff and reassuring about a big smiling sailor man with white ducks and an Irish accent,--of the northern kind that one doesn't associate with dynamite and revolvers and masks. He has quite put my idiotic fears to bed. I shall never--AH!"--

A hot, violet-yellow light seemed to fill the cabin, as the terrible detonation shook the _Loyalty_. The air seemed flame.... Dust filled their lungs and nostrils, and the shattering crash of descending tons of water, mingled with the great cry blended of innumerable voices, that goes up to Heaven from a mined or torpedoed ship.... Then the shrieks and cries ceased, as Discipline asserted itself. Through the deafening roar of escaping steam--and the racket of shattered engines--the bugle sounded the alarm--in deadly earnest now....

"Come!" said Katharine Forbis. She wrenched open the cabin door, letting in a rush of water, seized both their life-belts and gripped hold of Lady Wastwood, who, half-swooning, wavered as though about to fall. Somehow Miss Forbis dragged her charge through a jam of white-faced men and women--along the broad gangway, oddly tilted forwards--ankle-deep in water--up the main companion--tilted too, at that queer forward angle--down which the sea was rushing in a heavy waterfall. Drenched and gasping, to reach the promenade-deck--emerging into the radiant beauty of a Mediterranean day with the shout:

"All passengers on deck with life-belts on! All passengers on deck with life-belts on!" ringing in her ears....

Sun and sea, sea and sun,--and Death at its ugliest--an uncanny combination.... There was no panic after the first outcry and the headlong scrimmage for the upper deck. The deafening boom of escaping steam made it necessary to shout so as to be heard by those who stood nearest.... The forward tilt of the smooth white planks increased momentarily. The _Loyalty's_ bow-plates and forward compartments had been stove in by the explosion. She was settling down by the nose, into the mirror-clear water--while the Military Nurses in their grey cloaks,, and the men and women of the Red Cross stood to attention on her tilting decks--and her officers went to and fro....

There never had been panic, there was even a little laughter.... No fear of horrors of thirst and starvation attending on shipwreck in the crowded Mediterranean Sea.... The low grey hulls of the _Loyalty's_ two attendant Destroyers were visible on her starboard a long way ahead.... They were getting steam up.... "Coming to look after us!" shouted somebody to somebody. Of course they had been apprised by Wireless of what had occurred....

"Great invention, Wireless!" shouted somebody else to Katharine....

Katharine nodded back. She hardly felt depressed.

"_B'mm. Hm'm! Oom'm m! ..._"

A seaplane came droning out of the bright distance from where the low grey hulls of Destroyers showed, shepherding a stately procession of camouflaged troopers and battleships,--and hovered in narrowing circles over the _Loyalty_. Her pilot shut off--and his observer shouted something through a megaphone. What he said could not be heard through the roar of the escaping steam. Then he dropped a weighted note and flew away southwards, and the Second Officer grabbed the note and hurried off to take it to the Captain on the bridge.... Katharine never saw him again.... But inside the space of twenty seconds every soul on board the doomed vessel was in possession of the ugly fact....

The _Loyalty_ had got out of her course,--strayed miles from the guarded ocean highway, traversed in comparative safety by the shipping of the Allies, patrolled by British Fleet hydroplanes, submarines and Argus-eyed T.B.D.'s.... She was in the middle of a Turkish minefield, one of those fulminating enemy areas marked out on her charts with lines and letters in coloured inks, that had been displayed by her Captain to the anxious eyes of Lady Wastwood. The powerful magnetos of a German submarine,--hovering in her near vicinity, had caused deviation in the British transport's compasses. Or, there had been a blunder--the truth will never be known....

Of the boats that had got away from the ship,--the first were crowded with women only; the next were packed with women and a sprinkling of men.... They pulled away towards those grey shapes on the southern horizon--topped by columns of slanting smoke--and presently were mere specks upon the straining sight....

