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.. meta::
   :PG.Id: 51428
   :PG.Title: That Which Hath Wings
   :PG.Released: 2016-03-12
   :PG.Rights: Public Domain
   :PG.Producer: Al Haines
   :DC.Creator: Richard Dehan
   :DC.Title: That Which Hath Wings
   :DC.Language: en
   :DC.Created: 1918
   :coverpage: images/img-cover.jpg

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THAT WHICH HATH WINGS
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   .. _`"His arm was round her, her cheek was pressed to his, her bosom heaved against him."`:

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      "His arm was round her, her cheek was pressed to his, her bosom heaved against him."

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      THAT WHICH HATH
      WINGS

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      A NOVEL OF THE DAY

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      BY

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      RICHARD DEHAN

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      AUTHOR OF "THE DOP DOCTOR," "BETWEEN TWO THIEVES," ETC.

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      "*For a bird of the air shall carry the voice,
      and that which hath wings shall
      tell the matter.*"—ECCLESIAS. x., 20.

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      \S. \B. GUNDY
      TORONTO

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      COPYRIGHT, 1918
      BY
      \G. \P. PUTNAM'S SONS

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      The Knickerbocker Press, New York

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      THESE LEAVES IN
      DEAR REMEMBRANCE
      FOR YOUR GRAVE
      ACROSS THE SEA.

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      SIDMOUTH, DEVON,
          *January*, 1918.

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   CONTENTS

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   CHAPTER

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I.—`PRESENTS TWO YOUNG PEOPLE`_
II.—`DAME NATURE INTERVENES`_
III.—`FAIR ROSAMOND'S CHOICE`_
IV.—`RAYMOND OF THE \S. \AË. \F.`_
V.—`THE BIRD OF WAR`_
VI.—`SHERBRAND`_
VII.—`THE CONSOLATRIX`_
VIII.—`MONSEIGNEUR`_
IX.—`SIR THOMAS ENTERTAINS`_
X.—`A SUPERMAN`_
XI.—`PATRINE SAXHAM`_
XII.—`THE GATHERING OF THE STORM`_
XIII.—`THE SUPERMAN`_
XIV.—`A PARIS DANCE-GARDEN`_
XV.—`THE BITE IN THE KISS`_
XVI.—`THE WIND OF JOY`_
XVII.—`INTRODUCES AN OLD FRIEND`_
XVIII.—`SAXHAM PAYS`_
XIX.—`BAWNE`_
XX.—`THE MODERN HIPPOCRATES`_
XXI.—`MARGOT LOOKS IN`_
XXII.—`MARGOT IS SQUARE`_
XXIII.—`A MODERN CLUB`_
XXIV.—`DISILLUSION`_
XXV.—`THREE MEN IN A CAR`_
XXVI.—`A PAIR OF PALS`_
XXVII.—`SIR ROLAND TELLS A STORY`_
XXVIII.—`THE GOD FROM THE MACHINE`_
XXIX.—`A SECRET MISSION`_
XXX.—`THE REAPING`_
XXXI.—`VON HERRNUNG BAITS THE HOOK`_
XXXII.—`ADVENTURE IN THE AIR`_
XXXIII.—`BAWNE LEARNS THE TRUTH`_
XXXIV.—`THE BROWN SATCHEL`_
XXXV.—`NUMBER EIGHTEEN`_
XXXVI.—`HUE AND CRY`_
XXXVII.—`PATRINE CONFESSES`_
XXXVIII.—`THE REBOUND`_
XXXIX.—`A NIGHT IN JULY`_
XL.—`MACROMBIE IS SACKED`_
XLI.—`SAXHAM LIES`_
XLII.—`SAXHAM BREAKS THE NEWS`_
XLIII.—`THE PLUNDERED NEST`_
XLIV.—`PATRINE REMEMBERS`_
XLV.—`FLOTSAM FROM THE NORTH SEA`_
XLVI.—`AT NORDEICH WIRELESS`_
XLVII.—`THE MAN OF "THE DAY"`_
XLVIII.—`PATRINE IS ENGAGED`_
XLIX.—`THE WAR CLOUD BREAKS`_
L.—`THE EVE OF ARMAGEDDON`_
LI.—`THE INWARD VOICE`_
LII.—`KHAKI`_
LIII.—`FRANKY GOES TO THE FRONT`_
LIV.—`OFFICIAL RETICENCE`_
LV.—`NEWS OF BAWNE`_
LVI.—`LA BRABANÇONNE`_
LVII.—`THE BELGIAN WIFE`_
LVIII.—`SHERBRAND BUYS THE LICENCE`_
LIX.—`THE WOE-WAVE BREAKS`_
LX.—`KULTUR!`_
LXI.—`LYNETTE DREAMS`_
LXII.—`WOUNDED FROM THE FRONT`_
LXIII.—`BAWNE FINDS A FRIEND`_
LXIV.—`AT SEASHEERE`_
LXV.—`GOOD-BYE, DEAR LOVE, GOOD-BYE!`_
LXVI.—`MORE KULTUR`_
LXVII.—`THE QUESTION`_
LXVIII.—`THE DEVIL-EGG`_
LXIX.—`A MENACE; AND GOOD NEWS`_
LXX.—`A LOVER'S JOURNEY`_
LXXI.—`LIVING AND DEAD`_
LXXII.—`LOVE THAT HAS WINGS`_





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.. _`PRESENTS TWO YOUNG PEOPLE`:

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   That Which Hath Wings

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   CHAPTER I

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   PRESENTS TWO YOUNG PEOPLE

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In January, 1914, Francis Athelstan Sherbrand, Viscount
Norwater, only son of that fine old warrior, General the
Right Honourable Roger Sherbrand, V.C., K.C.B., first Earl
of Mitchelborough, married Margot Mountjohn, otherwise
known as "Kittums," and found that she was wonderfully
innocent—for a girl who knew so much.

It was a genuine love-match, Franky being a comparatively
poor Guardsman, with only two thousand a year in
addition to his pay as a Second Lieutenant in the Royal
Bearskins Plain, and Margot a mere Cinderella in comparison
with heiresses of the American canned-provision and
cereal kind.

It had seemed to Franky, standing with patent-leathered
feet at the Rubicon dividing bachelorhood from Benedictism,
that all his wooing had been done at Margot's Club.  True,
he had actually proposed to Margot at the Royal Naval and
Military Tournament of the previous June, and Margot,
hysterical with sheer ecstasy, as the horses gravely played at
push-ball, had pinched his arm and gasped out:

"*Yes*, but don't take my mind off the game just now;
these dear beasts are so *heavenly*! ..."

And theatres, film-picture-shows and variety halls,
race-meetings, receptions, balls and kettledrums, polo and
croquet-clubs, had fostered the courtship of Franky and
Margot; but all their love-making had been carried out to the
accompanying hum of conversation and the tinkle of crystal
and silver-plate in the dining-room of the "Ladies' Social,"
where Margot had her favourite table in the glass-screened
corner by the fire-place; or in the circular smoking-room
with the Persian divan and green-glass dome, that Margot
had given the Club on her nineteenth birthday; or in the
boudoir belonging to the suite she had decorated for herself
on the condition that no other member got the rooms if
Margot wanted them, which Margot nearly always did....

There was a big, rambling, ancient red-brick Hall,
stone-faced in the Early Jacobean manner, standing with its rare
old gardens and glass-houses, lawns and shrubberies, about
it, within sight and sound of the Channel, amidst pine and
beech-woods carpeted with bilberry-bushes, heathery moors,
and coverts neck-high in July with the *Osmunda regalis*
fern.  The Hall belonged to Margot, though you never
found her there except for a week or two in September and
three days at Christmas-tide.  The first fortnight with the
birds was well enough, but those three days at Christmas
marked the limit.  Of human endurance Margot meant,
possibly.  She never vouchsafed to explain.

She also possessed a house in town, but just as her deceased
father's spinster sister lived at the Hall in Devonshire, so
did her dead mother's brother Derek, with his collection
of European moths and butterflies and other *Lepidoptera*,
inhabit the fine old mansion in Hanover Square.
Devonshire at Christmas marked the limit of dulness, but
Hanover Square all the London season through beat the band
for sheer ghastly boredom....  Not that there were
any flies on little old London....  Paris and Ostend
were ripping places, and you could put in a clinking good
time at Monte Carlo....  Margot had tried New York
and liked it, except for the place itself, which made you think
of illustrations to weird Dunsany legends in which towering
temples climb up unendingly upon each other into black
star-speckled skies.  But the Club and London, with
Unlimited Bridge and Tango, constituted Margot's idea of
earthly happiness.  She never had dreamed of marrying
anybody—until Franky had arrived on the scene.

Perhaps you can see Franky, with the wholesome tan of
the Autumn Manoeuvres yet upon him.  Twenty-seven,
well-made and muscular, if with somewhat sloping shoulders
and legs of the type that look better in Bedford cords and
puttees, or leathers and hunting-tops, than in tweed knickers
and woollen stockings, or Court knee-breeches and silks.
Observe his well-shaped feet and slight strong hands with
pointed fingers, like those of his ancestors, painted by
Vandyke; his brown eyes—distinctly good if not glowing with
the fire of intellect, his forehead too steep and narrow; his
moustache of the regulation tooth-brush kind, adorning the
upper-lip that will not shut down firmly over his white,
rather prominent, front teeth.  Cap the small rounded skull
of him with bright brown hair, brushed and anointed to
astonishing sleekness, dress him in the full uniform of a
Second Lieutenant in the Bearskins Plain, and you have
Franky on his wedding-day.

Photographs of the happy couple published in the *Daily
Wire*, the *Weekly Silhouette*, the *Lady's Dictatorial*, and the
*Photographic Smile*, hardly do the bridegroom justice.  In
that without the busby his features are fixed in a painful
grin, while in the other there are no features at all.  But
Margot—Margot in a hobble-skirt of satin and chiffon, with
a tulle turban-veil, starred with orange-flowers in pearls and
diamonds, and a long serpent-tail train of silver brocade,
hung from her shoulders by ropes of pearls, was "almost too
swee," to quote Margot's Club friends.  Search had been
made, amongst the said friends, many of whom were married,
for a pair of five-year-old pages to carry the bride's train;
but there being, for some reason, a dearth of babies among
Margot's wedded intimates, the idea had to be given up.

The wedding was quite the prettiest function of the season.
The eight bridesmaids walked in moss-green *crêpe de Chine*
veiled with silver-spotted chiffon.  On their heads were
skull-caps of silver tissue, each having a thirty-inch-high
aigrette supported by a thin *bandeau* of gold, set with
crystals and olivines, the gift of the bride....  Their
stockings were of white lace openwork, the left knee of each being
clasped by the bridegroom's souvenir, a garter of gold,
crystal, and olivines.  Silver slippers with four-inch heels
completed the ravishing effect.

*O Perfect Love!* was sung before the Bishop's Address,
and the ceremony concluded with *The Voice that Breathed*
and Stainer's *Sevenfold Amen*.  The bridal-party passed
down the nave to the strains of the Wedding Chorus
from *Lohengrin*.  And there was a reception at the
Werkeley Square house of one of the dearest of Margot's
innumerable dearest friends, and the happy pair left in their
beautiful brand-new Winston-Beeston touring car *en route*
for the old red-brick Hall in Devonshire.  Decidedly the
honeymoon might have been termed ideal—and four subsequent
months of married life proved tolerably cloudless—until
Fate sent a stinging hailstorm to strip the roses from
the bridal bower.

An unexpected, appalling, inevitable discovery was made
in Paris in the *Grande Semaine*, at the end of the loveliest of
June seasons.  It utterly ruined—for two people—the Day
of the Grand Prix, that marks the climax of the Big Week,
when the Parisian coaching-world tools its four-in-hands to
Longchamps Racecourse, and the smartest, richest, and
gayest people, mustered from every capital of Europe,
parade under the chestnut-trees that shade the sunny
paddock, to display or criticise the creations of the greatest
*couturiers*.

Margot had put on an astonishing gown for the occasion....
You will recall that the summer dress designs
of 1914 *were* astonishing; the autumn modes promised to be
even more so, according to Babin, Touchet, and the
Brothers Paillôt.  Skirts—already as short and as narrow as
possible—were to be even narrower; the Alpha and Omega
of perfection would be represented by the Amphora
Silhouette.  And Margot, revolving before her cheval-glass in
a sheath of jonquil-coloured silk *lisse*, embroidered with
blue-and-green beetle-wings, found—to her horror and
consternation——

Shall one phrase it that Dame Nature, intent upon her
essential, unfashionable business of reproduction, was at
variance with Madame Fashion *re* the Amphora Silhouette?
The slender shape was not yet spoilt, but long before the
autumn came, no art would mask the wealthy curves of its
maternity.





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   CHAPTER II


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   DAME NATURE INTERVENES

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"I can't bear it!—I won't bear it!" Margot reiterated.
With her tumbled hair, swollen eyes, pink uptilted nose, and
the little mouth and chin that quivered with each sobbing
breath intaken, she looked absurdly babyish for her twenty
years, as she vowed that wild horses shouldn't drag her to
Longchamps, and railed against the injustice of Fate.

"None of my married friends have had such rotten luck!"
she asserted.  She stamped upon the velvety carpet and
flashed at Franky a glance of imperious appeal.  "Not Tota
Stannus, or Cynthia Charterhouse, or Joan Delabrand, or
anybody!  Then, why me?  That's what I want to know?
After all the mascots I've worn and carried about with
me....  Gojo and Jollikins and the jade tree-frog, and
the rest! ... Every single one given me by a different
woman who'd been married for years and never had a baby!
This very day I'll smash the whole lot!"

"By the Great Brass Hat! ..."

Franky exploded before he could stop himself, and
laughed until the tears coursed down.  So "Gojo," the
black velvet kitten, and "Jollikins," the fat, leering, naked
thing that sat and squinted over its pot-belly at its own
huge, shapeless feet, and all the array of gadgets and
netsukis crowding Margot's toilette-table and *secrétaire*, down
to "Pat-Pat," the bog-oak pig, and "Ti-Ti," the jade
tree-frog, were so many insurances against the Menace of
Maternity.  By Jove! women were regular children....
And Margot ... Nothing but a baby, this poor little
Margot—going, in spite of Jollikins and Gojo, to have a
baby of her own.

"What is one to believe?  Whom is one to trust in? ..."

"'Trust in.' ... My best child, you don't mean that
you believed those women when they told you that such
twopenny gadgets could work charms of—that or any other
kind?"

"Indeed, indeed they do!  Tota Stannus was *perfectly
serious* when she came to my boudoir one night at the Club,
about a week before our—the wedding....  She said—I
can hear her now; '*Well, old child, you're to be married on
Wednesday, and of course you know the ropes well enough not
to want any tips from me....  Still——'*"

"That wasn't overwhelmingly flattering," Franky
commented, "from a married woman twice your age.  What
else did she say?"

"She said I must be aware," went on Margot, "that a
woman who wanted to keep her friends and her figure,
simply couldn't afford to have kids."

"And you——"

Franky no longer battled with the grin that would have
infuriated Margot.  Something had wiped it from his face.

"I said she was frightfully kind, but that I was quite
well-posted—everything was O.K., and she needn't alarm
herself....  And she said, 'Oh! if you've arranged things
with Franky, jolly sensible of him!  Too often a man who
is open and liberal-minded before marriage develops
gerontocracie afterwards, don't you know? ...'  And I told her
that you were the very reverse of narrow-minded—and she
kissed me and wished me happiness, and went away.  And
the maid knocked later on to say Mrs. Stannus sent her
apologies for having forgotten to leave her little gift.  And
the little gift was, Jollikins.  And my special pals joined
in to stand me a farewell dinner, and they drowned my
enamel Club badge in a bowl of Maraschino punch, and
fished it up and gave me this diamond and enamel one,
mounted as a tie-brooch, instead.  And every married
woman brought me a mascot....  I had Gojo from
Joan Delabrand, and Ti-Ti from Cynthia Charterhouse, and
the jade tree-frog from Patrine Saxham, and the carved
African bean from Rhona Helvellyn, and——"

Franky objected:

"Neither Patrine Saxham nor Rhona Helvellyn happen
to be married women!"

"Perhaps not; but Patrine is an Advanced Thinker, and
Rhona Helvellyn is a Militant Suffragist."

Franky commented:

"As for Suffragists, that Club of yours is stiff with 'em.
Gassing about their Cause....  I loathe the noisy
crowd!"

"Then you loathe me!  I share their convictions!"
Margot proclaimed.  "I hold the faith that Woman's Day
will dawn with the passing of the Bill that gives us the
Vote...."

"My best child, you wouldn't know what to do with the
Vote if you had it."

Margot retorted:

"I cannot expect my husband to treat me as a reasonable
being while the State classes his wife with infants and
imbeciles."

It will be seen that a very pretty squabble was on the
point of developing.  Fortunately, at this juncture a valet
of the chambers knocked at the door to say that a waiter
from the restaurant begged to know whether Milord and
Miladi would take lunch *à la carte*, or prefer something
special in their own apartments?

"Tell him no!" wailed Miladi, to the unconcealed
consternation of Milord, who had a healthy appetite.

"Must keep up your pecker—never say die!"  Franky,
stimulated by the pangs of hunger, developed an unsuspected
talent for diplomacy.  "Look here!  We must talk
over things quietly and calmly.  I'll order a taxi, and we'll
chuff to that jolly little restaurant in the Bois de
Boulogne—where you can grub in the open air under a
rose-pergola—and order something special and odd——"

Since Eve's day, this lure has never failed to catch a
woman.  Margot began to dry her eyes.  Then she asked
Franky to ring.

"Three times, please....  That's for Pauline; I want
another handkerchief."

"Have two or three while you're about it," advised
Franky, obeying, returning, and perching on the arm of the
settee.  "And bathe your eyes a bit, have a swab-over of
the pinky cream-stuff, and a dab of powder."  He brushed
some pale mealy traces from his right-arm sleeve and
coat-lapel, ending, "And put on your swankiest hat and come
along to Nadier's."

"Could we get anything to eat at Nadier's that we couldn't
get here—or in London, at the Tarlton or the Rocroy? ..."

"Stacks of things!  For instance—*Canard à la presse*....
They squeeze the juice out of the duck, you twig, with a
silver kind of squozzer, and cook it on a chafing-dish under
your nose.  Look here! ..."  Franky, now desperate,
produced his watch.  "All the cushiest little tables will be
taken if you don't look sharp."

"Not on the day of the Grand Prix!"

Franky retorted, spurred to maddest invention by the
pangs of hunger:

"My best child, there are about a hundred thousand
wealthy Americans in Paris who don't care a red cent about
racing, while with most of 'em—to eat *canard à la presse*
at Nadier's in the Bois de Boulogne in the June season—is
a—kind of religious rite!"

So Margot disappeared to dab her eyes and apply the
prescribed touches of perfumed cream and powder, and duly
reappeared, crowned with the most marvellous hat that ever
promenaded the *ateliers* of the Maison Blin on the head of a
milliner's *mannequin*.

You are to imagine the tiny thing and her Franky
seated—not in one of the smart automobiles that wait for hire
outside Spitz's, but in a little red taxi, borne along with the
broad double stream of traffic of every description that
ceaselessly roared east and west under the now withering
red-and-white blossoms of the chestnut-trees of the Avenue
of the Champs Elysées, inhaling the stimulating breezes—flavoured
with hot dust and petrol, Seine stink, sewer-gas,
coffee, patchouli, fruit, Régie tobacco and roses—of Paris
in the end of June.

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All the world and his wife might be at Longchamps,
but here were people enough and to spare.  Luxurious
people in costly automobiles or carriages drawn by shiny
high-steppers.  People in little public taxis, men and women
on motor-bicycles and the human-power kind.  People of
all stamps and classes, clustered like bees outside the big,
smelly, top-heavy auto-buses, soon to vanish from the Paris
avenues and boulevards, with the red and yellow and green-flagged
taxis, to play their part in the transport and nourishment
of the Army of France.  People of all ranks and classes
on foot, though as of old the *midinette* with her big cardboard
bandbax, the military cadet, or the student of Art or
Medicine, the seminarist and the shaggy-haired and bearded man
with the deadly complexion, the slouch hat, the aged *paletôt*
and the soiled and ragged crimson necktie that distinguish
the milder breed of Anarchist, made up the crowd upon the
sidewalks, liberally peppered with the sight-seeing stranger
of British, American, or Teuton nationality—the
brilliantly-complexioned, gaily-plumaged, loudly-perfumed lady of the
pavements; the gendarme and the National Guard, and—with
Marie or Jeannette proudly hanging on his elbow—Rosalie
in her black-leather scabbard dangling by his side,
his crimson *képi* tilted rakishly—the blue-coated,
red-trousered French infantryman, the *poilu* whom we have
learned to love.

The Bois was not seething with fashionable life as it would
be towards the sunset hour.  The dandy Clubmen, the
smart ladies, had gone to Longchamps with the four-in-hands.
Polo was going on near the Pont de Suresnes, the
band of a regiment of Cuirassiers was playing in the Jardin
d'Acclimatation, and Hungarian zithers and violins
discoursed sweet music on a little gilded platform at the axial
point of Nadier's open-air restaurant—which is shaped like
a half-wheel, with pergolas of shower-roses and Crimson
Ramblers radiating from the gilded band-stand to the outer
circle of little white tables at which one can lunch or dine in
fine weather under a light screen of leaves and blossoms,
beneath which the green canvas awnings can be drawn when
it comes on to rain.

The tables were crowded with French people taking late
*déjeuner*, and English, Germans, and German-Americans
having lunch.  The gravelled courtyard before the terrace
was packed with showy automobiles.

If *canard à la presse* did not grace the meal supplied to
Franky and Margot on Nadier's terrace, the *potage
printanière* and *écrevisses* and a *blanquette d'agneau* were
exquisitely cooked and served.  Asparagus and a salad of
endive followed, and by the time they had emptied a bottle
of Chateau Yquem and the *omelette soufflée* had given place
to *Pêches Melba*, Margot had smiled several times and
laughed once.

She was so dainty and sweet, so brilliant a little human
humming-bird, that the laughing, chattering, feasting crowd
of smartly or extravagantly dressed people gathered about
the other trellis-screened tables under Nadier's rose-pergola
sent many a curious or admiring glance her way.  And
Franky was very proud of his young wife, and theirs had
been undeniably a love-match; yet in spite of the good dishes
and the excellent Château Yquem, little shivers of chilly
premonition rippled over him from time to time.  He had
got to speak out—definitely decline, in the interests of
Posterity, to permit interference on the part of Margot's
Club circle in his private domestic affairs....  How to
do it effectively yet inoffensively was a problem that
strained his brain-capacity.  Yet—again in the interests of
Posterity—Franky had never previously interested himself
in Posterity—the thing had to be done.  He refused
Roquefort, buttered a tiny biscuit absently, put it down
undecidedly, and as the waiter whisked his plate away—conjured
crystal bowls of tepid rose-water and other essentials from
space, and vanished in search of dessert—he spoke,
assuming for the first time in his five months' experience of
connubial life the toga of marital authority.

"I think, do you know, Kittums"—Kittums was Margot's
pet name—"that it will be best to face the music!"

"*Connu!*" Margot shrugged a little, widely opening her
splendid brown eyes, "But what music?"

"The"—Franky took the plunge—"the cradle-music, if
you will have it!"

Margot's gasp of dismay, and the indignant fire of a stare
that was quenched in brine, awakened Franky to the fact
of his having failed in tactics.  The return of the waiter with
a pyramid of superb strawberries and a musk-melon on
cracked ice alone stemmed the outburst of the pent-up flood
of reproach.  Entrenched behind the melon, Franky waited.
The waiter again effaced himself, and Margot said from
behind another handkerchief:

"Oh, how *could* you! ... I never *dreamed* that I should
*live* to hear you speak to me in that way."

Over the melon, whose rough green quartered rind had
delicate white raised traceries all over it, suggesting outline
maps of countries in Fairyland, Franky curiously regarded
his wife.  He said:

"Why are you and all your friends so funky of—what's
only a natural phe—what do you call it? ... What do
men and women marry for, if it isn't to have—children? ...
Perhaps you'll answer me?"

"What do people marry for?"  Margot regarded him
indignantly over the neglected pyramid of luscious,
tempting strawberries, "To—to be happy together—to have a
clinking time!"  Her voice shook.  "And this is to be a
gorgeous season.  Balls—balls! right on from now to the
end of July—then from the autumn all through winter.
Period Costume Balls, reviving the modes, music, and
manners of Ancient Civilisations—Carthagenian, Assyrian,
Babylonian, Gothic—got up and arranged by the Committees
of the Cercle Moderne, here in Paris, and in London
by the New Style Club....  Tony Guisseguignol and
Paul Peigault and their set are busy designing the dresses
and decorations—nothing like them will ever have been
seen!  And—Peigault says—Tango and the Maxixe are to
be chucked to the little cabbages.  A new dance is coming
from São Paulo that will simply wipe them out....  And
now—just when I was looking forward—when everything
was to have been so splendid——"

The shaking voice choked upon a note of anguish.
Franky had picked up the melon, quite unconsciously,
and was balancing it.  At this juncture he gripped the
green globe with both hands, and said, summoning all his
courage to meet the agonised appeal of Margot's
tear-drenched eyes:

"Look here.  This is—strict Bridge....  Do you
loathe 'em—the kiddies—so horribly that the idea of having
any is hateful to you?  Or is it—not only the—the veto it
puts on larking and kickabout and—the temporary
disfigurement—you're afraid of—but the—the—the
inevitable pain?"  He glanced round cautiously and looked back
again at his wife, saying in a low voice: "Nobody's
listening....  Tell me frankly...."  He waited an instant,
and then said in an urgent whisper.  "Answer me! ... For
God's sake, tell the frozen truth, Margot!"





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.. _`FAIR ROSAMOND'S CHOICE`:

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   CHAPTER III


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   FAIR ROSAMOND'S CHOICE

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The terrace under Nadier's roses—dotted with little tables
covered with napery, silver, crystal, and china, surrounded
with laughing, chattering feasters—the terrace was no longer
a scene out of a comedy of the lighter side of Parisian life....
Tragedy, pale and awe-inspiring in her ink-black
mantle and purple chiton, had stepped across the gravel in
her gold-buckled leather buskins, to offer to the girlish
bride—a piece of human porcelain, prinked in the height of the
fashion, and lovely—with her wild-rose cheeks and little
uptilted nose, her floss-silk hair and wide, dark, lustrous
deer-eyes—Fair Rosamond's choice, the dagger or the
bowl....

"Yes—yes....  It is the ugliness of the thing! ..."  The
little mouth was pulled awry as though it had sipped
of verjuice.  The tiny hands knotted themselves convulsively,
and the colour fled in terror from her face.  "The
grotesque ugliness....  And the"—the last two words
came as though a pang had wrung them from the pale
lips—"the pain—the awful pain!  And besides—my mother died
when I was born!"  Margot's voice was a fluttering, appealing
whisper; her great eyes were dilated and wild with terror.
"Perhaps that is why I am so deadly afraid"—she caught
her breath—"but there are heaps, heaps, *heaps* of married
women who fear—*that*—equally!  And they arrange to
escape it—I don't know how! ... For I knew—nothing—when
I married you! ..."  She lifted her great
eyes to Franky's, and he realised that it had been so,
actually.  "I've been ashamed ever to confess that I
was—ignorant about these things! ... I've talked a
language—amongst other women—that I didn't
understand! ..."

There are moments when even the shallow-brained
become clairvoyant.  Franky's love for her made him see
clear.  He looked back down the vista of Margot's twenty
years of existence, and saw her the motherless daughter of a
self-absorbed, cultivated, Art-loving valetudinarian, who
habitually spent the chillier part of each year in ranging
from French to Italian health-resorts, occupying the spring
with Art in Paris—returning to London for June and July,
generally spending August and September in Devonshire—to
take flight Southwards before the migrating swallows, at
the first chill breath of October frosts.

Margot had been educated at home, down in Devonshire,
by a series of certificated female tutors.  The spinster aunt,
the younger sister of her father, extended to her niece for a
liberal remuneration a nominal protection and an indifferent
care....  And Mr. Mountjohn had died when the girl
was sixteen, leaving her unconditionally heiress to his
considerable fortune, and the aunt had let Margot have her
head in every imaginable way.  She had allowed her to take
up her residence at the "Ladies' Social" Club three years
subsequently, on the sole condition that a responsible
chaperon accompanied Margot to Society functions.
Hence, Mrs. Ponsonby Rewes, the irreproachable widow of
a late King's Messenger, was evoked from Kensington
Tower Mansions upon these occasions—by telephone—to
vanish when no longer wanted, in the discreetest and most
obliging way.

"Poor little Margot! .... Poor little woman!..."  Franky
could see how it all had happened by the wild light
of the great deer-eyes, so like those in the portrait of the
girl's dead mother—half Irish, half Greek by birth.

While Franky reflected, the tables had been emptying.
People were hurrying away to hear the band of the Jardin
d'Acclimatation or to fulfil other engagements of a
seasonable kind.  Some remained to smoke and gossip over
liqueurs and coffee.  The light blue wreaths of cigar and
cigarette smoke curled up towards the awning overhead.
Franky mechanically produced his own case and lighted up.
And Margot, stretching a slender arm across the table, was
saying:

"Give me one!—I've forgotten mine! ..."

"Ought you? ... Is it wise? ..."  Franky was on
the point of asking, but his good Angel must have clapped a
hand before his mouth.  He silently gave Margot a thick,
masculine Sobranie and supplied a light; and as their
young faces neared and the red spark glowed, and the first
smoke-wreath rose between the approximating tubes of
delicate tobacco-filled paper, his wife whispered as their eyes
met:

"You're hurt!  But now you know—you're sorry for me,
aren't you?"  It was a dragging, plaintive undertone, not
at all like Margot's voice.

"Frightfully!  All the more because"—Franky drew so
hard at his cigarette that it burned one-sidedly—"I can't
help being thundering—glad!"

"I—see! ..."

She breathed out the words with a thin stream of
fragrant Turkish vapour crawling over her scarlet under-lip,
it seemed to Franky, like a pale blue worm.  And he bit
through his Sobranie and threw it on his dessert-plate,
saying desperately:

"Not yet.  Will you listen quietly to what I've got to say?"

She nodded.  Franky launched himself upon the tide of
revelation.  Nearly everybody who had been eating when
he had come into Nadier's with Margot had got up and gone
away.  And the Cuirassiers band was playing the love-music
from *Samson et Dalila* on the terrace of the Jardin
d'Acclimatation, as melodiously as only a French military
band can play.

"It's got to do with the Peerage.  Only a Second Afghan
War-Earldom dating from 1879—tacked on to the Viscounty
they gave my great-grandfather after Badajos—but
worth having in its way, or the Dad wouldn't have accepted
it.  And, naturally enough—I want a boy to take the
Viscounty when I succeed my father, and have the Earldom
when I've absquatulated, just as the kiddy'll want one when
his own time comes."

Margot was burning a strawberry-leaf on her plate with
her cigarette-end.  She asked, impressing another little
yellow scorched circle on the surface of rough green:

"Would it matter so very much if there wasn't any boy?"

Franky jumped and turned red to the white, unsunned
circle left by the field-cap on the summit of his high forehead.

"It would matter—lots!  For my Uncle Sherbrand, a
younger brother of my father's, would come in for the
Viscounty when I succeeded the dear old Dad.  And my
Uncle Sherbrand is a blackguard!  Got cashiered in 1900,
when he was an Artillery officer in a gun-testing billet at
Wanwich.  Kicked out of the Army—in War-time, mind
you!—for not backing up his C.O.  And the brute has got
a son, too, an apprentice in an engine-shop, if he isn't
actually a chauffeur.  Probably the young fellow's respectable,
and of course it ain't the pup's fault he's got such a sire.  But
my Dad would turn in his grave at the idea of being
succeeded by the brother who disgraced him—and as for *his*
grandfather—the jolly old cock 'ud bally well get up and
dance, I should say....  So, you see, I can't—sympathise
with you as you want me to do in this, darling!  I
want you to buck up and be cheerful, and face the music like
a brick....  As for what you've told me—about your
mother——"  In spite of himself, Franky gulped, and little
shiny beads of sweat stood upon his cheeks and temples.
"That sort of thing doesn't run in families, like rheumatism"—he
was getting idiotic—"or Roman noses!  Be plucky—and
everything will turn out all right.  Can't possibly go
wrong if we call in Saxham ... Saxham of 000, Harley
Street—man my sister Trix simply swears by.  Brought
her boy Ronald into the world thirteen years ago, and
successfully operated on him for appendicitis only the other
day! ..."

Margot looked at Franky attentively and bent her head
slightly.  Had she understood?  She must have....
Had she tacitly agreed?  Of course....





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.. _`RAYMOND OF THE \S. \AË. \F.`:

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   CHAPTER IV


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   RAYMOND OF THE \S. \AË. \F.

.. vspace:: 2

The Masculine Will had conquered.  You had only to be
firm with women—bless their hearts! and they caved
directly....  Couldn't hold out....  Not built that
way....  Franky's sternly-clamped upper-lip relaxed.
He beamed as he proposed a noonday stroll in the Bois.  In
the direction of the bigger Lake, by one of the narrower
avenues, or if Margot preferred a look-in at the Polo Club,
another avenue, intersecting the Allée de Longchamps and
skirting the enclosure of the Gun Club, would take them
there in a jiffy, *via* Bagatelle.

Margot assented to the latter proposition, and, with a
little flutter of the lips Franky accepted as a smile, reached
for her egret stole, a filmy feathery thing she had removed on
entering Nadier's, and drew on her long mousquetaire gloves
and pulled down her veil of sunset *chiffon*, half shaded red,
merging into jonquil yellow matching the shade of her
marvellous gown.  And Franky paid the bill in plump English
sovereigns (invariably exchanged as good for louis of twenty
francs by the suave and smiling waiter) and tipped the said
waiter extravagantly, and took his hat from the second
waiter (who invariably starts up by the side of the first when
you are going) and tipped him, and got his stick from the
third waiter (who came forward with this, and the *en tout cas*
of Madame—a lovely thing in the latest dome-shape, of
black net over jonquil colour, with a flounce, and an ivory
stick, upon the top of which sat a green monkey in olivines,
eating a ruby fruit), and lighted another cigarette, and
returned the elaborate bow of the manager with a nod of the
cheerful patronising order as he followed Margot through
the Rambler-wreathed archway leading by a flight of shallow
steps from Nadier's terrace to the wide carriage-sweep
that links the broad Allée de Longchamps with the narrower
Route de Madrid.  And the towering plume of her astonishing
hat brought down a shower of red rose-petals as she
passed out before him—and Franky, with some of these on
his top-hat-brim and others nestling in the front of his
waistcoat, was irresistibly reminded of their wedding-day.

Unconsciously, Franky and Margot quitted the broader,
more frequented avenue, crowded with people in carriages,
people in automobiles, people on motor-bicycles and
bicyclettes, and followed narrower pathways, stretching
between green lawns adorned with shrubberies and clumps
of stately forest trees, and chiefly patronised by sweethearting
couples, nursemaids in charge of children, children in
domineering but affectionate charge of white-haired ladies,
while venerable gentlemen dozed on rustic benches over the
columns of *Figaro* or *Paris Midi*.

When even these figures became rare, it was borne in
upon Franky that he and Margot were not upon a path that
led to the Grounds of the Polo Club.  Reluctantly, he
admitted himself lost.

"Does it matter? ..."  Margot's voice was weary.
"If you're absolutely set on it, we could ask one of those men
in cocked hats and waxed moustaches and red-and-yellow
shoulder-cords to give us the straight tip.  But I don't feel
the least bit keen about the Polo Club any more than the
Lakes.  These alleys are quiet, and the grass is nice and
green.  I vote we go on."

"Madame cannot pass this way.  It is not open for
strangers."

A Republican Guard, a good-looking *sous-officier*, had
spoken, comprehending the tone rather than the English
words.

"Why not?"  Margot's eyes suddenly brightened.  She
eagerly sniffed the air of the forbidden avenue.  The
corporal, indicating with his white-gloved hand other
Republican Guards posted at equal distances down the prohibited
alley, and at its intersection with another some two hundred
yards distant, brought his eyes back to Margot to answer:

"Madame, for the reason that certain military operations
are taking place here to-day."

"But my husband is an English officer—" Margot was
beginning, when Franky, reddening to his hat-brim,
exhorted her to be quiet, and the Republican Guard, civilly
saluting, stepped upon the grass and moved away.

"All the same, you are an English officer," Margot persisted,
"and what use is the Entente if that doesn't count?"

"Best child, don't be a giddy goose!" Franky implored
her.  "You don't suppose the Authorities care a bad
tomato for an English Loot—what they'd cotton to would
have to be a British Brass Hat of the very biggest kind.
Look there!—more to your left, little battums!"  He
indicated yet other Republican cocked hats strung at equal
distances down the length of a neighbouring alley, precisely
outlining the farther border of the sandwich-shaped
halfacre of greensward by which their particular avenue ran.
"And there!"  His professional eye had noted a big,
grey-painted military motor-lorry, numbered, and lettered
"S. Aë. F."  Behind the driver's seat towered the slender
T-shaped steel mast of a Field wireless, whose spidery
aerials, pegged to the turf, were in charge of men in *képis*
and blue overalls, while a non-commissioned officer, wearing
the telephone head-band of the operator, leaned on the
elbow-rest of the tripod supporting the apparatus, his finger
on the buzzer-key.  Near him his clerk squatted, pencil and
pad in readiness, while at a respectful distance from two
oblong patches of white in the middle of the green plat of
turf, several active upright figures in dark uniforms stood
conversing, or walking to and fro.

"*Officiers Aviateurs*, telegraphists and mechanics of the
French *Service Aëronautique*"—you are listening to
Franky—"tremendously well-organised compared with our little
footling Flying Corps, tinkered fourteen months ago out of
the old Air Battalion of the R. E.  These chaps are
Engineers—goin' by the dark red double stripes on their
overalls and their dark blue *képis*.  Some of their machines'll be
out for practice.  Despatch-droppin' or bombs.  Here's a
man with brass on his hat, coming our way....  Takes
me for a German soger-orficer I shouldn't wonder!—lots of
'em get their clothes cut in Bond Street.  But though you
can hide Allemand legs in English trousers"—Franky was
recovering his customary cheeriness—"and some of 'em
do it uncommon cleverly—you can't deodorise an accent
that hails from Berlin."

The officer approaching—a youthful, upright figure walking
quickly, with the short, springy steps of a man much in
the saddle—proved to be grey-haired and grey-moustached.
The double-winged badge of his Service was embroidered in
gold upon the right sleeve of his tunic, and upon the collar,
a single wing in this case, ending in a star.  He carried
binoculars suspended from his neck by a rolled-leather thong,
and a revolver in a black-leather case was attached to the
belt about his middle.  There was thick white dust upon
the legs and uppers of his high polished black boots, which
the grass had scoured from the toes and soles.  His bright
blue-grey eyes ran over Franky as the slight soldierly salute
was exchanged.  He said, speaking in excellent English:

"If Monsieur, the English officer, will obligingly mention
his name, rank, and regiment, it might be possible to allow
him to continue his promenade with Madame, the invention
we are testing being the patent of his countryman, and already
familiar to the Authorities at the British War Office."

Thus coerced, Franky produced his card, Margot dimpled
into smiles, the polite officer saluted again, introduced
himself as Raymond, Capitaine-Commandant pilot of the —th
*escadrille*, wheeled and walked away.  But he returned to
say, this time directly addressing Margot:

"Should Madame la Vicomtesse desire to witness the test
of her countryman's—apparatus, there can be no objection
to her doing so.  But that Madame should keep clear of the
vicinity of the"—he pointed to the two oblong strips of
white canvas adorning the middle of the expanse of
green,—"the signal, intended for the guidance of the aviator,
is of absolute necessity, Madame must understand!"

"There won't be any...?" Margot was beginning,
nervously.

"*Mais non, Madame*.  *Pas d'explosion*," the officer
assured her, and stiffened to attention facing eastwards, and
scanning the sky with eyes that blinked in the dazzling glare
of early noon.  For the droning whirr of a plane just then
reached them, drowning the sign of the hot south breeze that
rustled in the tops of the acacias and oaks, ilexes and poplars,
that rose about the arena of open ground....





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.. _`THE BIRD OF WAR`:

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   CHAPTER V


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   THE BIRD OF WAR

.. vspace:: 2

"The *avion* comes from Drancy."  The speaker looked back
at Margot as he focussed his binoculars.  "It is not one of
our Army machines, but a British monoplane built by your
countryman and fitted with the invention whose usefulness
we are here to test."  He continued: "Should the *officier-pilote*
in charge of the—apparatus—and who for the time
being represents an enemy—succeed in poising"—he hesitated
a bare instant—"for a stipulated number of moments
over the target—those two lengths of white canvas
approximating on the grass represent the target—he scores a
bull's-eye."

He blinked a little, and before Franky's mental vision rose
the aggregation of Government buildings near the *Carrefour
des Cascades*, marked "*Magazins et depôts*" on Bædeker's
maps.

"He scores a bull's eye," resumed the speaker.  "He has
already paid one visit of the requisite duration to an address
near the Porte d'Aubervilliers."  Franky had a mental
vision of the array of big, bloated gasometers pertaining to
the Strasbourg Railway Yards.  "He has made a similar call
at a point indicated between the station of the Batignolles
and the station of the Avenue de Clichy"—the well-preserved
teeth of the officer showed under the grey moustache
as he smiled, and Franky had another vision of the
huge *Gare aux Marchandises* tucked in the angle between
the Railway of the Geinture and the Western Railway lines,
as the speaker went on suavely "and the target succeeding
this will be the last.  It is situated on the Champ de
Manoeuvres at Issy.  The wireless-telegraph operator of my
*escadrille* informs me that two bull's eyes have already
been registered—which for your countryman's invention
presages well."

Franky, with British plumpness, queried:

"And the invention?  Some new bomb-dropping device—planned
to get rid of the way the engine always puts
on 'em?  If the English inventor-fellow has done that, his
goods are worth buying, I should say!"

Raymond, *Capitaine-Commandant*, answered as the droning
song from the sky grew louder:

"Of certainty, Monsieur, if his invention prove worth
buying, my Government will undoubtedly purchase what
has already been unavailingly offered to yours.  It is our
custom to examine and test, closely and exhaustively, new
things that are offered.  But what would you?  We seek
the best for France."

"He isn't flying his aëroplane himself, is he?  Or working
his own invention, whatever it may be?"

"But no, Madame!  One of our* Officiers-Aviateurs* is
acting as pilot, a skilled mechanic of our Service occupies
the observer's place.  Despite the Entente Cordiale—the
happy relations prevailing between my country and
England—it would hardly be *convenable* or discreet to permit
even an Englishman"—the tone of graceful, subtle irony
cannot be conveyed by pen or type—"*even* an Englishman
to fly over Paris, or any other fortified city of France.  But
see!  In the sky to the north-east—above that silvery puff
of vapour—arrives now the *avion* built and christened by
your countryman."

Margot asked, narrowing her beautiful eyes as she
searched out the darkish speck upon the hot blue background:

"The plane, you mean.  What does he call it?"

Raymond answered without removing his eyes from his
binoculars:

"Madame, he calls it 'The Bird of War.'"

The tuff-tuff of a motor-cycle sounded faintly in the
distance, as the resonant vibrating noise of the aëroplane
came more triumphantly out of the hot blue sky.  Save for
a scintillating white reflection to the north that might
have been the crystal dome of the great big Palm House in
the Jardin d'Acclimatation, and that unavoidable, useful
ugliness, the gilded lantern of the Tour Eiffel, thrusting up
into the middle distance over the delicately-rounded masses
of new foliage upon the right-hand looking east, the glory
and shame and magnificence and squalor of the Queen City
of Cities might have lain a hundred leagues away, so ringed-in
by delicate austere brown of serried tree-trunks, rising
above rich clumps of blossoming lilac, syringa, yellow azalea,
and pink, mauve, and snowy rhododendron, was the spacious
green arena wherein Franky and Margot were destined
to play their part.