As Katharine and Lady Wastwood were helped over the rail into their boat, and it was lowered to the level of the water--something like a shudder went through the _Loyalty_.... Her stern-ports lifted at a greater angle, and her bows were submerged more deeply. Looking up at her huge grey bulk, it seemed to Katharine that some vast cetacean,--bombed and harpooned--lay dying in agony upon the smooth and glassy sea....

She saw the Captain on the bridge, binoculars in hand, speaking to one of the minor officers. Urged in some way, he shook his head as though in refusal, and as his subordinate quitted the bridge--resumed his interrupted scanning of the distant sea. Perhaps the binoculars had focussed the travelling top of a periscope, and the breaking of white water, miles away to the east....

When the double White Death Streak cleaved the blue sea, and one after another two torpedoes hit the _Loyalty_ on her port side amidships--her bows plunged downwards, throwing most of the people remaining on her decks, into the water. Others clung to her rails and the roofs of her deck-structures, as with a thunderous rattle of scrapping iron, her bowels fell out of her mangled body,--and she dived and vanished in a whirlpool of her own. As her stern heaved up perpendicularly, lifting her huge triple screws sheer out of the swirling water, a Portuguese sailor scrambled up upon her counter, naked as in the hour of his birth,--and so stood poised; his rich brown body gleaming,--his wild eyes and bared teeth glittering in the sun:

"_Mao riao parta o' diabo!_ ... (May the Thunderbolt split you, devil! ...")

He shook his dark clenched fist towards the east, shrieking out the imprecation--meant perhaps for the Kaiser or the Sultan or the Commander of the submarine,--and dived magnificently as the ship sank, dragging down with her the last boats....

And then, through suffocation, and roaring sounds of water in her ears--flashes of sunlight piercing her smarting eyes, wedges of blackness driving over mind and soul--lightning flashes of consciousness--gasped-out prayers to God, wild cries for help,--washed down her choking throat by volumes of bitter waters--Katharine Forbis came up out of the depths--to find herself floating in sunlight and strange silence, on a sea covered with a strange confusion of floating _débris_....

Not alone, for all the silence. In the company of a good many other people, pluckily bent on keeping their courage up, and other folks' as well. Military nurses and Red Cross V.A.D's, orderlies, officers, sailors, Tommies.... Some of the men on duty forward had been horribly injured by the explosion of the Turkish contact-mine. What could be done for them had been done before quitting the sinking _Loyalty_. But as the blood from their cruel wounds drained away into the waste of water.... It was not the first time that Katharine Forbis had seen brave men die.... Then a V.A.D. woman perched with two others on a gangway, called to her across a patch of water--a lagoon ringed-in with floating wreckage:

"Oh, do look at the Commandant!--I am afraid she is dying!"

Treading water, paddling with a wooden fruit-dish, horribly hampered by her cork panoply,--Katharine crossed the patch of sea. The thin bluish wedge of Trixie's face lay tilted upwards to the jeering sunshine, against the slab of cork outcropping at the back of her belt. Her green eyes, half-open, looked hard and glassy as enamel--the livid lips were parted, showing the set white teeth....

"Oh try to live!" begged Katharine. "See--there are ships in the distance!" She pointed to some grey shapes moving on the southern horizon under their slanting columns of grey smoke. "The boats that have left us will be picked up--they will be sent back for us! ..."

"No ship commanded by a sane man will stick her nose into the middle of a charted Turkish minefield!" came from a man who hung on to a deck-seat and a wooden hen-coop next them, and had overheard. "When the contact stove in our forward plates I sent out the S.O.S. and got through to the Commander of one of those Destroyers...." He jerked his chin angrily towards some slanting streaks of smoke to the southward. "All he could do was to send that hydro from the nearest Battle Cruiser to have a look at us; explain what kind of a mess we were in--in case we hadn't guessed it already!--and tell us to wait for the boats! ..."