Now, followed by the wide-winged shadow that the sun
of high noon threw almost directly beneath her, darkening
drifting cloud, and open city spaces, passing over breasting
tree-tops and wide stretches of municipal greensward, the
Bird of War drew nearer and more near....  And glancing
up as the portentous flying shadow suddenly blotted out
the sunlight, Franky realised that the two-seater monoplane
was hovering, and buzzing as she hovered, like a Brobdingnagian
combination of kite-hawk, dragon-fly, and bumblebee.

He pulled out a pair of vest-pocket field-glasses and
scanned her as she hung there, gleaming in the sunlight, at a
height of perhaps five hundred feet above the white cloths
on the grass.  He could make out the Union Jack on her
underwings, the huge black raking capitals of her name
BIRD OF WAR painted on the side of the tapering canvas-covered
fuselage, the diamond-shaped tail swaying between
the pendant flaps of the huge triangular elevators, clearly
as though these features had been filmed upon the screen.
In a curious misty circle, spinning under the fuselage, he
suspected lay the secret of her kite-like poise and hover, and
behind his immaculate waistcoat he was sensible of a thrill.

If the English inventor had not solved the baffling
Problem of Stability, he had come uncommonly near it, by the
Great Brass Hat!  And the dud-heads at Whitehall had
shown the door to him and his invention.  "Good Christmas!—how
like 'em!" reflected Franky, lowering the glasses
to chuckle, and looking round for Margot.

There she was, some twenty yards distant, planted right
in the middle of the avenue, lost to the wide in rapt
contemplation of the hovering aëroplane.

"Kitts!" he called, but she did not hear, or disdained to
pay attention.  He tried to call again, but his mouth dried
up and his feet seemed rooted to the ground.  For, swinging
round the turf-banked corner of the avenue at its junction
with another, charging at a terrific pace down upon the little
brilliant creature, came a whity-brown figure on a motorcycle,
the frantic honking of its horn and the racket of its
engine's open throttle mingling deafeningly with the tractor's roar.





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.. _`SHERBRAND`:

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   CHAPTER VI


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   SHERBRAND

.. vspace:: 2

The frantic honking of the pneumatic horn was lost in the
crashing collision of earth and metal.  Franky, pallid and
damp with apprehension, reassured himself by a rapid glance
that Margot was safe and sound.  The aëroplane had
ceased buzzing and hovering, headed southwards, and
floated on, trailing her shadow, leaving the traces of her
passage in a smear of brown earth indicating a vicious slash
made by the right-side foot-rest of a motor-cycle in the
greensward, conserved and sacred to the French Republic—the
upset machine to which the foot-rest appertained, and
an angry young man in dusty overalls, sitting in the middle
of the raked-up avenue.

"You've had a spill! ..." Franky heard himself saying.

"Yes....  I have had a spill—thanks to that young lady!"

The dusty young man's tone was frankly savage; he
regarded the brilliant little figure in the distance with a scowl
of resentment as he gathered himself up from the gravel,
and dabbed at a jagged, oozing cut on his prominent chin
with a handkerchief of Isabella hue.  "The brake-handle
did that," he curtly explained, more for his own benefit than
apologetic Franky's.  But he looked full in the flushed and
dewy countenance of Margot's lord as he added:

"If I'd killed her, a French jury would have found that
she deserved it!—running like a corncrake across the avenue
when I was scorching up at top speed! ..."

"I know," Franky stammered.  "I—I see how it all
happened.  You had to steer slap into the bank—to save
my—my wife's life.  How can I apologise? ... You see,
she was crazy about the aëroplane....  She'd been
warned to keep well out of the way—you know what women
are! ..."

"Oh, as to that! ..."  The dusty young man, moving
with a perceptible limp, went to the prone motor-cycle,
stood it up on its bent stand with one twist of his big-boned
wrist, and began to examine into its injuries.  "Not much
wrong," he said to himself, and straightened his back, and
in the act of throwing a leg over the saddle, felt Franky's
restraining grip upon his arm.

"You don't go until my wife has thanked you!"  Franky's
upper-lip was Rhadamanthine.  "Margot!" he called, in a
tone of authority such as he had never previously heard
from his own mouth; "Come here at once, please!  I want
to speak to you!"

The fluttering little figure waved a hand to him.  The
gay little voice called back:

"Yes....  Oh!—but look at them! ... Can they
be going?  Why, I believe they are! ..."

The canvas strips had been rolled up by a mechanician of
the Service Aëronautique, and stowed away behind the big
grey telegraph-car, in the recesses of which the telescopic
steel mast and aërials of the wireless had been snugly tucked
away.  The mechanics in *képis* and overalls had stowed
themselves away inside the *camion*; the wireless operator,
a képi having replaced his headband, was acting as chauffeur.
And, occupying the front seat beside a junior officer, who
piloted a second, smaller car, Raymond, *Capitaine-Commandant
pilot* of the —th escadrille of France's Service
Aëronautique gave the signal for departure with an upward
wave of his hand.  Then, with some sharp, staccato trills of
a whistle and the double honk of a pneumatic horn, the
car of the commandant turned and sped down the avenue,
followed by the tractor-waggon; and both were lost to view.

"But—they're gone! ... And—and the aëroplane...."
Margot gasped out the words in amazed discomfiture, sending
her eyes after a dwindling shape beating down the sky to
the southward, and straining her ears to catch the last of the
tractor's whirring song.

"Nearly at Issy, I should calculate—travelling at eighty
miles an hour.  Impossible now to catch up with her in time
to see her do the last stunt.  Can choose my own pace for
going, anyhow," said the motor-cyclist ruefully.  "Nothing
left to do but take the Bird over and fly her back to the
Drancy hangar."

He tried to laugh, but his wrung face gave the lie to the
plucky pretence of indifference.  He went on, still doggedly
mopping away at his bleeding chin:

"I was lucky in getting a hearing on this side of the
Channel.  The bigwigs at Whitehall simply referred me to
the Superintendent of the Royal Aircraft Factory at
Frayborough, and as I'd tried him twice already, I knew what
*he'd* got to say.  The Commander of the Central School of
Military Aviation was a brick—I'll say that for him.  He sent
a French flying officer to look me up at Hendon, who got me
in touch with the Inventions Bureau of their *Service
Aëronautique*....  Well! the big test's over by this time.  I shall
know my fate in a week or two—or possibly in a year?"

"Oh!  You don't mean——"

The horrified cry broke from Margot.  Franky yelled:

"By the Great Brass Hat! ... You're the inventor!
The whole thing was your show!"

"Yes, I'm the inventor," the tanned young man in the
dusty overalls answered rather contemptuously: "What did
you take me for? ... A French medical student having
a joy-ride, or a *commis voyageur*?"

"Can't say.  Never thought! ... Fact is—my wife
had frightened me horribly.  When your machine bore
down on her—posted right in the middle of the gravel—I
was scared stiff—give you my honour!—you might have
sunk a brace of Dreadnoughts in the palms of my hands!"

Franky made this absurd statement with so sincere an air,
and clinched it so effectually by displaying a lovely
silk-cambric handkerchief in a state of soppy limpness, that the
abrased inventor nearly laughed.

But his thick, silvery, fair eyebrows settled into a straight
line across his tanned forehead.  He said with a directness
that seemed to belong to his lean, keen, hatchet-faced type:

"Once more, I am glad that no harm has happened to the
lady.  The delay caused by the—mishap can hardly have
prejudiced my success.  For all I know, the test of my
hoverer may have favourably impressed the judges.  If it
has done otherwise I have no right to blame man, dog, or
devil, for a failure that may be my own."

He lifted his goggled cap to Margot with a good air,
pulled it down, and was in the act of lowering the visor, when
Margot's voice arrested the big-boned hand.  That voice
Franky knew could be wonderfully coaxing.  It pleaded
now, soft as the sigh of a Mediterranean breeze:

"Whether the test is successful or isn't, will you promise
that we shall hear from you? ..."

"Good egg!" joined in Franky.  "Do let us know! ... We're
stopping at the Spitz, Place Vendôme."  He warmed
and grew expansive in the light of Margot's smile of
approval.  "Drop in on us there," he urged, "as soon as
you've found out.  Come and dine with us in any case....
No!—we're engaged to-night, but come and lunch at two
sharp to-morrow, and tell us all about your hoverer over a
bottle of Bubbly.  Suite 10, Second Floor.  Name of
Norwater.  Stick this away to remind you," he ended,
tendering his card.

"You're awfully good.  But at the same time I hardly——"

The voice broke off.  A glance at the proffered pasteboard
had dyed the inventor flaming scarlet from the collar of his
dusty gabardine to the edges of his goggled cap.  He dropped
the card quietly upon the gravel, and said, looking Franky
straight between the eyes:

"Even if I were able to accept I'd have to decline your
invitation.  My name's Sherbrand—I'm your Uncle Alan's
son."  He settled himself in the saddle and finished before
he pulled up the starting-lever.  "Understand—I'd no idea
who you were until I saw the name on your card.  It has
been a queer encounter—I can't say a pleasant one.  Let me
end it by saying 'Good-day!' ..."

Franky's new-found cousin touched the goggled cap and
pulled up the starting-lever.  With the customary bang and
snort, the motor-bicycle leaped away.  Margot had uttered
a little gasp at the moment of revelation.  Now she turned
great eyes of dismay on Franky, and withdrew them quickly.
For Franky's eyes had become circular and poppy, his
mouth tried to shape itself into a whistle, but his expression
was merely vacuous.  He continued to explode with "Great
Snipe!" at intervals, as he and Margot made their way back
to more populous avenues, chartered a fortuitously passing
taxi, and were driven back via the Porte Dauphine to Spitz's
gorgeous caravanserai in the Place Vendôme, when Margot
vanished into her own bower, sending her French maid to
intimate to Milord that Miladi would take tea alone in that
apartment, and did not intend to dine.

.. vspace:: 2

Thus Franky, relieved from duty, presently found himself,
in company with a cigar, strolling bachelor-fashion through
the streets of Paris.  No very clear recollection stayed with
him of how he spent the afternoon.  At one time he found
himself with his features glued against the plate-glass
window of a celebrated establishment dedicated to the culture
and restoration of feminine beauty, contemplating divers
gilt wigs on stands—porcelain pots of marvellous unguents,
warranted to eliminate wrinkles; sachets of mystic herbs to
be immersed in baths; creams guaranteed to impart to the
most exhausted skin the velvety freshness of infancy.

Later he strayed into a sunny, green-turfed public garden,
full of white statues, sparkling fountains, and municipal
seats whereon Burgundian, Dalmatian, and Alsatian wet-nurses
dandled or rocked or nourished their infant charges,
and bonnes or governesses presided over the gambols of older
babies, who played with belled Pierrots, or toy automobiles,
or inflated balls of gorgeous hues.

There is nothing profoundly moving in the sight of a stout,
beribboned wet-nurse suckling her employer's infant.  But
into the company of these important hirelings came quite
unconsciously a young working-woman in a shabby brown
merino skirt and a blouse of white Swiss.  Her shining black
hair was uncovered to the sunshine.  On one arm she
carried a bouncing baby, on the other a basket containing
cabbages and onions, and a flask of cheap red wine, which
receptacle its owner, having taken the other end of the seat
Franky occupied, set down between herself and the young
man.  She was a healthy, plump young woman with too
pronounced a moustache for beauty.  But when, having
methodically turned the baby upside down to rearrange
some detail of its scanty dress, she reversed it and bared her
breast to the eager mouth, a strange thrill went through
Franky.  A dimness came before his vision, and it was as
though those dimpled hands plucked at his heart.  He
suffered a sudden revulsion strange in a young man so
modern, up-to-date, and beautifully tailored.  He knew
that he longed for a son most desperately.  And the devil
of it was—Margot did not.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`THE CONSOLATRIX`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER VII


.. class:: center medium bold

   THE CONSOLATRIX

.. vspace:: 2

Thus, Franky got up and moved away, driven by the stinging
cloud of thoughts that pursued and battened on him, and
presently found himself following a stream of people up a
flight of marble steps, and under an imposing portico that
ended in a turnstile and a National Collection of Paintings
and Sculptures.

Wandering through a maze of long skylighted galleries
where the master-works of Modern Art are conserved and
cherished, he was to encounter the thought that haunted
him in a myriad of images, wrought by the chisel, the brush,
the burin, and the graving-tool in marble or bronze, upon
canvas or panel, in ivory, or silver, or enamel, or gold.

A sculptured Hagar mourning by the side of her dying
Ishmael caught his eye as he entered the first gallery.
Farther on, Eve after the Fall lifted the infant Cain to
receive the kiss of Adam, homing to his shack of green
branches at the end of the labouring day.  And a
shag-thighed, curly-horned Pan romped with a litter of sturdy
bear-cubs, and medallions and panels of childhood were
everywhere.

It was the same in the galleries devoted to painting.  A
Breton christening-party, depicted with the roughness that
hides consummate mastery of technique, trudged along a
snowy coast-road towards a little chapel near the seashore.
The young mother in her winged starched cap and bodice
of black velvet, yet pale from the ordeal of anguish, walked
between her smiling gossips, carrying her new-born infant,
chrysalis-like in its linen swaddlings, to be made into a good
Christian by M. le Curé.  And seated on a broken throne of
red granite beneath the towering propylæum of a ruined
Egyptian temple, whose colonnades of lotus columns, and
walls painted with processions of hierophants offering
incense to bird or beast-headed deities, and bewigged dancers
and musicians ministering to the pleasures of long-eyed
kings, receded down long perspectives into distance, a
Woman, young and slender and draped in a long blue cloak
over a white robe, gazed downwards at a naked Child sleeping
upon her knees.  And about the downy temples of the
Child shone a slender ring of mystic brightness, and another,
more faint, haloed the chastely beautiful head of the Mother
bending above.

Another canvas, austere and gorgeous, with the marvellous
blues and emeralds and rich deep crimsons of old
Byzantine ornament in relief against a background of dull
tawny gold, showed the same maternal figure, far older and
in darker draperies, seated upon a chair of wrought ivory
upon a daïs, looking outward and upward with deep eyes of
unfathomable tenderness and sorrow, and pale hands lifted
in supplication to that Heaven whither Her Son ascended
after His Victory over Death.  Across the knees of the
Consolatrix Afflictorum a mourning mother lay prone and
tearless.  And at the feet of the Virgin, outstretched amidst
the scattered petals of some fallen roses, you saw the nude,
beautiful body of a male child of some three years old.

.. vspace:: 2

But little of the inner meaning of Bouguereau's great
picture filtered through Franky's honest brown eyes to the
mind that lay somewhere behind them.  But he realised
that for the grieving woman who had borne a son and lost
him there was no more joy in the world.

The Child of that Woman upon whose knees she leaned
her breaking heart had lived to attain to the perfect ripeness
of glorious Manhood.  But then....  Franky followed the
lines of the dark, downward-drifting veil up to the rapt
Mother-face with the sorrowful, close-folded mouth and the
deep, fathomless eyes, and remembered what had happened
to Her Son.

.. vspace:: 2

"Beg pardon!" he found himself muttering between his
teeth.  His hand went up, and he had bared his sleek brown
head before he knew.  This wasn't a Roman Catholic
Church, anyway ... there was no obligation even to
appear respectful; France had long ago kicked over the
traces of Religion—all French people were Freethinkers in
these days.  Telling himself this, Franky did not replace
the shiny topper.  One rapid glance to right and left had
shown him that the gallery was nearly empty; the few visitors
it contained were too far distant to have observed the
action.  Except, possibly, one person, a lean, short, elderly
man in shabby black, who stood some paces behind, a little
to the left of Franky, holding a shovel-brimmed
round-crowned beaver with both hands against his sunken chest
as he gazed with bright, absorbed eyes at the wonderful
rapt face of the Consoler; his lips moving rapidly as he
whispered to himself, not breaking off or twitching a muscle
because Franky had glanced round:

Franky glanced round again, and this time encountered
the oddly young eyes of his neighbour, looking from a brown,
deeply wrinkled visage framed in thickly growing, straight
black hair, heavily streaked with white.

"Monsieur is a lover of Art?"

Undoubtedly a Frenchman, he addressed Franky in cultured
English, with a tone and manner excellently graced.
The vivid clearness of his amber-coloured eyes, set in the
now smiling mask of walnut-brown wrinkles, was attractive.
And Franky answered, unconsciously warming to the look
and smile:

"Must say I hardly know.  Things that clever, intellectual
people go into raptures over, bore me simply stiff.  Other
things—things they howl down—go straight to the spot, you
see.  And all I can say when I'm hauled over the coals for
liking rubbish is, that the rubbish is good enough for this
child."

"I comprehend.  Monsieur has the courage of his convictions.
It is a quality rare in these days.  And—this
painting particularly appeals to Monsieur?  May one be
pardoned for asking why?"

The voice was suave, but it somehow compelled an answer.
Franky, with an indistinct remembrance of *viva voce*
examinations awakening in him, cleared his throat and fell back
a pace or two....  Well set up and well-bred, well-groomed
and well-dressed, his figure, beside that other in the
priestly soutane of rusty alpaca, short enough to reveal
coarse ribbed stockings of black yarn, and cracked prunella
shoes with worn steel buckles, made a contrast sufficiently
quaint to provoke a stare of curiosity, had any observer
passed just then.  But standing together on the beeswaxed
floor at the upper end of the long, bright, skylighted gallery,
the Guardsman and his temporary acquaintance were as
private as it is possible to be in a public place.

Thus, at the cost of a heightened complexion and an
occasional stammer, Franky explained himself.  The painting
appealed to him because it recalled a Bible story—made
familiar to Franky by reason of having swotted it at School
for Sunday Ques. with other fellows of the Fifth in
Greyshott's time.  Also, on the wind-up Sunday of his, Franky's,
Last Term, having passed for the Army with the dev—hem!—of
a lot of trouble—a beastly epidemic of diphtheria and
scarlet fever having broken out among the children of the
Windsor poor, the Head had preached from the text in Big
Chapel.  And the text went something like this:

"*A Voice in Rama was heard, of lamentation and mourning:
Rachel bewailing her children: and would not be comforted
because they are not.*"

The haggard, beautiful, tearless Rachel of the picture
hadn't bucked at the disfigurement and the pain and the
danger of child-bearing.  She had welcomed them for the
sake of the kid....  It was a thundering pity he hadn't
lived—in Franky's opinion; "woman jolly well deserved
to have been let keep that clinking fine boy to rear."

"I comprehend."  The clear eyes flashed into Franky's,
the withered brown mask was alight with sympathetic
intelligence.  "To Monsieur, an English officer and a member of
the Protestant Church of England, that woman who leans
her bursting heart upon the knees of the Mother of
Consolation is Rachel."  He quoted:

"'*Vox in Rama audita est, ploratus el ululatus: Rachel
plorans filios suos: et noluit consolari, quia non sunt.*'"

"That's it!" Franky nodded, admitting candidly:
"Though I always was a duffer at Latin, and we weren't
taught at School to pronounce it—quite in that way."

Said the clear-eyed old man, whose dark wrinkled throat
displayed no edge of linen above the plain circular collar of
the soutane, only a significant border of purple from which
two widish lappets of the same colour depended beneath
the peaked and mobile chin, and who might have been a
prelate of sorts, had it not been understood of simple Franky
that the State had abolished the Catholic religion and
banished all priests, monks, and nuns from France.

"The Italianate Latin puzzles you....  It is—slightly
different to the Latin they taught you at Eton?  *Hein*?
When I lived in England—not so long ago—I counted
several brave Eton fellows among my acquaintances.  And
their mental attitude with regard to the language of Virgil,
Horace, and Tacitus was precisely that of Monsieur."

He chuckled, and his oddly young eyes twinkled quite
gaily as he pulled out a battered little silver snuff-box and
helped himself, wrinkling his thin hooked nose with evident
enjoyment.  As he dusted the pungent brown grains from
his lappets with a coarse blue-checked cotton handkerchief,
an amethyst ring on the wrinkled hand flashed pink and
violet in the light.

"To Monsieur who is doubtless familiar with the Scriptures
in Tyndall's translation, I might suggest that the Latin
of the Ancient Romans should be pronounced in the Roman
style!  But Monsieur will pardon this tone of the pedagogue.
I will not 'bore you stiff' with a classical disquisition.
Permit me to thank you for your amiable compliance with the
request of an old man, and to wish you good-day."

He combined apology, farewell, and dismissal in a courtly
little bow, and as though undoubting that the other would
pass on, plunged again into the picture.  But Franky
lingered to say, awkwardly:

"Perhaps ... If you don't mind...."

"*Hein*? ..."

The keen eyes reverted to his embarrassed face instantly.

"What if I do not mind? ... There is something you
desire to ask me?"

"Well, yes!" Franky admitted.  "Don't quite pipe why,
but I rather cotton to hearing your version....  Of the
meaning of that picture, you know! ..."

"Yes—yes!  I understand! ..."  The vivid eyes
flashed piercingly into Franky's, and leaped back to the
great glorious canvas within the stately frame.  "To you
who were once a boy at Eton that woman who has no more
tears to shed is Rachel of Rama....  To me, once Seminarist
of the Institut Catholique, as to others of my holy
faith and sacred calling—she is France—our beloved France,
who leans upon the knees and against the bosom of the
Catholic Church in her bereavement—mourning with
anguish unutterable her children who are dead....  Dead to
Faith, dead to the Spiritual Life—members separated from
the Body of Christ by their own choice as by the act of
Government.  Lost!—unless the ray of Divine Grace find
and touch them in their self-made darkness, and they repent,
and turn themselves to Christ again!"

Franky said, with wholly lovable banality:

"Rather sweepin', but natural conclusion, from a religious
point o' view.  Still, when a whole nation gets up like one
man and bally well chucks a Religion, there must be
something jolly off-colour and thundering rotten about that
Religion, don't you know?"

"A whole nation!"

The bright eyes held Franky's sternly.  He lifted his right
arm, and the withered hand still shut upon the battered
snuff-box shot up two fingers in vigorous protest.  "Pardon,
Monsieur—you are very seriously mistaken.  France was
never more Catholic at heart than now.  How strange!—when
but twenty-one miles of salt water divide Calais from
Dover—when the Entente Cordiale has established between
your country and mine nominally close and intimate relations;
that so complete an ignorance as to the French Nation,
its Government, its mode of thought, its moral, religious,
and social conditions, should be found prevailing in Great
Britain to-day!"

"My dear sir, you're off the bull—completely off!"
protested Franky—Franky whose second sister was married to
a Frenchman, Franky who knew Paris as well as the inside
of his week-end suit-case, by Jove!

A deprecating shrug and a supple outstretched hand cut
short the speaker.

"Pardon, Monsieur l'Anglais—I know what you would
say to me!  There is much force in the argument....  It
is *très sensée*—and there is truth in it, and yet it is false—to
be guilty of a paradox.  The aristocracy of Great Britain,
like her plutocracy, set high value upon much that comes
from France.  British gold is poured into my country in
return for the newest and most fanciful modes in costume,
millinery, and jewellery.  And not only do your beautiful
women adorn themselves with the inventions of our bold
and original genius for ornament, but for your *menus*, your
pleasures, the novels and plays that paint in intoxicating
colours the joys of unchaste love and illicit passion, for the
sensuous poetry that is garlanded with the flame-hued
flowers of Evil, you are ready to praise and pay us lavishly,
as though no nobler growth than this rank luxuriance sprang
from the intellectual soil of France.  Our vices—alas!—with
the appalling diseases that spring from them, and the
combinations of drugs that alleviate these—all find with you a
ready market.  And you attend our race-meetings at
Longchamps and Auteuil, where English jockeys ride French and
Irish horses—and you believe, you!—that you know the
social life of France.  No!—but you are ignorant—profoundly
ignorant!  May GOD be thanked that you misjudge
us thus cruelly.  For if my country were no better
than Great Britain and other foreign nations believe her to
be, it were time indeed for a rain of fire from Heaven!"

Hardly raising his voice above a clear whisper, the
emotion and vehemence with which he spoke, and the swift and
fiery gesticulations with which he illustrated utterance,
made the sweat start out in beads upon his wrinkled forehead
and cheeks.  He wiped these off with the blue checked
handkerchief, saying:

"Pardon!  I grow warm when I speak of these things.
I recognise that if in the judgment of other nations France
is a courtesan drunk with lechery, or at the best *un esprit
follet*, she has brought this judgment upon herself.  Flippancy,
the desire to *faire de l'esprit* under any circumstances—the
bold and brilliant gaiety that is her exclusive and most
beautiful characteristic—these have caused her to be
misunderstood.  But whatever else she be, she is not Pagan
nor Agnostic.  To believe that is to wrong her cruelly,
Monsieur!"

Franky, by now hopelessly at sea, endured the hailstorm
of swift, vehement sentences with an expression of amiable
vacuity, his stiffly pendent hands plainly yearning for the
refuge of his trousers pockets, his mind rocking on the waves
of the stranger's passionate eloquence like a toy yacht adrift
on the bosom of the Atlantic.  And the resonant Gallic
voice went on:





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`MONSEIGNEUR`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER VIII


.. class:: center medium bold

   MONSEIGNEUR

.. vspace:: 2

"The masters of France to-day are hostile to Christianity.
They are Freemasons (Freemasonry in England is not
Freemasonry as it is understood here); they are Freethinkers,
Socialists, Internationalists, and Hedonists, the avowed
enemies of the Catholic Faith.  Hence, churches,
seminaries, and schools have been closed by Government,
communities of religious men and women have been uprooted
and exiled.  Priests have been banished, ecclesiastical and
private property has been appropriated and confiscated,
churches have been desecrated, the symbols of Christianity
and religion everywhere torn down.  In France upon Good
Friday the standard of the Republic waves proudly, while
the flag of every other Christian nation hangs at half-mast
high.  And yet—the great mass of the French people
are—Catholic and nothing but Catholic!  The light may be hidden,
but the fire of devotion still burns in millions of faithful
hearts gathered about the Church's altars, beating beside
the hearths of innumerable homes in France.  Blood—torrents
of blood—would not quench that sacred fire.  When
the Day of Expiation comes, as it will come, most surely,
the Catholicism of France will prove her salvation yet!"

With the final sentence, the hand that had been lifted in
gesture dropped to the side of the speaker.  The flashing
glance took in Franky from the top of his sleek bewildered
head to the tips of his beautiful patent-leathers.  He said
with a smile of irresistible amusement:

"Monsieur, I fear I have fatigued you.  Let me thank
you for your admirable patience.  *Au revoir*, or if you
prefer it—*Adieu*!"

Another of the quick little bows, and he had covered
himself and passed on rapidly.  Franky reflected, staring
after the short black figure in the caped soutane with the
worn purple sash and shabby beaver shovel-hat, as it
receded from his view.

"Fruity old wordster, 'pon my natural!  Toppin' fine
talker!  Wonder who he is?  Head of a Public School,
swottin' an address for the beginning of the Midsummer
Half term—a Professor of Divinity gettin' up a lecture—the
Archbishop of Paris rehearsin' a sermon.  Whichever they
call him, why don't he pitch his language at a man of his
own size?"

And he went back to the Spitz through the boulevards
that were surging with the afternoon life of Paris, and heard
from Pauline that Miladi had retired to bed.  She had
already dispatched a billet of excuses to Sir Brayham, with
whom Miladi and Milord were engaged to dine downstairs
that evening, explaining that a headache prevented her
from accompanying Milord.  He—Milord—must be sure to
make no noise in changing for dinner, as Miladi, after a
crisis of the nerves of the most alarming, was now sleeping
like an angel, having taken a *potion calmante* of orange-flower
syrup with water, not the veronal so heartily
detested of Milord....

.. vspace:: 2

"Sleepin' like an angel, is she? ... Good egg!—though
I thought angels never went to bed—flew about singing
all the giddy time.  Righto, though!  I won't disturb
her ladyship....  When she wakes, give her my love...."

And Franky entered his dressing-room on cautious tiptoe,
lighted a cigarette, rang the bell for his valet, and began to
reflect.

It was to have been a dinner of eight people—Brayham
the host, with Lady Wathe, skinny little vitriol-tongued
woman!—a man unknown who was to have sat next Margot;
Commander Courtley—ripping good fellow old Courtley! no
better sailor walked the quarter-deck of a First-Class
Cruiser—damn shame those Admiralty bigwigs denied such a fellow
post-rank; and Lady Beauvayse, formerly Miss Sadie
Sculpin of New York—pretty American with pots of boodle,
married to that ghastly little bounder who'd stepped into
the shoes a better man would be wearing if his elder brother
(handsome fellow who married an actress, Lessie Lavigne
of the Jollity—good old Jollity!) hadn't got pipped in that
scrum with the Boers in 1900-1901.

Lessie, Lady Beauvayse, the widder called herself on the
posters and programmes.  Come down to second-rate parts
in Music Hall Revue—gettin' elderly and stout.  Must see
red when she happened to spy the present Lord Beauvayse's
pretty peeress in the stalls or boxes....  Wonder why
the P.P. made such a pal of Patrine Saxham?  Niece of
Saxham of Harley Street—handsome as paint, proud as the
devil, and an Advanced Thinker—according to Margot.
Remembering the gift of the jade tree-frog, Franky
involuntarily wrinkled his nose.

With Lady Beau and the Saxham girl, there would be a
party of seven, counting the man unknown....  Might
go on afterwards to the Folies Bergère or the Théâtre
Marigny—or perhaps the Jardin de Paris.  Why hadn't
Jobling answered his master's bell?  Why had he deputised
a waiter to enquire whether his lordship wished his
valet?  Did he think waiters were paid to do his, Jobling's,
work for him?  Or did he, Jobling, suppose he was
kept for show?

The strenuous stage-whisper in which Franky addressed
the recalcitrant Jobling penetrated the door-panels of the
adjoining bower, as such whispers usually do.  But Margot
was really sleeping—the orange-flower water had had a few
drops of chloral mingled with it.  Milord had never
prohibited chloral, as Pauline had pointed out.  But
unsuspicious Franky, unrigging (as he termed the process), while
the tardy Jobling prepared his master's bath and laid out
his master's "glad rags," plumed himself upon having made
a notable advance in the science of wife-government.  Even
the blameless potion of orange-flower testified to his
masculine strength of will.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`SIR THOMAS ENTERTAINS`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER IX


.. class:: center medium bold

   SIR THOMAS ENTERTAINS

.. vspace:: 2

You are invited to follow Franky, and sit with him at his
friend Tom Brayham's circular board, decorated with great
silver bowls of marvellous Rayon d'Or roses, that seemed to
exhale the harvested sunshine of summer from their fiery
golden hearts.

You remember the famous dining-room of the big Paris
caravanserai, with its archways supported by slender pillars
of creamy pink Carrara marble, wreathed with inlaid fillets
of green malachite and lapis lazuli, and its electric
illuminants concealed behind an oxidised silver frieze.  And
possibly you need no introduction to the deity—plain and
middle-aged—in whose honour Brayham—the Hon. Sir
Thomas Brayham, an ex-Justice of the King's Bench
Division—in the remote mid-Victorian era a famous Q.C.—made
oblation of luscious meats and special wines.  The
clever, sharp-tongued, penniless niece of a famous Minister
for Foreign Affairs, she had made a love-match at twenty
with Lord Watho Wathe, a handsome and equally impecunious
subaltern in a famous Highland regiment, who was
killed upon Active Service twenty years later, while travelling
upon a special mission to the Front Headquarters during
the South African War of 1900.

Two years later his widow conferred her hand upon
Mr. Reuben Munts, of Kimberley and South Carfordshire, a
diamond-mining magnate who had made his colossal pile
before the War.  She had never borne her second husband's
name, and when he died, leaving her sole mistress of his
millions, Lady Wathe resumed her place in Society,
thenceforwards to sparkle as never before.

"The '*Chronique Scandaleuse*' in a diamond setting"
some phrase-maker clever as herself had aptly termed her.
Without her riches, stripped of her wonderful diamonds,
Society might have found her to be merely a little chattering
woman, avid of the reputation of a humorist and *raconteuse*,
unflagging in her relish for stories, not seldom of the broadest,
related at her own expense or at the cost of other people,
and over-liberally garnished with nods and becks, darting
glances, and wreathed smiles.

Upon this night of the Grand Prix—won, you will remember,
by Baron M. de Rothschild's "Sardanapole"—the little
lady's jests fizzled and coruscated like Japanese fireworks.
Her gibes buzzed and stung like wasps about a lawn-set
tea-table, when new-made jam and fragrant honey tempt
the yellow-and-black marauders to the board.  And yet
from the soup to the *entremets*, Franky listened in dour and
smileless silence, unable to conjure up a grin at the sharpest
of the Goblin's witticisms, or swell the guffaw that
invariably followed the naughtiest of her *double-entendres*.

"Off colour, what? ..." his crony Courtley queried in
a sympathetic undertone, catching a glimpse of Franky's
cheerless countenance behind the bare, convulsed back and
snowy heaving shoulders of Lady Beauvayse, who occupied
the intervening chair.

"Putridly off colour....  Walked in the Bois, and got
a touch of the sun, I fancy!" Franky whispered back too
loudly, drawing upon himself the Goblin's *equivoque*:

"The sun or the daughter, did you say, Lord Norwater?
Dear me!" the Goblin shrilled; "you're actually blushing!
You've revived a long-lost Early Victorian art."

"Was blushing really an art with the ladies of that dim
and distant era?" asked the friendly Brayham, not in the
least comprehending Franky's discomfiture, yet desirous of
diverting the Goblin's glittering scrutiny from her victim's
scarlet face.

"It was the art that concealed Heart—or assumed it!"
Lady Wathe retorted, with a peal of elfish laughter, turning
her tight-skinned, large-eyed, wide-mouthed ugliness upon
the speaker, and nodding her little round head until the
huge and perfectly matched diamonds of the triple-rayed
tiara that crowned her scanty henna-dyed tresses flashed
blinding sparks of violet and red and emerald splendour in
the mellow-toned radiance of the electric lights.

The Goblin had meant nothing, Franky assured himself,
as the angry blood stopped humming in his ears, and his
complexion regained its normal shade.  The bad pun that
had bowled him over had possibly been uttered without
malicious intent....  Yet Lady Wathe rented a gorgeous
suite upon the floor below the Norwater apartments,
and one of her three lady's-maids might have been pumping
Pauline....  What was she saying? ... Why was
everybody cackling? ...

The Goblin was launched upon a characteristic story.  Its
*dénouement*—worked up with skill and related with
point—evoked peal upon peal of laughter from the guests at
Brayham's table, with the sole exception of Franky, whom the
anecdote found sulky and left glum.  He said to himself
that if Lady Beauvayse, *née* Miss Sadie J. Sculpin of New
York, sole child and heiress of a Yankee who had made
millions out of Chewing Gum, chose to forget her position as
the wife of a British Peer, and mother of his children, by
Jove! and scream at such nastiness, it was her look-out.  If
the big red-blond man who sat on Franky's right shook with
amusement, as he recapitulated the chief points of the story
for the benefit of the girl who sat next him, it was his affair.
But that the Saxham, an unmarried girl, who oughtn't to
see the bearings of such a tale, should openly revel in its
saltness, made Franky feel sick—on this particular night.

He realised that he detested the Saxham girl, one of
Margot's chosen Club intimates, more fervently than even
Tota Stannus or Joan Delabrand; more thoroughly than
Rhona Helvellyn; only little less heartily than he hated
Cynthia Charterhouse.  Big, bold, galumphing, provocative—in
fact, so much IT that you couldn't overlook her—he
found her more unpleasantly attractive than usual, in a
bodice that was no more than a fold of shimmering orange
stuff above the waist—tossing the *panache* of ospreys that
startlingly crowned her, offering up her *persistant* illusion
perfumes for the delectation of the appreciative male.

Only look at her, ready to climb into her neighbour's
pocket.  Leaning her round white elbows on the guipure
table-cloth, half-shutting those long greeny-brown Egyptian
eyes of her, wreathing her long thick white neck to send a
daring challenge into the face of the laughing man.  A big
man, bright red-haired, blue-eyed, and broad-chested,
showing every shining tooth in his handsome grinning head....

"She's *screaming*, isn't she, dear Lady Beau?"  Thus
the Saxham to her employer, friend, and ally, across the
silver bowls of Rayon d'Or roses, her naked shoulder
brushing the coat-sleeve of her neighbour, the big rufous man.
And Lady Beau gushed back:

"In marvellous form to-night....  Don't you think
so, Count?  Do agree with us!" and the big man agreed,
with the accent of the German Fatherland:

"She is *kolossal*....  *Wunderlich*! ..."

"Who's the German next me—big beggar Lady Beau and
Miss Saxham are gushing over?" Franky presently
telegraphed to Courtley behind the charming American's
accommodating back.  And Courtley signalled in reply:

"Von Herrnung.  German Count of sorts—Engineer
and Flieger officer.  Son of an Imperial Councillor, and
cousin to Princess Willy of Kiekower Oestern—really
rather an interestin' beast in his way.  Made a one-stop
flight to Paris from Hanover in April, with an Albatros
biplane.  Previously won an event in the Prinz Heinrich
Circuit Competition."  He added: "We can't decently
blink their progress in military aviation.  It's one o' them
there fax which the brass-hats at the War Office pretend
to regard as all my eye.  Yet they know the Fatherland—or
if they don't they oughter!  Good-lookin' chap this.
Not over thirty, I should guess him.  Always dodging in
and out of the German Embassy.  The Goblin frightful
nuts on him....  Goin' to steer him through the next
London Season—suppose he's lookin' out for a moneyed wife!"

"Hope he gets her!" Franky mentally commented.  But
he looked with new interest at his big blond German neighbour,
mentally calculating that with all that bone, brawn,
and muscle, von Herrnung couldn't tip the scale at less than
sixteen stone.

Small-boned himself and of stature not above the medium,
Franky appreciated height and size in other men.  And
von Herrnung was undeniably a son of Anak.  The noiseless,
demure waiters who paused beside his chair to refill his
glass or offer him dishes were dwarfed by his seated presence
to the proportions of little boys.

Once, when there was a momentary bustle at the principal
entrance to the now crowded restaurant, and a party of men,
ceremoniously ushered by M. Spitz in person, passed up
the central gangway between the rows of glittering tables,
shielded by glass-panelled screens framed in oxidised silver,
and crowded now with gossiping, laughing, gobbling
patrons—men and women of varied nationalities, representing the
elite of the fashionable world, von Herrnung rose and
remained imperturbably standing at the salute, his eyes set
and fixed, his head turned rigidly towards the personage,
semi-bald, stout, with a prominent under jaw and a hard
official stare rendered glassier by a frameless square
monocle, and showing beneath the open front of a loose military
mantle a star upon the left side of his evening dress-coat,
and the glitter of an Order suspended from a yellow riband
about his thick bull-neck.

"The German Ambassador, Baron von Giesnau," Lady
Wathe returned to a question from Lady Beauvayse, as the
portly official figure creaked by, leaving a whiff of choice
cigars and a taint of *parfum très persistant*, lifting three
fingers of a white-gloved hand in acknowledgment of his
countryman's salute, and von Herrnung unstiffened and
dropped back into his chair.  "No! ... I'm not sure
where the Emperor is...."  She added, with one of her
laughs and a shrug of her thin vivacious shoulders: "Ask
Count von Herrnung—he's sure to know!"

"*Gnädige Gräfin*," von Herrnung returned when
interrogated, "I am not able to answer your question."  He
shrugged his broad shoulders and showed his white teeth.
"*Unser Kaiser* is—who shall say where?  At the Hof
... possibly at Homburg....  Stop! ... Now I remember!
*Seine Majestät* is at Kiel...."  He continued, arranging
with a big white hand displaying a preposterously long
thumb-nail a corner of his glittering, tightly rolled
moustache: "At Kiel ... *ach*, yes! he has been there since the
25th of June.  Entertaining the British and American
Ambassadors, visiting the Commander-in-Chief of your British
Squadron, superintending the armament of one of our own
new battle-cruisers,—seeing put into her those great big
Krupp guns that are to sink your super-Dreadnoughts by-and-by!"

The deliberately-uttered words of the last sentence
dropped into a little pool of chilly silence.  He had spoken
with perfect gravity, and the Englishmen who heard him
stared before they grinned.  Then the women shrieked in
ecstasies of amusement—the Goblin's laugh overtopping all.

"For he hates us! ... You can't think how he hates
us! ..." she crowed, writhing her lean little throat,
clasped by seven rows of shimmering stones, wagging her
Kobold's head, crowned by its diadem of multi-coloured
fire.  "Tell us how you hate us, Tido! ... Do—pray do!"

"I hate you, *ach* yes! ... All German officers are like
that—particularly the officers of our Field Flying Service,"
gravely corroborated von Herrnung.  "We have many
pleasant acquaintanceships with men and women of British
nationality, but your race—the Anglo-Saxon branch of the
great Teutonic oak-tree, it is natural that we should hate!
For that Germany must expand upon the west and north-west
as well as south and east, or suffocate, is certain.  She
must wield the trident of Sea Power; she must transform the
map of Europe.  She must exploit and disseminate German
trade and German Kultur; therefore, as the British, more
than any other nation, stands in the way of German development,
we look forward to the Day when we shall exterminate
you and take our right position as masters of the world!"

The women screamed anew at this.  The men were now
laughing in good earnest.  Franky found it impossible to
restrain the convulsions that shook him in his chair.
Purple-faced Brayham tried to speak, but broke down wheezing and
spluttering.  The Goblin shrilled:

"Tell them, Tido....  Please tell them! ... Do—ha! ha! tell
them how you're spoiling for a scrimmage
with us!  Show them your thumb-nail, pray do!"

Thus adjured, the big German solemnly extended his
left hand for general inspection.  The pointed,
carefully-manicured thumb-nail was at least two inches long.  Its
owner said with perfect gravity:

"This is the badge of a Society of England-haters, chiefly
Prussian military officers, young men of noble birth, bound
by an oath of blood.  This mark we carry to distinguish us.
It is a sign of our dedication, to remind us of the purpose
for which we are set apart."  He added: "Count Zeppelin
himself set the fashion of the uncut thumb-nail.  It will be
cut when the Day comes, and it has been dipped in blood!"

"In blood—how beastly!" said the Saxham girl, curling
the corners of her wide red mouth contemptuously.  "What
a horrid crowd your noble young Prussian officers must be!
And when is the dipping to come off?"  Her voice was deep
and resonant as a masculine baritone, and of so carrying a
quality that Franky started as though the words had been
spoken at his ear.

"*Gnädige Fräulein*," von Herrnung answered, "I have
already told you.  When the Day comes for which we are
preparing.  When the great German nation shall abandon
Christianity—cast off the rusty fetters of Morality and
Virtue—call on the Ancient God of Battles—and beat out
the iron sceptre of World Power with sword-blows upon the
anvil of War."

"When we're all to be exterminated, he means!" Lady
Wathe gasped behind her filmy handkerchief.  "Tido,
you're too absolutely screaming!  Do say why your noble
young Prussians keep us waiting? ..."  And von
Herrnung answered composedly:

"Because we are not yet ready.  We shall not be
perfectly ready before the spring of 1916."

His hard, bright glance encountered Franky's, and he
lifted his full glass of champagne and drank to him, smiling
pleasantly.

Of course the German was rotting, reflected Franky.  If
he wasn't, the combined insolence and brutality of such a
menace, uttered at the table of one of the Britons in whose
gore von Herrnung and his comrades yearned to dip their
preposterous two-inch thumb-nails, took the bun, by the
Great Brass Hat!  He was perfectly cool, as his muscular
white hands—for the dinner had arrived at the dessert
stage—manipulated the silver knife that peeled a blood-red
nectarine.  What a splendid ring, a black-and-white pearl, large
as a starling's egg, and set in platinum, the fellow sported
on the little finger of that clawed left hand.  What was he
asking, in the suave voice with the guttural Teutonic
accent?

"You were in the Bois, I believe, Lord Norwater, early
in the midday.  Did you see any *avions* of the *Service
Aëronautique*?  Did the invention they were testing come
up to expectations? .... Did the English aërial stabiliser
answer well? ..."

Franky knew, as he encountered the compelling stare of
the hard blue eyes, that he objected to their owner.  He
returned, in a tone more huffy and less dignified than he
would have liked it to be:

"Can't say....  I was merely walking in the Bois
with a lady.  Wasn't on the ground as—an investigator of
the professional sort."

"*So!*"  Von Herrnung's face was set in a smile of easy
amiability.  The shot might have missed the bull for
anything that was betrayed there.  "And the name of the
inventor?  It has escaped my memory.  Possibly you could
tell me, eh?"

"Certainly," said Franky, planting one with pleasure.
"He happens to be a cousin of mine.  Would you like me
to write down his address?"

"*Gewiss*—thanks so very much.  But I will not trouble
you!"

Nobody had heard the verbal encounter.  Lady Wathe
was holding the table with another anecdote punctuated
with staccato peals of laughter, tinkling like the brazen bells
of a beaten tambourine.  Mademoiselle Nou-Nou, a Paris
celebrity, belonging to the most ancient if not the most
venerable of professions, had promenaded under the chestnuts
at Longchamps that morning, attired, as to the upper
portion of her body, in a sheath of spotted black gauze
veiling, unlined—save with her own charms.  And a witty
Paris journalist had said that "the costume was designed to
represent Eve, not before nor after, but behind the fall";
and Paillette, who was there, working up her "Modes"
letter for *Le Style*, had answered——

Everybody at table was leaning forward and listening, as
the Goblin quoted the *riposte* of Paillette.

Von Herrnung, showing his big white teeth in a smile,
chose another nectarine from the piled-up dish before him,
seeming to admire the contrast between his own muscular
white fingers and the glowing fruit they held.  But Franky
saw that he was angry as he neatly peeled the fruit, split the
odorous yellow flesh, tore the stone out crimson and dripping
like a little human heart, and swallowed both halves of
the fruit in rapid succession, dabbing his mouth with the
fine serviette held up before him in both hands.  Then,
with an air of arrogant self-confidence peculiar to him, he
said loudly, addressing the whole company:

"Madame Paillette certainly deserves the Croix d'Honneur
for so excellent a *bon-mot*.  As for Mademoiselle
Nou-Nou, I do not myself admire her, but my brother Ludwig,
when he was alive, paid intermittent tribute to her charms."  He
added: "He was killed in the charge by a fall with his
horse in the Autumn Manoeuvres of last year, while the
Emperor was being entertained by command at a shooting-party
upon a forest property of my father's that is about
fifty kilometres from Berlin."





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`A SUPERMAN`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER X


.. class:: center medium bold

   A SUPERMAN

.. vspace:: 2

"Do tell what the Kaiser said when he heard of the
accident!" came in the voice of Lady Beauvayse, pitched now
in a high, nasal tone that was a danger-signal to those who
knew her, like the mischievous twinkle in her beautiful eyes.
"I guess he must have been real upset!"

"*Ja, ja, gewiss*," returned von Herrnung, slightly shrugging
his broad, square shoulders.  "Of course the Emperor
was greatly grieved for my father's loss.  But naturally the
programme had to be carried out.  There is another day's
Imperial shooting; the business is concluded—very
satisfactorily—and *Seine Majestät* takes leave.....  But of
course he sent to my mother a sympathetic message, which
greatly consoled her.  And his Chief Equerry, Baron von
Wildenberg, represented him at my brother's funeral.  And
shortly afterwards he graciously conferred upon my father
the Second Class of the Order *Pour le Mérite*."

"How nice!  But what for?" demanded the downright
American, with astonishment so genuine that Brayham
strangled with suppressed chuckles, and the bearded
mouth of Commander Courtley assumed the curve of a sly
smile.

"What for?" exclaimed von Herrnung.  He stiffened his
big body arrogantly, reddening with evident annoyance, and
thickly through his carefully-accentuated English the
Teutonic consonants and gutturals began to crop.  "*Gnädige
Gräfin*, because that so coveted decoration is the reward of
special service rendered to the Emperor.  And my father
in his-personal-sorrow-conquering that it upon the
amusements of Imperial Majesty-might-not-intrude—had the
noblest devotion and courage exhibited—in the opinion of
the All-Highest."

"My land!" exclaimed Lady Beauvayse, stimulated by
the undisguised enjoyment of Brayham, Courtley, and
Franky, "if that don't take the team and waggon, with the
yella dog underneath it, an' the hoss-fly sittin' on the
near-wheel mule's left ear!"  She added: "No wonder your
Kaiser thinks himself the hub of this little old universe—being
nourished from infancy on flapdoodle of that kind."  She
added, dropping the saw-edged artificial accent, and
reverting to the agreeable, drawling tones familiar to her
friends: "But, last fall, when King George and Queen
Mary were allowing to spend the day with us at Foltlebarre
Abbey, and see the Gobelins tapestries after Teniers that
were restored by our great American dye-specialist,
Charlotte B. Pendrill of New York—and I had a dud head with
neuralgitis, and couldn't have bobbed a curtsey without
screaming like peacocks before a wet spell—Lord Beauvayse
just sent a respectful note of excuse over by fast car to the
place in our county where their Majesties were spending a
week-end, and got a kind, cosy little line by return, making
an appointment for a more convenient day."

"*Es mag wohl sein*," said von Herrnung stiffly, repeating
an apparently favourite phrase.  "It may be so—in Great
Britain.  But in Germany the trivial happenings of
ordinary existence are not permitted to interfere with the
Imperial plans."

"Mustn't spoil Great Cæsar's shoot by letting a natural
sorrow dim your eye, in case you're unexpectedly informed
of a family bereavement," said Brayham to Lady
Beauvayse.  "So now you know what to expect in case the
Kaiser should take it into his head to pop in on you at
Foltlebarre somewhere about July."

"I surmise I'd expect a visitor of mine, whether he's the
Kaiser, the King, or the President," retorted Lady
Beauvayse, "to be a gentleman!"  Her beautiful eyes blazed
with genuine ire as she gave back von Herrnung's dominating
stare.  She continued, reverting more purposefully than
ever to the exaggerated New York accent, mingling cutting
Yankee humour with bitter irony in the sentences that
twanged, one after another, off her sharp American tongue:
"And I guess, Count von Herrnung—though between your
father and Amos J. Sculpin of Madison Avenue, New York,
and Sculpin Towers, Schenectady, there's considerable of a
social gulf—if your Emperor had been a house-guest of my
parpa's, and my elder brother"—she lifted an exquisite
shoulder significantly ceilingwards—"had happened to get
the hoist—parpa'd just have said: 'Your Imperial Majesty,
I am unexpectedly one boy short, and far from feeling
hunkey.  My cars are waiting at my door to convey you
right-away to your hotel.  Look in on us after the interment, when
Mrs. Sculpin has had time to get accustomed to her mourning.
And as my *chef* had orders to serve a special dinner in
honour of your Majesty, I shall be gratified by your taking
the hull menoo along—outside instead of in!'"

The Goblin cackled.  Ecstatic Brayham shrieked:

"Magnificent, by Gad!  He ought to know your father!"  Franky
and Courtley yielded unrestrainedly to mirth, as did
the Saxham girl.  While her teeth, dazzling as those of a
Newfoundland pup, gleamed in her wide red mouth, and
her long eyes glittered between their narrowed eyelids, von
Herrnung gave her a quick sidelong glance of anger.  She
caught the look, and suddenly ceased to laugh, as the young
Newfoundland might have stopped barking.  She said
below her breath:

"Vexed? ... Why, you're really! ... And Lady
Beau wasn't joking about your brother....  She wouldn't
dream of such a thing! .... She's tremendously kind
and sympathetic.  Was he—your brother—nice? ..."

"Most women thought so."

"Would I have thought so?  What was he like?" the
girl persisted.

Von Herrnung turned in his chair so as to face her,
answering:

"You see him now, with one difference.  He was as black
as I am red."

The blue eyes of the man and the long agate-coloured eyes
of the young woman encountered.  She said slowly in her
warm, deep voice, less like a feminine contralto than the
masculine baritone:

"I like—red men—best!"

"So!  Then it was lucky that, instead of me, my brother
Ludwig died!" said von Herrnung, so loudly that Lady
Wathe's quick ear caught the final words.  She shrilled
out her laugh:

"But you're a wretch, Tido!"  She shrugged her thin
vivacious shoulders under their glittering burden.  "A
heartless wretch!"

"Of course I was regretting my brother, yes!" said von
Herrnung.  "But I do not pretend that his death did not
improve what you English would call my worldly prospects.
That is the cant of Christianity—particularly the
sentimental Christianity of England.  One world is not enough
for your greed of possession.  You must eat your cake here
and hereafter.  But for the robust super-humanity of
Germany, this world is both Hell and Heaven.  It is Hell
for the man who is stupid, weakly, poor, and
conscience-ridden.  It is Heaven for the man who has knowledge,
power, health, wealth, the craft to keep his riches, and the
capacity to enjoy to the fullest the pleasures they can
procure him, with the courage to free himself from the bonds
of what Christians and Agnostics term Morality, and live
precisely as Nature prompts.  So when my brother fell in
the charge," continued von Herrnung, with perfect seriousness,
"he opened for me the gates of Heaven.  Since then
I am a god!"

"A mortal god," called out the chuckling Brayham; "for
you've got to die, you know, when your number's up."

"When the time comes, of course I shall die," acquiesced
von Herrnung, "in the vulgar sense of the word.  But not
so those who come after.  Our bacteriologists will have
discovered the microbe of old age and its antitoxin, and then
we shall die no more."

"Dashed if I know the difference between the vulgar way
of dying and the other style!" Brayham snorted apoplectically,
feeling in his waistcoat-pocket for the box of digestive
tabloids that showed in a bulge.  "Dashed unpleasant
certainty—however you look at it!  And a man who weighs
eighteen stone at fifty has *got* to look at it, every time his
tailor lets out his waistcoats, and his valet asks him to order
more collars because the last lot have shrunk in the wash."

"Ah, yes, to die is a hellish bore!" agreed von Herrnung,
contemplating his obese and purple host with a cruel smile.
"But I and my friends have no Hell, and we have done away
with the myth of Heaven.  To dissolve and be reabsorbed
into the elements—that is the only after-life that is possible
for a Superman."

"You'd hardly call it Life, would you?" came unwillingly
from Franky.  For von Herrnung's eyes seemed to challenge
his own.

"'*Imperial Cæsar, dead and turned to clay*,' what?" quoted
Courtley, to whom von Herrnung transferred his smiling
regard.

"I venture to hope that my clay may serve a more
patriotic purpose than stopping a draught-hole," said the
German, carefully fingering the tight roll of glittering red
hair upon his upper-lip.  "It may be baked into a sparking-plug
for the aëro-motor of one of our Zeppelin dirigibles—the
mysterious Z. X., for instance, in whose trial trip from
Stettin across the Baltic to Upsala in Sweden you were so
keenly interested some months ago.  Or some of my body's
chemical constituents may pass into the young tree beneath
which my ashes will be deposited.  If beech or spruce, then
I may furnish ribs or struts for an Aviatik or a Taube.  But
the best way of continuing to exist after one is dead is to
leave plenty of vigorous sons behind one.  To perpetuate
the race"—he continued speaking to Lord Norwater,
who had flushed and moved restlessly—"that is the high
and noble obligation Duty imposes upon the German
Superman."

"You'll have to hurry up your matrimonial arrangements,
Tido," interposed the Goblin, with her cackle, "if your
family is to tot up to a respectable number before the year
1916."

"You mean that I may get killed in our great War of
Extermination?  That is possible," agreed von Herrnung.
"Our Flying Service is not a profession conducive to long
life.  Many of our keenest officers remain unmarried for
that reason.  The Emperor would prefer each of us to
marry, or at least adopt a son.  For myself, I would like to
steal one of your splendid British boys and rear him up as
a true German——"

Something sharp and keen and burning stabbed through
Franky's brain to his vitals.  It would have been a relief to
have insulted von Herrnung.  He set his teeth, fighting with
the desire, as the guttural voice went on:

"I would teach him to hate you...."  The speaker
sucked in his breath as though he relished the idea
exceedingly.  "You cannot think how he would hate you!—my
German-British Superman."

"By-the-by, the literary genius of Dreadnought type who
invented the Superman," began Courtley, who had been
peaceably nibbling salted pistachios, "can't pronounce his
name for ginger-nuts, but it sounds something like a
sneeze——"

Von Herrnung said stiffly:

"You doubtless speak of our great Nietzsche, whose
triumphant thought has crushed all other mental systems."

"Quite so.  Must be the chap!" said Courtley.  "That
is, if he died a lunatic....  But possibly I'm mixing
him up with some other philosopher of the crushing
kind?"

"No, no.  It is true," corroborated von Herrnung.  "The
brain of Nietzsche gave way under the terrific strain of
incessant creation.  How should it be otherwise?"  He
became ponderous, even solemn, when he descanted upon the
literary idol of Modern Germany.  "How should it indeed
be otherwise?" he demanded.  "And was it not the fitting
crown of such a career—the appropriate end to such a
life-work?—to evolve the Superman—and die!"

"Quite so, quite so!" Courtley agreed.  He smoothed his
well-trimmed beard with his broad hand, and his eyes
assumed a meditative expression.  "Rather tantalising—always
hearing about Germany's Supermen and never seeing
any.  What sort of chaps are they?  I'm really keen to
know."

"You have not to go far," returned von Herrnung.  His
fine florid complexion had suffered a deteriorating change.
Savage anger boiled in his blood.  He had thrown the iron
gauntlet of German military preparedness in the faces of
these cool, well-bred, smiling English, and brandished the
iron thunderbolt of German intellectual supremacy—and
with this result—that they took his deadly earnestness as
jest.  "*Kreutzdonnerwetter!* these English officers....  The
pig-dogs! the sheep's heads! ..."  He swallowed down
the abusive epithets he would have liked to pitch at them,
and stiffened his huge frame arrogantly as he stared in
Courtley's simple face:

"*Aber*—you have not far to go, to visualise the type
conceived by Nietzsche.  I and my comrades—*we* are
Supermen!"

"Thanks for explaining, frightfully!" said Courtley with
artless gratitude, as Brayham purpled apoplectically and
even the Goblin tittered behind her fan.  "Shall know what
to ticket you now, you know.  Thanks very much!"

"You have read Nietzsche?" the sailor's victim queried.

Said Courtley, with his best air of frank simplicity:

"His works were recommended to me by my doctor,
when I had a bad attack of insomnia, about a year ago.
Ordered a volume of 'Thus Spake Zara Somebody.'  Half a
chapter did the business.  No insomnia since then.  Sleep
like a mite in a Gorgonzola, the instant my head touches the
pillow—never read another word.  But heaps of friends in
the Fleet'll be wanting to borrow the book presently, depend
on it.  For we'll all be too scared of Germany to sleep—in
the year 1916."

Laughter broke forth.  Lady Wathe gasped, dabbing her
tearful eyes with a lace-bordered handkerchief:

"Oh, Tido! will you dead-in-earnest Germans never learn
what pulling a leg means?"

"*Ach ja*!  I should have understood!"  He had stared,
frowned, and reddened savagely.  Now, with a palpable
effort, his equanimity was regained.  He turned with a
smiling remark to Patrine Saxham, as Lady Beauvayse
breathed in Courtley's ear:

"You perfect pet!  How I love you for that!"

"Man simply suffering for a set-down.  Good egg, you!"
murmured Franky in the other ear of the Commander.

"Felt sorry for him.  Had to do something—common
humanity!" rejoined Courtley, eating more and more
pistachios.  "Seems as over-crammed with their *Kultur* as a
pet garden-titmouse with coco-nut.  Vain too, but that's
the fault of the women.  Lord! how they gush at those big,
good-looking blighters.  See the Saxham!—ready to climb
into his waistcoat-pocket and stop there.  Would, too, if
she wasn't built on Dreadnought lines herself."

She was laughing into von Herrnung's smiling visage as
he offered her a light from his cigar.  For with the arrival of
coffee and liqueurs, the fragrance of choice Havana and
Turkish had begun to mingle with the tang of Mocha, the
heady bouquet of choice wines, and the odours of fruit and
flowers.  The screens of frosted glass were
rearranged,—the ladies had produced their cigarette-cases,—of gold
with the monogram of the Goblin set in diamonds; of
platinum adorned with turquoises and pearls wrought
into the Beauvayse initial and coronet; and of humbler
tortoiseshell, bearing in fanciful golden letters the name
"Patrine"——

"Patrine..."

"The Saxham girl" had taken the tortoiseshell cigarette-case
from the front of her low-cut, sleeveless bodice.  Von
Herrnung had leaned towards her, boldly exploring with his
eyes the bosom where the trinket had been hiding, and read
the golden letters.  He smiled as he met her puzzled eyes,
saying:

"'Patrine' is your name....  Now I know it I will not
forget it!  Tell me!"—he spoke in lowered tones—"why do
you carry your cigarette-case just in that place?"

She laughed, half-shutting her long eyes and slightly
lifting her big white shoulders.  "Simply for convenience—when
I'm in evening kit.  Dressmakers don't allow us poor
women pockets in these days."

"It may be so!"  As von Herrnung spoke with a calculated
roughness that he had found useful in dealing with
many women, he took the cigarette-case from her,
momentarily covering her hand with his own.  As his curving
fingers touched her palm, he felt the soft warm flesh wince
at the contact.  Her black brows drew together, her sleepy
agate eyes shot him a hostile sidewise glance.

"I have not offended?" he whispered in some anxiety.
And she answered in a louder tone, under cover of the talk,
and laughter of the others:

"No! ... Only—I hate to be touched, that's all."

He smiled under the crisp tight roll of his red moustache,
and his large, well-cut nostrils dilated and quivered.

"One day you will not hate it.  I will wait for that day.
But—about your cigarette-case—you do not now tell me the
truth! ... The real reason is more subtle.  You carry
that thing there—under your corsage—to make live men
envious of an object that cannot feel!"

"Really! ... What a lot you must know about women!"

The words were mocking, but the voice that uttered
them was big, warm, and velvety.  Far above the ordinary
stature of womanhood—you remember that Franky
regarded her as a great galumphing creature—her head
would yet have been much below the level of von
Herrnung's, but for the height of the extraordinary diadem or
turban that crowned her masses of dull cloudy-black hair.
Folds of vivid emerald-green satin rose above a wide band
of theatrical gilt tinsel, set with blazing stage rubies, and
above the centre of the wearer's low, wide brow a fan-shaped
panache of clipped white ospreys sprang, boldly challenging
the eye.  Thrown with royal prodigality upon the back of
the chair she occupied was an opera-mantle of cotton-backed
emerald-green velvet lavishly furred with ermine
and sables that were palpably false as the garish gold and
jewels of the diadem that crowned her, yet became her big,
bold, rather brazen beauty as well as though the Siberian
weasel and the Arctic marten had been trapped and slain
to deck and adorn her, instead of the white rabbit of
ordinary commerce and the domestic pussy-cat.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`PATRINE SAXHAM`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER XI


.. class:: center medium bold

   PATRINE SAXHAM

.. vspace:: 2

Who was the girl—the woman rather—who diffused
around her so powerful a magnetic aura, whom prodigal
Nature had dowered with such opulence of bodily splendour,
that cheap, tawdry clothes and ornaments borrowed from
her a magnificence that conjured up visions of the
Salammbo of Flaubert, gleaming moon-like through her gold
and purple tissues—of Anatole France's Queen of Sheba
treading the lapis-lazuli and sardonyx pavements of King
Solomon's palace in her jewelled sandals of gilded
serpent-skin, darting fiery provocations from under the shadow
of her painted lashes towards the Wise One rising from his
cushions of purple byssus, between the golden lions of his
ivory throne?

What a voice the creature had! thought von Herrnung.
Soft and velvety like that dead-white skin of hers.
The tortoiseshell case he held in his big palm still glowed
with the rich vital warmth of her.  His blood tingled and
raced in his veins; his hard, brilliant stare grew languorous,
and his mouth relaxed into sensuousness.  He said almost
stupidly, so keen was his enjoyment:

"You English ladies smoke a great deal, I think."

"Why should we leave all the pleasant vices to the men?"

She asked the queer question, not defiantly, but bluntly.
Her strange eyes laughed a little, as she saw Franky wince.
"Lord Norwater hates me.  Well, that's about the limit!"
she told herself.  "And I helped on his love-affair for little
Margot's sake!"  "I beg your pardon, Lord Norwater!  You
were saying something? ..."

"You're an Advanced Thinker, aren't you, Miss
Saxham?  At least, my wife tells me so," Franky began.
"Well, I'm not!  But I've got my doubts as to whether
vice is pleasant, for one thing—and for another, whether
the general run of women in these days aren't quite as
vicious as the men?"

"He wants to be nasty....  Poor boy, what have I
done to him?" passed through the brain topped by the
bizarre diadem.  But before its wearer could reply, von
Herrnung interposed:

"Naturally they are vicious—if they desire to please
men.  A dash of vice—that is the last touch to perfect an
exquisite woman.  It is the chilli in the *mayonnaise*, the
garlic and citron in the *ragoût*, the perfume of the carnation,
the patch of rouge that lends brilliance to the eye, the bite
in the kiss! ..."

"The bite in the ... Great Snipe! what an expression!"
thought Franky, whose attack of propriety had reached the
acute stage.  Patrine Saxham repeated slowly, and with
brows that frowned a little:

"'*The bite in the kiss*'...."

"You pretend not to understand..." said the guttural
voice of von Herrnung, speaking so that his wine- and
cigar-scented breath stirred the heavy hair that hid her small
white ear.  "But you are wiser than you would have me
believe.  Are you not?  Tell me!—am I not right?"

He bent closer, and she broke a web that seemed in the
last few moments to have been spun about her, invisible,
delicate, strong, making captive the body and the mind.
Her odd agate-coloured eyes laughed into his jeeringly.  Her
wide red mouth curved and split like a ripe pomegranate,
showing the sharp white teeth that, backed by a vigorous
appetite and seconded by a splendid digestion, had done
justice to every course of Brayham's choice menu.

Men always waxed sentimental or enterprising towards
the close of a rattling good dinner.  Patrine didn't care, not
a merry little hang!  They might say and look what they
liked, as long as they kept their hands off.  At a touch, the
quick revulsion came.

"You are amused....  I understand...."  Von
Herrnung spoke between his teeth, in a tone of stifled anger.
"Always to rot; it is your English fashion....  When you
encourage a man to make love to you, you are rotting.
When you say sweet things to him—possibly you are rotting
too?"

She turned her face away from him, striving to control
her irresistible laughter.  In vain; it took her as a sudden
gale takes a pennant at the masthead—seized and shook
her—as von Herrnung could have shaken her had they been
alone.  He turned savagely from her; she heard him speak
to Brayham, who responded with what-whattings, his fleshy
hand to his deafest ear.  Von Herrnung repeated his utterance.
Brayham goggled in astonishment.  Courtley murmured to Franky:

"Hear what the blighter's saying....  No keeping him
down, is there? ... Buoyant as one of his own Zeppelins!"

They looked and listened.  Brayham's thick bull-neck
was shortening as his shoulders climbed to his mottled ears.
They caught a sound between a snort and a bellow.  Then
Lady Wathe's diamonds flashed all the colours of the
rainbow as she turned vivaciously to her friend....  Count
Tido wanted to propose a toast, the custom in dear,
sentimental Germany....  Why shouldn't he?  Rather
amusing.  She begged him to go on.  Said von Herrnung:

"To-night the laugh goes much against me.  I have
been most frightfully rotted.  Now, in my country it is the
custom when a guest has been made game of that those
who have laughed at him must drink a toast with him—to
show there is no ill-will."

"Never heard of such a custom—and I've lived in
Germany a good deal."

This from Brayham.  The German persisted:

"Still, it is a custom, and it may be you will gratify me?"  He
went on, now addressing the company generally: "Here
at the Spitz they have a Tokayer that is very old and very
excellent.  If I might order some?  It would be amusing if
you would all join me in drinking to The Day! ..."

The speaker, without waiting consent, beckoned to one of
the attendants.  Brayham, his cockatoo-crest of stiff grey
hair erect, stared, as at a new and surprising type of the
human kind.

But the words Brayham might have uttered were taken
out of his mouth.  A swift glance had passed between the
English Naval officer and the rather stupid, titled young
Guardsman occupying the seat left of von Herrnung.
And while the Commander coolly intimated to the advancing
waiter by a sign that his services were not needed, Lord
Norwater, lobster-red and rather flurried, turned to von
Herrnung and said, not loudly, yet clearly enough to be
heard by every guest at the table:

"Stop!  Sorry to swipe in, Count, but you'd better not
order that wine, I think!"

"You think not?" asked von Herrnung, with coolest
insolence.

"I—don't think so.  I'm dead-sure!" said Franky, getting
redder.  "We Britons laugh at brag and bluffing, and the
gassy patriotism shown by some foreigners we're apt to call
bad form.  We abuse our Institutions and rag our
Governments—we've done that since the year One—far as I can
make out.  And when other people do it we generally sit
tight and smile.  We've no use for heroics.  But when the
pinch comes—it ain't so much that we're loyal.  We're
Loyalty.  We're IT!"

With all his boggling he was so much in earnest, and with
all his earnestness so absurdly, quaintly slangy, that the
listeners, men and women of British race, whose blood
warmed to something in his face and utterance, were forced
to struggle to restrain their mirth.  Some inkling of this
increased the speaker's confusion.  He cast a drowning
glance at his bulwark Courtley, and Courtley's eye signalled
back to his, "Good egg! ... Drive on, old son!"

"You're a foreigner here, of course ..."  Franky
pursued before the German could interrupt him.  He appeared
oblivious to his own analogous case.  Perhaps for the
moment the Hotel Spitz in the Place Vendôme, Paris, and
its gorgeous namesake in the London West End, were
confused in his not too intellectual mind.  He went on: "We're
ready to make allowances—too rottenly ready sometimes....
But I read off the iddy-umpties to Full Stop, a minute
back....  Count von Herrnung, when you ask English
ladies and Englishmen—two of 'em in the Service—to
drink that toast with you—you must know you're putting
your foot in your hat!"

"Especially," said Courtley, as Franky collapsed, dewy
all over and wondering where his breath had gone
to—"especially as—a friend of mine happens to have heard
that toast proposed rather recently during a Staff banquet
at a military headquarters in Germany.  And the words,
are—not—quite exactly flavoured to suit the British taste."

"'*To the Day of Supremacy.  On the Land and on the Sea,
under the Sea and in the Air, Germany Victorious for ever
and ever!*'" said von Herrnung, who had got upon his legs,
and loomed gigantic over the lace-covered, flower-decked
table, now in the after-dinner stage of untidiness, with its
silver-gilt and crystal dishes of choice fruit and glittering
bonbons disarranged and ravaged, its plates littered, its
half-emptied wine-goblets pushed aside to make room for
fragrant, steaming coffee-cups in filigree holders, and tiny
jewel-hued glasses of Maraschino Cusenier, and Père
Kermann.  There was a rustle, and a general scraping-back of
chairs.  Courtley had also risen, and Lord Norwater.  A
susurration of excitement had passed through the long,
lofty, brilliant dining-room.  People were getting up from
the tables—the pink-and-yellow sheets of *Paris Soir*, the
late edition of the *Daily Mail*, and another of the *Liberté*,
were fluttering from hand to hand....  And the shrill
voice of Lady Wathe was heard.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`THE GATHERING OF THE STORM`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER XII


.. class:: center medium bold

   THE GATHERING OF THE STORM

.. vspace:: 2

"Sit down, Tido!" said Lady Wathe.  "What is the matter
with everybody?  What are they talking about?  Tell a
waiter to get us a paper!  What do you say, Sir Thomas?
Of course!  Stupid of me to forget.  To-day was to be the
official summing-up of the evidence in the Perdroux Murder
Case.  A French Jury won't guillotine a woman—you said
they wouldn't, Sir Thomas, from the beginning.  But of
course the verdict's 'Guilty' for Madame! ..."

Brayham, with a King's Bench cough, admitted that he
had few misgivings as to the ultimate upshot.  Upon the
waiter's return without a newspaper, affirming a copy not
to be procurable, judicial inquiries elicited from the man
that the general *furore* for news was less due to popular
interest in the famous *cause célèbre* than to popular thirst
for details with reference to the Assassinations at Serajevo.
Which brought from Lady Wathe the shrill query:

"Sarajevo—where's Sarajevo?  Ask him about the
Verdict—I simply must know!"

The Verdict had been "Not Guilty," according to the
waiter....  The Goblin screamed:

"But she is!—she is!  Good heavens, my dear Sir Thomas!
Isn't it murder to riddle an editor to death in his own office,
before his subordinates, with bullets from a revolver you've
hidden in your muff?"

Brayham summoned up his best King's Bench manner to
answer:

"If he dies—and a jury don't happen to decide that
you're innocent—the evidence is against you, my dear ma'am!"

Lady Wathe's vivacious gestures provoked astounding
coruscations from her panoply of jewels.  She had been
certain from the first that there would be no capital
sentence.  But "Not Guilty." ... Surely it should have
been Mazas for life.  Or New Caledonia—didn't they send
murderesses to New Caledonia?

Brayham, with a tone and manner even more deeply
tinged with the King's Bench, begged leave to correct—arah!—his
very dear friend's impression that the blameless
and much-tried lady, now probably—aha—arah!—supping
in the company of her husband and her advocate in her own
luxurious dining-room, might, without libel, be called a
murderess.  Like—aha!—many other highly-strung women,
Madame Perdroux had had recourse to the revolver as the
*ultima ratio*.  But the Verdict pronounced by the President
of the Paris Court of Assize that afternoon
had—arah!—purged——

"Bother the Verdict!" snapped the Goblin.

Brayham, incensed at this irreverence, replied with
acrimony.  The pair wrangled as Paris had wrangled since March
16th, while the great, crowded restaurant buzzed with the
name of an obscure town in Eastern Europe—"*Sarajevo,
Sarajevo*"—tossed and bandied from mouth to mouth.

.. vspace:: 2

We have learned to our bitter cost the appalling significance
of this crime of Sarajevo, which had dwarfed in the
estimation of the keen-witted Parisians the most sensational
*cause célèbre* ever tried before a French Criminal Court.

The Perdroux trial and its probable result had split Paris
into hostile factions.  The Press had attacked or defended,
lauded or vilified the chief personages of the drama with
tireless energy for weeks.  The Verdict of "Not Guilty"
would have caused fierce rioting upon the boulevards this
sultry night of July.  Blood would have been spilt between
the partisans of Madame Perdroux and her opponents, but
for this unexpected bolt from the blue.

Berlin had had the story of the assassinations with its
breakfast-rolls and hot creamed coffee.  Now, in the blue-white
glare of the great electric arc-lamps of the Paris boulevards,
men and women leaned over one another's shoulders to get a
whiff of the big black letters on the displayed contents-bills;
at every kiosk and bookstall the newspaper-vendors were
sold out; much-thumbed copies of the papers were bought
by knowing speculators, to be sold and bought and sold again.

The Kaiser at Kiel was racing his own clipper when the
operator of the Imperial private wireless read a story from
the notes of the singing spark that smote him pale and sick.
When his anointed master heard the gory news, his chief
regret seems to have concerned the untimely decease of the
partner of his "life-work."  "It will have," he said with
bitterness, "to be begun all over again!"

.. vspace:: 2

One wonders, in the blood-red light of four years of dreadful
carnage, seeing Hell and its dark Powers still unchained,
and raging on this War-torn earth of ours—what would
have been the nature of the edifice reared by these two
Imperial craftsmen, had the younger not been removed by
a violent and sudden death?

Did the prospect of unlocking—with one touch on an
electric button and the scrawl of a wet pen—the brazen
gates of Death and Terror ever strike cold to the heart of the
rufous Hapsburg Archduke?  Madness, we know, is in the
blood of his evil-fated House.  But, when the shots from a
Bosnian High School student's revolver pierced Franz
Ferdinand's brain and body, was he sane enough to realise
that the crime of the Anarchist had saved his own name
from foul, indelible, and hideous infamy?  We shall know
when the trumpet of the Archangel sounds the Last Réveillé,
and the grave gives up its dead, and the Sea spews forth its
victims, and the secrets of that deeper abyss, the human
heart, are revealed in the sheer, awful Light that streams
from the Throne of God.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`THE SUPERMAN`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER XIII


.. class:: center medium bold

   THE SUPERMAN

.. vspace:: 2

People had for some time been rising, passing out
through the oxidised silver-framed glass doors of Spitz's
big brilliant dining-room; beyond these the vestibule was
now full to the walls, so that its palms and tree-ferns rocked
amidst the billows of a heaving human sea.  Many guests
lingered in conversation, standing in groups near the
vacated tables.  The glitter and blaze of jewels, adorning
bizarre coiffures, bare and powdered throats, bosoms, arms,
and backs,—the dazzling display of brilliantly-hued toilettes,
made an *ensemble* marvellously gay.  And now, returning
as they had arrived, but unattended by M. Spitz, came the
party of notables from the German Embassy, talking
together in loud, harsh, Teutonic accents.  Von Herrnung,
erect, stiffening to the salute as previously, remained in the
rigid attitude until the Ambassador had passed.  But this
time the official finger beckoned.  He turned, pushed back
his chair, and in a stride, joined the squat, elderly figure.
The yellow-white, heavily-featured face with its stiff brush
of white hair above the square brain-box turned to him, the
deeply-pouched, shrewd grey eyes looked past *him* to the
table he had left.  The coarse mouth under the white
moustache with the brushed-up points, uttered a few
emphatic words.  Then, with a slight nod, the representative
of the All Highest at Berlin passed on.  The swing-doors
opened and shut behind him and his following.  And von
Herrnung rejoined his party, saying with a queer, excited
breathlessness:

"The ladies will pardon....  His Excellency had
something to say!"

The ladies were rising, looking for their theatre-wraps.
He deftly lifted the barbaric garment of green velvet and
sable-edged ermines from the back of Miss Saxham's chair,
and, opening it, held it to receive her tall, luxuriant person,
mentally commenting:

"With such hips, such a bosom, and such shoulders, the
jade must be twenty-eight or nine."  And remembering
how boldly she had said to him that she liked red men, he
thought: "Amusement here....  Nothing needed but
time and opportunity—which this Bosnian affair reduces
to a minimum."  "*Gnädiges Fraulein* will you not put on
your *mantel*?"

She told him that she was too hot.  He insisted, with all
the Teuton's dread of chill:

"But it will be cooler in the vestibule, and cooler still
when we are driving.  Do we not go on to a theatre?  I
think Lady Wathe has told me so?"

She shrugged her splendid shoulders.

"Nothing so proper.  The *Jardin des Milles Plaisirs*, on
the Champs Elysées.  We're all dead nuts on seeing the
new dance from São Paulo.  The thing that has exploded
Tango and Maxixe, you know.  Look!—the others are
moving.  Don't let's lose them!  No!  I won't take your
arm.  Please carry my wrap with your coat."

"I will put my coat on.  Then I shall better carry your
*mantel*."

An attendant deftly hung von Herrnung's thin black,
sleeveless garment over his broad shoulders, and gave him
his white silk wrap and soft crush felt.  He slipped a coin
into the man's palm, its small value being instantly reflected
in the features of the receiver, and moved towards the
swing-doors with Patrine.  She said, as a slight block
momentarily arrested their progress:

"What are they all jabbering about?  Who has been
assassinated?  What has happened at this place with the
crack jaw name? ..."

"Sarajevo..." came in von Herrnung's guttural accent.

"Sarajevo....  Not that I know where it is," said the
deep warm voice, that was more like a young man's
baritone than a young woman's contralto.  And von Herrnung
answered, with a renewal of that tingling thrill:

"Sarajevo is the capital of Bosnia in Eastern Europe.
When Austria annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1909,
she made her seat of Government at Sarajevo.  The Slavs
grumbled.  They wished for union with Servia—that little
nation of pig-breeders! ... They themselves—the
Bosnians—are stupid peasants, *dümmer Teufels!—Schafskopfs*!
They cultivate their land with the wooden ploughs that
were used at the date of the Trojan War....  But this
does not interest you at all, I think?"

"How do you know it doesn't interest me?"

"Because dress and jewellery and amusement are the
chief things in your life, *gnädiges Fräulein*.  You are not
even interested in *der Politik*, or in the higher *Kultur*.  The
social progress of your own country is nothing to you.  You
are too——"

"Too frightfully stupid....  Thanks!"

"I did not say too stupid," von Herrnung contradicted.
"But if you were stupid, you are too hellishly handsome for
that to matter in the least."

To be called hellishly handsome pleased her.  Her eyes
gave him a flashing side-glance.  As a surge in the crowd
pressed her curving hip against his tall, muscular body, she
took his offered arm with a rough, brusque grace.  They
were near the swing-doors when she spoke:

"Tell me about the Sarajevo business....  Who is the
official swell the Trojan ploughmen have hoisted—as Lady
Beau would say?"

"I will tell you.  It has happened only this morning——"

She felt the man's powerful muscles thrill and become
rigid with suppressed excitement under the hand that rested
on his arm.

"Two personages of the highest rank have been horribly
assassinated.  The Archduke Franz Ferdinand, *Kronprinz*
of the Imperial House of Austria, and his wife; you have
heard of the *Gräfin* Sophie Chotek, created Duchess of
Hohenberg?  Virtually she was *Erzherzogin*—Archduchess—but
the wife of the Archduke by a *mariage de la main gauche*.
A morganatic marriage—such unions have been heard of in
your virtuous England."

They had passed the swing-doors now, and mingled, with
the crush in the vestibule.  Patrine said, signalling with a
pair of long black suéde gloves and a vanity-bag of gilded
metal chain-mail:

"There's Lady Beau.  Behind the second column right
of the entrance.  And here's Captain Courtley coming to
hurry us up!"

Courtley, smiling and unruffled as ever, dodged under the
huge roseate elbow of an immense lady in Oriental kincob
tissues.  He gave his message, turned and dived back again.
The rich, womanly baritone of Miss Saxham said, addressing
von Herrnung:

"Lady Wathe and Sir Thomas Brayham have gone on in
Lady Wathe's auto-brougham.  Lord Norwater has done a
bunk.  Pretended he had an appointment; he's been frightfully
fed up with all of us this evening.  Lady Beauvayse
says her chauffeur is on the string all right, but about a
million cars are ahead of him.  Why did your Austrian
Archduke and his wife go to that place in Bosnia if it wasn't
healthy for Royalties?  Fancy!—they went to their deaths
this Sunday morning!  Why does one always forget it's
Sunday in Paris?"

"That English Sunday of yours," exclaimed von
Herrnung, "is very good to forget, I think!"

She gave her deep, soft laugh.  He went on rapidly:

"Of the Archduke and the Duchess I tell you, since you
have asked me....  They inspected the troops—regiments
of the Austrian garrison.  Then they drove in their
automobile along the Appel Quay, towards the Sarajevo
Town Hall.  They are passing beneath the shade of an
avenue of tamarind and oak trees when a bomb is thrown
at them by a man hidden among the branches....  The
Archduke is very prompt—he wards off the bomb with his
arm.  He is not then hurt, nor is the Duchess.  But his
*Adjutant*—in the car behind them—is wounded in the neck.
When they arrive at the Town Hall the Mayor commences
the address of welcome.  To him Franz Ferdinand says
angrily: '*Halt den Mund!* ... Shut up, you silly fellow!
What the big devil is the use of your speeches?  I came to
Sarajevo on a visit, and I get bombs thrown at me....  It
is too damned rotten for anything! ..."

"Yes, yes! ... Go on!"  She bit her lips, fighting a
nervous impulse to laugh.

"So the Imperial cortège drove away, and a student threw
at the Archduke another bomb.  It did not explode, so he
shot him with an automatic revolver, an American Browning.
The Duchess tried to cover him with her body, and the
assassin shot her also.  The Archduke begged her to live for
their children, but both victims died as they were being
taken to the Governor's house....  They have arrested
the assassins, he who tried to kill, and the fellow who
succeeded....  They are both young, and men of Serb
race.  They are rebels all—they hate their Austrian
rulers.  Sarajevo is swarming with fellows of the same
breed...."

"What will the Austrian Government do to them, now
they've caught them?"

"To the regicides," von Herrnung returned harshly,
"Austria will do—nothing that very much matters.  It is
not an important thing to destroy two trapped rats.  But I
think there will be an ultimatum from Vienna to the Servian
Government; and if the terms of that are not complied with,
then the Emperor of Austria may give the signal for his
monitors upon the Donau to open fire upon the capital of
Belgrade."

Patrine asked negligently, as a new surge of the crowd
thrust her tall, lithe figure away from her companion's,
forcing her to tighten her hold upon his arm:

"'Monitors?' ... I used to think monitors were big
schoolboys and schoolgirls.  Senior pupils told off to keep
order.  I was one myself once....  Chosen because I was
bigger, and noisier, and naughtier than any other girl in my
class...."

"Ha, ha, ha! ... Prächtig! ... That is capital!"  She
could feel the laughter shaking his big ribs.  "That is
just what they are—those monitors of the Donau.  Each is
a big girl who keeps order *von anderen Sorte*.  But they have
turned-up noses, not Egyptian and beautiful like yours!"

He added, with the calculated roughness that had
previously pleased her:

"You shall now put on your *mantel*.  For the car, I see,
is open."  He shrugged his broad square shoulders closer
into his overcoat and pulled up the collar about his throat,
saying ill-temperedly: "Always does one find it with the
English.  It is *lächerlich*—that passion for the air."

"Lovely, did you say? ..."

Ignorant or careless that he had said "ridiculous," Patrine
suffered him to wrap her mock ermines about her, seeing
above the frieze of waiting figures that filled in the lower
part of the picture framed by the portico, the emerald-green
bird-of-Paradise plume of Lady Beauvayse whisk into the
big white Rolls-Royce, past the neat black-haired head of
Courtley, and the peaked cap and pale Cockney profile of
Morris, the chauffeur.  She threw back a jest as she passed
out:

"I'm glad you think it lovely.  It's one of the nicest
things about us—that we're keen on soap and water and
can't do without lots of fresh air."

She was in the car before his outstretched hand could
touch her.  He followed, letting Courtley precede him
because he wished to sit opposite, and the great Rolls-Royce
purred out of the jam beneath the illuminated glass
archway, and in a moment was out of the Place Vendôme
and moving with the stream of vehicles down the Avenue
of the Champs Elysées.  In the mingling of moonlight and
electric light the tawdry paste jewels of Patrine's preposterous
diadem rivalled the costly splendours of the jewelled
fillets adorning Lady Beauvayse's coiffure, her *panache* of
white osprey flared above her broad, dark brows as
insolently as though they crowned a Nitocris or a Cleopatra.
But—and here was a titillating discovery—the strange face
with its broad brows, wide, generously-curving cheeks, and
little rounded chin, did not belong to a woman of thirty, or
even twenty-five.  She was much younger than the German,
who plumed himself upon his *flair* for the accurate dating
of women, had at first credited.  It would be amusing—he
told himself again—hellishly amusing, to cultivate
this curious hybrid, half hoyden, half *femme-du-monde*.

Sarajevo—still Sarajevo.  You caught echoes of the
crime of that morning in the tongues of twenty nationalities
upon the Paris boulevards that night.  People in automobiles
and open carriages, people in the little red and blue
flagged taxis, people crowding the auto-buses and Cook's
big open brakes, the army of people on foot, endlessly
streaming east and west along the great splendid thoroughfares,
tossed the name of the Bosnian capital backwards and
forwards, as though it had been a blood-stained ball.