And the speaker, who had been the Wireless Operator on board the _Loyalty_, whose head was swathed in a bloody towel and whose right arm hung broken by his side,--grinned a forlorn grin, and tightened with his teeth the buckle of the leather waist-strap that supported him on his improvised raft, as Trixie's head fell limply back, and a faint moan fluttered from her lips, that were getting ashen grey....

"Please, please, don't give up!" said Katharine, mustering all her forces. She splashed water on the grey, peaked face and shook the thin shoulder. "Listen to me.... Do you hear? Don't you _dare_ to die! ..."

But not Katharine's utmost efforts could have kept the dwindling life in Trixie, as the hours dragged on, and the blazing sun beat on their misery.... But that her good Angel, or Trixie's, reminded her that the little courier-bag slung about her shoulders, containing her money and papers, accommodated a tiny brandy-flask.

A sickness of sheer despair came over her as she realised that, environed by the unwieldy cork slabs of her life-belt, she could not possibly get at the bag.... Then she remembered, when there had been a moment or two of delay in readying the ship's boat--she had taken the flask out of the bag, and thrust it in the breast-pocket of her serge jacket. With a rush of thankfulness she felt for it, and found it there still.

It seemed long to Katharine before she could unscrew the flask-cap, and force a few drops of Cognac between the other's tightly-clenched teeth. When Trixie sighed, and opened her green eyes,--between her dazed vision and the marvel of a Mediterranean sunset, leaned the even greater wonder of a compassionate human face....

The glory of the sunset culminated to its utmost splendour. Floods of blazing wine of rubies poured into the sapphire bowl of the sea.... The water was calm as a mill-pond,--the air was balmy sweetness--as the evening star kindled, under the round breast of Asia's radiant moon.... And of all the innumerable ships that passed and repassed along the crowded sea-road on the southern horizon, not one altered her course for the castaway passengers of the luckless _Loyalty_....

They had been so brave, talking and cracking jokes--singing even,--asking riddles, and attempting recitations, "being British" some of them would have called it--up to the last volt of strength.... Towards morning they began to die,--the Wireless Operator leading the way, slipping off quite easily.... A baby went next, the only child on shipboard, and its desperate mother,--the English wife of a native official at Malta--shrieking--cast loose the rope that lashed her to some floating deck-fittings and, clutching the tiny body to her--leaped into the sea. And others died of exhaustion, and yet others; until quavering voices bravely raised in familiar strains of well-loved hymns, were dumb for sheer despair.... But, after all, though not until Dawn had risen over the unseen Desert of Syria--the boats that had pulled away, came back for yet another freight....

"Are we dead, you and I?" asked Lady Wastwood dreamily, waking out of an exhausted sleep, in a cabin of the trooper that had taken the rescued ones on board....

"Not yet," said Katharine Forbis gently, stooping over her. "It seems that God has yet some work in this world for you and me to do!"

"It is a lonely world," said Trixie faintly, and turned her peaked face to the bulkhead, "I had done with it! And--though it sounds horribly ungrateful, dear! I am sorry that you have brought me back!"

"But I am glad you aren't dead," said Katharine, kissing her, "because I love you, and you know that you are fond of me!"

"You saved my life.... I can never forget that," said Lady Wastwood. "My dear! there ought to have been somebody to photograph you doing it! What a success it would have made on the screens! ..." She returned Katharine's kiss with warmth. "It's quite true," she said. "I always have been fond of you,--you dear thing! That is why I was so frightfully down on poor Edward Yaill!"

"Do not--do not let us go back to that!" begged the other, wincing.

"I remember cutting him," continued Lady Wastwood reminiscently, "enough to have drawn blood. My Jerry always said--you remember how keen he was on golf? 'Mums carries too many clubs for one game, and always uses a niblick when it ought to be a putter!' But, believe me,--I really meant well!"

And that was the sealing of a compact of sisterhood between Katharine and Trixie.... For that we have striven for we love as part of us.... And Friendship forged on the anvil of Endurance is a metal that will stand strain.