A gay masculine voice called from a knot of chatterers
standing near the wide illuminated archway of electric
stars and crowns and flowers under which streamed a
variegated crowd of pleasure-seekers as the big Rolls-Royce
deposited its load:

"*Nom d'un chien*!  What a pack of assassins these
Serbians! ... And yet—what if the whole show were got
up by Rataplan at Berlin? ... His bosom friend, you
say—the big Franz Ferdinand?  *Zut!* what of that? ...
Sometimes one finds inconvenient the continued existence
of even a bosom friend."





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.. _`A PARIS DANCE-GARDEN`:

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   CHAPTER XIV


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   A PARIS DANCE-GARDEN

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By "Rataplan" was meant the Kaiser, Patrine comprehended,
as her companion glanced over his shoulder at the
candid speaker, muttering something that sounded like
a German oath.  But Lady Beauvayse was twittering
through a filmy screen of verd-blue chiffon, now discreetly
enveloping her lovely Romney head:

"We're going to hunt up Lady Wathe and Sir Thomas.
Take care of Miss Saxham, Count von Herrnung, in case we
get separated in the crush....  Don't forget our
programme, Pat.  A whiff of Café Concert ... Colette Colin is
billed to sing some of her old songs and the very newest of
the new ones....  Then we're coming to the Pavilion de la
Danse to see the São Paulo sensation....  La Rivadavia
and Herculano, and all the rest of the crowd....  Meet
you there....  So long!  Mind, you're not to get lost!"

"In London you often hear La Colette," said von Herrnung,
as he paid the lean-jawed functionary in the gold-laced
light-blue uniform—the usual notice of free entry
having vanished from the entrance—and passed with his
companion into the gravelled promenade of the open-air
concert-hall.  "But to-night you will hear no songs of old
France, no Chansons Pompadour nor Chansons Crinoline.
She comes to this place from her own theatre to oblige an old
comrade.  There is Nou-Nou in that box with some smart
women and the Turk who wears our Prussian Order of the
Red Eagle with the Star and Crescent of the Medjidie.  He
is Youssouf Pasha, the Sultan's Envoy-Extraordinary.
Nou-Nou has brought him to hear La Colette.  Shall we
not sit here?"

"Who is Nou-Nou?" Patrine asked, as she settled her
tall, luxuriant person on one of the little green-painted iron
chairs.

"Who is Nou-Nou?" her companion echoed.  "You saw
her to-day at Longchamps in her black confection.
Everybody was looking....  She is wonderfully *chic*—Nou-Nou!
May I be permitted to light a *zigarre*? ..."

"Do! ... But—why is she so much the rage?  She
isn't even pretty, your Mademoiselle Nou-Nou."  Patrine
said it with her bright gaze fastened on the famous
Impropriety who had paraded under the chestnuts of Longchamps
in the sheath of black gauze unlined, save with her own
notorious attractions—both irresistible and fatal, judging
by their recorded effects upon excitable Parisian *viveurs* and
*gommeux*.  She saw a triangular and oddly-crumpled face,
rouged high upon the cheek-bones in circular patches, a
pair of almost extinguished eyes, indicated by streaks of
blue pencil, and caught a sentence screamed at the stout
Turk in a voice like a hoarse cockatoo's.  Boldly erect upon
the skull adorned by a scanty thatch of lemon-yellow
balanced a black feather, long and attenuated as the wearer.
Nou-Nou's stick-like, fleshless arms, the cadaverous and
meagre torso unblushingly revealed by the transparent
casing of her upper person, might have enthralled a keen
student of anatomy.  But of feminine charms, in the
accepted sense of the word, she possessed not one, it seemed
to Patrine.

"Do not look at her too hard, or she may send round and
invite you to supper," warned the laughing voice of von
Herrnung speaking close to her ear.  "She has all the
vices—the good Nou-Nou!"

"Including the vice of indiscriminate hospitality,"
Patrine laughed; but a little uncontrollable shudder rippled
over her as she withdrew her eyes from the painted, crumpled
visage, leering with half-extinguished eyes from under the
canary-coloured wig.

"That is so.  Tell me—you and Lady Beauvayse seem
great friends—quite inseparable...."  He leaned nearer,
his bold eyes closely scrutinising her face.  "How comes it
that she leaves you alone in a Paris dance-garden: with me,
whom you have met to-night—for the first time?"

"She knows I can take jolly good care of myself, wherever
and with whomsoever I may happen to be!"  Her black
brows frowned; it was evident she resented his criticism.
"And—what are you getting at?  What's the matter with
poor old Paris?  You know—perhaps it sounds odd!—but
I've never been in Paris before....  And I love it!
Down to the ground—it suits me!  It's so gay and
brightly-coloured and pagan.  The public buildings and parks are
dreams; the shops—too entrancing for anything!  And this
place, with its jabber and music and stagy illuminations,
trellises where real roses mix up with artificial ones—ornamental
beds of geraniums and calceolarias and thingumbobs
bordered with smelly little oil lamps, gilt band-stands,
concerts, and lovely trees in blossom....  Is it so luridly
awful?  To me, it's rather sweet!  Of course the
dancing—everybody knows the dancing is pretty well the limit.  But
one has seen such a lot of Tango in London—the bloom will
be pretty well rubbed off!"

"Yet some lingers.  You have still something to learn
from Herculano and La Rivadavia! ..."

"Do I strike you as such a perfect daisy of inexperience?"  Something
in his tone stung, for the full white cheeks
coloured faintly.  "You didn't talk to me at dinner as though
I were one!"

"How could I help that?" he asked, with the roughness
that had previously intrigued her.  "Am I to blame that
you look like Phryne or Aspasia when you are only
Mademoiselle de Maupin—before she set out upon her travels?
For you have only got as far as Paris with your friend Lady
Beauvayse.  Why does she bring you?  I am curious to know."

"Because I am her paid secretary and amanuensis."  Patrine
brought the words out with a rush; it was clear that she
thought the candour a necessity, but hated it.  "She can't
get on without one, and her husband, Lord Beauvayse—awful
little bounder!—won't stand her having a man.  Don't
great ladies have secretaries in Germany?  Can't you see
me doing Lady Beau's correspondence in my fearful
fist—enclosing cheques to people who solicit donations for
charities with a committee and Hon. Treasurer—tearing up the
begging letters full of howlers in the spelling-line—smelling
of bad tobacco and beer or gin?  Then I have to keep her
posted in her engagements, go to shows, and functions, and
kettledrums with her when she hasn't a pal handy—that's
where my share of the fun comes in.  Just as I'm visiting
Paris, as I dare say I shall visit other centres of lively
iniquity—in the character of the sheep-dog that doesn't
bow-wow at the wrong man!"

"You should bow-wow at me."  His teeth were hidden,
but his eyes were crinkled up with soundless laughter.
"For I am a very wrong—a very wicked man!"

"How sad!"  Her brows were still frowning, but her
wide red mouth was beginning to curl up at the corners.
"Couldn't you reform?  Is it too late?"

"I hope so!" he answered her.  "For if I were good I
should possess no attraction for a woman of your type.  And
to charm you I would give my soul—if I had a soul!"

"Great Scott!  You're candid....  Modest too....
And complimentary!"

"I am candid, because I cannot help myself."

Three comedians had come upon the stage.  She told him
not to talk to her.  She wanted to see the turn; she liked
music-hall stuff.  He obeyed, mentally congratulating himself
on having ascertained her social status, something better
than a typist, hardly on the same level with his sister Gusta's
*dame de compagnie*.

While his bold eyes read the book of her provoking beauty,
the performance on the stage, backed by the deep green
palmate foliage and white or ruddy candelabra-like blossom-sprays
of the chestnuts, framed by a broad band of electric
lamp-flowers, was culminating to its final gag.  A
preposterously fat man attired in the historic low-crowned hat,
Union Jack waistcoat, brass-buttoned blue tail-coat, leathers
and hunting-tops of the traditional John Bull, another
comedian in the legendary costume of M. Jacques Prud'homme,
and a truculent-looking personage whose Teutonic
French accent, spiked silver helmet with the Prussian eagle,
First Imperial Guards cuirass and tunic, breeches and
spurred jack-boots, in combination with a well-known
moustache with upright ends, a huge Iron Cross, and a great
many other property decorations, left no doubt as to the
political bent of the scrap of pantomime.

It was an ordinary bit of comic knockabout, to which the
tragic circumstances of the day lent a peculiar tang.  One has
seen it before, played by the three comedians, in the green-baize
aprons, brown duffel knee-breeches, and shirt-sleeves
sported by the waiters of low-class Paris or Munich brasseries.

In the centre of the stage, instead of a bright-hooped
beer-barrel on a wooden cellar-stand, was a revolving globe
representing the World.  And each of the three comedians, being
armed with a tumbler, a spile-awl, and a spigot-tap,
proceeded, with appropriate patter, gesture, and grimaces, to
insert his spigot, draw, and drink.  John Bull turned the
globe to the United Kingdom, and tapped the big black
patch in East Middlesex.  Creamy-headed London porter
filled his glass.  He held it up, nodded a "Here's to you!"
and toped off.  M. Prud'homme punctured France in the
rich vine-growing district of Epernay.  Champagne crowned
the goblet, and he drank in dumb show to Gallia, the land of
love, laughter, and wine.  It was then the turn of the
Teuton.  He bored, and Brandenburg yielded a tall bock of
foaming blonde lager.  He sucked it down with guttural
*Achs* of delight.

But this was not all.  John Bull exploited the East Indies.
A stream of rubies and emeralds filled his glass.  He bored
deep in the Union of South Africa—diamonds and gold-dust
heaped the vessel.  Fired by his success, M. Prud'homme
inserted his spigot into wealthy Bordeaux, whipped it out,
applied his lips, and drank deep.  He corked the oozing
spot and tapped Algerian Africa.  Coffee rewarded him,
fragrant and richly black.  He next exploited Pondicherry,
Chandernagore on the Hooghly, French Equatorial Africa,
and New Caledonia.  Nothing came.  He tried Cochin
China, and drew off a glass of yellow tea at boiling-point.
Encouraged to drink the strange beverage by the appreciative
pantomime of his British neighbour, he swallowed it,
with results of a Rabelaisian nature, at which everybody
laughed heartily, including Patrine.

It was now the turn of the Teuton.  He drew German
beer from Togoland, Cameroon; German South-West and
South-East Africa yielded an indifferent brand of the
beverage.  German New Guinea in the Pacific, the Solomon,
Caroline, and other islands, with Asian Kiao-Chao, merely
wetted the bottom of the glass with a pale fluid, German
beer by courtesy.  "*Sapperlot*!  *Der Teufel*!
*Kreuzdonnerwetter*!"  He tasted, spat, stamped, and sputtered forth
strange expletives, M. Prud'homme's terror at these
unearthly utterances being provocative of more humour of the
Rabelaisian kind.  Then he decided to try again, excited to
envy by the spectacle of the stout Briton drawing gold from
Australia, gold from Canada, gold from New Zealand and
the West Indies, and gold from Ceylon, gold from the Crown
Colonies in China, gold from the Gold Coast, gold from
Rhodesia and Nigeria, gold from everywhere; filling the
capacious pockets of his blue brass-buttoned coat, of his
tight breeches, of his nankeen waistcoat, until he bulked
enormously, a Bull of Gargantuan size.

Such wealth roused respect in Prud'homme, who esteems
the yellow metal.  He embraced the Briton, heartily
congratulating him.  This roused the Teuton's ire.  He seized
the spigot and once more plunged it into Germany, Prussia,
Bavaria, Saxony—each of the States yielding beer, beer,
BEER.  He went on, tapping, filling, and guzzling....
Twelve full tumblers and he had begun to swell most
horribly.  Fifteen—and his rotundity equalled that of John
Bull.  But one State remained untapped.  He swilled down
the twenty-fourth bock, drawn out of Lubeck—plunged the
spigot into the Reichsland—once Alsace-Lorraine——

And the big glass crimsoned with a sudden spurt of blood.

It was over in an instant, the comedians had skipped
nimbly from the scene, the globe had developed a pair of
very thin human legs and followed them off at a proscenium-wing,
before many of those who had witnessed, clearly
understood.  Only the men and women of Gallic race among
the cosmopolitan, polyglot audience answered with a deep,
inward thrill to the ruby gush that told how the blood of
France still ran red in the throbbing arteries of the beloved,
reft, alienated province, in spite of her forty-five years of
separation, in defiance of the loathed laws, customs,
language, service, all the gyves rivetted on her by the Teuton,
her conqueror.  Now round after round of applause
signified their comprehension.  But the comedians did not
answer the call.

Von Herrnung, who had worn the same contemptuous
smile for every phase of the clumsy by-play, relaxed his stiff
features.  A stout tenor from the Opera appeared and sang a
Spring song by Tchaikovsky, following it with the exquisite
Serenade of Rimsky Korsakov, "Sleep, Sad Friend."

The tenor was recalled.  Colette Colin succeeded him.
She sang "*Notre Petite Compagnon*" and "*La Buveuse
d'Absinthe*" to the accompaniment of a pale, lean, red-nosed
man with a profile grotesque as ever adorned a comic poster;
who touched the piano-keys as though they were made of
butter; and had a way of sucking in his steep upper-lip and
cocking his eye at the star as he waited on her famous efforts,
that made Patrine shake with suppressed laughter on her
green iron chair.

The last ironic line of Rollinat's ballad, marvellously
uttered rather than sung, died out upon a stillness.  A
storm of approval broke.  Men and women stood up
applauding in their places, and the singer came back, to sigh
out the bitter-sweet lyric of Jammes, "*Le Parle de
Dieu*."  Then, while her name still tossed on the surges of human
emotion, backwards and forwards under the electrics,
Colette Colin, the pet of Paris, the eclipser of the famous
Thérésa, was gone.  Something of the yearning anguish of
Jammes, who sees Religion as a dusty collection of ancient
myths and folk-tales; to whom Faith is mere superstition,
but who would give his all to be able to pray once more as
in childhood, had given the girl lumps in the throat as she
listened to Colette Colin.  Though, unlike the sad, Agnostic
poet, Patrine had no tender, sentimental memories in
connection with a mother's knee.

Not from Mildred Saxham had she learned her first childish
prayer, but from a procession of nurses; beginning with
"Now I Lay Me Down" and "Gentle Jesus," instilled by
Hannah, a Church of England woman, continuing with the
Lord's Prayer, insisted on by Susan, a Presbyterian;
culminating in the "Our Father" "learned the childer" by
Norah the Irish Catholic, a petition which—minus the final
line—was just the same as the Lord's Prayer.  Also the
Creed in English, and a surreptitious "Hail Mary" which
brought about the sudden exit of Norah from the domestic
scene.

For teaching Patrine and Irma about God and Heaven
and all that, was sufficiently interfering, said Mrs. Saxham,
but when it came to Popery, *rank Popery*, it was time the
woman went.  So Norah ceased to be, from the point of
view of the little Saxhams—and He who had risen above the
horizon of childish intelligence, a Being vaguely realised as
all-powerful and awful, great and beneficent, stern and
tender, sank and vanished at the same time.

But the Idea of Him remained to be merged in the
personality of the child Patrine's dada.  Dada, so handsome
and jolly, and nearly always kind to his rough little romping
Pat.  The boy, Patrine's senior by sixteen months, had died
in infancy.  Captain Saxham was always gloomy on the
deceased David's birthday.  Mildred reserved a nervous
headache of the worst for the anniversary, the kind that is
accompanied by temper and tears.

She was indifferent to Patrine, who resembled the
Saxhams.  But she was devoted to Irma, her own image
bodily and mentally.  Thus nothing interfered with
Patrine's adoration of her father.  The handsome, genial,
ex-officer of cavalry was his daughter's god, until Mildred
tore away the veil of Deity, broke the shrine and cast
down the idol, one day when Patrine was fourteen years old.

The girl learned that Captain Saxham's noisy fun and
alternating fits of rage were due to over-indulgence in
brandy-and-soda.  That he gambled away Mildred's income
over cards and Turf speculations, as he had wasted the
sum of money for which his Commission had been sold.
That he was "not even faithful"—that he spent week-ends
"at hotels with fast women"; that he was not worthy the
sacrifice Mildred had made for him.

Had she not for his sake jilted his younger brother, Owen!
Even on the verge of their marriage; the presents received;
the house taken and furnished; the trousseau ready, everything
perfect to the last pin in the wedding veil.  Nobody
could resist David when he chose to woo, but why, why had
Mildred yielded?  So fierce a sense of shame awakened in
the daughter as she listened, that it seemed to her as though
her face and body scorched in the embrace of an actual,
material flame.

"How could he? ... How could you? ... Betray
Uncle Owen....  One of you was as low-down as the
other, to play a beastly, sneaking game like that!"

"You insult your mother and father.  Leave the room!"
commanded Mildred.  And Patrine left it, vigorously
slamming the door.

Captain Saxham, who had sold out of the Army when
Patrine and Irma were respectively seven and six years old,
never knew what he had lost in the esteem of his elder
daughter.  She loved him still, but he had ceased to be her god.
They lived at Croybourn and occupied three sittings at one
of its several Anglican Churches.  The Vicar, a strenuous
man, whipped in Patrine and Irma for Confirmation classes.
They studied the Thirty-Nine Articles, the Athanasian
Creed, and dipped once more into the Protestant Church
Catechism, first instilled at the certified High School for the
Daughters of Gentlemen—an establishment they attended
as day-pupils, and were to leave, without passing the Oxford
Secondary, in the following year when Captain Saxham died.

For David, that cheerful, easy-going Hedonist, dropped
off the perch quite suddenly, in the smoking-room of his
London Club.  In life he had been of the easy-going type of
Christian, who avoids open scandal, and hopes to die at
peace with the clergyman.

An attack of cerebral effusion had anticipated the
clergyman.  Mildred and Irma wept bitterly, Patrine sat
dry-eyed.  Even in the face of the new tombstone at Woking
Cemetery, testifying to the many virtues of David, as
soldier, husband, and father, her stiff eyelids remained
unmoistened by a tear.  At the base of the scrolled Cymric
Cross ran a text in leaded letters:

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   BLESSED ARE THE DEAD WHO DIE IN THE LORD.

.. vspace:: 2

The undertaker had recommended the text to the widow
because it contained the right number of letters required to
fit in at the bottom.  But did it fit in, Patrine had
sometimes wondered, quite so appropriately, at the close of her
father's life?

She treasured his portrait, taken at the age of thirty, the
tinted presentment of a handsome, stupid young officer,
resplendent in the gold and blue and scarlet of a crack
Dragoon regiment.  It had fallen to her keeping when her
mother had re-married.  But she cherished no illusions
regarding the original.  How often, since her own eyes had
been opened to the fact of their existence, had she not
screened David's vices from strangers' eyes.

She had made him her ideal, and Mildred had revealed
him to her as vicious, unprincipled.  She could not forgive
her mother for telling her those horrors, she, Mildred—seemed
to forget whenever she was pleased.  But Patrine
had never forgotten.  She would wake at night even now
with the dry sobs shaking her....  To have been able to
believe in that dead father as noble, chivalrous, good, would
have been so sweet; she had shed big surreptitious tears in
sympathy with the anguish of Jammes, who would have so
loved to believe in the existence of Almighty God, and the
dear little Jesus, the Blessed Virgin, and the holy Angels,
because Faith is so restful, *si paisible*....





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.. _`THE BITE IN THE KISS`:

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   CHAPTER XV


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   THE BITE IN THE KISS

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But von Herrnung was saying, as they moved with a straggling
procession of similar pleasure-seekers, over smooth
sanded pathways between beds of geranium and verbena
and lobelia, ivy-leaved geranium and gaily coloured
foliage-plants, bordered with little twinkling lamps:

"Shall I tell you what I have just heard as those people
passed us?  The tall man with the white moustache, and
the chic little woman in the Spanish *mantilla*.  She told her
friend that we make a handsome couple.  Perhaps that
makes you a little angry? ... Shall I make you still
more angry?  Well then, listen? ... If we were really
a couple you would not have that so-black hair...."

"Why not?"  He had roused her curiosity.  She put
away the little damp, laced handkerchief.  "Would your
cruel usage of me have turned it white?"

"Not that, but you would have added the one touch that
makes perfection.  You are too sombre—too much like a
night in October with all that cloudy blackness....  You
would have bleached and dyed your hair—not yellow, nor
yet orange—nor even flame....  The colour of beech-leaves
in winter, as one sees them burning against a snow-bank.
And—all the women would be crazy with jealousy—and
all the men would be dying at your feet!  For you
would be Isis then—you would be the Sphinx-woman of
whom La Forgue wrote and Colette has sung to us.  You
would be hellishly, divinely beautiful!"

"Hellish again."  She gave her low, deep laugh,
prolonging it a trifle stagily.  "What do you bet me I
don't—do what you said?"

"Bleach and dye...?"

"That's it."  She nodded.  "To the colour of—what
was it?  'Beech-leaves in winter.' ..."

"Against a snow-bank."  He added: "The snow is your
wonderful skin.  And I will bet you four hundred and
twenty marks—that is twenty pounds English.  Is it
agreed? ... Do you not say—Done? ..."

"Twenty pounds...."  She shrugged her big white
shoulders.  "My dear man, I haven't got twenty pounds in
this blessed old world!"

He hesitated; finally said with reluctance:

"I will lend you twenty pounds—it will cost you twenty
pounds to have your hair done here in Paris....  But you
will be *sehr schön*—the money will be well spent.  No?
..."—for she had shaken her head, frowning.  "It is
offered—why will you not accept?"

"Because I won't....  There are some things I draw
the line at.  Borrowing money's one of them."

"Then I will bet you my magpie pearl—you may have
seen it"—he displayed the ornamented little finger—"against
that not-very-good diamond you wear on your left hand."

She burst out laughing and repeated through her laughter:
"'Not very good.'  I call that insulting....  When it
cost me fifteen francs in the Palais Royal.  Well, done with
you!"

"It is done!  But you have not done with me."  Von
Herrnung's tone had a new note of triumph.  He urged:
"You go back to London—when? ... The day after
to-morrow....  *Gut!* ... I have myself to visit
London upon business—I shall see Isis with her beautiful
new hair.  One thing more.  An address where I may call
and see it.  Be quick!  We turn down here! ..."

Patrine protested, peering with narrowed eyes through
the dusk-blue twinkling semi-darkness.  "But no! ... That
big marquee-thing at the end of this avenue—with all
the festoons of lights and the ring of promenade about
it—surely that's the *Pavilion de la Danse*?"

"*Halt den Mund!*"  His hand closed peremptorily on her
arm: he hurried her down the trellised vine walk that invited
on the left of them, as light measured footsteps padded on
the gravel, and a man ran past calling, as it seemed, to
somebody ahead:

"Miss Saxham ahoy! ... Lady Beauvayse——"

"He's calling me.  It's Captain Courtley...." Patrine
persisted.

"Let him call!  Are you not with me?"  Von Herrnung's
tone was masterful.  "You shall go to him when you have
given me that London address!"

She was amused and yet annoyed by his persistency.

"Oh, all right!  'The Ladies' Social Club, Short Street,
Piccadilly, West.'  That's where I'm generally to be found
when I'm in town."

"*Sehr gut*!  Tell me once again, then I shall not forget, no!"

"Write it on your cuff!"

"It is written in a safer place," he told her.  "We Prussian
officers are trained to remember without writing things
down.  A face, an address, a conversation, the outlines of a
country.  Though for *reconnaissance* there is nothing like
*die Photographie*."  He added: "When we meet in London
I shall be able to tell you everything you wore to-night."

"Really! ... How flattering! ... You've made a
mental inventory?"

They were retracing their steps to the avenue recently
quitted.  He walked with noiseless strides behind the tall,
supple figure as it moved between the trellised vines and
roses, gowned with its flaunting diadem, robed in the
insincere splendours of the opera-mantle already described.

"As you say.  I shall be able to tell you that the back
of your *mantel* was cut in a V-shape nearly reaching to your
waist-line.  Shall I tell you why?"

"If you're keen to...."  She felt a scorching breath
between her shoulders and quickened her pace, making for
the avenue.  But he moved with her, his voice came thickly:
"Because your back is so superbly beautiful you cannot
bear to hide it from men!"

"*Ah-h!*"

She whirled about, glaring like an angry leopardess, her
strong white arm upraised to strike.  Face, throat, and
bosom glowed with painful crimson.  Between her violated,
insulted shoulders, his furious kiss still burned and stung.

"How dare you touch me!" she gasped.  But he had shot
past her even as she turned.  He was running towards the
avenue, calling gaily:

"Were you looking for us, Lady Beauvayse?  Here we are!"

"Cad, cad!" she stammered.  "Insufferable! beastly!"  Then,
because a scene was quite out of the question, she
went forward with head held high, and resentment heaving
her broad bosom, to meet Lady Beauvayse.

"Pat!  You needle in a haystack," cried her friend,
"where did you get to?"

"Nowhere.  We missed you at the Café Concert,"
Patrine began.

"And then," von Herrnung explained, "we happened to
take the wrong turn.  But we have not gone far before we
are recalled."

"—To the path of probity," suggested Lady Beauvayse,
adding: "And in this instance the path of probity leads to
the *Pavilion de Chahut*."  She explained to Patrine:
"*Chahut* is the modern version of the *can-can*—famous in the
days of the Second Empire; when the great cocodettes of the
Court of the Tuileries—rivals of Cora Pearl and Skittles
and other naughty persons—did high-kicking under the rose
here, and they called the place Mabille."

.. vspace:: 2

It was not easy to get near the Pavilion, so dense and
variegated a crowd had congregated before its illuminated
entrance.  But the entrance fee was doubled.  Gold must
be paid to see the famous São Paulo dance.  Thus many
would-be pleasure-seekers of the less affluent kind turned
back disappointed from the row of gilt turnstiles under the
blazing archway, compelled to content themselves with the
outer promenade.

Breasting the human eddy caused by these, Patrine and
her party passed the barrier, climbed a flight of shallow gilt
marble stairs carpeted with pink plush and decorated with
roses and tree-ferns and reached the elevated promenade.
Set within the circumference of the outer one, it commanded
a complete view of the circular ball-room, to whose level
descended from it at intervals yet other flights of broad gilt
stairs, similarly carpeted and flower-decked for the convenience
of those who wished to join the dancers, or return from
the ball-room to the level of the promenade.

The revels were in full swing.  Standing upon the brink,
looking down as into a cockpit, you saw Patrine, superb in
her false diadem and mock ermines, leaning her bare white
hand upon a velvet-covered rail.  At first she could only
make out a giddying whirl of arms and heads and shoulders.
Presently, the picture began to clear.

To the wail, clang and clash of strange, discordant, exotic
music, rendered by an orchestra of coloured performers, two
wide circles of dancers rhythmically spun.  The floors they
danced on were set at different levels, and rotated
automatically,—each floor revolving in a different direction.
Coloured lights, flung at intervals from reflectors in the
ceiling, conveyed to Patrine the impression of staring down
upon the whirling planes of a huge gyroscopic top.

Only the central space of shining parquet was void within
the double circle of gyrating dancers.  A crash from the
orchestra and three couples, oddly costumed, leaped
suddenly out upon the floor.  Patrine could not make out where
they had come from.  They appeared, and there was a slight
commotion.  A hedge of applauding spectators, four or five
deep, formed about the central, stationary patch of
parquet.  The music changed, the six Brazilians began the
famous dance.

They were not beautiful to look at it seemed to Patrine,
the men, familiarly styled by voices in the crowd as Lauro,
Pedro, and Herculano, being undersized, sleek-headed, lithe
and sallow, attired in faultlessly fitting evening dress-coats,
white vests, black satin knee-breeches, black silks, and
buckled pumps.  They wore shallow collars of curious cut,
lawn-frilled shirts and wide black neckties.  Their female
companions were swarthy as Indians, even through their
paint, and plain of feature.  But their superb hair
and eyes, the rounded grace of hip and waist and limb,
the slenderness of throat and wrist and ankle, testified,
like their tiny feet and high-arched insteps, to a strain
of Spanish blood.

"La Rivadavia, Alexandrina, and Silvana," the eager
spectators named them.  They wore transparent sheaths,
and brief, oddly *bouffante* overskirts, like flounced muslin
lamp-shades with a boldly suggestive forward tilt.  They
began the dance with some familiar Tango figures.  The
poses, the approaches, the hesitations, were well known to
Patrine.

"Nothing very new....  But—the music made by
those buck niggers!  '*Bizzarramente*' isn't the word for it.
One expects to see gombos covered with serpent-skin, trumpets
of elephant-tusk, skull-rattles, and all the paraphernalia
of Obeah in the orchestra, instead of those huge, superb
brass wind-instruments, cymbals as big as table-tops and
ten-foot silver trumpets, like poor de Souza's....  Raised
in the States, but wasn't he a Brazilian by birth?"  It was
the voice of Lady Beauvayse, and von Herrnung's answered
from behind Patrine:

"It may be so.  But the *Blechinstrumente* and the
*Blasinstrumente*—for the biggest of those they have to go to
Germany.  Nowhere else can they be made as there....
Bravo! ... *Bis—bis!*"

He applauded....  Everybody was applauding.  The
gyroscopic whirl of dancers had become stationary.  All now
were eager spectators.  And the three couples from São
Paulo had reached the culminating point of a uniquely
curious and exotic figure.  Savage and violent, sinuous and
creeping; suggestive of the nocturnal gambols of enamoured
jaguars, in the deep primeval forests of Brazil.

"Horrid!  One expects them to lash tails and roar....
I've got what Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch called 'cold
clams walking up my backbone.'"  Lady Beauvayse shuddered
and made a pretty grimace.  "All the same I think
I'll go down and look at them a little closer.  Ah-h! ...
Good grapes!  Why, he simply picked her up by the scruff
of the neck with his teeth and shook her....  I've just
*got* to see that done over again!"

She was gone, with a whisk of the emerald bird of paradise
and a waft of *parfum très persistant*.  Captain Courtley
vanished in her wake.  Patrine made no motion to follow
them.

The tense excitement, the pungent exhalations rising from
the crowded ball-room were affecting her brain.  She felt
giddy, and the steady pressure of the crowd behind her was
thrusting her to the very verge of the promenade.  She
yielded automatically, unconscious of danger near.

You are to see her there, poised on the verge of the
rose-carpeted precipice, her hand gripping the velvet-covered
railing, her wide nostrils distended, her broad bosom heaving
as she inhaled the sultry, vitiated atmosphere, heavy with
a myriad perfumes, tainted by a thousand breaths.  Her
stare, lifeless as the enamelled, glittering regard of some
Princess-mummy of Old Egypt, was fixed upon the artists,
of whom two couples had retired, as though in despair of
competition with the chief favourites, leaving La Rivadavia
and her comrade Herculano in possession of the floor.

And the passions expressed by the rhythmical, sinuous
movements of these dancers grew moment by moment less
human, and more bestial.  Art of the most consummate was
displayed and degraded.  Beauty and Truth shone
pre-eminent in the hideous display.  Now the woman sank
towards the ground, with supple limbs outstretched and her
wild head thrown back in fierce surrender.  Her white fangs
gleamed, her dumb mouth seemed to roar.  And as her
conqueror crept stealthily towards her, the play of his great
muscles could be seen beneath his civilised attire, as though
his supple body had been clothed with the tawny-golden,
black-dappled hide of the Brazilian jaguar.

As Herculano crouched and sprang, La Rivadavia's
muscles visibly tightened.  She bounded high, turned in the
act....  Their gleaming fangs clashed in mid-air.  And
from the massed spectators came a hiss of excitement,
"*Th-h-h!* ..." like the hissing of a thousand snakes.

"Great Scott!" Patrine heard herself saying.  "*Great—Scott!*"

She no longer heard von Herrnung harshly breathing
behind her....  He had moved to the leftward.  His
tall, broad-shouldered figure now stood against the railing
some dozen feet away.  His well-cut face, seen in profile,
was purplish-red to the crisp, scarlet waves topping his high
square forehead.  The big white hands that held the glasses
glued to his eyes, jerked, and as he pressed against the
railing Patrine knew that he was shuddering.  Now he looked
at her, and his ravaged face was terrifying to the girl.

"Will you not..." he began, thickly.

She quivered, cast a look about; saw the ugly emotion
under which he laboured reflected in every face within her
range of vision, as round after round of plaudits rose to the
roof of the pavilion, escaping through the wide-open spaces
between its gilded, rose-twined pillars into the night.  The
rafters vibrated with demands for a repetition of the popular
sensation.  The dancers accepted the encore.

If von Herrnung beckoned now, asking Patrine to go down
with him amongst the acrid exhalations of that cockpit of
variegated lights, thronged with excited men and
strangely-bedizened women, rent by devastating emotions, drunk with
strange excitements, would Patrine say Yes or No? ...

*Ouf!* but it was hot.  How thick the air was with those
illusion perfumes.  And from whence was that cool breeze
blowing that suddenly freshened the heavy air? ...





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`THE WIND OF JOY`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER XVI


.. class:: center medium bold

   THE WIND OF JOY

.. vspace:: 2

Patrine drew back from the edge of the promenade.  A
stout, swarthy Frenchman, a Southerner evidently, whose
full brown face streamed with little rills of perspiration,
stepped nimbly into her vacated place.  His female
companion instantly took his.  The same movement was
repeated—the packed bodies seemed to melt before her.  In
a few more steps she had merged from the crowd, upon the
outer edge of the elevated promenade.

There was another velvet railing there, and steps leading
down to the promenade upon the ground-level.  Against the
background of starlit sky and illuminated gardens stood the
tall figure of a man.  He was broad-shouldered and lightly
built, the poise and balance of his figure admirable.  But
for the gleam of his living eyes in his tanned face, and the
movements of his head as he turned it from side to side,
evidently seeking somebody, he might have been a statue of
Mercury cast in light-hued bronze.

For he wore loose, waist-high leggings strapped at the
ankles, and a belted gabardine of thin light brown material,
while a cap with an upturned brim and ear-flaps dangled
from his sunburnt hand.  And a uniformed official, all
lacquered moustaches and gold-laced blue cloth, stood
gesticulating a few paces from him, keen on defending from
so unceremonious an intruder the integrity of the Upper
Promenade.

"Monsieur cannot possibly descend into the ball-room
... the costume of Monsieur is not appropriate.  It
offends against good taste.  It outrages the proprieties....
It is *peu convenable* even that Monsieur should be here."

Patrine heard the protest, saw it driven home by swift
expressive Gallic gestures, caught a gleam of mirth in the
eyes of the oddly-garbed intruder, and the quirk of a smile
at the corners of his mouth.  No doubt the suggestion of the
proprieties in connection with the traditions of Mabille had
evoked it.  She liked his face; it was lean and hard and
rather hatchety, with a brave outlook of clear light eyes
under the marked eyebrows, thick and straight and silvery-fair
against his sunburnt skin.  To her woman's eyes, Fatigue
was stamped upon it and anxiety, and a kind of rueful
impatience, as he apologised for the necessity of the
intrusion in fragmentary but excellently accentuated French.
He came in search of a friend, who was here and must be
found; it was imperative...

"There is to-morrow!—there is always to-morrow!" the
official stated with a wave.

"That's just the point....  To-morrow! ..."  The
stranger's forehead was ploughed with lines of anxiety.
He spoke in English now—the well-bred, modern, clipped
English of the public school and the University.  "No! you
don't understand"—for the official had vigorously
disclaimed all knowledge of the strange, barbarous tongue in
which the other addressed him.  "And I don't believe I'd
ever make you.  If I could only hammer into you what
sort of a hat I'm in!"

He knitted his brows; pulled himself together for a crowning
effort.  Patrine spoke, not as a stranger yielding to a
sudden, helpful impulse, but quite simply, with a little,
joyful catching of her breath:

"Could I explain for you, do you suppose?"

"A—thanks!  You're awfully good!"

He turned to her eagerly, if with a certain embarrassment.

"If you would....  There is a man here I have to
get word to.  And—what French I have is simply technical....
You hardly find it in modern dictionaries—the
argot of the engine-shop and the Flying School."

"Now I understand...."  She smiled in his perplexed
face, drinking in deep breaths of the fresh fragrant air that
blew about them as they stood together behind the thick
wall of bodies that hid the cockpit from their view.  A deep
dimple von Herrnung had never seen showed low down in
one of her pale cheeks.  Their whiteness was slightly tinged
with delicate pale rose.  And her eyes had lost their brilliant
enamelled hardness.  They shone like dusky stars as she
went on: "Now I know why I thought of wide green spaces
and a breeze blowing to me over gorse and heather as I
looked at you.  Sub-conscious memories of Hendon and
Brooklands and Upavon.  For you're a Flying Man!"

"Just that!"  His ruefulness was banished.  "And now
you know how I come to be in Paris with the clothes I stand
up in and not another rag....  Two of us flew the
Channel yesterday morning....  If the weather holds
decent, we should be on the wing again by four A.M.  And
my mechanic's given me the slip.  To say he's taken French
leave would be appropriate under the circumstances.  Left
a line—the cool—beggar!—to say I'd find him here."

"Too bad!" she said, as fresh furrows dug themselves
into the tanned forehead.  "Not fair to leave you in the
cart like that.  No wonder you followed—hot upon his
track."

"Combed the whole place—everywhere they'll let me in.
But my aviator's kit's against me.  I've seen some rummy
get-ups.  But they draw the line at Carberry's overalls."

One hand rested easily on his hip, in the other hand he
swung the eared cap with goggles.  A pedestal in the
moonlight would have suited him.  It occurred to her to
ask:

"What was he like—your runaway mechanic?"

"I hardly ... Oh! ... Little black-avised
Welshman—barely tips the scale at eight stone.  Has to be a
light-weight, because I weigh all of eleven.  And with the
hovering-gear—but that can't interest you."

"Indeed it does.  What of the hovering-gear?"

His face darkened and hardened.  He said:

"It's an invention of mine.  And after no end trying—our
own people at Whitehall simply wouldn't have anything
to do with me—the chiefs of the French Service
Aëronautique consented to give it a test."

"Sporting of them, wasn't it?"

He agreed:

"No end sporting.  So I bucked the tiger over the
Channel with Davis—to find that an officer and mechanic
of the S. A. were told off to try the hoverer over the selected
area.  For us to engineer the thing ourselves wasn't
'*l'etiquette militaire*.'  That's the French for Government
red-tape."

"Bother etiquette!  I'm beginning to sympathise with Davis!"

His vexation broke up in laughter.

"That's what *she* did.  She sympathised with Davis
and carried him off here."

Patrine said, a light breaking in on her:

"Why, of course, there would be a girl....  He'd
hardly come to a place like this alone, would he?"

Some query in his look made her add hastily:

"What was she like?"

"Like....  The girl who's carried off Davis? ..."  He
reflected a moment.  "Pretty and plump and fluffy,
with a pair of goo-goo eyes!  She's daughter or niece or
something"—he boggled the explanation rather—"to the
German chap who hired us the hangar at Drancy—if you
can give that name to a ramshackle shed in a waste
building-lot!  And Davis—thundering good man, but once on a
spree..."  He whistled dismally.  "If I could only get
my claws on him! ..."

Here the uniformed official returned to the charge:

"Monsieur has found his friend—Monsieur has explained
the situation.  To enter the *Salon de Danse* with Madame
is not permissible—in the costume Monsieur displays.
No doubt Madame will understand!"

Patrine said, with a slight catch in her breath, as though
some drops of chilly pleasant perfume had been suddenly
sprayed on her:

"He supposes ... he thinks ... that I'm ... your friend!"

"I'll explain."  He reddened, turning to the official, saying
in the French of the British schoolboy, laborious, devoid
of colloquialisms:

"*Monsieur, vous n'avez pas compris.  Madame elle—elle
n'êtes qu'une étrangère.  Pour mon ami, je ne lui vois.  Si
vous permettre d'entrer, peut-être——*"

"*Rototo!  Voyez, man blousier, j'connais bien la sorte!
Sufficit!  Assez!  Ça m' fait suer, comprends?*"  The
gold-braided arm described a magnificent sweep, the large white
kid-covered hand indicated remote distance—"*Sortez!* ..."

The Briton, thus invited to retire, looked at Patrine.

"I can't quite follow, but it's plain he's telling me to
hook it.  The rest is—pretty—strong?"

She nodded, biting her lip.

"Frightfully rude.  Not that I know much Paris slang.
But a friend of mine—"  She broke off to listen, as from
under the functionary's waxed moustache rattled another
sentence:

"*A l'instant, ou j'appelle l' sergent d'ville!*"

"He's talking about sending for the police now!"  She
added hastily: "Don't let him do that!  Offer him a tip!"

The magic word must have been comprehended of the
braided functionary.  He ceased to fulminate.  He waited,
his avid eye upon the pair.  The lean hatchety face of
the aviator had flamed at Patrine's suggestion.  He
said:

"Don't you think I'd have tipped him in the beginning—if
I'd had the wherewithal?  But expenses have been
frightful!—the waste lot with the shed I've stalled the machine in
costs as much as a suite of rooms at a decent middle-class
hotel would.  Had to fork rent in advance too.  Proprietor's
a German as well as a jerry-builder, and when I've
paid his goo-goo girl for our coffee and rolls to-morrow
morning"—the speaker exhibited a disc of shiny metal
bearing the classical capped and oak-wreathed head of the
Republic, value exactly twopence-halfpenny—"I'll have
just one of these blessed tin things left."

"How rotten!"  In the gilt metal vanity-bag, Patrine's
inseparable adjunct, lurked, in the company of a mirror,
powder-puff, and note-book, a tiny white silk purse.  In the
purse nestled two plump British half sovereigns, the moiety
of Patrine's salary for the previous week.  "Would you
jump down my throat if I asked you to let me finance
you?" she pleaded, an eager hand in the depths of the
receptacle.  "Why not?"

"Because I'm a decent man!"  If he had been previously
crimson he was now scarlet as a boiled lobster.  "Thanks
all the same, though!  I can't wait here, even to catch
Davis....  I must bike back to Drancy, where I've left
the Bird—the machine—in the German's shed...  Not a
soul to keep an eye on her! ... My heart's in my mouth
when I think of what might hap—"  He bit off the end
of the sentence and went on: "But if you'd be so awfully
kind as to take charge of this, in case you ... There's a
message written on it...."  He offered her a soiled, bent
card.

"I understand.  If I should chance to come across your
Davis....  A little man ... looking like a Welshman....
But you haven't told me whether he's dark or fair!"

"Black as a crow," he told her.  "Not dressed like
me!"  His well-cut mouth began to twist upwards at the
corners.

"Quite a swell, in a silk-faced frock-coat, white vest and
striped accompaniments.  A silk hat, too, rather curly
brimmed, but still, a topper.  I suppose a friend of the
lady's rented Davis the kit."

"Of the lady's? ..."  She remembered.  "Yes, yes!
Of course! ... The German's appendage....  Why!
... Look! ... Those two people who have just passed
the turn-stile at the other end of the Promenade....  If
there's anything in description, here comes Davis with the
goo-goo girl!"

"By—gum!  You've nailed me the pair of them."  As
the aviator's long strides bore him down in the direction of
the little sallow, black-avised mechanic in the capacious
silk-faced frock-coat, and his high-bosomed, florid,
flaxen-haired enchantress, and before the moustached guardian of
the Promenade could renew his indignant protest, Patrine
had dropped the little sovereign-purse in his deep, rapacious
hand.  And at that instant the music ended with a crashing
succession of barbaric chords.  The São Paulo dance was done.

"*Merci millefois, Madame!* ..."

Patrine turned from the hireling's thanks to see the high
head and powerful square shoulders of von Herrnung forging
towards her, towering above the polyglot, variegated
crowd.  He hailed her with:

"So you met a friend?  Is that why I found myself
deserted?"

She answered coldly:

"I did not desert you—and I did not meet a friend."

His face, still suffused with a purplish flush, pouched
and baggy about the eyes, told of the maelstrom of
unhealthy excitement the dance of the jaguars in the
jungle had set whirling in his brain.  She guessed that
he had taken advantage of their separation to descend
into the ball-room, and that as one of the spectators
in the front rank he had revelled in the final thrill.  He
persisted:

"*Was*?  But what means it?  I have lost you....
I think you must have gone down into the ball-room after
your friend....  I follow and you are not there.  I come
back to find you....  Who was that dirty bounder I saw
you talking to?"

"He wasn't a dirty bounder!"  His rudeness enraged
her.  "He was a nice, clean, first-class, top-hole, plucky
English boy!"

He sneered:

"'*Boy*' ... Men of forty are boys, in the mouths of
you English ladies.  You borrow the term from women of
the street-walking class."

"Then I'll call him a man.  The best kind of man going!
English—from the top of his nice head to the very tips of
his toes."

"How can you tell if he was not a friend of yours?  What
do you know of him?"  He fixed his eyes compellingly on
hers.

She answered:

"Nothing but that he flew the Channel yesterday—with
Davis—to test his invention—and he has got to be on the
wing for home at four."

"So!  He has told you all this, and you do not know his
name, even?  Perhaps it is on that card you hold in your
hand?"

She started, and the card fluttered from her twitching
fingers to the carpet.

"Allow me...."  Von Herrnung stooped as though to
retrieve the bit of pasteboard.  "Curious!  It has gone!
... It is not there!" he said.

"I think you have your foot on it."  Her eyeballs ached,
she felt weary, and flat, and stale.  "Please lift up your
foot and let me see if it is there," she urged, and grown
suddenly obtuse, he lifted up the wrong foot.  She was
trying to explain that he had done so when they were
rejoined by Courtley and Lady Beauvayse.

"Say, did you see she wore a head-band with a rubber
mouth-hold at the back of her neck?  And waist-fixings
under her frillies so's Herculano could swing her around his
head.  My land! that man has jaw-power to whip Teddy
Roosevelt, and she's got vim enough for a nest of
rattlesnakes....  Used up, Pat? ... If you aren't, you look
it!"  The speaker yawned prettily: "I'm about ready to be
taken back to by-by, though it's only two o'clock."

Von Herrnung escorted the wearer of the green bird of
paradise as they went through dark alleys and illuminated
avenues back to the archway with the blazing crowns and
stars.  Courtley accepted the offer of a lift back to the
hotel.  The German declined, saying that he preferred to
walk, as the car was closed.

"Pardon! ..."  His voice had arrested Morris on the
point of starting the Rolls-Royce.  His handsome face had
appeared in the frame of the car-window.  "Excuses! but
this belongs to Miss Saxham!"  His cuff shone white in the
semi-darkness, the great magpie pearl on his little finger
gleamed maliciously as he dropped the missing card upon
Patrine's lap, and drew back, uncovered and smiling, as the
car moved away.  Later on, when she was safe in her room,
she looked at the card, and read upon it in plain black
lettering:

::

   +———————————————————————-+
   |                                               |
   |  ALAN SHERBRAND,                              |
   |                                               |
   |  PILOT-INSTRUCTOR AND BUILDER OF AËROPLANES,  |
   |  FANSHAW'S SCHOOL OF FLYING.                  |
   |                                               |
   |  THE AËRODROME,                               |
   |  COLLINGWOOD AVENUE,                          |
   |  HENDON, N. W.                                |
   |                                               |
   +———————————————————————-+

.. vspace:: 2

Something was scrawled in violet pencil on the upper
blank space.  Being a girl with notions about squareness,
Patrine would not at first read, remembering that it was his
private message to Davis, whom Chance had brought within
his master's reach.  But later still, or earlier, when, after a
brief interval of silence, the traffic of Paris began to roll over
the asphalt, principle yielded to impulse.  She switched on
the electric light above her pillow and read:

.. vspace:: 2

"*This Sarajevo business spells War.  Must get back at once
to Hendon.  I trust to your Honour not to fail me.  You know
what this means to*

.. vspace:: 1

.. class:: noindent

"*A. S.*"

.. vspace:: 2

So the young Mercury in gabardine and overalls was a
professional, a teacher; a pilot who helped men to qualify
for the certificate given by the Royal Aëro Club without
breaking too many bones.  She had seen the big painted
sign in the Collingwood Avenue, Hendon, that advertised
Fanshaw's Flying School.

"*I trust to your Honour*," he had written to his mechanic.
The word would have seemed big, and awful, and imposing,
spelt like that, with a capital "H," if the writer had been a
gentleman.

Disillusioned, she tore the card into little pieces and sank
into a heavy sleep before the broad yellow sunshine of
Monday outlined the pink velvet brocade curtains
unhygienically drawn before the open windows.  And she
dreamed, not of the magic wind that had blown upon her
that night, nor of the Mercury-like figure in the suit of
Carberrys, but of the supple bodies that had bounded and
whirled, and of the gleaming panther-fangs that had clashed
in mid-air.  Then the dominant figure became that of von
Herrnung.  Again the red mouth under the tight-rolled red
moustache alternately flattered, insulted, and cajoled.
Again she felt that violation of her virgin flesh, its moist,
hot touch upon her naked shoulder.  Its kiss bit and stung.

She awakened late from those poisoned dreams to a riotous
blaze of colour and a breath of musky fragrance.  On
the coffee-stand beside her bed lay a great sheaf of
long-stalked roses; deep orange-hearted, with outer petals of
ruddy flame.  She plunged her face deep into the flowers.
The corner of a large square envelope thrust from amongst
them.  She caught it between her teeth and pulled it out.

It was from von Herrnung, written on paper bearing the
device of the Société Aëronautique Internationale in the
Faubourg St. Honoré.  It was brief enough.

.. vspace:: 2

"*That I offended yesterday, Isis will pardon.  The address
I promised is—'Atelier Wiber, 000, Rue de la Paix.'  The
good Wiber demands no fee for making Beauty yet more
beautiful.  All has been arranged.*

.. vspace:: 1

.. class:: noindent white-space-pre-line

   "*Devotedly,*
       "*T. v. H.*"





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`INTRODUCES AN OLD FRIEND`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER XVII


.. class:: center medium bold

   INTRODUCES AN OLD FRIEND

.. vspace:: 2

Saxham, M.D., F.R.C.S., M.V.O., Consulting Surgeon to
St. Stephen's and the Hospital of St. Stanislaus and
St. Teresa, sat busily writing at the big leather-topped table
in the consulting-room, that, with the well-stocked library
adjoining, occupied the rearward ground-floor of the Harley
Street corner house.

The hands of the table-clock pointed to eleven A.M.  Since
nine the doctor had sat at the receipt of patients, the crowd
in the waiting-room had melted down to half a dozen souls.
Fourteen years had gone by since Saxham, late Temporary
Captain, R.A.M.C., attached Headquarters Staff, H.I.M. Forces,
Gueldersdorp, had taken over the lease and bought
his practice from the fashionable physician who had been
ruined by the war slump in South African mining-stocks.

The broken speculator's successor had struck pay-reef
from the outset.  Society had taken Saxham up and could
not afford to drop him again.  He was harsh and unconciliatory
in manner—a perfect bear, according to Society—but
quite too frightfully clever; and as yet no speedier rival had
outrun him in the race.

Now as the July sunshine, its fierceness tempered by the
short curtains of pale yellow silk that screened the wide-open
windows, came streaming in over the fragrant heads of a
row of pot-grown rose-trees, ranged on the white-enamelled
window-seat, it shone upon a man to whom both Time and
Fortune had been kind.  The admirable structure of bone,
clothed with tough muscle and firm white flesh, had not
suffered the degrading changes inseparable from obesity.
Nor had the man waxed lean and grisly in proportion as his
banking account grew fat.  His scholar's stoop bowed the
great shoulders even more, disguising the excessive
development of the throat and deltoid muscles.  The square, pale
face, with the short aquiline nose and jutting under-lip, was
close-shaven as of old.  The thickly growing black hair
was streaked with silver-grey and tufted with white upon the
temples.  His loosely fitting clothes of fine silky black cloth
were not the newest cut, neither were they old-fashioned.
They were suited perfectly to the man.

While Saxham minutely copied his prescription, the
patient who sat facing the window in the chair on the
doctor's left hand had not ceased from the enumeration of
a lengthy catalogue of symptoms, peculiar to the middle-aged,
self-indulgent, and tightly-laced.  At the close of a
thrilling description of after-dinner palpitations, she became
aware that her hearer's attention had strayed.  Following
up his glance she ran him to earth in one of three tinted
photographs that stood in a triptych frame upon his writing-table,
and glowed with an indignation that tinged with violet
a plump face coated with the latest complexion-cream.

"How very charming your wife is—still!"

The speaker, her recent character of patient now merged
in that of visitor, plucked down her veil of violet gauze with
a gesture that betrayed her wrath.  But her voice was
carefully honeyed to match her smile—as she continued:

"You have been married quite an age, haven't you?"

The anniversary of her own second honeymoon was due
next week.  She went on answering her own query:

"Nearly fourteen years, I think?"

Saxham answered, not glancing at the silver table-almanac
but at the threefold photograph frame:

"To be precise, just fourteen years and six weeks.  We
were married on the 6th of June, 1900."

"You have a good memory—for some things!"

The undisguised resentment in her tone pulled Saxham's
head round.  He surveyed her with genuine surprise.  She
bit her lips and tossed her head, waggling her tall feather,
jingling her strings of turquoise and amber, coral and onyx,
kunzite and olivine, big blocks of which semi-precious
stones were being worn just then, strung on the thinnest of
gold chains.  Each movement evoked a whiff of perfume
from the scanty folds of her bizarre attire.  Her frankly
double chin quivered, and her redundant bosom, already
liberally displayed through its transparent covering of
embroidered chiffon, threatened to burst its confining bands
of baby-ribbon, as the Doctor said:

"Is it not natural that I should have a particularly
clear recollection of the greatest day of all my life—save
one?"

"You're quite too killing, Owen!"

She laughed tunelessly, clanking her precious pebbles.

"Of course, we all know you're fearfully swanky about
your wife's beauty.  I saw her yesterday at Lord's—sitting
under the awning on the sunny side, with the Duchess of
Broads and Lady Castleclare.  Your boy was with them,
jumping out of his skin over Naumann's bowling for Oxford.
Really marvellous!  Your poor dear Cambridge hadn't a
chance!  Tremendously like you he grows—I mean Bawne.
Really, your very image!"

"I should prefer," said Saxham, stiffly, "that my son
resembled his mother."

"Ha, ha, ha!  How quite too romantic!"  She threw
back her head, its henna-dyed hair plastered closely about
it and fastened with buckles of jade, set with knobs of
turquoise.  A kind of stove-pipe of enamel green velvet
crowning her, was trimmed with a band of miniature silk
roses in addition to the towering violet plume.  The plume,
carefully dishevelled so as to convey the impression of a
recent wetting, threatened the electric globe-lamp springing
from a standard near.  Her crossed legs liberally revealed
her stockings of white silk openwork, patterned with
extra-sized dragon-flies in black chenille, and her laugh
rattled about Saxham's vexed ears like Harlequin's painted
bladder, full of little pebbles or dried peas.  "In love with
your wife—and after fourteen years and six weeks!"  Her
fleshy shoulders shook, and her opulent bosom heaved
stormily.  She passed a little filmy perfumed handkerchief
under her violet gauze veil and delicately dabbed the corners
of her eyes.  "You remind me of my poor David.  I was
always the *one woman on earth*, in his opinion.  To the last,
he was jealous of the slightest reference to you!"

"To *me*?  Why should he have been?"

Mildred—for this was Saxham's faithless bride-elect of
more than twenty years previously—swallowed her wrath
with an effort, and went on with the mulish obstinacy of her
type:

"Perhaps it was absurd.  But men in love are unreasonable
creatures, and David was perfectly mad where I was
concerned.  He worshipped me to the point of idolatry!
He never could *quite* believe that I did not regret my—my
choice—that my heart did not sometimes escape from his
keeping in dreams, and become yours again, Owen!  He
never *really* cared for Patrine, because she has a look of
you....  Absurd, considering that she was born two years
after you disappeared into South Africa....  Though of
course I could not truthfully say that I did not—think of
you a great deal!"

It seemed to the silent man who heard, that Mildred
offended against decency.  His soul loathed her.  She
went on:

"Her brother—my darling boy who died—was the very
image of David!"  Her tone was even womanly and tender
in speaking of the dead boy.  "But Patrine—a year
younger—Patrine is really wonderfully like you, with her
commanding figure and almost Egyptian profile, those long
eyes under straight eyebrows—and all those masses of
dead-black hair!"  As Saxham writhed under the category
she gave out her irritating laugh again.  "Ah!—I forgot!
When Patrine was in Paris with Lady Beauvayse for the
Big Week—Lady Beau took her to the Atelier Wiber—the
famous hairdresser's establishment at 000, Rue de la Paix—where
they specialise in *Chevelures des Teintes Moderne*—all
the newest effects displayed by stylish mannequins—and
really the change is astonishing—her sister Irma and
I hardly knew Patrine when she came to see us at
Kensington—looking superb, with hair—one might almost call
it terra-cotta coloured—showing up her creamy-white skin."

"Do you tell me that Patrine has bleached her splendid
hair and stained it with one of those vile dyes that are based
on aniline—or Egyptian henna at the best?"

Mildred retorted acidly:

"It was a very expensive process....  Five hundred
francs—but I understand that Lady Beauvayse was so
good as to insist on paying Wiber's charges herself."

Saxham answered brusquely:

"I would have given ten times the money to know my
niece's hair unspoiled.  Whoever paid, the process will
prove an expensive one to Patrine when she finds herself
excruciated by headaches, or when the colour
changes—as it will by-and-by!"

Mildred shrugged:

"She can have it re-dipped, surely?  Or let it return to
its original black!"

"There are many chemical arguments against human hair
so altered returning to its original colour," came from
Saxham grimly.  "As these women who have made coiffures
of orange, pink, crimson, blue and green, fashionable, had
previously found to their cost.  Do you not realise that
from mishaps of this kind resulted the chromatically tinted
heads one sees at public functions?  Bizarre and strange in
the electric lights, hideous in the sun."

"Ha, ha, ha!"  Mildred's laugh rattled about the
Doctor's ears like a shower of walnuts.  "I shall certainly
bring Patrine to call upon you, if her hair happens to turn
peacock-green or pinky-crimson.  I would not miss seeing
your face for all the world!  But seriously, my dear Owen,
when a girl is as handsome as my girl and has no *dot* to
back her, she must make herself attractive and desirable to
eligible men."

"By trying to make herself look like a Parisian *cocotte*,
she renders herself neither attractive nor desirable—to the
kind of man whom I should like to see married to my niece.
The cleanly kind of man, with wholesome tastes, a sound
constitution, and an upright character."

"My dear Owen, you might be composing an advertisement
for a butler or a *chauffeur*!"

Mildred ostentatiously controlled a yawn as the Doctor
continued:

"As to a provision for Patrine on her marriage, you
know that I shall gladly give it.  Of course, upon
condition——"

"Yes, yes, I know what your condition would be!"  Mildred's
finger-tips, adorned with nails elaborately
veneered and dyed, drummed a maddening little tattoo on
the table-ledge.  "That she marries the 'right kind of man,
with wholesome tastes,' and all the rest of it.  The question
is—would Patrine be able to endure him?  She is—let us
say—more than a little difficult to get on with—and
essentially an independent, up-to-date girl."

"If Patrine would have subdued her ideas about independence
and given up this idea of taking a place as salaried
companion, I would have welcomed her, and so would my wife!"

"Patrine is—as you are very well aware—something very
different to a mere companion.  She is reader and secretary
to Lady Beauvayse.  Her Club subscription is paid, she
moves there amongst gentlewomen, and is treated at
Berkeley Square exactly like a favoured guest.  You
should see the presents Lady Beauvayse absolutely
showers upon her—and she gets all her expenses and a
hundred a year."

Saxham was silent.  Patrine might have had all this and
much more, if she would have accepted the home he offered.
Not only because she was his niece, but the girl was dear to
him.  His wife loved her, and in her strange, wild way
Patrine returned some measure of Lynette's tenderness.

"She is worth loving," Lynette had told her husband.
"She has a generous, brave, independent nature and a deep
heart.  She is not easily won because she is so well worth
winning.  Ah! if the Mother were only with us, how well
she would understand and help Patrine!"

But Mildred had risen to depart.  Saxham rose too, not
without alacrity, and taking her offered hand, pressed it and
let it fall to her side.

"Well, good-bye.  My kind regards to Captain Dyneham."  He
referred to the second legal possessor of Mildred's
once coveted charms.  "When can I dine with you
at Kensington, do you ask?  I fear I have very few
opportunities for sociality.  Some day! ... Tell Patrine to
come and see me.  Half-past one o'clock to-morrow.
Lunch after my scolding—and a chat with Lynette."

"You are extremely kind to Patrine."  Mildred's tone
was sweetly venomous.  "But I fear just at present she has
little time to spare.  Men in love are so exacting.  Dear
me, what a feather-brained creature I am! ... Haven't I
told you about Count von Herrnung?"

"You have told me nothing," said Saxham, "and you
know it.  Who and what is the man?"

Mildred said with a great air of dignity:

"He is a distinguished officer of the Prussian Flying
Service, the son and heir of a high official in the German
Foreign Office.  He holds the rank of Count by courtesy.
I assure you I never met a more agreeable young man."

"Even were he all that you say, and more, and even while
I regard the German Army as a marvel of organisation and
efficiency—I should not, knowing the type of man that is the
product of their military system, desire my niece to marry
a German officer."

Mildred mocked:

"'Marry'—who said anything about marriage? ... When
they have not known each other for a month.  Not"—her
tone became sentimental—"that I am a disbeliever
in love at first sight.  No one could doubt that Patrine is
attracted, and he—the Count"—she dropped her eyelids—"is
simply too fearfully gone for words.  Absolutely dead-nuts!"

"'Gone.' ... 'Dead-nuts.' ..."

"I give you my word.  Entangled hopelessly.  'What a
captive to lead in chains,' I said to Patrine—he is quite six
feet in height or over, and has the most perfect features;
simply magnificent eyes, the most fascinating manner, and
the build of a Greek athlete.  He is staying at the 'Tarlton,'
and I must say Lady Beauvayse is extremely sympathetic.
For since they came back from Paris together the Count has
been taking Patrine about everywhere.  She can hardly
have had a glimpse of my gay girl....  Dinners, theatres,
the opera, and heaven knows what else, they have crowded
into the week!"  The smiling speaker shrugged her ample
shoulders.  "To say nothing of cabaret suppers and dances.
He even promises to take her to the famous 'Upas
Club.'  Wonderful, by all accounts.  They say the French Regency
came nowhere near it.  Dancing in the Hall of the
Hundred Pillars, a simply wonderful three A.M. supper, and
champagne of the most expensive brands, served up in
gold-mounted crystal jugs."

"Can it be possible? ..." broke from Saxham.  "Are
you mad, that you countenance this German in taking
Patrine to such an infamous place?"

"'Infamous!'  Really, Owen, your notions are too old-fashioned
for anything."  Her laughter broke out, and her
chains and bangles jingled an accompaniment.  "Do," she
urged, "come out of your shell.  Dine with us on Thursday.
We have a box for the 'Ministers' Theatre.  We'll go on,
you and I, George and Irma, from there to the cabaret
supper at the 'Rocroy.'  We can't afford the 'Upas,' the
subscription is too fearfully prohibitive.  But the
entertainment at the 'Rocroy' is really *chic*—the dancing is as
good—everyone says—as they have it at Maxim's.  Do
come!  Of course, you can trust us not to blab to your wife!
Mercy! how severe you look!"  Her tone changed, became
wheedling, her made-up eyes languished tenderly.  "Odd! how
we poor, silly women prefer the men who bully us.
Come!  One chance more.  Dine Thursday and see
'Squiffed' at the 'Ministers'—try a whiff of Paris at the
'Rocroy' after midnight, 'twill buck you up like nothing
else—take my word!  Won't you?"

"I will not!"

"Why not?"

"I have told you why not.  Because these places are
centres of corruption, schools for the inculcation and
practice of vice in every form.  Men and women, young or
old, those who take part in or witness one of these loathsome
dances, hot and reeking from the brothels and voodoo-houses
of Cuba and the Argentine are equally degraded.  I
had rather see my niece Patrine dead and in her coffin than
know her capable of appreciating such abominable exhibitions,
pernicious in their effects, as I, and others of my
profession have grave reason to know!—ruinous in their
results to body, mind, and soul!"

"Intolerable!"

Her plump, middle-aged face was leaden grey beneath her
violet veil as she screamed at him:

"You have insulted me!  Horribly—abominably! ... How
dare you tell me that I frequent infamous places, and
encourage my daughter to visit schools of vice!  And it is
not for Irma you are so rottenly scrupulous, but for Patrine,
your wife's favourite!  Who will do as she pleases, and
marry whom she prefers without 'by your leave' or with
mine!  She is a mule for self-will and obstinacy—another
point of resemblance to yourself! ..."

He had recovered his stern self-possession.  His face was
granite as he said:

"I have not insulted you, but if you will set no example
to your daughters in avoiding these evils, it is my duty to
expostulate."

She reared like an angry cobra, then spat her jet of
scalding venom.

"I take leave to think my present example quite harmless
to Irma and Patrine.  Now yours—of a few years ago—was
certainly calculated to damage the bodily and worldly
prospects of your son."  She added, as Saxham silently put
out his hand to touch the bell: "No! please don't ring.  I
know my way out.  Good-morning....  Pray remember
me to Bawne and your wife!"





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`SAXHAM PAYS`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER XVIII


.. class:: center medium bold

   SAXHAM PAYS

.. vspace:: 2

Thus, having shot her bolt, Mildred departed.  The Dop
Doctor standing in the open doorway, watched the
gaily-accoutred, middle-aged figure in the peg-top skirt and
bouffante tunic of green taffeta patterned with a violet
grape-vine, moving down the white-panelled corridor.

Saxham watched her out of sight before he shut the door
and went back to his chair.  There he sat thinking....
No one would disturb the Doctor until he touched his
electric bell.

Ah! if the truth were told, not all of us find solace in the
thought that in the niches of Heaven are safely stored our
ancient idols.  To Owen Saxham it was gall and verjuice to
remember that for love of this woman, weak, vain, silly,
spiteful, he, the man of intellect and knowledge, had gone
down, quick, to the very verge of Hell.

Mildred was just eighteen when he had wooed and won
her.  She had been slight and willowy and pale, with round,
surprised brown eyes, an indeterminate nose, and a little
mouth of the rosebud kind.  Her neck had been long and
swanlike, her waist long and slim, her hands and feet long
and narrow.  He had desired her with all the indiscriminating
passion of early manhood.  He had planned to pass his
life by her side.  He had hoped that she might bear him
children—he had wrought in a frenzy of intellectual and
physical endeavour to take rank in his chosen profession,
that Success might make life sweeter for Mildred—his wife.

She had seemed to love him, and he had been happy in
that seeming.  Then the shadow of a tragic error had fallen
blackly across his path.  From the omission to copy in his
memorandum-book a prescription made up by himself in a
sudden emergency had sprung the branding suspicion that
culminated in the Old Bailey Criminal Case of the Crown *v.*
Saxham.  His acquittal restored to him freedom of movement.
He left the Court without a stain on his professional
reputation, but socially and financially a ruined man.

Friends and patients fell away from Saxham—acquaintances
dropped him.  Mildred—his Mildred—was one of
the rats that scurried from the sinking ship.  She had
thrown him over and married David, his brother.  Her
betrayal had been the wreath of nightshade crowning
Saxham's cup of woe.  Those vertical lines graven on his
broad white forehead, those others that descended from the
outer angles of the deep-cut nostrils to the corners of that
stern mouth of his, and yet those others at the angles of the
lower jaw, were chiefly Mildred's handiwork.  They told
of past excess, a desperate effort to drown Memory and
hasten longed-for death on the part of a man who had
quarrelled with his God.

The demons of pride and self-will, defiance and scorn had
been cast out.  An ordeal such as few men are called upon
to endure had purified, cleansed, and regenerated the
drunkard.  Friendship had taken the desperate man by the hand,
plucked his feet from the morass, led him into the light and
set his feet once more on firm ground.  His profession was
his again to follow.  Love, real love, had come to him and
folded her rose-white wings beside his hearth.

Years of pure domestic happiness, of successful work, had
passed, and now—the July sunshine had no warmth in it,
though it streamed in through the open window over the
tops of the pot-roses.  The Dop Doctor's head was bowed
upon his hands, his great shoulders shook as though he
strove with a mortal rigour, the wood of the table where his
elbows leaned, the boards beneath the thick carpet on which
his feet rested, creaked as the long shudders convulsed him
at intervals.

It had seemed to Saxham—in whom the seed of Faith had
germinated and put forth leaves in one great night of storm
following upon years of arid dryness—that Almighty God
must have forgiven those five worse than wasted years.

Fool! he now cried in his heart.  The Divine Mercy is
boundless as the ocean of air in which our planet swims, and
for the cleansing of our spotted souls the Blood of the
Redeemer flowed on Calvary.  But He who said in His wrath
that the sins of the fathers should be visited on the children,
does not break, even for those repentant prodigals whom He
has taken to His Heart again—the immutable laws of
Nature.  Nature, of all forces most conservative, wastes
nothing, loses nothing, pardons nothing, avenges everything.

The shouted curse, like the whispered blessing, is carried
on the invisible wings of Air forever.  Thus, the deformed
limb, the devouring cancer, the loathsome ulcer, and the
degrading vice, are perpetuated and reproduced as diligently
and faithfully as the beautiful feature, the noble quality,
the wit that charms, the genius that dominates.  Nay, since
Nature turns out some millions of fools to one Dante or
Shakespeare or Molière or Cervantes, it would appear that
she prefers the fools.

So it is.  Divine Grace has reached and saved the sinner.
The ugly vice, the base appetite, have been eradicated by
prayer and mortification, by years of self-control and
watchfulness.  Free will, moral and physical force, self-command
and self-respect are yours again.  And with sobs of gratitude
the erstwhile slave of Hell gives thanks to Heaven.

Saved.  Cured.  Great words and true in Saxham's case
as in many others.  But though they are saved and cured
they cannot ever forget.  Their eyes have a characteristic
look of alert, suspicious watchfulness.  For wheresoever
they move about the world, in the drawing-rooms of what is
called Society, in the business circles of the City, in the
barracks or the mining-camp, on the ship's heaving deck or
the floor of the Pullman carriage; amidst the sands of the
Desert or the golden-rod of the prairie, or the red sand and
dry karroo scrub of the lone veld, they will hear, when they
least expect it, the thin, shrill hiss of the Asp that once bit
them to the bone.  Or supposing that they have forgotten
in reality—so cleverly has the world pretended to!—with
what a pang of mortal anguish Memory awakens.  When
you recognise the devil that once entered and possessed you,
looking out of the eyes of your child.

.. vspace:: 2

When Saxham lifted up his ashen face and looked at the
portrait in the third leaf of the triptych frame and met the
clear, candid gaze of his son's blue eyes, you know what he
was seeking, and praying not to find.

To have given Lynette a drunkard for her son would be
the most terrible penalty that could be exacted by merciless
Nature for those five sodden, wasted years.

Ah! to have had a clean, unspotted life to share with
Bawne's fair mother.  That his priceless pearl of
womanhood should gleam upon a drunkard's hand—his spotless
Convent lily have opened to fullest bloom in a drunkard's
holding, had been from the outset of their married life,
verjuice in Saxham's cup by day, and a thorn in his pillow
by night.

But never before had it occurred to the man of science, the
great surgeon, the learned biologist, that relentless Nature
might be saving up for him, Saxham, a special rod in saltest
brine.

Bawne....  He sat in silence with set teeth, asking
himself the bitter question:

"How could I have forgotten—Bawne?"





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`BAWNE`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER XIX


.. class:: center medium bold

   BAWNE

.. vspace:: 2

As so often happens, the thought of the beloved heralded
his well-known thump upon the door-panel.  When had the
Dop Doctor ever cried, "Come in!" with such a leaden
sinking of the heart?

The boy who came in was alert, upright, slim, and strong
for his twelve years.  You saw him attired in the dress with
which we are all familiar—the loose shirt of khaki-brown,
with its knotted silk neckerchief of dark blue, the lanyards
ending in clasp-knife and whistle, the roomy shorts upheld
by a brown leather pouch-belt supporting a serviceable axe,
the dark blue stockings turned over at the knee, fitting close
to the slim muscular legs, the light strong shoes, the brown
smasher hat with the chin-strap, completed the picture of a
Scout of whom no patrol need be ashamed.  He carried his
light staff at the trail, and entering, brought it to an
upright position, and saluted smartly.  The salute formally
acknowledged, he came straight to the table and stood at
his father's elbow, waiting, as Saxham feigned to blot a
written line.  Outwardly composed, the drumming of
the man's heart deafened him, and a mist before his
eyes blurred the page they were bent upon.  Fatherhood
gripped him by the throat as in the first moment of his
son's separate existence.  A thing we prize is never so
poignantly precious as when we contemplate the possibility of
its ruin or loss.

"Father, you aren't generally pleased when I come
bothering you in consulting hours, but this time it is really
serious business, no kid, and Honour bright!"

Saxham answered with equal gravity:

"If you have a reasonable excuse for coming, I have said
that you may come."

The boy was like him.  You saw it as he stood waiting.
The vivid gentian-blue eyes were Saxham's, as were the
thick throat and prominent under-jaw and the square facial
outline.  But the plume of hair that swept over the broad
forehead was red-brown like Lynette's.  The delicate,
irregular profile and a sensitive sweetness about the lips
were gifts from his mother.  The directness of his look, and
the tinge of brusqueness in his speech were unconsciously
modelled on the father's, as he said, sacrificing sufficient of
manly independence to come within the curve of the
Doctor's strong arm:

"First, I wanted to show you my new badge."

Saxham's left hand squeezed the arm most distant from
him, where a familiar device was displayed upon the sleeve,
midway, between the shoulder and elbow, below the six-inch
length of colours distinctive of this Scout's Patrol.

"Turn round and show it, then!"

"Father, you're larking.  That's my General Scout
Badge.  I've had it ever since I passed my Second Class
tests.  Before then, you know, when I was a Tenderfoot,
I'd only the top-part—the *fleur-de-lis* without the motto,
and you wear that in your left pocket button-hole.  But
this is something special, don't you see?"

Saxham eyed the row of little enamelled circles on the
sleeve next him with respectful gravity.  The boy went on,
trying to control the gleeful tremor in his voice:

"I've got the Ambulance Badge!—look at the Geneva
Cross!—and the Signaller's Badge—this is it—with the
crossed flags—and the Interpreter's Badge—the one with
the two hands holding.  But this is the very latest.  Our
Scoutmaster gave it to me after parade to-day.  It's the
Airman's Badge—"  He caught his breath, the secret was
coming in a moment....  He went on: "To get it you
must have made a model aëroplane.  Not a flying-stick,
any kid of nine can make one—but a model that will really
fly.  That's my special reason for coming.  Mother was
out—and—and next to her I wanted to tell you!"

"And next after me?"

The boy considered a moment before he looked up to
answer:

"Cousin Pat, because she can keep a secret so tightly."

Saxham patted the sturdy square shoulders.

"You are fond of Cousin Patrine, aren't you?"

"Rather!"

"Just tell me why?"

"Because"—the young brows were puckered—"because
she's so big and so—beautiful.  And she'd just die for you
and Mother....  She comes in my prayers next after
you two."

"And—the Chief Scout?"

"Father, wouldn't it be—a bit cheeky to go and pray for
a man like that?"

A spark of laughter wakened in Saxham's sombre eyes.

"Not quite respectful, you think?  Is that it?  Why so,
when you're taught to pray for the Holy Father, Mother
Church, and the King and Queen?"

The boy's puckered brows smoothed.  The question was
settled.

"Of course.  I forgot.  Then the Chief Scout must come
in after Cousin Patrine.  Because a gentleman must always
give place to a lady.  That's what Mother says."

"Suppose Cousin Patrine never came to see you any more,
what would you do then?"

Bawne straightened the sturdy body and proclaimed:

"I would go and find her and bring her back!"

"Suppose she did not want to come?"

Bawne said instantly:

"I would tell her Mother was wanting her.  For Mother
would be, you know.  And Cousin Pat wouldn't keep her
waiting.  Not much, sir, she wouldn't!"

"She cares so?"

"Doesn't she!  Why, have you forgotten when I was a
little shaver and Mother was so ill?"

Saxham, with a certain tightening of the muscles of the
throat, recalled the wan, red-eyed spectre that had haunted
the landing outside the guarded bedroom where Lynette lay,
white and strengthless, while her husband fought for her
with Death.

"Well, well.  Go on loving Patrine and praying for her!
Now tell me of your model."

The boy said, controlling his exultation:

"It has to be left at our District Headquarters until
to-morrow.  You see—it's rather a special affair.  It's not
a flying stick, like the things I used to make when I was a
shaver, nor a glider—you see men in spectacles flying those
every day to please the kids on Hampstead Heath and in
Kensington Gardens, but a model of a Bristol monoplane
with a span of thirty inches, and a main-plane-area of a
hundred and fifty"—he caught his breath and with difficulty
kept his eager words from tumbling over one another
as he reached the thrilling climax—"and I built up her
fuselage with cardboard and sticking-plaster out of the First
Aid case you gave me to carry in my belt-pouch, and cut
the propeller out of a tin toy engine I've had ever since I was
a kid—and made the planes of big sheets of stiff foolscap
strengthened with thin strips of glued wood, and her spars,
sir!—the upright ones are quills, and her stays and struts
I made of copper wire and she's weighted with lead ribbon
like what you wrap about the gut when you're bottom-fishing
for tench or barbel—and her motor-power is eighteen
inches of square elastic twisted—and father"—he broke
into a war-dance of ecstasy unrestrained—"when Roddy
Wrynche and me went on a secret expedition to Primrose
Hill to test her—she flew, sir!  First go-off—by George!"

"Really flew? ... You are certain?"

"Upon my life, sir, and that's my Honour.  Scout's
Honour and life are the same thing.  That's what the Oath
rubs into us."  He squared his shoulders and lowered his
voice as a boy speaking of high matters that must be dealt
with reverently.  "I think it's—ripping.  I can say it.
Would you like me to?"

Saxham nodded without speaking, because of that choking
something sticking in his throat.  That something Lear
called "the mother."  And, dammed away behind his eyes,
were scalding tears that only men may shed.  As the young
voice said:

"On my Honour I promise that I will do my best to be
loyal to God and the King.

"On my Honour I promise that I will do my best to Help
other people at all times.

"On my Honour I promise that I will do my best to obey
the Scout Law....  You see"—the boyish arm was on
Saxham's shoulder now, the ruddy-fair cheek pressed against
the pale, close-shaven face—"you see, Father, when a Scout
says 'On my Honour' it's just as if he swore on the Crucifix!"

Saxham said, crushing down the fierce emotion that had
almost mastered him:

"It is—just the same!  For the man who breaks a promise
will never keep an oath....  I have a friend of whom
I have told you....  I think he would like to hear about
your model aëroplane....  May I tell him, or would you
prefer to tell him yourself?"

Bawne's fair face glowed.  He gasped in ecstasy:

"*Father*....  You mean Mr. Sherbrand—your Flying
Man who's in the Hospital?"

"My Flying Man—but he is well again and back at work
at Hendon.  There was not much the matter with him; a
slight obstruction in one of the nasal passages that prevented
him from breathing with his mouth shut as he should.  Now
he has asked me—this afternoon if I am at leisure—to
bring my little son to the aërodrome and see him make
a flight."

"And go up in his aëroplane with him?  Father, say Yes!
Do, please do!"

As the little figure bobbed up and down beside him in
joyous excitement, Saxham answered, not without an
inward tug:

"If your mother says 'Yes' I shall not say No!  Now off
with you, my son!"

The boy saluted and went.  Even his bright obedience
wrung his father's heart.  The man looked haggard and old.
He hid his careworn face in his hands for a minute.  His
lips were still moving when he looked up and made the Sign
so well known to many of us upon his forehead and breast.
Prayer, that most powerful of all therapeutic agents, so often
prescribed by Saxham for his patients, was his own tonic and
sedative in moments of bodily exhaustion and mental overstrain.

He had prayed, he, the sceptic, on that unforgettable
night at Gueldersdorp, when he wrestled with his possessing
fiend....  Lynette had taught him the habit of prayer.
And even as she, a friendless, neglected waif, had learned to
look up and see the shining Faces of our Divine Redeemer
and His Virgin Mother through the features of a pure and
tender woman; so her husband, looking in the eyes of
Lynette, had found the gift of Faith lost years before.

"Oh! ... Prayer!" you say—"Faith!" ... and I
see you shrug and sneer a little, you who are intellectual and
highly educated, and have ceased to believe in what you
term the Hebraic myth or the Christian legend—since you
learned to point out the weak places in the First Book of
Genesis, and sneer at the discrepancies between the
statements of the Gospel narrators—though you will hear such
testimonies sworn to in good faith, wherever witnesses are
examined in a Court of Law.

But no! you tell me, you are not an Agnostic.  You credit
the existence of Almighty God, but prayer is the parson's
affair.  Well, because a man wears a straight black coat,
will you abandon to him so inestimable a privilege?  Is it
not a marvellous thing that you or I should lift up our
earth-made, earth-begrimed hands, and that He who set this tiny
planet to spin out its æons of cycles amidst the innumerable
millions of systems wheeling through His Universe should
stoop to hear the words we utter?  Feeble cries, drowned
by the orchestras of the winds, and the chorus of the Spheres
revolving in their orbits, or silent utterances imperceptible
to any Ear save His alone.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`THE MODERN HIPPOCRATES`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER XX


.. class:: center medium bold

   THE MODERN HIPPOCRATES

.. vspace:: 2

Patients rapidly succeeded one another in the chair that
faced the window.  There were confirmed invalids who were
really healthy men and women, and certain others who came
in smilingly to talk about the weather and the newest
Russian Opera, who bore upon their faces the unmistakable
stamp of mortal disease.  The wife or the husband, the
father or the mother had worried for nothing....  Would
the Doctor prescribe a little tonic to buck them, or the
surgeon alleviate a little trouble of the local kind?  Really
nothing—but—Death's knock at the door.  And there were
cases—open or unacknowledged—of the liquor-habit and
the drug-mania.  To these, instead of dropping out bromide
of potassium and throwing in the chloral hydrates with
strychnine and the chloride of the metal that is crushed and
assayed out of the quartz reef near Johannesburg, or
pick-axed out of the frozen ground of the Klondyke, Saxham
dealt out that savage tonic Truth, in ladlesful.

The secret dipsomaniac or druggard could not deceive
this man's keen scrutiny, or escape his unerring diagnosis.
When, beaten, they admitted the fact, Saxham said to them
as to the others:

"You say you cannot conquer the craving.  I myself once
thought so.  Your moral power can be restored, even as was
mine.  In your case the habit is barely as ingrained as in
the case I quote to you.  I drank alcohol to excess for a
period of five years."

Some of the sufferers—elderly women and mild-mannered
old gentlemen—were horrified.  Others thought such candour
brutal—but attractively so.  Yet others responded to
the sympathy masked by the stern, impassive face, and the
blunt, brusque manner.

"At any rate the man's no humbug!" such and such an
one would stutter.  "And seems to have any amount of
Will.  Think I shall put myself in his hands for a bit."  Adding
with a rueful twinkle: "He knows how the dog bites,
if anyone does!"

He did, and those hands of his were strong, prompt and
unfaltering.  Since the grip of human sympathy had
fastened on the Dop Doctor of Gueldersdorp, and drawn him
up out of the depths into sunlight and free air, and set his
feet once more on the firm ground, how many of his
fellow-sufferers had Saxham not hauled reeking and squelching out
of the abysmal sludge, whose secrets shall only be revealed
upon the Last Day.

Yet Saxham realised that the grand majority of these
twentieth-century men and women really wanted little more
of the physician and surgeon than the thirteenth-century
patient desired of the apothecary or the leech.  A patient
hearing given to their category of evils—a little hocus-pocus,
and a nostrum or so.

We scoff, thought Saxham, at the ignorance of those men
of the Dark Ages, yet in this enlightened era the eye of newt
and toe of frog, the salted earthworms, and the *Pulvis
Bezoardicus Magistralis* or *Pulvis Sanctus*, dissolved in the
liquor of herbs gathered under a propitious conjunction of
their ruling planets with the Moon—have but given place
to extract of the dried thyroid gland of the sheep, the ovaries
of the guinea-pig, the spinal cord and brain of rabbits and
mice and other small mammalia, with—instead of broth of
vipers, liquor distilled from the parotid secretion of the
tropical toad; identical with the reptile administered in
boluses to Pagan patients by the Greek Hippocrates.  With
other remedies hideously akin to the hell-brews that
whipped the sated desires of Tiberius and Nero....
Such as the pastelloids frequently prescribed by bland-mannered,
frock-coated, twentieth-century physicians—professing
Christians who pay West-End pew-rents, and
deplore the abnormal drop in the birth-rate—for the
spurring of the sense of debilitated Hedonists.

Thus, summed Saxham, we have rediscovered Organotherapy.
We have harnessed the bacillus to Hygeia's silver
chariot.  In Surgery the Short Circuit is the latest word.
It is wonderful to know how well one can get on, at a pinch,
without organs hitherto deemed indispensable to existence.
Radiology reveals to us the inner mysteries of the human
machine, alive and palpitating.  The splintered bone, the
bullet or the shell-splinter embedded in the muscle or the
osseous structure, can be detected and photographed by
the teleradiographic apparatus.  The electro-magnet
automatically carried out the removal of such fragments,
provided only that they are of steel.  Ah yes!  We are very
clever in this twentieth century, reflected the Dop Doctor.
Modern Science has even weighed the Soul.

Could Dee and Lilly have bettered that?  Debate—consider....
This quenchless spark of Being, kindled in
Saxham's breast and in yours and mine by the Supreme Will
of the Divine Creator—this Ego for whose eternal salvation
Christ died upon the bitter Cross, dips the scale at precisely
one-sixteenth of an ounce avoirdupois.  The expiring man,
weighed a moment previously to dissolution, and again
immediately afterwards, was found to have lost so much and
no more.

The dying world is in the scales to-day, thought Saxham,
bitterly and sorrowfully.  Religious Faith being the soul of
the world, one wonders, when the last thin hymn shall have
died upon the fierce irrespirable air; when the last human
sigh shall have exhaled from Earth, how much in ponderability
shall be lacking to the acorn-shaped lump of whirling
matter.  Will the result proportionate with the moribund's
sixteenth of an ounce?

It seemed to Saxham, that without a moral and social
upheaval upon a vaster scale than historian ever recorded
or visionary ever dreamed; a cataclysmic cleansing, a purging
as by fire; the regeneration of the human race, the
reconstitution of the human mind, the renaissance of the Divine
Ideal, could never be brought about.  Unconsciously he
sought for the decadent world some such ordeal as he himself
had passed through.  You looked at him and saw the scars
of suffering.  The soil of his nature had been rent by
volcanic convulsions and seared by the upburst of fierce
abysmal fires, before the green herb clothed the sides of the
frowning steeps, the jagged peaks were wreathed with gentle
clouds; the pure springs gathered and ran; the valleys
became fruitful and the plains carpeted themselves with
flowers.

A miracle had been wrought for Saxham the Man, and he
saw the need of one for the World, and said in his heart that,
though holy men might pray, it would not, could not, ever
be vouchsafed.  And all the while the miracle was ripening,
the Day was coming, the Great Awakening was at hand.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`MARGOT LOOKS IN`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER XXI


.. class:: center medium bold

   MARGOT LOOKS IN

.. vspace:: 2

It drew on to the luncheon hour.  The last patient a very
young, very little, very pretty married woman, was
summoned by the neat maid from the waiting-room, in a remote
corner of which a husband of military type and ordinarily
cheerful countenance, remained, maintaining with obvious
effort a fictitious interest in the pages of a remote issue of
*Punch*.

The dainty little lady bore a name well known to Saxham.
The fact that a title was attached to it did not interest him,
nor had it shortened her term of waiting by a second of the
clock.  But her youth smote him with a sense of pity as she
took the chair upon his left hand facing the window, and
without overmuch embarrassment made clear her case.

She was going to have a baby.  Franky, her husband,
earnestly desired the kiddie for family reasons, yet its advent
was unwelcome to him, in that it must inevitably involve
physical pain and mental anxiety for the little lady, Franky's
wife.

The little lady had been frightfully downed by the prospect.
She rather cottoned to kiddies, she explained, than
otherwise.  It was the bother of having them that didn't
appeal.  It put everything in the cart as regarded the
Autumn Season.  Besides—there were family reasons on her
side, why the prospect should not be too rosy.  She stated
the reasons, and Saxham's listening face grew grave.  He
realised the danger of a Preconceived Idea.

He said nothing.  Margot went on talking.  Her beautiful
deer-eyes were alternately wistful and coaxing.  They
entreated sympathy.  They begged for gentleness.  They
grew brilliant with enthusiasm as she explained that after
a lot of chinning, she and Franky had hit upon a perfectly
ripping plan.

A friend, recently encountered in Paris, had thrown a ray
of hope upon the doubtful prospect.  No doubt Dr. Saxham
was in sympathy with the pioneers of the New Crusade
against Unnecessary Pain....  Of course, Dr. Saxham
knew all about the wonderful experiments of German
gynæwhatdoyoucall'ems.  The right term was frightfully
crack-jaw.  Perhaps Dr. Saxham knew what was meant?

Saxham reassured the little lady.

"You refer of course to the experiments of Professors von
Wolfenbuchel of Vienna, and Krauss of the Berlin *Fraüenklinik*,
resulting in the method of treatment now known
throughout the Continent as 'Purple Dreams.'  Wolfenbuchel
and Krauss have published a pamphlet on the subject.
Perhaps you have read the pamphlet?"

"Yes—I've read it.  A wonderful book that has been
translated into every language.  A German officer, friend of
a friend I met in Paris, told her about it.  His sister had
tried the treatment, and found it A1.  So I bought a French
translation of the book in Paris, and an English one at a
shop in the Haymarket.  It's bound in rose-coloured vellum
stamped with a rising sun in gold.  'Weep No More,
Mothers!' it's called.  Isn't that a charming title?  And
the subject is: 'Pangless Childbirth, Produced through
Purple Dreams.'"

In a sweet, coaxing voice that trembled a little, she began
to tell the Doctor about the wonderful results obtained by
hypodermics of Krauss and Wolfenbüchel's marvellous
combination of drugs.  And Saxham hearkened with stern
patience, while the table-clock ticked and the luncheon hour
drew near, and Franky chewed the cud of suspense in the
Doctor's waiting-room.

Thousands of peasant women, and others of the lower
middle-class in Germany had become mothers under the
Purple Dreams treatment.  Maternity Hospitals in Paris,
Brussels, and New York had adopted the method after
controversy and hesitation.  It had triumphed over every
doubt.  An American woman whose brother's wife had had
a "Purple Dreams" baby at the Berlin Institute had told
the little narrator only yesterday how quite too wonderful
was the discovery of the enlightened Krauss and the gifted
Wolfenbuchel.  Everything was made easy.  When your
ordeal drew near you simply went to the place, and signed
your name in a book, and put yourself in the hands of
skilled persons.  You felt no pain—not a twinge.  Only the
prick and throb of the hypodermic needle-syringe, and most
people were used to the *pique* nowadays—administering
the first subcutaneous injections of the wonderful new drug....
Under its mild sedative influence you dozed off to
sleep presently.  And when you woke up—there was the
baby—beautifully dressed, and lying on a lace pillow in the
arms of a smartly dressed, fresh-cheeked nurse.

This had been the experience of the sister of the German
officer, as of the wife of the brother of the American lady.
The same thing happening to thousands everywhere.  The
philanthropic Wolfenbuchel and the benevolent Krauss had
made of the stony Via Dolorosa by which Womanhood
attains maternity—a path of soft green turf bordered with
fragrant lilies and bestrewn with the perfumed petals of the
rose.

She ended.  Saxham had kept his keen blue eyes steadily
upon her during the eloquent recital.  Not a hair of his
black brows had twitched, not a muscle of his pale face had
moved—betraying his urgent inclination to smile.  His
fine hand, lying upon the blotter near the small black
case-book, might have been carved out of ancient Spanish ivory,
or yellow-white lava.  Now he said:

"There is nothing new nor marvellous about the 'Dreams'
method.  It is—persistent narcosis obtained from the
subcutaneous injections of morphine with the hydrobromide of
hyoscine, another alkaloid obtained from henbane.  I have
visited not only the Institute at Berlin, but the Rottburg
Fraüenklinik—and an establishment of the same type in
Paris, and another in Brussels.  It is a fact that when a
patient awakens from the anæsthesia there is no recollection
of anything that has taken place subsequently to the
injection of the drug."

"There has been no pain.  Absolutely—none whatever!"  She
spoke with a little, joyful catch in her breath.

"Pardon me," said Saxham.  "You labour under a
delusion which the rose-coloured pamphlet was not written
to dispel.  There must have been pain—if there has been
childbirth.  Perhaps there has been overwhelming pain.
Pain manifested by outcries and convulsions—violent
struggles—subdued by the attendants and nurses—for the
friends and relatives of the patient are rigidly excluded—the
patient enters and leaves the Home alone.  Two or three
days may have vanished in that vacuum which has been
created in her memory.  Days in which she has been lying—it
may be—strapped to the bed in the private ward of the
nursing home—her purple, congested face and staring eyes
concealed by a mask of wetted linen—her agonies only
witnessed by paid attendants whose interests are best served
by denial or concealment—supposing anything to have gone
wrong?"

The relentless surgeon's hand had torn away the painted
curtain.  Margot contemplated the grim truth in silence for
a moment.  Then she found words:

"But nothing ever *does* go wrong.  The pink pamphlet
says so.  My American friend's sister-in-law says so....
Thousands of women have had children under scopolo—what's
its name?  And none of them felt pain—not the
slightest.  And in every case—in *every* case—there was the
baby when they woke up!"

The sweet bird-voice quivered.  She had entered the
room so full of hope and enthusiasm, and this man with the
piercing eyes and the brusque, direct manner was putting
things before her in a way that dashed and damped.  Hear
him now:

"Yes, there is generally a baby—when it is necessary
there should be one.  Though the patients who are treated
in the free wards of German and Austrian *Kliniks* may not
always be scrupulous upon this point.  Still, if the treatment
can be carried out without undue peril for the mother—and
I do not allow this for a single moment—have you not
considered the risk for the child?"

Margot had pulled off one long glove.  Now she murmured,
setting the tip of a little bare, jewelled finger near
the corner of a distracting little mouth:

"You consider that it's handicapping the start for—the
kiddie?"

The avalanche fell; shocking and freezing and stunning her.

"Ask yourself, Lady Norwater, and do not forget to ask
your husband: Will a healthy or a degenerate type of man
or woman be eventually reared from an infant in whom the
springs of Life have been deliberately poisoned with henbane
and morphia—before its entrance into the world?"

She gasped:

"Then it's all U.P.?"  She was slangy even in her tragic
misery.  She sought in her gold vanity-bag and produced
the envelope that held the cheque, but Saxham waved it
away.

"Pray put that back....  Neither from rich nor poor
do I accept unearned money.  You have not really consulted
me.  You have asked my opinion upon a course of treatment.
And I have given it, for what it is worth.  You will
go home, and tell your husband that I have talked tosh, and
consult another physician."

"No, I won't!" She said it bravely.  "I want you to
prescribe!"

"If I prescribe," Saxham told her, "you shall certainly
fee me.  But you do not need treatment."  His eyes smiled
though his mouth did not relax its grimness, as he added:
"You strike me as being in excellent health."

She owned to feeling "top-hole," first-class, and simply
awfully beany!  Though, and her dimple faded as she owned
it, the thought of what must happen in November took "the
gilt off the gingerbread."

"Do not think of what is going to happen in November,"
Saxham advised her.  "Or teach yourself to think of it in
the right way."  The sense of her childishness and
inexperience went home to the sensitive quick beneath the man's
hard exterior, as she said to him with an unconsciously
appealing accent:

"But how am I to find out what is the right way?"

He had gained upon her confidence.  The admission
proved it.  With infinite tact he began to win yet another
woman to drain out her chalice of Motherhood, untinctured
with the druggist's nepenthe,—to gain for the race yet
another babe unmarred before its birth.  For this end no
labour was too great for Saxham.  A crank you may call
him, but that cranks of this type are the leaven of the world,
you know.

It is typical of the human butterfly Saxham dealt with,
that his clothes pleased Margot.  She liked their characteristic
mingling of elegance with simplicity.  Some fashionable
doctors got themselves up like elderly bloods, others
affected garments dating from the year One.  There was
neither perfume upon Saxham's handkerchief nor flue upon
his coat-sleeve.  His shirt of soft white cashmere, his
slightly starched linen cuffs and narrow double collar were
fastened with plain buttons of mother o' pearl, the black silk
necktie was blameless of pin or ring.  The handsome gold
chronometer he carried because it had been presented to him
by the Staff and patients of St. Teresa and St. Stanislaus.
The chain attached to it—rather worn and shabby now—was
of woven red-brown hair.

The hair of his wife.  A creamy-pale Niphetos rose stood
where her hands had placed it near his writing-pad, in a tall,
slender beaker of green-and-gold Venetian glass.  His eyes
drank at the beauty of the lovely scarce-unfolded blossom.
Perhaps the resemblance of the fair flower to the beloved
giver softened the lines of the stern square face into the smile
that Margot liked, as he found her eyes again, saying:

"Perhaps I could better answer your question by telling
you how another patient bore herself in—circumstances akin
to yours.  Will it tire you?  I promise not to be unduly
prolix.  And to listen commits you to no course of action.
Now, shall I go on?"

"I'd love you to go on!"

Always in extremes, the little wayward creature.  She
flushed and sparkled at the Doctor as he took from its place
on his writing-table a triptych photograph-frame in
gold-mounted mother-o'-pearl, folded the leaves so as to reveal
but one of the portraits, and held under Margot's eyes the
delicately-tinted photograph of a girl of twenty.  The
portrait had been taken the year following Saxham's return
from South Africa with his young wife.

"How beautiful!" Margot exclaimed.

"Beautiful, as you say, but does she look happy?"

Margot wrinkled her dainty eyebrows, puzzling out the
question.  Did she look happy, the girl of the portrait,
whose face and figure might have served one of the old Greek
masters as model for an Artemis to be carved upon a gem?
Well, perhaps not quite happy, now one came to look
again.

The black-lashed eyes of golden hazel were full of wistful
sadness, there was a faintly indicated fold between the fine
arched eyebrows, much darker than the rippling red-brown
hair, whose luxuriance seemed to weigh down the little
Greek head.  The closely-folded, deeply-cut lips spoke
dumbly of sorrow, the nymph-like bosom seemed rising on a
breath of weariness.  Something was lacking to complete
her beauty.  So much was plain even to Margot.  But not
until the Doctor showed by the side of the first, the second
portrait, did she realise what that Something was.

In the first portrait both face and figure were shown in
profile.  In the second, bearing a date of two years later,
the beautiful, sensitive face of the young woman was turned
towards you.  Still rather grave than smiling, she held in
her arms a sturdy baby boy of some twelve months, upon
whose downy head her chin lightly rested.  The clasp of her
slender arms about her child, the poise of her still nymph-like
figure, expressed fulness of life, buoyant energy, and
happiness in fullest measure.  What was previously lacking
was now made clear.

"Lovely, quite lovely!" trilled the sweet little voice.
"And what an exquie kiddy!"

"Then you do not dislike children?" Saxham asked, as
his visitor's husband had done not long ago.

"On the contrary," the little lady assured him, "I rather
cotton to them.  But"—she shrugged her little shoulders
prettily and quoted boldly from another woman—"but the
fag of having them doesn't—appeal!"

The Doctor replaced the threefold frame and turned his
regard back upon his visitor.

"These photographs speak for themselves ..." he said
quietly.  "She—the mother of the boy you see, was, when
she first knew that she was to be a mother, fragile and
delicate in body, and in mind highly-strung and sensitive.  As a
child she had known neglect and unkind usage.  Twice she
had sustained an overwhelming shock, physical and mental;
she had rallied, passed through a crisis and regained lost
ground.  But the possibility of a relapse was not to be
blinked at.  It was a lion in the path!"

The slight form of the listener was convulsed by a
shudder.  The pretty face lost its wild-rose tint.  The lion
in the path ... Margot saw him crouching, his tawny eyes
aflame, his great jaws slavering, his tail lashing the dust,
his great muscles tightening for the fearful spring.  And
Saxham went on:

"She maintained from the first a sweet, sane mental
standpoint.  She tamed her lion by sheer force of will.  Her
courage was her own: she did not owe it to the physician
and surgeon.  But he advised as he knew best, and she
followed his advice implicitly, as to wholesome diet and regular
exercise, thus keeping her body in health.  She surrounded
herself with objects that were beautiful in form and colour.
She made a point of hearing great music and of re-reading
the works of great poets, essayists, and novelists.  She
wished her child to owe much to pre-natal influences.  For
that these——"

The speaker faltered for a moment, before he resumed
the thread of his discourse.

"—That these form character for good or evil no physiologist
can deny.  Therefore while she did not flee from,
she avoided the sight of deformity or ugliness, as she shunned
active infection, or tainted air.  It was desirable that her
child should be healthy, strong, and beautiful.  But the love
of loveliness, though one of the dominants of her character,
scales lowest of the triad.  Human love, the love of mother,
husband, and friend rank above it, and first of all stands the
love of God."

"How awfully good she must be!"

"She took the child, first and last, as a gift from God to
her.  If she lived or died, and she longed inexpressibly to
live—Death, like Life, would be the fulfilment of the Divine
Will.  Fortified by the Sacraments of her Church she lay
down upon her bed of pain as though it were an altar.  She
suffered intensely——"

His voice broke.

"She suffered inexpressibly.  Not until the actual
crisis did I have recourse to chloroform.  When I was
about to use it she said to me: '*Not yet! ... I will
wear it a little longer...  this mother's crown of thorns.*'
To-day the crown is one of roses.  Does not this appeal
to you?"

The Doctor's supple hand displayed the third portrait in
the triptych, and Margot saw the same assured joy, rounded
with a richer and more deep content.  The exquisite face
was fuller, the outlines of the form displayed the ripeness
of early maturity, the slender palm was now a stately tree.
The girl of twenty was merged in the woman of thirty, rich
in all feminine graces, beautiful exceedingly, with the
beauty that is not only of line and proportion, form and
colour, but shines from within, irradiating the perishable
living clay with the immortal radiance of the soul.  Her boy
stood at her side, a manly square-headed young British
twelve-year-old, wearing a simple, distinctive dress;
familiar to us all.

"Y-yes.  But I'm afraid you have forgotten: I told you
at the beginning, or I meant to....  My—my own mother
died when I was born!"

"And that sad fact increases your natural fear and repugnance.
Naturally.  It will strike you as a curious point of
resemblance between your case and that of the—patient
whose portrait I have shown you, when I tell you that her
mother did not survive the birth of a later child.  May I
tell you further that the possibility of some inherited
weakness does not render you more promising—regarded as a
subject for the treatment of Wolfenbuchel and Krauss."

Margot was beginning to hate this stern-faced man who
set forth things so clearly.  He had bored her almost to
weeping.  Why on earth had she come?  The fact that
Franky's sister Trix's boy Ronald had been helped into the
world by Saxham thirteen years ago and recently operated
on for the removal of the appendix, was no reason that
Franky's wife should regard him as infallible.  She glanced
at her tiny jewelled wrist-watch.  Ten whole minutes had
gone.  She rose.

"You have been so kind, and I have been so much
interested.  But I must go now!" she said, like a weary
child pleading to be let out of school.  "Franky—my
husband—will be waiting.  I have promised to lunch with
him at the Club."

"If he is here, perhaps Lord Norwater would like to
speak to me," Saxham suggested.

Margot lied badly.  She reddened as she answered:

"Oh, what a pity that he did not come!"





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`MARGOT IS SQUARE`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER XXII


.. class:: center medium bold

   MARGOT IS SQUARE

.. vspace:: 2

She was in what she would have termed "a blue funk"
for fear that Saxham would accompany her to the threshold.
But he merely bowed her out of the consulting-room and
smartly shut his door.  Then she tripped to the waiting-room
and beckoned forth Franky with an air of buoyant,
fictitious cheerfulness.  Her eyes were radiant, her little
face was dressed in artful smiles....

"Did I seem long?  Were you getting the hump?" she
asked of Franky, who rose and hurried to meet her,
dropping *Punches* all over the place.  His smooth hair was
almost rumpled and his brown eyes begged like a retriever's.
He asked in the kind of whisper that travels miles:

"Yes—no!  Did you pull off the interview?  What does
the Doctor——"

"S-sh!"  She glanced anxiously towards the one remaining
patient.  "Tell you when we get out.  Impossible here!"

He urged: "But is it all right?"

"As right as rain!"

"Good egg!"  She had got him out of the room and as
far as the hall door.  "Stop! ... Wait!  Oughtn't I to
go and thank——"

"No—no!"  The door was open, the neat little
landau-limousine that had brought them was waiting by the
kerb-stone.  Before Franky knew it, Margot had plucked him
down the steps, pulled him into the car, and given the
chauffeur the signal.  They were in Hanover Square before
he recovered his breath.

"Oh come, I say, Kittums!  That sort of Sandow business
can't be good for you.  Why you're in such a thundering
hurry to get me away, I'd rather like to know?"

Her heart shook her, but she lied again bravely.

"Didn't you want to hear what the Doctor told me about
the 'Purple Dreams' treatment?"

"More than anything in the world.  That drug with the
freak name! ... Can it do any harm—to you and——"

"Not a scrap!"

She planted a flying kiss between his ear and his collar.
He greatly appreciated the attention, though it tickled him
horribly.

"Dr. Saxham said it was a frightfully clever, practicable
method.  Absolutely harmless, and the patient doesn't
suffer—not that much!"  She measured off an infinitesimal
bit of finger-nail and showed him, and went on as he caught
the little hand and gratefully mumbled it: "You don't
know a thing that happens.  You simply go to bye-bye.
And—there's always the baby when you wake up!"

"A first-class baby?"  His harping maddened her.  "A
healthy little buffer to send to Eton and represent us in the
Regiment, and inherit the title presently when his poor old
Pater pops?  Just look me in the face like the little sport
you are, Margot, and tell me that you're playing square
with me.  For this—for this is the game of Life!"

He had both her hands.  He made her look at him.  She
met his eager stare with limpid eyes.  And all the while that
sentence of Saxham's about the pre-natal poisoning of the
springs of existence, drummed, drummed at the back of
her brain.  "*What a little beast I am!*" she mentally
commented, hearing her own voice answering:

"I've told you No, and that I am playing square with
you!"  She grasped the fact that Franky had suffered, by
the grunt of relief with which he loosed her hands.  "And
so it's settled I go to Berlin about the middle of—September,
say?"

"Wow-wow!  It's us for the gay life!  Just when the
beastly hole's as dusty as the Sahara and as hot as
hell!"

"You won't be in the beastly hole, and perhaps I needn't
go before the beginning of October.  You can go down to
Brakehills and slay away at the pheasants, and run over
when I cable, to bring me back——"

"With my boy!  Our boy, Kittums!"

His simple, kind face was quivering.  He put out a
strong brown hand and laid it on hers, and she gave the
hand a little affectionate nip:

"Hullo!"  Perhaps he talked on to cover up the momentary
lapse into sentiment.  "Pipe old St. George's, where
we did the deed!  Hardly seems close on six months since
we got spliced, does it?  And there's the Bijou
Cottage...."  Franky thus irreverently designated the large,
drab, stucco-faced, eminently respectable if mousey
mansion on the Square's east side, where Margot's bachelor
Uncle Derek lived with his collection of moths and beetles.
"Shall we stop and give the old gentleman a cheero?  Is he
at all likely to be in?"

His hand was on the silk-netted rubber bulb of the
chauffeur's whistle, when Margot caught it back.

"No, don't stop!  Of course he's in.  He never goes out,
unless it is to a meeting of the Entomological Society, or the
Museum of Natural History, or some other place equally
stuffy and scientific.  Besides, Uncle Derek is a
vegetarian—and there wouldn't be anything but tomato soup, and
pea-flour cutlets, and Lepidoptera for lunch!"

"Poor little woman, was she peckish, then?  All lity,
we'll chuff along and fill up tanks at the Club.  Bally odd
bill of fare, pea-flour cutlets and Lepidop—what's-their-names?
But we'll get things nearly as rummy served up to
us in Berlin.  Pork chops with sweet gooseberry sauce, and
pink sausages with lilac cabbage and dumplings.  Why do
you look so scared?"

She forced a laugh.

"Not scared, but you said '*we*' ..."

"You don't suppose I could go shooting when you were—facing
what you've got to face?" he asked her, and added,
in a tone and with a look that she had once before
encountered from him: "When you go to Berlin in October,
Kittums, I go with you; take that as straight from
Headquarters, old child!  Unless—something happens to prevent
our going there at all!"

He added, answering the mute question in her eyes:

"Something that's been on the cards since the Anglo-French
Agreement of 1904.  It cropped up again in 1905,
when the German Kaiser's feelings were so upset by John
Bull's carryings-on with the pretty lady in the tricolour
petticoat and Cap of Liberty, that he called on the Sultan
of Morocco at Tangier to ask his Sublimity to interfere.
And again in 1908 we were up against it ... when Austria
annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Russia took the
needle, and William ordered out his best suit of shining
armour in readiness for a scrap....  If there's anything
in the Triple Entente, the fat was nearly in the fire then....
And again in 1911, over the French occupation of
Morocco, when the German gunboat *Panther* and the
German cruiser *Berlin* were sent to the closed Fort of
Agadir near the mouth of the smelly River Sus.  That
piffed out after a good deal of what they call 'acute tension
between the Powers.'  To the Services acute tension
means the stoppin' of leave.  And I'd fixed things up for
spendin' the July fortnight before Henley with some jolly
people at Baden-Baden, and if the trip had come off, the
chances are I'd have come back engaged to another girl!"

"Are you sorry?"

"Do I look sorry?" was the quick *riposte*.  He went on:
"France and Germany went in for 'precautionary measures'
that time.  Precautionary measures mean concentration of
troops on both frontiers, and General Manoeuvres on the
biggest scale.  Dress-rehearsal for a general mobilisation,
you tumble?  While our Home Fleet quietly concentrated
on our north-east coast.  And just when the lid seemed on
the point of being taken off, Billiam the Bumptious climbed
down, and withdrew from Agadir.  The squabble was
patched up.  France got a free hand in Morocco in return
for the open door and 100,000 square miles of the Congo
Basin.  French and German troops left off mugging at one
another across the frontiers.  Whitehall Wireless, Nordeich
Station, and the Eiffel Tower emitted radios reversin' the
weather-signals from 10 to 0, which means a dead calm.
And the British Fleet gave up all hope and went home to bed.

"But—and don't you swipe in, Kittums, for I'm gettin' to
the thrillin' part—the bigwigs who manage Foreign Affairs
weren't taken in so easily.  They knew the bad blood had
got to break out somewhere, and it did.  Italy and Turkey
went to war in November, 1911, and the Balkan Rumpus
broke out ten months later.  Turkey didn't win, though her
Army has had German instructors ever since von Moltke
licked it into shape in 1835, and Germany'd naturally
expected her to finish as top-dog.  So the concessions
Germany wanted from Turkey were lost.  I rather think the
Prussian Eagle had its eye on Adrianople on the Black Sea
coast, and the Gallipoli Peninsula, for the furtherin' of her
views on the Near East—and Austria had a fancy for the
Sanjak of Novibazar—and wanted Salonika as a base for
operations on the Mediterranean.  Anyhow, both of 'em
were wiped on the jaw.  And William the All Too Knowing,
as Courtley calls him—Courtley's going in strong for
Nietzsche just now—says his works are a slogging attack on
Teutonism!—William has got to the end of his patience.
The shining armour's been hanging up all these years,
getting too tight for an Emperor inclined to run to tummy.
The shining sword was getting rusty in its regulation sheath.
And then in the nick of time—happens the Affair of
Sarajevo.  The news came through that Sunday in Paris.  I
remember how Spitz's Restaurant boiled over, and the
people were shouting 'Sarajevo' on the boulevards.  By
George!  I forgot you were in bed and asleep while we were
dining."

Margot, between waking and sleeping, had got some
inkling of the tragedy of that night.  She asked, as Franky
took off his hat and proceeded to mop his non-intellectual
forehead:

"And is Sarajevo likely to stop me from going to Berlin?"

Franky left off mopping and said, looking at her squarely:

"If Austria's Note to Serbia is—what the Kaiser would
like it to be—you may take it we're on the giddy verge of
a General All-Round Scrap."

"You mean—a war?"

"I mean *the* War that'll dwarf all others by comparison.
The War of Nations, that the prophet wrote of in
Revelations.  Armageddon....  The Last Battle.  The Big
Bust Up that comes before the end."

"Darling old boy, what rot!"

"Rot if you like.  You wait and see what happens.
D'you pipe me tipping you the gag Asquithian?"  He
grinned at the idea.

"Franky, you've set me asking myself something."

"Why you've married an idiot? ... Is that it?"  He
turned upon her a rueful face from which the grin had been
wiped away.

Margot said, as the car turned smoothly into Short
Street and stopped before the Club portico:

"No, but—How is it you know—all the things you know,
when I've always known you knew nothing about anything?"

He shook his head.

"Give it up! ... No, I don't!  The answer is—I'm one
of those fellows—and the Services are simply stiff with 'em,
who are absolute asses till it's necessary for 'em to be
something else."





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`A MODERN CLUB`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER XXIII


.. class:: center medium bold

   A MODERN CLUB

.. vspace:: 2

Perhaps in those prehistoric days before the War, you
knew the big, cool, ground-floor dining-room of the "Ladies'
Social" Club.  They lunched excellently at Margot's pet
table in the corner near the conservatory, between whose
rows of well-tended pot-plants you pass to the smoke-room,
celebrated for its Persian divan, and green-and-rose-coloured
glass dome.

Soon the Club would be abandoned to sweeps, painters,
charwomen, and window-cleaners.  Just now everything
was in full swing.  As the little tables became vacant, the
drawing-rooms and lounges filled up.  The smoke-room
was a crush of well got-up men and extravagantly-caparisoned
women, chattering nineteen to the dozen under a
thick blue canopy of Turkish, Egyptian, and Virginian.
The tang of Kümmel and Benedictine and Crème de Menthe
came to you with the fragrance of the Club's especial coffee
and the reek of innumerable illusion perfumes.

People were having a cigarette and a gossip before going
on to Lord's to see the tennis-singles between Oxford and
Cambridge; or the Inter-Regimental Polo Finals at Hurlingham.
Others had just motored back from witnessing the
rowing-matches at Henley, between Eton and Darley, and
the Eton second Eight and Montbeau College, and were
recuperating before dropping in for a whiff of the new
comedy at the Ambassador's, or the latest revue at the
Fleur de Lis.  To be followed by Tango Tea at the Rocroy,
or Unlimited Bridge at the house of an accommodating
friend.

Perhaps you can recall them—those men and women of
the best and bluest blood in Britain, strenuously spending
their days in doing nothing as expensively as ever it could
be done.  Light, frivolous, shallow, dry-hearted; restlessly
seeking new things on which to waste their barren energies,
they seemed, and bore out their seeming in all thoroughness;
the degenerate sons and daughters of a once great and
splendid race.

Save Vanity and the Pride of Life there seemed but little
in Eve or Adam.  Not overmuch grey brain-matter
appeared to be contained within their small neat skulls.
Though in comparison with the modern Eve, slangy, loud,
extravagantly attired in every tint of the Teutonic
dye-chemist's chromatic register, topped with feathers that
missed the ceiling by a bare half-foot, Adam in his neutral
greys, and buffs and browns, and umbers, struck you as a
being of mild demeanour and uncostly apparel, until
looking closer, you found him out.

His nice hair was gummed about his head as sleekly as a
golliwog's.  He sported stays, for the preservation of his
silhouette.  His gossamer cambric exhaled perfumes like a
Georgian dandy's.  Fashionable complexion-creams lent
his tanned and well-shaved cheek a tempting peachiness.
His socks were all too lovely for description by this feeble
pen of mine.  The uppers of his boots were of every
imaginable material and substance, ranging from silk brocade,
green lizard, and ivory-white shark skin, to sandy-pink
armadillo-belly, or the tender grey of the African gazelle.

The results of the Olympic Games of 1912 must have
made dour reading for the fathers of these youthful Britons,
remembering their own triumphs in the early eighties.  A
bitter pill for those stark old men, their grandfathers,
makers of 'Varsity records in '61 and '67, whose faith in the
superiority of British lungs and muscles had been bequeathed
them by their own sires.  Yet their juniors took
it calmly.  They carried the stigma of inferiority with
cheerful indifference.  Even while holding it the thing best
worth living for—they placidly submitted to be outclassed
in sport.

And both the man and the woman of this era were possessed
by strange crazes and pleased with vivid contrasts.
The musical jig-saw puzzles of Lertes, Hein, and de Blonc
vied in their favour with the weird Oriental Operas of the
Russian Rimsky-Korsakov and the delicate rhapsodies of
Delius, and the sylvan nymphs and fauns of Russian Ballet
shared their plaudits with Señora Panchita and Herr Maxi
Zuchs, the celebrated exponents of the Tango.

Ah, yes, it was an extraordinary era.  Slips from that
old, old Tree that bore the Forbidden Fruit had been
successfully grafted upon so many old-world stocks in
British orchards, that you caught a tang of its exotic flavour
in almost everything.  Play ran high.  Luxury ran riot.
Period Balls and Upas Club Cabaret Suppers were
IT—absolutely IT.  Morality was at lowest ebb—Religion a
forgotten formulary.  And as the Christian virtues cheapened,
so the prices of dress, jewellery, motor-cars, and other
indispensables of modern existence climbed to still more
amazing altitudes.  The marvel was, because nobody
seemed to have any money—where the money came from
to pay for these things?  What we are yet to pay for the
wholesale levelling of moral barriers, and the abolition of
old-world modesty and good taste, that distinguished the
years of ill-fame 1913 and 1914, only Heaven knows.

Even more comprehensively pervasive than the illusion
perfumes extracted from coal-tar by German chemists, and
supplied us by German manufacturers; even more striking
than the dazzling, vivid aniline dyes, procured from the
same source, even more potent than the vast array of
by-product drugs which represent as it were the scum of the
insulated vats wherein the Teuton chemist macerates and
mingles his high explosives—was the strange, mysteriously
pervasive flavour, the seductively-suggestive tang of evil
in the social atmosphere.  You caught the look of secret,
intimate, half-cynical knowledge in the faces not only of
the merest youths, but of the youngest, freshest, prettiest
girls.  Subjects held unmentionable a few years ago were
openly discussed in English drawing-rooms.  Curious lore
in strange things old and new was much sought after at this
period, when Cubism and Futurism governed design, not
only in dress and stage scenery, but in Painting, Sculpture,
and Architecture; and dances known in the voodoo-houses
of East Africa and the West Indies, and the hells of Central
America and the Argentine were seen in the ball-rooms
as in the brothels, of Paris and London, Petrograd and
Brussels, Vienna, New York, and Berlin.

Novelty was so much the rage, that if the Arch-Enemy of
Mankind had appeared among the exclusive patrons of a
fashionable night-club in any one of these cities, a hearty
welcome would have been extended to him, and his ripe
experience would have been laid under contribution with a
view to imparting to the latest Cabaret entertainment some
exotic novelty from Hell.

.. vspace:: 2

Franky with obtrusive care selected a comfortable corner
of the Persian divan for Margot, and while she signed for
coffee and Kümmel, established himself at her side.

They were isolated, it seemed to Kittums.  Friends
nodded and smiled cordially, but did not attempt to join
them.  Was it because Franky's too-possessive manner
had told secrets? ... She shivered and glanced at her
lord.  He said, as the light-footed button-boys scoured
about with coffee and liqueur-trays, while the electric fans
purred, the blue smoke-canopy thickened under the green
and rose glass dome, and the clamour of many feminine
voices, in combination with the gaudy feathers of the
clamourers, suggested the South American macaw-house
at the Zoo:

"My eye! you're pretty thick in here.  Might be a fog
in mid-Channel."  He mounted a square monocle recently
purchased in Paris and the pride of his bosom, threw back
his head and stared up into the famous green and rose dome.
"Swagger affair.  How much did it tot up to?"

"Seventeen hundred, clear, with the carpet and the divan."

"Pretty stiff!"  His doleful whistle set Margot's teeth
on edge.  She added:

"And rattling cheap at the price!  And—if it wasn't, I
was spending my own money....  There was nobody—then—to
interfere!"

He conceded:

"Of course I don't suggest that you were done in the eye.
Probably you got the value of your dibs.  But you'll have
something better to spend cash on presently.  Me, too!
We must both draw in our horns now, Kittums.  For
the sake of—you know who! ... Hullo!  Is anything
wrong?"

She had winced, but she gritted her little teeth, and
fought back the rising hysteria.  She could have shrieked,
or thrown the little coffee-pot at his head.  He went on,
recognising friends through the smoke-haze:

"There's Lady Beau with that German aviator-chap
we met in Paris.  Big red-headed brute.  You remember
him?  And—who's the girl?  But for her hair, I'd say it
was Miss Saxham.  By the Great Brass Hat, it is!  With a
wig, or dyed...."

"Dyed.  It was done in Paris—done most beautifully."  Margot's
eyes had lighted up with interest.  "I must have
forgotten to tell you.  I've known it three or four days.
Don't you like it?"

"Like it?"  Franky had reached for his little glass and
gulped the contents hurriedly.  "My stars, I never saw
such a transformation.  Order another Kümmel, please, to
give me a buck-up."

"Take mine.  I simply loathe the sticky stuff."  She
added, as Franky obliged: "*I* think that Pat looks ripping."

"All too ripping.  That's where the trouble comes in."  He
went on: "When her hair was black, you knew where
it was you'd seen her.  Makin' one in an endless procession
of women—all with long eyes and big busts and curving
hips, walkin'—like pussy-cats along a roof-ridge, on the
walls of those old Egyptian temples we did together—that
November when I got such spoons on you—going up with
the Gillinghams from Cairo to Philae—a flat-bottomed Nile
tug towin' the whole crowd in a string of dahabeahs.  You
remember those ochre-coloured Nile sunrises?  When a
dust-storm had been blowin' over the Desert, and the River
was all wrinkly white, like curdled milk."

"How killingly poetic!"

"Am I poetic?  Good egg!  Never thought I'd live to
be called that."

"Live and learn!"  Margot's laugh was a hard little
silvery tinkle.  She too was remembering the sunrises and
sunsets of Egypt, and the long days under the green canvas
awnings.  How beautiful she had thought the brown eyes
that seemed only vacuous now.  She, Margot, would be ugly
very soon now, she told herself.  Already her small face
showed lines and hollows.  Soon beauty-loving men and
women would turn their eyes away....  Her cheval-glass
would tell her why, and shop-windows when she passed
them would reveal her shapelessness.  She would only
possess interest for three people.  For the doctor, as a
patient.  For the certificated nurse, as a Case.  For her
husband, as the potential mother of the boy he longed for.
And—what price Margot?

"Should you like me to take you to see some polo, or
wouldn't a chuff-chuff in the country be best?"  Franky's
eyes were full of hungry solicitude as they rested on the
small, pinched features.  "You look a bit fagged, it strikes
me!"

She nipped her little lower lip, stung by the tone of
sympathetic proprietorship.  "Oh! very well.  A drive!" she
told him, and they passed together from the smoking-room.
The sheath-skirt revealed, as she moved, what she would
have hidden.  Von Herrnung smiled, following the little
figure with bold, curious glances.  Other men stared, if more
discreetly.  Towering feathers nodded to each other as
their feminine wearers commented:

"Poor little Margot, how quite too rough on her!"

Said Lady Beauvayse, assuming the rip-saw Yankee
accent in which it pleased her to deliver her witticisms:

"Say now! if we women could pick babies right away off
the strawberry-vines, it would save a deal of trouble, and a
considerable pile of self-respect."

Everybody laughed.  A slender white and golden woman
with a string of sapphires very much the colour of her own
eyes, picked up a toy Pekingese that squatted near her, and
said, cuddling the goggling morsel under her chin:

"I agree.  When I look at my two precious duckies I say
to myself: 'You little dears, for each of your sweet sakes I
became a plain woman with a shapeless silhouette and
saucer-eyes.  Now that I've done my duty to your pappy and
Posterity, this is the only kind of baby I'll indulge in."  She
kissed the Pekingese on the end of its black snub-nose.
"And when I want a new one—I'll buy it at the shop!"

"*Noch besser*.  Why not hire one? ..." suggested von
Herrnung.

Mrs. Charterhouse laughed and gave him the Pekingese
to hold.  But it snapped at him furiously and she took the
little beast back again.

"Dogs do not like me," said the big German.  "You will
read perhaps in novels that that is a bad sign, yes?"

"I never read novels," returned Mrs. Charterhouse, with
her famous manner, "nor any books, only bits of the papers
for the Sporting and Society news.  And Reports of Divorce
Proceedings, and the Notices in Bankruptcy.  One likes to
know what one's friends are doing, and where they are
to be found.  Don't you, Count?  Not that there is any
great difficulty in ascertaining your whereabouts, just now,
I fancy....  Why, what has become of Patrine?"

"Miss Saxham went in there just now to write a letter,"
said the smiling von Herrnung, pointing to the leather-covered
swing-doors communicating with the writing-room.
"She comes now, I think!  Yes, it is she!"  He rose with
his air of exaggerated courtesy as the tall figure of Patrine
Saxham returned through the swing-doors and re-crossed the
room.  She carried her head high, and had a letter in her
hand.  The alteration in the colour of her hair made her
whiteness almost startling.  There were bluish shadows
about her long eyes, and her rounded cheeks had lost a little
of their fulness, but her beauty had never been more
apparent than now.

"She has dyed, therefore she is dead to me!" groaned
Courtley, who was, as usual, in attendance on Lady
Beauvayse.  He added, plaintively: "It's like—white-washing
the Sphinx, or enamelling a first-class battle-cruiser in some
fashionable colour.  Why did you let her do it, my lady fair?"

Lady Beauvayse retorted:

"Am I Miss Saxham's mother that I should meddle in her
love-affairs?"

"If I was acquainted with her mother," said Courtley,
below his breath, "and thought the good lady would take
my tip seriously, I'd step in and nip this affair in the bud.
It's no go, even if Miss Saxham thinks it is.  It's a dud.
That German flying-chap is booked to marry a cousin; a
Baroness Something von Wolfensbragen-Hirschenbuttel.
I've seen it in the Berlin *Lokal Anzeiger*, and that's
inspired, a sort of Imperial Court Almanac.  And even if it
wasn't true, there are reasons—"  His kind grey eyes
were worried, he tugged at his pointed black beard in a
vexed way.  "Take me seriously, Miladi, tell her what I've
told you, before it's too late!"

"And bring on myself the fate of the interferer....
Couldn't you—since you're so anxious?" Lady Beauvayse
began.

"Not possible," said Courtley.  "Too crushed with
responsibilities.  Got to brush up my seamanship, while my
junior executive swots away in Docks at Chatham, fillin' in
the watch-bill and making out commissioning-cards."

"You've got a ship, do you mean?"

Courtley nodded.

"They call her one at the Admiralty just by way of being
funny.  When they've scraped off the dirt enough to get at
her, she may turn out to be a first-class protected cruiser.
Twenty months out of commission—and mobilised for the
Spithead Naval Review."

"Ought one to be glad? ... Does it mean that we're
to congratulate you on promotion?" asked puzzled Lady
Beauvayse.

"Well," Courtley admitted cautiously, "when I've got
my full-dress frock-coat and sword out of pawn, and hoisted
my pennant and called on the post Commander-in-Chief—I
shall be something between a Rear-Admiral and a Post
Captain—or they'll have told me wrong."

"And the Review—what do you call it?" persisted Lady
Beauvayse.  "Can one go and see it—whenever it comes off?"

"It'll be big enough to see—with a stiffish pair of
binkies," admitted Courtley in his gentlest manner; "and the
newspapers seem to have arranged it for somewhere in the
middle of the month.  As to what you're to call it—if you
called it an Object Lesson on the biggest scale for the use
of German Kultur Classes, perhaps you wouldn't be very
wide of the bull."

He got up before Lady Beauvayse could rejoin, and had
met Patrine, and engineered her into his vacated seat next
her friend upon the divan almost before she knew.  She
lowered her tall person upon the cushions, studiously
avoiding von Herrnung's glances.  She wore a white
embroidered gown of cobwebby material and extreme
scantiness, a stole of black cock's feathers was looped about
her shoulders, and on her dead beech-leaf-coloured hair sat
a curious little hat of glittering silver spangles, from which
sprang a single black cock's plume.

"What have you all been talking about?" she asked,
looking about her.

Lady Wastwood, who sat near, answered, balancing her
long, slim, fragile personality on the fender-stool before the
hearth that was filled with tall ferns and flowering plants
in pots:

"We were saying—what a wretched pity the process of
racial reproduction is so abominably unbecoming.  It
really points to a loose style of reasoning on the part
of Nature—or whoever it is who arranges these things!"

Who does not know Lady Wastwood.  She affected, at
this period, a skull-cap of gold-green hair and a triangular
chalk-white face, with a V-shaped mouth, painted scarlet
as a Pierrot's.  Her eyebrows were black and resembled
musical slurs.  Through her few diaphanous garments you
could have counted every bone of her frail person, so light
that it was a favourite vacation joke with her eldest
boy—who was now at Sandhurst qualifying for a Cavalry
Commission—to sprint with his widowed mother on his shoulder
up and down corridors and stairs.

Listen to Trixie:

"I suppose—Nature.  She's so unreasonable—that must
be why she's a she, in literature.  She implanted in us poor
women the raging desire to be pretty under all imaginable
circumstances....  At the same time she says to us:
'You're immoral, unnatural, and selfish, if you don't
replenish the Race.  Go and do it!'  Consequently, when
one is ordered in that bullying way to choose between
immorality and ugliness, one calls out: 'Oh! do let me be
pretty, please!'"

A soldierly, good-looking man, sitting with a charming
girl in a particularly smoky corner, lazily propounded:

"Why do women covet prettiness beyond everything?"

"To please men, I rather surmise," said Lady Beauvayse,
turning her Romney head in the direction of the speaker,
who queried:

"Ah! but why do women want to please men?"

"I can answer that," interrupted Mrs. Charterhouse.
"Because she who pleases is perfectly sure of having a
gorgeous time."

"It has been said by some inspired idiot," lisped Lady
Wastwood "that women make themselves beautiful for the
sake of their own sex.  Give us your opinion on this
question, Count von Herrnung.  Did I put on this perfectly
devey frock for Miss Saxham, or for you?"

"*Gnädige Gräfin*, for neither myself nor Miss Saxham.
For your own pleasure," said von Herrnung, "have you joy
in making yourself beautiful."

"You feel like that when your tailor has done you particularly
well?" asked Lady Wastwood, wickedly, looking down
her long, thin nose to hide the sparks of humour in her eyes.
Half a dozen pairs of ears were cocked to catch the answer,
in which von Herrnung's characteristic lack of humour
showed.

"Gracious Countess, certainly.  It is *prachtvoll* for a
cultured man to study and develop his physical advantages.
To please women," he made his little insolent bow, "who
adore Beauty, and for the sake of ingratiating oneself with
men.  But above all for one's own sake.  For ugliness is
despicable," said von Herrnung.  His florid face paled, his
hard blue eyes dilated, he shivered as he spoke with
uncontrollable disgust.  "It is—*niedrig*!  There is no other word!
No longer to be beautiful and strong—that would be
horrible!  There are many ugly accidents in our German
Flying Service.  Thus far I have escaped disfigurement.
But when my time comes I shall take care to be killed
outright.  Better to die than to be made hideous!"

"Did you hear?" said the man in the distant corner to
the charming girl who shared it with him.  "The fellow's
dead in earnest.  And he is uncommonly good-looking,
though I don't care about the German Service type of man
myself.  Don't like their clothes, don't like their jewellery,
don't like their tone when they're talking to women, and
simply loathe it when they're talking to me!"

"It's a case of Doctor Fell," said his pretty friend.  "Now
*I* should admire him—if he admired himself a little less, and
his valet or somebody with influence over him could
persuade him to cut that awful thumb-nail.  No, you can't see
it now.  He's wearing a glove on his left hand.  But it
can't be under two inches long."

"Queer kind of freak for a Twentieth Centurion," said
the man contemptuously.  "All very well for the Imperial
Court of China, or a Stone Age make-up for a Covent
Garden Fancy Ball.  But for a London drawin'-room in the
year 1914 it is a little off the bull.  We must approach
Miss Saxham in the matter of cutting it.  She appears to
be the Ruling Star."

His friend glanced across at the big knot of people
gathered near the ferny fireplace.

"They go about together a good deal, and he does stare
at her in rather a possessive style.  She's so awfully good
to look at, isn't she?"

"She is; but she isn't quite so good for you to know!"

"Why?"

"Could we drop the subject?  I'll say why later.  Let's
scoot now!  With luck, we could nip in for the end of the
second act of 'The Filberts' at Ryley's Theatre, and see
Jimmy Griggson do 'The Dance of the Varalette.'"

And they rose and sauntered away in search of entertainment,
leaving Cynthia Charterhouse drawing out von
Herrnung, who seemed in a particularly arrogant mood.
Did he like England and London especially?  Did he find
English women as nice, generally, as the friends he had left
at home?

ü

"Nice....  One is charmed with English ladies!"
declared von Herrnung.  "So tall, willowy, and elegant, so
independent of manner, and so amiably ready to make a
stranger feel at home!  True, they have not the plumpness
and repose of our German ladies ... at the theatres
especially they are rather thin than otherwise....  But
they have *gehen* and *chic*"—he showed his white
teeth—"and change is a delightful thing!"

Patrine, silent in her settee-corner, wondered whether
Trixie Wastwood and Cynthia Charterhouse knew that he
was insulting them?

"Change from a fat woman to a thin one, is that what you
mean?" asked Mrs. Charterhouse.  She added: "I'm so glad
we strike you as having lots of go.  Perhaps it's a result of
our being given to exercise, that general effect of slimness
you mention.  But if German women don't walk, or ride, or
skate, or fence, or swim, they do dance a great deal."

"They dance a great deal, yes!" agreed von Herrnung.
"One might say they are passionately devoted to it.  Dancing
is also one of the chief joys of a German officer's
life—when he has handsome partners to choose amongst!"  He
added: "When one is young, and the blood runs hot in the
veins, what more glowing pleasures can Life offer, than to
ride a noble horse, to drink glorious wine, or to dance all
night with a beautiful woman, to the sound of music
voluptuous and exquisite!"

Patrine, behind the shelter of a copy of the *Pall Mall
Gazette*, was shuddering uncontrollably.  Her life seemed
driven back from the extremities to centre about her heart.
In that and in her brain were glowing cores of fire.  All else
was ice, rigid and heavy and cold.

"Dear me!" came plaintively from Mrs. Charterhouse.
She signalled with her eyebrows to Lady Wastwood and
continued, as the diaphanous Trixie came drifting to her
assistance: "Really, I shall have to seek a delightful change
by going to Germany.  I'd quite forgotten how different
you are!  The way you talk about your blood, and all that.
It's simply too awfully interesting!  Trixie, you've got to
listen to this!"

"I need no telling, I assure you.  I have been drinking in
Count von Herrnung's eloquence at every pore," affirmed
Trixie.  She added: "Like you I have been deeply intrigued
by his descriptions of his countrymen.  So, *so* different from
our poor creatures, who don't drink glorious wine because
they funk gouty complications, and leave their noble horses
eating their heads off in loose-boxes while they're scorching
about the country in racing-cars.  And as for dancing all
night—"  She shrugged her frail shoulders, and elevated
her Pierrot eyebrows beneath the veil that tightly swathed
her white triangular face.

"Doesn't it fire you to go to Germany?" gushed
Mrs. Charterhouse.  "Why"—she demanded, raising her fine
eyes to the genuine Adam ceiling—"why can't my husband
get a post in the Berlin Diplomatic, instead of stupid old
Petersburg?  One never *dreamed* Germans could be so
interesting before!"

"We are interesting, yes!" blandly agreed von Herrnung.
He lighted a fresh cigarette, balanced his magnificent person
upon an inlaid Oriental chess-stool, folded his huge arms
upon his broad breast, and turned upon Trixie and the
impressionable Cynthia the batteries of his superb blue eyes.
"*Es mag wohl sein*—it may possibly be because the Englishman
is a human machine—a cold and formal, if intelligent
being; while the German is a child of Nature, whatever his
calling may be.  His bounding pulses throb under the official
or military uniform as though it were a fawn-skin worn by
a young satyr.  He can sing.  He can revel.  He can enjoy.
He can love——"

"He can love!  Now you're getting really quite too
interesting!" Mrs. Charterhouse exclaimed in seeming
ecstasy: "Do go on, Count.  Pray, pray tell us how
German officers love!"

"Yet this exuberance, and seeming-careless child-likeness,"
pursued von Herrnung, "co-exists in the representative
male of our glorious German nation with an energy
which is pitilessly indomitable, and a hardness like that of
diamond, or of the metal of the Hammer of Thor.  Scratch
the child, joyous and voluptuous"—the ladies nodded to
each other delightedly at this second reference to
voluptuousness—"you will find beneath its rosy skin the German
Superman.  *Gnädige Gräfin*, may I give you a cigarette?"  He
pulled out a massive silver-gilt case, and offered it to
Lady Wastwood, who had thrown away the end of a tiny Péra.

"Thanks," said the lady, "but it might turn out a
super-cigarette and disagree with me.  How astonishingly
well-informed you Germans are upon the subject of yourselves!
I've met heaps of your countrymen whom the subject
seemed perfectly to obsess.  I suppose they begin to teach
you at a very early age, don't they?  Don't you suppose
they would, Cynthia dear?"

Mrs. Charterhouse agreed.

"Of course.  But I wonder if that sort of—might one call
it—intensive culture?—can be good for you?"  With her
charming head on one side she regarded von Herrnung
pensively.  "Don't you *sometimes* get fed up with yourselves?
One would somehow suppose you would!  Like the East
End Board School children whose mother had to write to
the Fifth Standard teacher to ask her not to tell Hemma
and 'Arriet any more nasty things about their insides."

Courtley and Lady Beauvayse, who under cover of a
separate conversation had been listening, were seized with
simultaneous attacks of coughing, rose and escaped from
the smoking-room.  Patrine Saxham remained, seeming to
study the newspaper she had picked up.  But only a
confused jumble of letters, big and little, danced up and down
the columns she held before her eyes.

And yet there were lines scattered here and there throughout
the newspapers, that boded ill for the peace of the world.
How little we dreamed of what was coming while crowded
London audiences applauded Jimmy Greggson in the
"Dance of the Varalette."  The River was ablaze with
multi-coloured sweaters, vast crowds planked their
gate-money to witness cricket-matches, lawn-tennis and
polo-matches, Flying contests, and bouts between International
champions at the ancient game of fisticuffs.

Even while the handsome young French heavy-weight
Carpentier was whacking the Yankee Smith at Olympia,
white-faced, weary-eyed men of great affairs were spending
the hot hours of the July days and nights—*minus* a stray
half-hour for a meal and a snatched eyeful of sleep now and
then—in reading reports in cipher sent by lesser men, agents
of the Secret Intelligence Department—who were registered
as numbers and owned no names.

These told of vast preparations long complete, and terrible
designs perfect and perfecting.  Poison-fruit, grown and
matured in shade, now bursting-ripe and ready to kill.
The aërials thrilled, the long waves travelled through
invisible ether, carrying the despatches for the weary-eyed
men.

The despatches were not all in cipher.  Thus little polyglot
employés, youthful radiotelegraphic operators in charge
of ship-stations in Territorial or foreign waters, or Wireless
posts quite recently established on foreign frontiers, found
themselves sharers in the secret councils of Ambassadors,
Emperors, Kings, and Presidents.

In their ear-pieces such words as "situation," "utmost
gravity," "friction avoided," "Triple Alliance," and
"Triple Entente," were repeated over and over.  To them
the tuned spark sang what the Tsar was saying to his
Cousin of Great Britain and the Dominions overseas.  They
heard the British Foreign Secretary talking from Downing
Street to the British Ambassador at Berlin, and the British
Ambassador at Paris, and the French President, on a visit
to Tsarskoe Selo, replying to *communiqués* from the Quai
d'Orsay.  Also de Munsen from the Embassy at Vienna,
confirming Whitehall views as to the extreme gravity of the
Austro-Servian situation.

Last, but not least, the voice from a certain guarded
sanctum in the Kaiserlicher Palais on the Schloss Platz,
Berlin, saying in a cipher of grouped numbers, the secret
language of Hohenzollern intrigue not understood of little
operators—things that bleached the face of the listener in
London to the yellow of old cheese.

"As Vicegerent of the World, charged by Almighty God
with the supreme duty of maintaining peace among nations
... warn these silly devils of the danger in which they
stand!  Just for the word 'neutrality'—a word in War-time
often disregarded—they risk annihilation of a dynasty
by my conquering sword, and the inevitable blotting-out of
the British race.  Invasion Belgium indispensable....
Must strike the blow before Russia could get to the frontier.
Life and death as regards the Success of my Plan.  Delay
by diplomacy.  Promise anything for neutrality.  Obtain
an understanding of non-intervention.  Bluff for all you are
worth!"

Again in yet more groups of numbers, the vocal spark
sang on and on:

"Attention.  If the Secret Service agent who has
managed to get into Lord Clanronald's service as
under-librarian at Gwyll Castle can secure complete copies—or
better still, the originals—of the old Lord's plans for
construction of the secret War-machine that hypocritical
England has kept up her sleeve out of so-called humanity since
the days of the British Regency—strike a deal with him at
once.  To the *ménu* that will presently be served to our
enemies—beginning with Super-Explosive—explosive bullets,
incendiary shells, lachrymatory shells serving as *entrées*—the
bombardment of Dover from Calais—the destruction
of London and the chief Naval Ports of Great Britain by
our Zeppelin Fleet being the *pièce de résistance* of the
banquet—the Clanronald Death-engine will be added as fifth
course!  Thou wilt pay the rogue who has dared to stickle
for higher terms ten thousand pounds in English
banknotes on account of the sum of twelve million marks he
presumptuously demands of us.  The balance will be paid
him on personal application at the Wilhelmstrasse—you
understand!  Warn Prince Henry and von Moltke not to
risk bringing the Secret Plans personally.  Should the loss
of the documents be discovered, suspicion would
instantly attach to one of these two.  Trust not the thief;
he may be tempted to betray us.  Send the plans by
Undersea Boat 18 now on coast-observation duty in Area
88—fathoms 50—44, east of Spurn Head.  Annulled.  Forward
by air.  Squadron-Captain-Pilot von Herrnung of my 10th
Field Flight will be detailed for this duty, being now in
London investigating the value of a new stabiliser—rejected
by the English War Office—which the French Chiefs of the
Service Aë are anxious to secure.  Tell him to obtain
a personal flying-test from the inventor.  I say no further!
As the Hohenzollern were noble robber-knights, so also were
von Herrnung's ancestors.  Let the eagle fly home to his
Imperial master with booty from across the sea.  England
may suppose him drowned.  France also....  We shall
know better....  A hearty welcome awaits the proud
bird-knight alighting on our German soil."





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.. _`DISILLUSION`:

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   CHAPTER XXIV


.. class:: center medium bold

   DISILLUSION

.. vspace:: 2

Rhona Helvellyn came stalking in, looked round,
recognised Patrine, came over and dropped down beside her on
the divan, full to the brim of the invariable subject, and
suffering to talk.

Through the good offices of a legal pal she had got in to
hear the Suffragette Trial at the Old Bailey that day.  Fan
Braid and Kitty Neek had been frightfully plucky.  Full of
grit and vim, in spite of the six weeks' hunger-strike.  Began
shrieking like Jimmy O! the moment they were brought
into the dock by the warders and wardresses.  On being
rebuked by the Judge, Fan had bunked a bundle of pamphlets
at the head of his lordship, catching the Clerk of the
Court, who was seated immediately underneath the Bench,
no end of a biff in the eye.

"And then?"

Patrine heard a strange voice from her own stiff lips
asking the question.

"Then both of 'em were removed from the Dock.  It was
done—in time!"  Rhona's light eyes danced with enjoyment.
"Such a scrimmage!  Such a rumpus!  Took three
men and a woman to tackle each of 'em.  We could hear
'em giving tongue all the way down to the cells.  Then they
had to go on with the Trial without 'em."  She chuckled.
"You may guess there were a lot of us at the back of the
Court waiting—just for that!  Perfect wadge all together.
Hell and trimmings when we started.  They had to eject
us before they could jog on with their gay old summing-up!"

"But in the end they got through?"  The weary voice
was so unlike Patrine's that she wondered why Rhona did
not jump and stare at her.  But Rhona was mounted on her
hobby-horse, and unobservant of other things.

"Through right enough!  And Fan and Kitty—"  Rhona
screwed up her lips into the shape of a whistle, and
winked away a tear that hung on one of her fair eyelashes;
"It's too brutal!  Three months each, and poor little Kitty
dying of lung-trouble.  They only brought her back from
Davos in May.  That riles me!"  She clenched her hands
fiercely and went on, cautiously lowering her tone: "So far
I've taken no active share in any Militant Demonstration.
Partly because I'd be wiped off the Club books if I got
spouting in public, or was mixed up in any police-court business,
partly because I'm funky—there's the word!  But at last
I'm wound up!  It was Kitty's little peaky-white face did
it! ... She—she broke a blood-vessel as the warders
were carrying her down to the cells."

A sob choked Rhona's voice, and a spasm of misery
wrenched her.  She controlled herself.  She was deadly in
earnest—wound up to go, as she had said.  She went on,
talking rapidly, in a tone that only reached the ear it had
been meant for.  How many such secret disclosures the
Club divan had known.

"I've thought....  A regular swarm of Distinguished
French and Belgian Big Pots and Little Pots—Mayors—Prefects
and Deputies, Judges, Press Representatives and
Inspectors-General—are engaged in Discovering England
this week as ever is.  It's an echo of the Entente Cordiale.
Behind the badge of the International Advancement
Association—I've got one!—I might drop in at one of
their farewell speechifications, I believe the next's on
Friday at Leamington—and heckle 'em like one o'clock!
Ask 'em why women don't have the Vote in France and
Belgium——"

"Don't they?"

"Nix a bit!  Not for all the fuss they make about the
sex.  Or—to fix the scene of my maiden effort nearer
home—there's a Banquet of Archbishops, Bishops and their
wives at the Mansion House to-morrow night.  Music just
after the flesh-pots and before the speeches or after—a select
company of Concert Artistes, the gemmen in boiled shirts
and the usual accompaniments; the ladies in white with
black sashes and black gloves.  And that's where I shall
come in—in white with black trimmings.  Land of Hope
and Glory!—when I get up and ask the Archbishop of
Canterbury to plump for Female Suffrage!—or shall it be the
Lord Mayor? ... Won't my Uncle Gustavus burst the
buttons off his episcopal waistcoat.  You've seen him.
He's Bishop of Dorminster—and they fasten 'em at the
back."

"Let the Bishop keep his buttons on!" said Patrine,
suddenly and savagely.  "What the—devil does it matter
whether women get the Vote?  Would we keep it if we got
it, or throw it away—oh! idiots—idiots!—to gratify some
vulgar vanity, or some beastly sensual whim?"

"Gee-whillikins!"  Rhona whistled shrilly in astonishment.
"Why, I thought you were one of Us.  Not actively
militant, but a sympathiser, no end.  Didn't you get our
Committee in touch with Mrs. Saxham, when we'd set our
hearts on having her speak at the Monster Meeting of
Women we're going to have in October at the Grand
Imperial Hall?  She's promised to address us on Suffrage and
we're all over ourselves to hear her.  That last article of
hers in *The National Quarterly*—'The Burden of Tyre,' has
collared the literary cake.  People tell me who've read it
that she doesn't care a hang about the Vote for Women in
any other sense than that it'd open a gateway to legislation
on the Sex Question of a much more drastic kind.  She'd
bring in a Bill to have moral offences against children
dealt with by a Jury of Mothers—a lot they'd leave of the
offender once they'd their claws on him!—and make it
a Life Sentence every time, for the fellow who seduces a girl."

Patrine listened in stony silence.  Rhona chattered on.
"Of course the work she does amongst those unlucky
wretches—young girls and women who've come to grief—is
topping.  But why waste herself rescuing prostitutes and
street-walkers?  Aren't any of us good enough—or bad
enough to interest her?  I'm going to ask her that when
you introduce me—remember you've promised to!"

Patrine said in a voice jarred and harsh with anger:

"Since your declared intention is to be offensive to
Mrs. Saxham, whose shoes neither you nor myself, nor any
woman of our set is worthy to unlace, I take back the
promise, if it was ever given!"

"What's up?"  Rhona turned and stared.  "I say!—but
you look fearfully seedy!  Worried about Margot, is
that it?"  She was off on another tack, carried by the light
shifting breeze of her imagination.  "Poor little Margot!—in
spite of good advice and top-hole mascots—booked for
the Nursery Handicap—and out of the running for a year!"

"Who told you—that?—about Margot?"

"Melts—the head housemaid here—had it from Kittum's
maid Pauline, who dropped in to fetch away some stored
luggage of her ladyship's....  They've furnished a house
at Cadogan Place—Margot and her Franky-wanky.  West
End enough, and quite exquie inside, but not as convee as
the dear old Club.  But—I believe I'm boring you."  Her
nimble glance left Patrine's face, and darted in the direction
of von Herrnung.  "Who's the big, good-looking, carroty
man, gobbling you up with his eyes while he's talking piffle
to Cynthia and Trix?  Now I remember—I *have* heard some
hints of your going over to the Common Enemy."  Rhona's
sharp light eyes sparkled like polished gold-stones.  "Is
that the reason why you've bleached your hair?  What a
putrid shame of you!  And the Enemy's a foreigner—a
German!  Did he give you that gorgeous ring?"

Upon the third finger of Patrine's left hand was the magpie
pearl set in platinum, gleaming to its wearer's fevered
fancy, like some malignant demon's eye.  Rhona caught the
hand, and uttered a little squeak as Patrine wrenched it
away.  She—Patrine—was driven beyond endurance: her
self-command was breaking.  Her hair seemed to creep
upon her tingling scalp.  Down her spine and along the
muscles of her thighs passed slow recurrent waves of
physical anguish.  She could have screamed aloud, torn her
garments, set her teeth in her own flesh.  But she mastered
herself sufficiently to say:

"I won the ring over a bet in Paris.  You can see for
yourself I don't wear it on the engagement left.  Do not
despair of me.  At this moment I do not particularly esteem
women.  But on the other hand, I absolutely abominate
men!"

"Hope for you then, politically speaking," said the
misanthropic Rhona.  "What, are you going?"

Patrine had thrown aside her paper and risen, towering
over her.  She nodded without speaking, and went out of
the smoking-room, crumpling the letter she had written in
her strong white hand.  She would not post it, she told
herself as she passed through the outer lounge.  She would go
and look up Uncle Owen at Harley Street.  She spoke a
word to an agile hall-boy in the vestibule and he skipped
out, and signalled a taxi-cab.

A handsome Darracq four-seater, enamelled bright yellow
and fitted in ebonized steel, was waiting by the kerbstone.
As the taxi manoeuvred to get round it, von Herrnung's
voice said, speaking behind Patrine:

"Stop the boy, that machine will not be wanted....
I have here a car that is lent me by a friend."

She turned and saw him, standing hat in hand.  His tone
was pleasant, and he was smiling.  He went on:

"He—my friend—is a Secretary of our German Embassy.
He has three automobiles—why should he not lend me one?"  He
replaced his hat and pulled a curved gold cigar-case out
of the breast-pocket of his waistcoat asking: "I may light
a zigarre after these stupid cigarettes I have been smoking?
It will not be unpleasant to *gnädiges Fräulein*?"

His courtesy insulted.  His smile was an outrage.  She
controlled the trembling of her lips with difficulty.  Whether
he observed or not was uncertain, he seemed to busy himself
solely with the selection and kindling of his cigar.

"Pardon that I get in first, as I shall be driving!" he said,
and threw away the smoking vesta, pushed back the hall-boy
who was wrestling with the door-handle, got in and took
his place at the steering-wheel, beckoning to Patrine.

"Thanks, but I cannot....  I am going to Berkeley Square."

"I will drop you at Berkeley Square."  He met her eyes
hardily.  "You will not refuse me this pleasure, when I
have not seen you since—"  The slight significant pause
stabbed as it had been meant to.  He saw her wince, and
finished: "Since two days.  Will you not get in?"

She took the seat beside him.  He stretched his arm
across her knees and shut the door neatly.  She leaned back
to avoid his touch, and he smiled, feeling her shudder.  Her
eyes were on his gloved left hand as he drew it back.

He manipulated the electrical starter and the yellow
Darracq moved up and out of Short Street.  Patrine stared
before her, sitting rigid in her place.  Not once did her
glance visit *him*.  But every skilful movement of his hands
upon the steering-wheel, every creak of the springy leather
cushion under his great body, every tightening of his mouth
or twitch of his thick red eyebrows, were photographed
upon her brain.

He was irreproachably got up in thin, loose grey tweed
morning clothes, cut by a West End tailor, and his
feather-weight grey felt hat testified to the make of Scott.  His
knitted silk tie, a combination of electric blue and vivid
yellow, was a discordant note.  Patrine was certain it must
have been the work of some other woman in Berlin.  The
heavy flat gold ring through which the ends were drawn
was set with a ruby and two diamonds, another false note
that jarred her painfully.  But he was looking strong and
well and in admirable condition.  His blue eyes were bright,
his red hair and his tightly-rolled moustache glittered in the
sunshine, there was a bloom of perfect health upon his florid
skin.

If Patrine did not look at von Herrnung, his eyes were less
abstemious with regard to her.  Under cover of their short
red eyelashes, they scrutinised her from time to time.
There was unbridled curiosity in their regard, and also a
retrospective vanity, admiration, and resentment as well.
She rode the high horse.  She was hellishly sure of herself.
Sure of von Herrnung, it might be.  This passed in his mind
as he said to her:

"Do you know that this car has had the honour to carry
the Emperor of Germany?  When *Seine Majestät* paid a
visit to England in the year 1907, he used it every day."

Patrine returned indifferently:

"It seems to go smoothly."

Von Herrnung said, as the car obeyed every motion of
his practised hands upon the steering-wheel:

"It is a wonderful traveller.  It has been fitted with a
Heinz motor, three times more powerful to its weight than
any other known petrol-engine.  Some journeys, I can tell
you, it has had with the All Highest.  Travelling incognito,
driven always by a—certain young Prussian officer; then of
Engineers—attached to the Personal Staff specially for this
work."

"I daresay you mean yourself?"

"That is a clever piece of guessing; I congratulate you,
*gnädiges Fräulein*.  Well, it is now no secret.  I do not
object to admit having been the young *Leutnant* in the case.
So now you know how I gained my *flair* for English scenery
and my violent penchant for English beauty.  A weakness
of which I am rather proud, since it is one the Emperor
shares."

The final sentence might have conveyed a jeer.  But
Patrine was not listening.  She called to her companion:
"You are driving in the wrong direction for Berkeley
Square, but it does not matter.  Please put me down just
here at the corner of Harley Street.  I can leave this letter
at a house there instead of putting it in the pillar-post."

"You are not getting out, *gnädiges Fräulein*.  You are
coming with me to Hendon.  I have there a little business
which will occupy an hour."  He added with a familiarity
that stung, looking at the tense white profile and the black
brows knitted in anger: "You are yourself to blame that I
cannot part with you.  You are really as magnificent by day
as by evening—with your so-gloriously-coloured hair.  May
I also congratulate you on the effective costume?  Black
and white are our Prussian colours.  I take that as a
personal compliment."

"Take it as you like, it will not make it one."

"*Sehr gutig*.  I do not need telling.  When I want things
I take them.  It is a habit of mine."

He spoke sheer, brutal truth.  Oh God! what of Patrine's
had he not coveted and taken, only two horrible days ago.
"So," he went on, "you will have to post your letter.  I
will stop at a *Postammt* and drop it in for you.  You see, I
am greedy of your society.  At any moment I may be
recalled to Germany.  One must catch the Bird of Happiness
and hold it while one can.  Now tell me, is not that a pretty
speech?"

"Extremely, but it does not alter the situation.  I have
a particular appointment.  I cannot go to Hendon with you."

"I have already told you that we are going there.  *Grosse
Gott!*"  His tone was savage.  "How is it that you are so
confoundedly stubborn?  Do you think such behaviour
sensible—or wise?"

"I am certainly wiser than I was two days ago."

He slewed his head round to look at her with a greedy
curiosity.  He saw the lines of face and figure grow rigid,
and her bare hands clench themselves together in her lap.

He glanced at her ringed hand, then transferred his regard
to his own left hand, the glove upon which he had retained
at the Club.  The soft dressed *suéde* bulged as though a
bandage were concealed underneath.  She averted her eyes
hastily as though she shunned some ugly, sickening,
spectacle.  He said:

"I see that you honour me by wearing my mascot.  The
magpie pearl most excellently becomes your beautiful hand,
my dear!"

They had reached Regents Park Square and were turning
into the Broad Walk.  She plucked the ring from her bare
finger, and held it out to him, saying in a low tone:

"Please take it back!"

"I am to take it back? ... You are in earnest?"

She repeated her words, holding out the bauble.  He
released his gloved left hand from the steering-wheel to
take it.  His eyes were on the road ahead and his face was
hard as pink stone.  But she heard him give a little sigh of
relief as he slipped the ring into an inside coat-pocket.  He
said, as though to excuse the sigh:

"It was given me in April, when I made my raid on Paris
from Hanover, landing my *Albatros* once only during two
days' flight.  The weather was magnificent.  My engine
gave no trouble.  That is why I call the ring my mascot,
you understand.  Now that it has been worn by you, it is
more precious than when I first received it.  Whenever I
look at it, it will speak to me of you."

"Don't let it!"

"Why should it not speak of you?  Isis!  My heart's
Queen!"

"I have told you—don't revolt me with—piffle of that
kind.  And don't touch me, unless you want me to jump
out of the car!"

A voice that he barely knew had issued from the face she
turned on him—a face all violet shadows and haggard drawn
lines, under the burning splendour of the dead beech-leaf
hair.  She vibrated like an electrified wire, and round her
pale pinched mouth and about her blue-veined temples were
little points of moisture, fine and glittering as diamond-dust.

"Am I to understand that my touch is unpleasant to you?
That you are angry with me?  That you do not love me any
more?"

"Love...."

She laughed out harshly, hugely disconcerting him.

"Lady Wathe said at that Grand Prix night dinner in
Paris that you were without a sense of humour.  But you
must have a grain or so—to talk of love to me!"

She turned her face away, and the exquisite beauty of her
small white ear appealed to him provokingly.  He ground
his teeth.  He could have thrown his arm about her, and
crushed the tall, full, womanly figure against him.  How
superb she was in her mood of hate.  The strapped-up
wound in his left hand was throbbing and smarting, just as
when she had writhed her head free from his furious kisses
and bitten him to the bone.

He had made her pay richly for her bite.  He hugged
himself as he remembered....  Now the sting of desire
was renewed in him and he eyed her with greediness.
Presently he stooped and said in her ear, coaxingly:

"Let us be friends!  Dine with me at the Rocroy
to-night.  We will have a box at the Alhambra, and sup
again at the Upas.  Say you will come, loved one!  Will
you not, Patrine?"

"No!"

"No?  But I think you mean Yes!  Do you not?"

"I have said No!  Is that not enough?"

"You are mad!" he blustered at her—"mad as a March hare!"

She answered him:

"I have been mad, but I am sane now and I stay so."

He said scoffingly:

"You may not always remain as you are now!"

If he launched a poisoned dart, its meaning glanced aside
from her.

"Shall you not write to me when I am back in Germany?
Not one line?  Not one single word?  Yet I have a few
little notes from you that I particularly value...."

"Make the most of them.  I shall write no more."  And
suddenly her hate and loathing of him reached boiling point
and ran over.  "My God!  Can't you understand that I
ask nothing better than never to see nor hear of you again!"

"*Grossartig*!  You are hellishly conciliatory."  His voice
was thick and shook with anger.  His smile mocked and the
look in his eyes was hateful as he pursued in a tone that was
now quite gentle and purring: "Just think a bit, my dear!
Because—to burn one's boats behind one—that is not
prudent at all!"

She did not answer, and he drove on to Hendon, planning
fresh assaults upon this unconquerable woman's pride.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`THREE MEN IN A CAR`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER XXV


.. class:: center medium bold

   THREE MEN IN A CAR

.. vspace:: 2

When the yellow Darracq car turned in under the archway
that advertised Fanshaw's Flying School in three-foot
capitals, the name revived no associations in the mind of
Patrine.  She had never visited the aërodrome upon an
afternoon in the mid-week, when as in the present instance
practice and instruction were being carried on.  The cafés, no
longer crowded by smart people, were thinly patronised by
bronzed young men in overalls, not innocent of lubricating
medium, thirstily drinking ginger swizzle or sucking
iced-lemon squashes through yellow straws.  Business-looking
middle-aged men discussed the market-prices of steels and
timbers, dope and fabrics, over bitter beer and
ham-sandwiches, while experimenting amateurs, male and female,
discussed in loud, relieved voices the experiences of the
premier flight.  These, having been previously warned not
to experiment upon a crowded system, were now ravenously
putting in the solid, three-course lunches they had foregone.

It was a perfect July day, hot and blue and green and
golden.  To the nor'-west, you glimpsed the elms and oaks
and beeches of Boreham Wood, westward the chestnuts of
Bushey and Stanmore in fullest summer foliage.  The
hawthorns of New Barnet were already browning in the sun.
Hill and common were plumy with the brake-fern.  Heather
and ling were purpling into bloom.

Still looking westwards, you snatched a glimpse of Windsor.
Eastwards, a diamond set in emeralds, was the Crystal
Palace at Sydenham.  Across the whitish-grey scarp of
Highgate and the verdant shoulder of heathy Hampstead
you saw the dun-coloured haze that is the breath of London,
the huge, black, formidable and formless monster, as,
sprawling on her ancient River, she keeps her envied place
in the Sun.

At the café end of Fanshaw's enclosure the Frogged
Roumanian String Orchestra were playing the "Dance
Rhapsody" of Delius.  From a rival establishment came
the brazen strains of a German band in a death-wrestle with
ragtime.  Behind a straggling crowd of visitors, where the
cars that had brought them were parked in a double row,
von Herrnung stopped the yellow Darracq, leaned across
Patrine's unwilling knees and opened the car-door.

As Patrine was getting out, a large hand in a white leather
glove was thrust forwards for her assistance.  The owner of
the hand was a square-faced, fair-haired, soldierly-looking
servant of the somewhat hybrid type that has replaced the
carriage-groom.  He wore a dark blue livery overcoat with
silver braid upon collar, belt, and shoulder-straps, black
knee-boots, and a white topped cap with silver braid, a shiny
black peak and an enamel front badge in black, white, and
red.  Looking past Patrine, he saluted in military fashion
and spoke to von Herrnung in German, of which language
Patrine possessed a smattering:

"Will the *Herr Hauptmann* speak to the *Herrschaft*?
Upon business.  *Er ist sehr wichtig*."

Von Herrnung, at the first sound of the messenger's voice,
had stiffened to rigidity.  He glanced over his shoulder in
the direction pointed out by the big hand in the white glove,
and answered:

"Say to the *Herrschaft* that I come!"

The groom vanished.  Von Herrnung jumped out of the
yellow Darracq and went quickly over to the machine that
had been indicated, a large, superbly-finished
F.I.A.T. touring-car of the landau-limousine type, enamelled dark
blue with a narrow silver line of finish.  The top was open.
A white-capped chauffeur in dark blue and silver livery sat
immovable at the steering-wheel, and three men, only one of
whom was plainly visible to Patrine, occupied the roomy
body of the car.

The visible man, sitting in the forward seat with his back
to the motor, his baldness topped, in deference to the
weather, with a white felt Newmarket, was a long-bodied,
broad-shouldered personage, certainly over seventy; clean-shaven,
with staring eyes of light grey tinged with bilious
yellow, and skin of a prevailing yellow-grey doughiness, with
a huge wart in the middle of the cheekbone on the side next
to Patrine.  His clothes were of yellowish-grey like his eyes
and skin, his linen had a yellow line in it and a huge,
crumpled vest of buff nankeen threw into relief a flaming
crimson satin necktie confined within bounds by a flat
jewelled ring.  He had the air of an old actor of character
parts, or of a libertine monk who has foregone the cord and
cowled habit.  Of the two men sitting facing him little could
be seen beyond the peak of a gold-banded white yachting-cap
pulled rather low over a bronzed and rather aquiline
profile with an upward-turned moustache and slightly-grizzled
beard of reddish-brown, and a Homburg straw with
a broad black ribbon and a slouched brim, overshadowing
the face of the man who sat on White Cap's left hand.
An astute and cunning face, his; long and sallow, with
narrow, blinking eyes, a drooping nose, and a drooping black
moustache.  With this its owner played constantly, twisting
and pulling it with a delicate white hand that wore a
diamond solitaire.  He never looked up, when addressed by
either of his companions, but raised his eyes to the speaker,
and pivoted, without lifting his head.

Von Herrnung's friends were nothing to Patrine, and von
Herrnung's person was by now intolerable, yet her eyes
unwillingly followed the tall, soldierly figure as he drew
himself up, clicked his heels and uncovered.  A brown hand
went up to the peak of the white yachting-cap, the wearers
of the straw Homburg and the felt Newmarket slightly
raised their hats.  Von Herrnung did not speak first, he
waited bareheaded to be spoken to.  When the door of the
big blue car was opened by the servant at an imperious
signal from the sallow man, von Herrnung got inside, and
sat down beside the personage with the wart on his
cheek,—leaning forwards deferentially to be addressed by the
bearded wearer of the white yachting-cap, who made great
play with a brown right hand that sported a heavy gold
curb-chain watch-bracelet.  Once the hand clenched and shook
in vivacious threat or warning, very close to von Herrnung's
handsome nose.  That made Patrine laugh, and instantly
she was angry with herself for laughing.  She put up her
long-sticked sunshade, turned her back upon the blue
F.I.A.T. car and moved away towards the part of the
enclosure where the visitors sat or promenaded, drawing eyes
as she went with her spangled silver headgear twinkling
in the sunshine, and its black cock's plume waving over her
strangely coloured hair.

So changed, so changed.  She was sensible of an alteration
even in her gait and gestures.  A sickness of the soul
weighed on her body as though she walked in invisible fetters
of lead.  The free space, the fresh air, seemed to yield no
physical stimulus.  She had bitten deep into the apple of
Knowledge, and found bitterness and ashes at the core.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`A PAIR OF PALS`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER XXVI


.. class:: center medium bold

   A PAIR OF PALS

.. vspace:: 2

Among a dozen pairs of masculine eyes that followed the
gallant womanly figure, crowned by the plumed hat of silver
spangles and displayed in the frank unreticence of fashion
by the semi-transparent sheath of glistening white, a pair
very blue, very shiningly alert and interested, drew nearer
until the elongated shadow of a small boy in Scout's uniform
mingled upon the sunlit turf with the longer shadow of
Patrine.

His thumping heart had said to him: "You know her!"  It
was Pat and yet not Pat.  Her tall, rounded figure.  Her
walk.  The same face—and another woman's hair.  The
white gown and the long stole of black cock's feathers he
had seen before, and the hat had previously fascinated him.
He had asked Pat if it were not made of the twinkly stuff
with which they covered the Bobby-dazzlers on Christmas
trees?  She had cried "Yes!" and assured him that she
would always hereafter call it her "Bobby-dazzler chapper."
... And his Cousin Irma, whom Bawne secretly abominated,
had said it was too bad to talk costermonger slang to
the child.  "*The child*." ... A man must be ready to
pardon an insult from the unpunchable female.  But
Bawne found himself wishing that Cousin Irma had been
a boy.

He loved Pat.  You had to love a person who could keep
secrets as faithfully as Dad or Mother, and play tennis and
hockey better than a great many grown-up fellows.  Bowl
you out at cricket, too, middle bail, before you could wink.
She could cycle all day without getting knocked up, and
swim a mile, easily.  For these reasons Bawne knew he
loved her.  But he loved her most for the reasons that he
did not understand.

"Pat!"

He had screwed up his courage to touch his crusher felt
and speak the name, but the tall lady with the electrifying
hair did not seem to hear.  Her long eyes looked at him in a
blind way without seeing him.  He had never kissed this
frozen, stranger's face.

"I thought you knew me!  I most awfully beg your
pardon!" he stammered, in scarlet anguish, and the dull
eyes suddenly came to life, and the stiff lips smiled:

"It's Bawne.  My sweet, I'm glad!  How did you come here?"

"Dad brought me because he'd promised," the boy said
joyously as they shook hands.

"Where is Uncle Owen?"

"Over there."  Bawne pointed to two men talking apart
beyond the straggling line of spectators, and Patrine
recognised the great frame and scholarly stoop of the Doctor,
standing with his side-face towards her, a half-consumed
cigar in the corner of his mouth, and his stick, a weighty
ivory-topped Malacca, loosely gripped in both hands behind
his back.

"And the man he is talking to?  Why—of course!  It's
Sir Roland—how is it I didn't recognise him?"

"The Chief Scout!"  Bawne's tone was one of incredulous
wonder.  "But you couldn't have forgotten *him*!  It—isn't
possible!"

Nor even to a stranger did he appear a personality to be
easily forgotten, the bright-eyed, falcon-beaked, middle-aged
man, whose feather-weight crusher felt was worn at an
inimitable angle, and whose slight, active figure set off his
well-cut morning suit of thin blue serge in a way to arouse
envy in a military dandy of twenty-five.

"You see," Bawne explained, "*he* was talking business
with Father, so I just took myself out of the way."  He
added: "They hadn't told me to, but they might have
forgotten.  And so"—the big word came out of the childish
mouth quaintly—"I acted on my initiative—you understand?"

"I understand."  The formal handshake once over, their
fingers had not separated.  She held in her large, strong,
womanly palm the hand that was little, and hard, and
boyish.  It squeezed her fingers, and the squeeze was an
apology.  It said:

"I'd like you to have kissed me if there hadn't been lots of
people looking.  For, of course, you know I love you, Pat!"

"And I love you, Bawne.  We'll always love each other,
whatever happens," said the answering pressure.  Her
spoken utterance was:

"So these are your holidays! ... How did you leave
them all at Charterhouse?  And—are you still tremendous
pals with young Roddy Wrynche?"

He said, with a naive, adorable gravity:

"Boys don't squabble like girls—and Wrynche is a frightfully
decent fellow.  We passed together from Shell into
Under Fourth, and we've promised always to stand by each
other!"

"Good egg!  And now, how is it you're here?  Has
Uncle Owen given in at last about the flying?"

"Really and truly!  Man alive!"—Bawne's characteristic
expletive—"I've been up to-day in the air-'bus and—wasn't
it first-class!"

"Honour?"

"Honour!  Twice round the aërodrome with the
Instructor—and presently I'm to have a longer flight with
Mr. Sherbrand in his monoplane."

"'Mr. Sherbrand' ..." Patrine repeated rather vaguely.
"Sherbrand" had somehow a ring that was familiar.
Bawne explained:

"He's a great friend of Father's.  He's splendid.  A
regularly topping chap!"

"And you've actually flown?"

"I've flewed—and I mean to go on with it."  He repeated
the assurance more sedately: "It's the profession I have
chosen.  They say you've got to begin young.  And my legs
wobbled and the ground rocked a bit when I got down on it.
But I wasn't air-sick at all."

"*Air-sick*....  Are people...?"

Bawne said from the pedestal of superior knowledge:

"Oh, aren't they just, like anything!  The Calais-Dover
steamer-crossing's nothing to it sometimes—the Instructor
told me."

Patrine laughed.  The latest circulating-library novel,
*Love in the Clouds*, had omitted to mention this fact.
The heroine had donned an aviator's cap and pneumatic
jacket, and "leapt nimbly on board" the aëroplane in half
a gale of wind.  As the machine dipped and rose gracefully
upon the heaving element that cradled it, Enid had
experienced merely a delicious exhilaration.  Then a crisp
moustache had brushed her rosy ear.  The voice of Hubert,
attuned to deepest melody of passion, had murmured in the
shell-like organ of hearing: "Little girl.  At last I have
you! ... Mine, mine, my bride of the swan-path!—mine
for ever and aye!"

Bawne continued, innocently discounting further statements
on the part of the author of *Love in the Clouds*:

"He told me before we went up, you know.  Of course,
when you're flying you can't hear anything but the racket
of the propeller.  It goes roaring through you till your bones
buzz, and the very ends of your teeth hum.  So the other
man has to yell at you through a trumpet, or write to you
on bits of paper, unless he's switched off the engine for
diving, and then you don't feel like talking—that's if you're a
beginner, you know....  But man alive! it's splendid.
You must try it, Pat!"

She declared, laughingly:

"While a single flight costs a brace of my hard-earned
guineas, the sport is not for me!  Why haven't I got a pal
like your wonderful Mr. Sherbrand?  I'm getting envious—you
lucky infant, you!"

It didn't hurt to be called an infant by Pat, because she
never would have done it in a stranger's hearing.  And it
was ripping to have her here, sharing his hour of joy.

He told her: "Father brought me here as a reward for
making a model aëroplane.  Reminds me!—I've got to tell
you all about that.  But it's only a toy and this is the Real
Thing.  There's nothing worth having in the whole world,"
added the unconscious philosopher "unless it's real and
true!"

"Am I not real?" Patrine asked, squeezing his shoulder.

"Now you are!"  He said it with an effort of candour.
"But when I saw you a minute ago, I wasn't—quite
sure."  He glanced up at her and asked shyly: "Why are you
different since you have been away in Paris?"

"Different, how different?"  She whipped her hand from
his shoulder.  Her black eyebrows knitted, and her face
stiffened into the strange mask that had puzzled him, under
the scrutiny of his clear blue eyes.  "Do I seem changed?"
she queried.  And Bawne answered:

"A little.  I was afraid at first you were somebody else,
because of"—he said it shyly—"because of your hair."

"My hair?" she repeated blankly, and then said awkwardly:
"The air of Paris did that, darling, but it will soon
be its old colour again!"

"Will it ever be just like it was before?" asked Bawne,
looking innocently up at her, and something broke in
Patrine's heart just then.  She gave a sudden gasping sigh,
and a sudden spate of tears rolled over her thick underlids,
streamed down her pale cheeks, and fell upon her broad
bosom, heaving under its thin covering of filmy white voile.

"Pat!  You're—crying!"  Bawne had never yet seen his
friend weep, and he was wrung between pity and
bewilderment.  "Who has vexed you?  Who has been hurting
you?" he begged, and she answered brokenly:

"No one! ... Someone....  It doesn't matter!"
adding: "Would you punch him, if anyone had—done as
you say?"

"*Wouldn't* I?"

"My sweet!"  Her arm went round his slight, square
shoulders.  She doted on the little amber freckles on his
pure, healthy skin, the little drake's tail of silky red-brown
hair at the nape of his brown neck, the half-shy, half-bold
curve of his mouth as he smiled, the blue sparkle of his eye
glancing sidewise up at her.  She found in the pure warmth
and sweetness of the slight young body leaning against her,
a healing, comforting balm.

"Why aren't you my little brother, Bawne?" she said,
hugging him closer.  He answered after an instant's thought:

"If my mother could be your mother too, it would be
jolly!  Not unless! ..."

He was not going to take on Mildred for anybody.
Patrine sighed pensively.

"That's what I used to cry for when I was a little
pig-tailed girl, my sonny.  More than anything I wanted to
belong to Aunt Lynette.  But she's so young—only
thirty-three.  She couldn't be my mother."

"No."  His eyes considered her face gravely.  "Of course
not.  You're far too old.  How old are you, Cousin Pat?"

"How old am I?"  A shudder went through her.  "Nineteen
in August.  And I feel about a hundred and one."

"That's 'cos you're not well!"  His eyes were anxious
and a little pucker showed between his reddish eyebrows.
"You're not going to be ill—are you?" he asked in alarm.

"Not I!"  She murmured it caressingly in her deep, soft
voice.  "My pet, don't worry.  Everything's all right with
me!—perfectly all right and O.K.!  Only talk to me.
Don't let me keep on thinking.  Things are never so—bally
rotten if you can stop brooding over them."

Why did she look like that?  What had somebody done
to hurt her?  His boyish hand clenched, the thumb well
turned in over the knuckles.  Instinctively Bawne knew
that the Enemy, who had stamped that dreadful look of
frozen misery on the face of his beloved, white as ivory or
old snow in its strange setting of flaming tresses—was of his
own sex.

.. vspace:: 2

All the while, ever since Patrine had entered the gates of
Panshaw's, the song of the air-screw had not been absent
from her ears.  The tractor of the practice-engine roared
fitfully, like a tiger being prodded in its den by a spiteful
keeper's meat-fork.  The propellers of the double-engined
passenger-buses kept up a steady droning as Fanshaw's
pilots followed the pointing arms of the red, white, and blue
pylons marking the limits of the air-circuit, or were silent
as the machines dropped to earth within the huge white
circles where a giant T indicated "Land."

This was not a show day when visitors' half-crowns
rattled unceasingly into the boxes at the turnstile.  The
rows of green-painted chairs behind the whitewashed iron
railings of the spectators' enclosure were but thinly
patronised by friends of people taking passenger-flights.  No
man with a megaphone announced events forthcoming or
imminent.  No white flag fell for the start, no pistol cracked
signifying the conclusion of a race.

Three men occupied the Judge's stand behind the Committee
enclosure.  One, small and dapper, in a frock-coat
and topper, kept his eye on what was probably a
stop-watch.  Another, stout, bearded, and straw-hatted, was
absorbedly gazing at the sky through a big pair of Zeiss
binoculars.  The third, in the uniform of a commissionaire,
was an employé of the School.  No one manifested any
particular interest in them or their occupation.  The sparse
general public were not enlightened as to the reason of their
presence on the Judge's stand.

"Talk," Patrine said, clinging to Bawne, her slender
plank in moral shipwreck.  "Tell me what Sir Roland and
the Doctor are waiting to see.  What is that thin man
doing with the stop-watch and the note-book?  And the
fat gentleman beside him, who never leaves off staring at the
sky through those big field-glasses.  Nothing is billed to
happen—there are no numbers up on the pylons—yet
something seems to be going on!"

"Rather!"

The boy broke into a little gurgle of excited laughter, and
began to dance up and down under the arm that rested on
his neck.

"*Rather*!  Didn't you know?  How funny!  Why, man
alive, we're waiting for *him*!"

"For him?"

"For Mr. Sherbrand.  Father's friend.  The Flying Man
I've told you about."

"Mr.——  Where is he?" Patrine asked vaguely, looking
all about her.  In the tumult of her thoughts the name
that had been upon a crumpled card suggested no association
with that so rapturously uttered by the boy.

"There!"  Bawne pointed upwards with another of
the excited laughs.  "Carrying out a hovering-test.  The
man with the stop-watch is timing him, and the other with
the binnocs is observing him.  He's French—no end of an
official swell!  The French Government sent him," went on
the boy, with infinite relish, "to see Mr. Sherbrand test his
invention.  He thought they didn't catch on, but the hoverer
has fetched them.  If he hovers for twenty minutes, ten
thousand feet up, his fortune's made!—I heard a fellow say
so to the Instructor.  Man alive! isn't it topping that you
and I should be here to-day!"





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`SIR ROLAND TELLS A STORY`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER XXVII


.. class:: center medium bold

   SIR ROLAND TELLS A STORY

.. vspace:: 2

While yet the Bird of War hovered invisible at ten
thousand feet of altitude, and the lungs of the men aboard her
toiled and laboured, and foam gathered about their nostrils
and lips, Saxham stood talking with the man who in his eyes
ranked above all others, the tried and trusty friend of
fourteen years.

In those unforgettable months of the Siege of Gueldersdorp
you might have noticed a crow's foot or so at the corner
of the Chief's keen falcon-eyes.  To-day, their hazel
brightness undiminished, they looked at Life from a network of
fine criss-crossed lines.  But Time, the spider, had spun no
web in the fine alert brain, and the man's heart was free from
crow's feet or wrinkles.  Fresh and evergreen, it was as it
would always be, an oasis of kindness for the downhearted
or weary, watered by the twin wells of sympathy and
enthusiasm.  He said, speaking to Saxham of the invisible
Sherbrand:

"I wish we had a million like him!"

Saxham answered:

"I wish we had several millions.  He is a fine, energetic
type.  A bit of a hero-worshipper—a bit of a philosopher, a
bit of a stoic: '*He hath seen men rise to authority without envy,
and schooled himself to endure adversity, that he might bear
himself the better when his time should come to rule.*'"

"His time is coming, or I am no judge of capability.  And
you quoted from the *Encheiridion* of Epictetus, I think?
I've always found good reading-meat in that and the
*Discourses*.  Used to carry a little sixpenny copy about in
my pocket, until I wore it to rags."

"I have often seen and noted its raggedness, and its
uncompromising Isabella-hue!"

"It was negroid in complexion before the Relief of
Gueldersdorp.  Perhaps you won't be astonished when I
tell you I have got it now."  The Chief's smiling eyes
narrowed in laughter.  "My wife has bound it gorgeously,
and with other volumes of my Siege library, it occupies a
special and most sacred shelf near my writing-desk at
home."

He went on:

"This fine fellow Sherbrand is an old correspondent of
mine.  He would say I might tell you the story, and I think
it's worth hearing, in a way.  It must be eight years ago,
when he would be about seventeen, that he wrote to me from
an engineering college at Newcastle, to say he had read
some papers of mine on the subject of scouting, and
proposed—if I thought it would not be presumption on his
part—save the mark!—to enrol and organise a troop on the
lines laid down.  He wanted a definite code of Scout law to
work on, and Rules and so forth, all of which I supplied him,
you may be sure.  Busy as I was drilling and cub-licking
the North British Territorials, I couldn't find time to spare
to run up and see the boy.  So he commandeered a holiday
and motor-cycled to Headquarters.  Rode all through one
night in pelters of rain, and caught me in my 5 A.M. tub."

"He meant business."

"Business—and it was up to me to encourage such grittiness
and enthusiasm.  So I ordered coffee for two, and
bacon and eggs for half a dozen, and when I had fed him I
talked.  My book wasn't published, but I lent him some
proof-sheets.  He thanked me, but before he took them he
had to disburden his mind."

The fine sunburnt hand went thoughtfully to the grizzled
moustache, worn rather longer than of old.

"He had got something on his mind.  He had been reading
that old bogey-book, *Hales on Mental Heredity*, and the
theory of the transmission of base or criminal tendencies
from the parents to the children, had haunted him night and
day.  He said to me, standing up before me, looking about
as long and thin as a fathom of pump-water: 'My father was
dismissed from the Army in War-time, for not backing up
his C.O.  Is there a kink in *my* brain or a bacillus lying
waiting in *my* body that will one day make a slacker of me?"

Saxham's square face was ashen, but the Chief's eyes were
elsewhere.

"And you told him——?"

"I told him, that whilst physical disease and deformity
are transmissible from the unhealthy parents to their
unlucky offspring, no sensible Christian regarded the theory
of inherited vice or crime, as anything but the most pernicious
lie that the devil ever invented to spread as a net for
the catching of bodies and souls.  That seemed to buck
him up!"

"I do not doubt it!" said Saxham.  He breathed more
freely, and his face had regained its natural hue.

"I reminded him," went on the Chief, "that our Army
and our Fleet are indebted for thousands of the finest men,
morally and physically speaking, to Reformatories and
Industrial Schools and Homes.  'Think of the character
borne by Barnardo's boys,' I told him, 'and grind the
scorpion lie to pulp under your boot-heel, whenever and
wherever you find it cocking up its damnable tail!'"

"So he went back," said Saxham, "cheered and strengthened
by your sympathy, as—other men have been before
now!"

"So he went back to the College, fortified by my bit of
nervous English, and worked at his troop for all he was
worth.  Raked in seventy in the first month, and kept on
raking.  He is dandy at drill and organisation, is
Sherbrand.  When he left the College they mustered three
hundred strong."  The speaker struck his stick upon the
turf and said emphatically: "How it grows!—how the
Movement spreads and gathers and ramifies!  Do you know
Saxham, that there are moments in my life when I am
tempted to be proud.  When rank upon rank of young,
fresh, fearless faces with bright eyes are turned to me.
When thousands of active, lithe, healthy young bodies
run out into the open and rally about the Chief Scout."

There was a mist in the bright eyes that his manliness was
not ashamed of.

"Years ago, when the officer in command of a certain
beleaguered garrison was doing his best to defend it, a great
Fear came upon him in the watches of a particularly anxious
night.  Perhaps you will guess what I mean, Saxham?
The man had not slept for more weeks than I like to
remember, and the hours of rest in the day-time were hot-eyed
staring horrors of insomnia.  He was—up against it!  The
shrunken lids would not shut down over his bursting
eyeballs, and his jaws were clamped so that he could not yawn.
Then, on this night, his Fear rose up and mopped and
mowed at him, and it had the kind of face that madhouse
doctors and keepers know.  He wasn't ordinarily a 'fearful
man,' like Kipling's immortal Bengali, but now he was
horribly, sickeningly afraid!"

"I guessed it," said Saxham.  "I realised what you were
suffering, but I did not dare to hint my knowledge to you.
There was no danger of madness.  But you were certainly
on the verge of mental and physical breakdown."

"And being in such desperate case," said the other, "I
prayed to God in my extremity.  I promised Him if He
would help me to carry out my duty to Him, as to my
earthly superiors, and those men and women and children
who looked to me as their protector and guide, that I would
one day, if He spared me, build Him a big Temple, made of
the little temples that are the work of His Hands."

"And to-day the Temple is a reality!"

"A grand reality.  East, West, North, and South, it
spreads and widens and towers.  It is built of boys.
Clean-limbed, clean-minded, self-respecting fellows, scorning
vices, eager for service, sensitive in Honour, chivalrous,
patriotic, keen for Truth and Right.  It frightens me,
Saxham, when I think what a leaven is working through
these boys of mine, potential fathers of sons in the ripeness
of Time, for the ultimate regeneration of this vicious,
degenerate world.  It makes me understand how near old
Coleridge got to the live heart of things when he wrote the
*Ancient Mariner*.  The service of Almighty God is the love
of your fellow-man.  But why to me, and not to another
worthier, should God have given this wonderful, glorious
thing to bring about? ..."

"Because you are worthy of doing His work for Him.
Has He not used you as His instrument in my own
case?  Should I not own to this, I who owe everything to
you?"

The other laid a hand on the great shoulder of the Dop
Doctor.

"If ever you owed me anything, Saxham, you paid me
long ago!"

He was silent a moment and said in a lighter tone:
"I am not quite clear yet as to how you met my whilom
Scoutmaster."

"Our acquaintance dates from a cross-Channel flight he
made in the end of June."

"I know."  The Chief prodded the turf with his walking-stick.
"A French pilot-officer of their Service Aëronautique,
a certain Commandant Raymond, who flew here in the
contest for the Ivor International Cup in May, had heard
of Sherbrand and his inventions from Lamond of the Central
Flying School.  He took a shine to the aërial stabiliser and
got his Chiefs to give it a trial.  That came off on the
Grand Prix Sunday, when Paris went wild over the
Sarajevo affair."

"And scenting War in the air," said Saxham, "Sherbrand
promptly took wing for England without waiting for the
decision of the judges who were present at the test."

"Did he?  He has keen scent."

"Better now," said Saxham laughing, "than when he
came to me—on the recommendation of an old patient—suffering
from an aggravated form of nasal catarrh.  He had
had it at intervals for years, and suspected it to be owing to
what he described, in the language of the engineering-shop,
as "a defect in the air-intake."  He proved to be
right—and I sent him into the Hospital, where Berry Boyle
performed a slight minor operation which removed the trouble,
and left him capitally fit.  Then, when he came out of
the Hospital, he found a letter from the French Consul
waiting at his office——"

The Chief interpolated:

"Ah yes.  The aërial stabiliser had gained the suffrages
of Messieurs the Chiefs of the Aëronautique Française.  I
hope M. Jourdain's report to his Government will induce
them to buy the patent.  For, judging by the interest that
the representatives of another Power seem to take in——"

The Chief broke off.  The smiling lines about his eyes and
mouth had vanished as he queried: "Who is the lady my
Scout over there is squiring?  A superbly-shaped young
woman, with hair of the fashionable terra-cotta shade.  But
for the hair, I should have said it was your niece, Patrine."

Saxham's eyes followed the direction of the Chief's glance.
He said, and his face looked hard as a mask of stone:

"Your memory for faces is correct as usual.  The lady
with the terra-cotta hair is my late brother's daughter,
Patrine."

The Chief's familiar whistle filled in a space of silence,
with a pensive little fragment of Delius' *Spring Song*, while
Saxham's frown grew deeper and his jaw thrust out more
angrily.  Then the well-known voice said:

"I am sorry that Miss Patrine has been tempted to follow
the fashion.  But I regret still more her choice of friends!
I refer to the German officer in whose company your niece
arrived here, in a yellow Darracq car, about half-an-hour
ago."  The speaker made sure, with a rapid glance to right
and left, that no listener was standing near them, and added:
"I know that I may trust you as myself in any private or
official matter.  Between ourselves frankly, I am here
to-day for the purpose of—keeping an eye on this particular
man!"

The Doctor's vivid blue eyes darted rapier-points at the
other, from caves that had suddenly been dug about them.
The General went on:

"The man himself is no common spy, though he may on
occasion act as an agent or post-box for Secret Intelligence
communications.  He is an extraordinarily able young
officer, a squadron captain in their Field Flying Service,
with some astonishing records to his credit, though he was
an Engineer Lieutenant in 1907 when he came to England
as chauffeur-officer attached to the Kaiser's Personal Staff.
For a comprehensible reason his superiors desired him to
improve his knowledge of the topography of the British
Isles.  He certainly did so, but"—the keen eyes twinkled—"the
record runs accomplished by von Herrnung with the
All Highest as passenger, were not unattended, or
unobserved by us.  That he is well-born and well-looking is
undeniable, and these advantages, with other social gifts, may
easily attract your niece, like any other of Eve's daughters.
But to say the least it is inadvisable that she should
encourage the advances of this man, or of any other German
officer,—when the next forty-eight hours may see Britain
and Germany at grips in War."

"That is your opinion?"

"It is my plain, unvarnished opinion, speaking as one of
those who are admitted behind the scenes.  Not that I am
infallible, but the Signs and the Tokens all lead one way."  He
lifted his lean brown hand and pointed eastwards.  "For
years they have been making ready, but now—what a frenzy
of ordered preparation.  What secret councils, what
reiteration of orders, what accumulations of stores, what
roaring of electric furnaces—I'd give my little finger to
know what chemical they're making in huge bulk at the
Badische Anilin-und-Soda Fabrik, and hundreds of other
dye and bleaching-powder works in Germany and
Austria!—every one backed up by the German Imperial State or
the Dual Monarchy on the understanding that at the signal,
they are to turn to and turn out—what?  Benzine for
phenol, phenol for picric, and toluene for Super-Explosive,
that's understood.  But this stuff puzzles me.  Do you
see the Senile Arc in my eyes yet, Saxham?  It must be that
I'm getting old!"

He smiled his whimsical smile and went on:

"A day or two after the burial of the Archduke Franz
Ferdinand and his morganatic partner, murdered by some
fanatics among the Greater Serbs, a huge majority among
the German military and naval officers doing duty in their
Colonies, or on political service in Africa, were recalled by
Wireless.  Leave has been stopped.  Rolling-stock in
inconceivable masses is being concentrated on the greater
strategic railways, while the official and semi-official Press
prates and gabbles of peace and neighbourly goodwill!"  He
shrugged.  "Things were safer when they yelled and
foamed in convulsions of Anglophobia.  Then one doubted....
Now one is sure! ... Ah, I thought I wasn't mistaken.
Here's Sherbrand coming down!"





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`THE GOD FROM THE MACHINE`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER XXVIII


.. class:: center medium bold

   THE GOD FROM THE MACHINE

.. vspace:: 2

The dazzling turquoise of the sky was now streaked with
milky bands of haziness.  Dappled golden-white cloudlets
at the zenith made what is known as mackerel sky.  Trails
of rounded stratus floated low in the east and south-east.
Long shadows of hangars, pylons, semaphore and electric
searchlight-stations, stretched over the turf from westwards,
crossed by perambulatory shadows of people moving about.
These became stationary, betokening that popular interest
was newly awakened.  Umbrellas and sticks flourished
towards the sky.  Bawne gave a little crow of delight as the
whitish-brown, shining shape of the monoplane dived down
out of the empyrean, travelling with a bold, beautiful
swooping glide that took away the gazer's breath.

"Look, oh look!" Bawne gasped, leaning against Patrine.
Now her tardy interest was genuinely awakened.  Reaching
the end of its glide, the monoplane had regained the
horizontal position.  As she flattened out and hung well-nigh
motionless in mid-air with the sunlight beating on and
drenching her fragile, lacy structure, she was a thing of
beauty and of wonder.  The humming of her tractor came
to you mingled with the buzzing of her gyroscopic hoverer,
like the incessant vibration of living, sentient wings.

She seemed to tire of hanging between earth and heaven,
ceased buzzing, tilted a wing sharply and began to frolic
after it as a kitten runs after its tail on a hearthrug, or as a
swallow gambols on a chase after gnats, always turning
towards the West, whilst her greyish shadow danced and
skipped upon the gold-white cloud-surfaces to eastwards a
long way below her, like the ghost of an aëroplane.  All the
time she was gobbling up distance, steadily descending.
She presently reversed her sun-worshipping tactics, dived,
and spiralled, banking, from west to east.  You saw
plainly the helmeted heads and slightly hunched shoulders
of the pilot at the controls and the mechanic strapped in the
forward cockpit.

Soon she hovered again and swooped, so suddenly that
Patrine nipped Bawne's shoulder, saying "Great Scott!"
under her breath.  Another long sweeping glide brought her
close to the green turf of the aërodrome.  Then, with an
adroit flexing of the wing-tips, she balanced, flattened, and
landed lightly within the huge white circle, rocking a little
on her tyred wheels.

The man with the stop-watch checked the mechanism,
the bearded man with the big binoculars lowered and closed
them, scribbled in a memorandum-book and came down
the judge's stand.  The Bird of War's mechanic stayed in
his place, the pilot unhitched his body-strap, pushed up his
goggled visor, threw a long leg over the fuselage and jumped
lightly to the ground.  He staggered as he reached it,
recovered himself and stood breathing quickly, as a man
overcoming giddiness, or other physical sensation of
distress.

Tall, young, and lightly built, with long active limbs and
a physique suggestive of youth and courage and enterprise,
as he stood motionless, his eared and goggled cap now in
hand, the play of sunlight upon his thin brown waterproof
gabardine and overalls made him look like a statue of
Mercury wrought in pale new bronze.  And with a lifting
of her sick heart as though it had suddenly spread wings,
and soared into a region of unlimited space and glorious
freedom, Patrine recognised her Flying Man of the Jardin
des Milles Plaisirs.

.. vspace:: 2

From what airt, of what world unknown, did it blow, that
cool, fragrant wind that then and always heralded for
Patrine his coming?  It took her by surprise; lapped her
delicately about; enveloped her from head to foot in its pure
invisible waves.  The hot, sore places in her heart were
bathed and healed, the deep caverns filled, the little thirsty
rock-pools set awash and brimming.  When the sough of it
was no longer in her ears or the tug and flutter of it among
the folds of her garments; when she ceased to be conscious
of the cool resilient pressure upon cheek and neck and
forehead—her brief sweet hour of joy was over.  Sherbrand
had gone away again.

.. vspace:: 2

"*Cela ira-t-il, monsieur?  Je suis prêt à faire une nouvelle
demonstration si vous n'êtes pas satisfait.*"

His clear, strong voice speaking in laborious public school
French gave her a delicious shock of pleasure.  He was
addressing the stout, bearded Frenchman who, accompanied
by the thinner man who had timed Sherbrand by the
stop-watch, now walked across the turf to shake the aviator's
hand.  As Sherbrand spoke, he drew a white handkerchief
from the sleeve of his gabardine and wiped from the
corners of his mouth some little blobs of foam, slightly
bloodstained.  The stout, friendly Frenchman glanced at
him, and uttered an exclamation.  Sherbrand shook his
head in vigorous protest and laughed, repeating his offer to
demonstrate again.  Upon which the bearded man, who had
also a moustache with thick, stiff waxed ends, and wore a
large checked-pattern summer suit with a white drill
waistcoat, a low collar and a necktie with flowing ends, and was
topped with a high-crowned straw hat that suggested
Trouville in mid-season, negatived the proposal with a
vivacious gesture, pouring forth a stream of words:

"*Au contraire, Monsieur, je suis convainçu que vous avez
une idée superbe.  Nous vous avons observé avec la lunette
Zeiss, pendant votre vol, et nous avons constaté le temps très
soigneusement: vous avez maintenu le bruit et la stabilité
pendant cinq minutes de plus que les vingt-cinq minutes
stipulées.  Permettez moi comme une simple formalité de voir votre
altimètre?*"

"By all means!" Sherbrand returned.

They went back to the aëroplane together, and Sherbrand
reached over and unhooked the altimeter from a board in
the pilot's cockpit, and the bearded man examined it, and
then cordially shook hands.

"Within two days, at latest.  Possibly sooner!" Patrine
heard the straw-hatted, bearded gentleman say in English,
pronounced with a strong French accent.  "Believe me,"
he added, "I shall represent most strongly the usefulness of
your invention to the Chief of the État de l'Aviation.  *Au
revoir, Monsieur, et encore mes félicitations!*"

Then he went away with the small dark man who had
used the stop-watch, and who carried the Zeiss binoculars
slung in their case.

During this business interview Patrine had felt Bawne
panting and wriggling close beside her, like an excited, but
well-mannered fox-terrier waiting to be whistled for.  But
Sherbrand, though he glanced at the boy smilingly, had
turned aside to engage in conversation with Saxham, and
the Chief Scout, whom Sherbrand saluted in orthodox
Scout fashion, flushing red under the clear sunburn that
darkened his fair skin.

"He's one of Us!" Bawne whispered to Patrine, his own
young face alight with pleasure.  "He was Scoutmaster of
a troop in the North, he told me, and I know he must have
been a splendid one.  He's the kind of chap who'd be
prepared for anything.  Don't you think he looks like
that?"

Patrine did not answer.  She was feeling "cheap," as
Lady Beauvayse would have expressed it.  She had put the
man out of her thoughts because she had taken it for granted
that Fanshaw's instructor could not be a gentleman.  Now,
as she watched Sherbrand in conversation with the elder
man, his manner of quiet, well-bred deference, mingled with
a pleasant courtesy, showed her beyond all doubt that his
place was above the salt.

He had looked towards her, when he had smiled at Bawne,
and his glance had swept over her without recognition.  She
would have known him anywhere, while he——!  She had
forgotten her preposterously-coloured hair.

How sweet the breeze was, bringing from the west the
smell of strawberry-fields and red and white clover.  Yet
she had not noticed it until now.  Her mood had changed.
She had put away the thing she most hated to remember.
She felt almost like the Patrine of two days ago.

"Miss Saxham!"

It was von Herrnung's voice speaking behind her, and
with a shock of loathing horror she remembered all.  She
turned to see his tall figure approaching.  The first
impression was that he was ill; the next, that he was furiously
angry.  His florid complexion had bleached to an ugly,
greenish pallor, even the blue of his eyes had faded to a
curious lilac hue.  He carried in his gloved left hand, and
with evident care, a flat strapped wallet of brown leather,
fastened with two Bramah locks and a lock-strap.  He said
to Patrine in a jarring voice of resentment and impatience:

"I have been looking for you.  Could one not leave you
for a minute but you must go off by yourself?  *Sapperlot*!
Whom has one here?  Where did you pick up the boy?"

Her heart swelled as Bawne looked up at her in astonishment,
then transferred his stare to von Herrnung, puckering
his brows in disapproval of the rude, strange man.  She
answered as calmly as was possible:

"This is my cousin, Bawne Saxham, Count von Herrnung."

"Why did you leave me?" von Herrnung grumbled as
Bawne stiffly saluted, and she told him:

"Because I saw you occupied in conversation with your
German friends."

"Women are incomprehensible creatures! ... How do
you know that they were German?  At any rate, whether
they were or not, they have gone away now!  You find
me annoyed.  It is because they are—what shall I call
it?—perhaps a little exigent.  Now I will have a smoke.  I
suppose you do not mind?"

He had not freed his hand from the brown leather satchel
to remove his hat when he had mopped his perspiring forehead,
with a big cambric handkerchief scented with the *très
persistent* perfume that always clung about his clothes.
Nor did he relinquish it to help himself to a cigar, but
opened the gold case containing the weeds with the hand
that drew it from his pocket, extracted a cigar with his teeth,
and returned the case to his pocket; then produced a matchbox,
opened it in the same way, picked out a match, shut the
box, and struck the match upon it, saying to Bawne, as he
blew out the first mouthful of smoke: "What do you think
of that, my fine fellow?  Should I not make a famous
one-handed man?"  But Bawne's suffrages remained unwon,
although the dexterity of the thing had secretly pleased him.
He remained doggedly silent, scowling with his reddish-fair
brows, thrusting out his chin.

"Should I not?  Tell me!" von Herrnung persisted.
"Or is it that British boys are cowards and afraid to answer
when they are spoken to?"

"I am not afraid—of anything or anybody!"

Bawne reddened and looked the taunting big man
between the eyes, squarely.  The look added—*And least of
all of anybody like you*!  He went on:

"But I think it takes more than—that kind of being
clever—to make a famous man."

"*Nicht so schlimm!*" Von Herrnung nodded.  "But
all the same these little tricks are worth knowing.  You
might be bound with ropes to a post, or tree, or waggon
by the enemy, and if he happened to have left your matches
on you—and you could get one hand free—there is no knot
man could tie that I could not wriggle myself out of!—you
might burn the rope and get away!  I did that once when
I was a gunner-boy of seventeen in South Africa——"

Von Herrnung stopped short.  Bawne asked simply, and
with the same straight look between the eyes:

"Did you fight with the Boers against us in the War?"

Von Herrnung did not seem to have heard.  He had
caught the drift of a sentence spoken by Sherbrand, who was
answering to a question of the Chief Scout.

"Oh yes!  I live here—have quarters over Mrs. Dunlett's
restaurant—you could communicate with me practically at
any time.  We've the 'phone and a private telegraph-office,
and the wireless—under the usual licence from the
Postmaster-General."

He pointed towards the well-known tall posts with the
short cross-pieces, china insulators and lines of thick wire,
standing beside the telegraph-cabin, over the roof of which
straddled the wireless installation's tall, latticed steel mast.

"We find it useful for business as well as instructional
purposes," he went on.  "Macrombie—the man in charge—is
a one-time Royal Navy Petty Officer Telegraphist and
a first-class operator."  Sherbrand's mouth twisted a little
at the corners as he added: "About twenty-four days out of
thirty, let us say!"

The quick rejoinder came:

"Then he's D.O.D. two working days in the month, not
counting Sundays.  I've met plenty of Macrombies in my
time.  This doesn't happen to be the monthly pay-day, by
any chance, or one of the other close days in its neighbourhood?"

"No, no!  He's as right as rain and as sober as a seal,"
said Sherbrand.  "And—this tall fellow with red hair must
be the man who has written to me upon business.  I shall
have to go to him."

They exchanged a left-handed grip, mutually smiling.

"Good old habits stick," said the Chief, and Sherbrand
answered:

"Fortunately, they do.  Let me say again how much and
how gratefully I have to thank you for the teaching that has
helped me to find myself!"  His clear light glance reverted
to Saxham.  "The Doctor too, for giving me this chance of
meeting you.  Please tell him the story if you think it would
interest him.  I hope with all my heart, sir, that you will
soon come here again!"

"I had already taken the permission for granted," the
Chief said, as Sherbrand saluted and went forward to meet
"the fellow with red hair."  "There is big business in that
gyroscopic stabiliser of his," he added to Saxham, "and
our friends at the French War Ministry have tumbled to it
as one might naturally expect.  So much the worse for our
bungling bigwigs at Whitehall, who've let a good thing slip,
for the millionth time, out of their claws.  But taking
for granted the value of the patent, and recognising the
likelihood of the French bid stimulating Teutonic
competition——"

The gentle, modulated voice broke off.  Von Herrnung
had stepped out upon the green and was striding towards the
lightly-moving, less stiffly-carried figure of Sherbrand, the
approximation of the two somehow suggesting a salute of
gladiators previous to the fight.  Now the big, grey-clad
German was arrested in the middle of his stride by the
sudden kling-a-ling of a motor-gong, a sharp crystal vibration
that stiffened him to attention, and pricked his ears for
a repetition of the sound.

It did not immediately come.  He raised the left hand
that held the leather satchel, and swung it from front to
rear, so that it was for a moment clear of the outline of his
body, as who should signal: "*I have it safe!*"  Quick, watchful
eyes noted this.  Took in also the ornate bulk of the dark
blue F.I.A.T. touring-car, as with the characteristic,
noiseless smoothness of its make, it glided between the ranks
of parked and waiting automobiles, and stopped in the open,
perhaps some forty yards away.

A fat yellow hand, with a twinkling solitaire upon it,
waved.  A brown hand, with a massive gold curb-chain
watch-bracelet on the wrist of it, beckoned imperiously.
Something had been forgotten, something was still to say.
Von Herrnung wheeled, and went back in his traces as
obediently as the pointer that has been called to heel.  He
did not uncover, perhaps he had been told not to.  He
saluted, and stood stiffly, listening to a harsh German voice
that yapped at him.  All his arrogance and swagger seemed
to have been juggled out of him by the gestures of the brown
hand with the flashing wrist-bracelet, emerging from the
white cuff with jewelled sleeve-links and the snowy sleeve
with its broad bands of glittering golden braid.

"*S'th!*"

The slight sound pulled Saxham's head round.  He had
not been looking at the occupants of the blue F.I.A.T.
His eyes were intent on the tall white figure of the woman
standing beside his boy.  Her black lace sunshade was
closed.  She held the tall-sticked thing at arm's-length,
leaning upon it, and the westering light smote a myriad of
multi-coloured sparkles out of the tinsel spangles of the hat with
the single black cock's plume.  The queer headgear crowning
her barbaric hair, and her full white oval face with its
wide, low, arched black brows and long eyes, made her
seem strange, alluring, as some tall-stemmed, exotic flower,
sprung at the incantation of an Oriental conjuror, from a
green stretch of English turf.

In the same instant von Herrnung touched his hat,
stepped back from the blue car, wheeled and walked away
toward the waiting figure of Sherbrand, the sallow man in
the Homburg hat gave an order, the chauffeur touched the
electric starter, and the F.I.A.T. turned and smoothly
bowled away.  But in the instant of its turning, the bearded
man in the white naval uniform rose in his place, and
obtruding half his short, bulky body across the lean person
of his sallow neighbour, scrutinised the face and figure of
Patrine Saxham with a cool, appraising deliberateness that
tortured the wincing flesh it enveloped like the cut of a
carriage-whip.

They were full, bright, and rather handsome grey-blue
eyes shadowed by the white cap-peak, and they had the
indefinable expression of authority and power.  Their glance
said—and the face with the perfectly-trimmed beard and
the upturned moustache wore a curious smile that bore out
the glance's meaning:

"So!  That's the woman!"  And a surge of scalding
shame and bitter resentment rose in the heart of Patrine
Saxham and filled it to the brim.

She could not have explained why she felt certain that her
shameful secret was known to the man with the powerful
eyes, the cast of whose face with its pointed beard faintly
reminded one of the King and the Tsar.

Patrine had always abominated cheap sentiment.  She
had once laughed until she cried at a revival of an old
four-decker drama, whose hero, waking to the knowledge of a
committed, irrevocable deed cried in throaty, stagy tones
of anguish upon God to put back the dreadful clock of Time
and give him yesterday.

Now she perceived the deep, vital interest of the
common-place human story.  If asking Him on whom that other
sinner cried would wipe from Time's register a span of hours
between twelve P.M. and three o'clock in the morning—blot
one deed from the Roll of things that done, are
beyond Humanity's undoing—Patrine told herself that it
would be worth while to wear sackcloth, live on boiled
field-peas, drink brook-water, and pray—until her knees
were worn to the bone.

She caught Saxham's piercing glance across the intervening
strip of greensward.  He turned away his eyes, and a
shudder went through her frame.  Had he suspected—could
anyone have found out and told him?  The Doctor's
head was bent now as the General talked to him.  It
seemed to her that a muscle in his lean cheek twitched, a
characteristic sign with him of excitement, or emotion.  She
wondered what the General had said to Uncle Owen to
make him look like that.

As a fact, the quiet voice was saying in Saxham's ear:
"And prepare against a surprise, Doctor—for though
your nerves are tough as aluminium bronze, a few
million gallons of water have rolled under the Thames
bridges since you and I held Council of War....  As I
mentioned before, the interest taken by the French
Government in Sherbrand's gyroscopic hoverer may well have
stimulated the interest of our Teuton neighbours.  But it
doesn't explain the presence on Fanshaw's Flying Ground
of Lieutenant-General Count Helmuth von Moltke, Chief
of the German Great General Staff, and—Grand Admiral
Prince Henry of Prussia, brother of the Kaiser—in a
F.I.A.T. touring-car!"





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`A SECRET MISSION`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER XXIX


.. class:: center medium bold

   A SECRET MISSION

.. vspace:: 2

"Can it be possible——"  Saxham checked himself.  "You
see how rusty I am getting, General.  You refer to that
machine that turned out from where cars are parked just
now.  The German fellow went up to it....  It had a
groom beside the chauffeur and three other men inside it....
While I was looking—elsewhere—it must have
moved away!"

"It has only turned the corner of the café-restaurant,"
the Chief said in his quiet tones.  He glanced in the
direction of the squat block of gaily painted wooden buildings
devoted to the inner needs of Fanshaw's clients.  "The awning
hides it, but I can see a bit of it still.  Until it moves,
I can go on talking.  Frankly, I am in the position of the
High Church curate who went out wild-pig shooting in the
territories of the Limpopo with a single-bore hammer-gun of
grandpapa's pattern—and got his choice of pot-shots
between a lion and a rhino.  Prinz Heinrich is my royal lion
and von Herrnung,—who counted for little more than a
bush-pig—has suddenly swelled into a rhinoceros."

He pulled the grizzled moustache thoughtfully, keeping
his eyes glued on the back of the big blue car.

"If I could get hold of Sherbrand!—but the chance is
dead for the rhino and lion winding me.  Old von Moltke
with the big wart on his ginger-coloured face, and the
charming manner that makes you forget that you don't like
him!—would certainly recognise me—and the nautical
Hohenzollern and I have met once or twice before.  I must
lay low like Brer Rabbit, and take a single-handed chance.
No, no, Doctor, you have your patients to look after!  I
am not going to drag you into this.  But if I'd got a couple
of my Boy Scouts handy——"  He broke off, encountering
Bawne's bright eyes.  "By George, Doctor!  I'm going to
chance it!  I'm going to give your youngster an opportunity
to prove his Saxham blood!"

The Master-hand gave the Scout's Sign, and Bawne shot
across like a brownish streak of swiftness.  He drew himself
up, gave the Full Salute, and stood waiting, his rigid
attitude in sharp contrast with his dancing, expectant eyes.
The Doctor looked at his watch and moved away silently.
The Chief said in a clear undertone:

"You see that tall, red-haired man in grey clothes over
there with Mr. Sherbrand?  Don't look at him openly, or he
will know we are talking about him, but take a sidelong
gliff, and say."

"I see him, sir."

"Do you know anything of him?  Stand easy and answer
carefully."

The hand came down from the hat-brim.  The boy said:

"I've heard him talk, sir, and I think he is German.
I'm learning that and French at Charterhouse."

"He is a German.  Do you speak enough of the language
to understand him, suppose he were talking to one of
his countrymen?"

"*Ich—kann—lesen, aber Ich kann es—nicht sprechen.*"  The
answer came slowly.  "And if they weren't using
crack-jaw words, sir, or talking very quick, I might manage—I
could make out a lot of what they said."

"Very well, keep your man under close observation
and—you see that brown satchel he has in his hand?"

"I've seen it close, sir.  A flat brown leather despatch
case thing—with a criss-cross pattern on the leather, and
two locks, and another lock on the strap that goes round.
He hadn't it with him when first I saw him talking to—a
lady.  Then a man—a servant—came and called him away
to speak to some gentlemen in a big blue motor-car.  One of
them—fat and old and bald—with a wart on his cheek, who
wore a white topper, and yellowy clothes, and a red necktie,
and looked rather like a—like an Inspector of Sunday
Schools in shooting-clothes—passed him the leather case.
That's how I know he didn't bring it, sir.  Oh! and the
yellow car he drives isn't British.  She's got an oval
International plate with the German 'D' in black on a white
ground."

"I am glad my Scout knows how to use his eyes!"

The Chief's own eyes were crinkled with merriment.
That Moltke, the Chief of the German Great General staff,
bosom friend of the All Highest, should resemble a stout
Inspector of Sunday Schools in the estimation of a small
British boy, was lovely in the extreme.

"Well, I want to know what the big German officer—he is
an officer!—does with that leather satchel he's carrying so
carefully.  Where he goes with it, whom he talks to, and
what he says to them.  Find out whether it is light or
heavy, if it is what I believe it to be, you might be rendering
good service to your country in destroying it.  But you'll be
doing all I want or expect, if you stick to the man who
carries it!"

"I'll do that, sir, on my Honour!"

"Good!  Make your little German serve you.  I may
have to leave here upon this business, but I'll be back
within, at least—half an hour.  If he goes before I get
back, find out where he is going.  If you can't find out,
follow him.  On foot if he walks, in a taxi if he doesn't.
Here are six separate shillings—in that case you'll want
money for fares.  Remember, if things take a puzzling turn
and you find yourself in a tight place, whisper a quiet word
to Sherbrand, though I'd prefer you to carry through on
your own!  Report to me, in case he goes before I get back
here—at Headquarters, Victoria Street.  Have you got all
this tucked away safe in your head?"

"Yes, sir."

"Then quit yourself like a man.  My signal to you that I
have left will be a dog's yelping.  Ah!"  The keen bright
eyes, glued on the distant back of the blue car, had seen the
rear wheels moving.  Before the F.I.A.T. glided smoothly
out of eyeshot the Chief had hurried away.

In the opposite direction to the archway of exit, the slight,
active figure in the perfectly-cut blue serge morning clothes
and pot hat of Bond Street block, was rapidly walking.
Bawne doubted his eyes for a moment before he remembered
that the Collingwood Avenue ran along that side of the
Flying Ground fence.  There was a smaller gate in charge of
a commissionaire, in the fence, about a hundred yards along
it.  Taxi-cabs were standing outside the gate.  Any person
on foot or awheel, leaving the Flying Ground, must pass the
gate and the taxi-stand.  You could see through the chinks
in the fence when they passed, nip out when they were well
by, and follow in a green-flagged chuffer.  Bawne had
settled this to his satisfaction before a wrench at the rein
of duty pulled his head round to the business on hand.

"I'm not spying on Mr. Sherbrand," the boy told himself,
gritting his small square teeth doggedly.  "I've *got* to listen,
so as to understand the German's game.  And I'm going to.
This is how I'm going to!"

He began to turn hand-springs after the fashion of the
London street Arab, thus lessening the distance between
himself and the talking men.  They glanced at him, and
Sherbrand grinned, but they looked back again directly at
each other.  Then Bawne threw himself down and panted,
rolled over and lay, still panting.  Now he was near enough
to hear what passed between the two.

Sherbrand said:

"No, I was not particularly solid in my conviction that
the aërial stabiliser would take the fancy of the Chiefs
of the Service Aëronautique.  An accident prevented me
from witnessing the final test, and I got what the Americans
call cold feet and judged it no use staying in France longer.
So I flew back here, starting early by daylight the next
morning, with Davis, my mechanic, and found a cable waiting
at my office to say the working of the invention had been
observed with interest by the Chiefs of the S. Aë. F., and
that if I could carry out a satisfactory time-trial at my
headquarters in the presence of the French Consul, the
authorities at the Ministry of War would be willing to buy my
patents for France.  As it happened, I was suffering from a
slight obstruction in the nasal passages, that spoiled my
climbing.  It was absolutely necessary to go into Hospital.
That is why I could not give M. Jourdain an earlier date for
the hovering-test you have just seen carried out."

Von Herrnung demanded:

"But did you not receive a letter containing a business
proposal?  A communication from Rathenau, Wolff and
Brothers, Aëromotor Engineers of Paris, 200, Rue Gagnette?
I happen to know that it was posted, and the date
being that of the Paris trial, Herren Rathenau and Wolff
certainly possess the prior claim!"

"Their communication reached me in Hospital, three
days later than the French War Office cable," Sherbrand
answered.  "It had been forwarded from the makeshift
hangar I rented at Drancy—a mistake in the address being
the reason of the delay!"

"That fellow Lindemann is a *Dummer Teufel*," said von
Herrnung, shrugging.

"My German landlord....  Why—do you know him?"
asked Sherbrand with a look of surprise.

"No, certainly.  But you—you said the fellow's name
was Lindemann.  Not so?  No?—then I am mistaken,"
said von Herrnung with another shrug.  He hurried on as
though to cover a mistake with a spate of sentences:

"Of course, with Rathenau and Wolff I have nothing to
do.  Save as an old customer, of whom they have asked a
favour—you understand?  Indeed I—you will pardon me!—do
not your hoverer regard as an original invention.  In
1912 our German Ministry of Marine completed a gun-boat
fitted with a gyroscopic stabiliser to prevent rolling—you
understand—in stormy weather.  The device was hellishly
effective."

"So effective," rejoined Sherbrand, without the quiver of
a facial muscle, though there was laughter in his eyes, "that
it broke up the ship."

"*Es mag wohl sein!*" returned von Herrnung, covering
discomfiture, if he felt it, with his imperturbable shrug and
hard blue stare.

Sherbrand went on, straightening his wide shoulders and
clasping his hands loosely at his back as he talked:

"I don't claim that my patent is an absolutely new
invention.  Far from it.  But it is a new arrangement of some
old ideas, and limited though its use may be—it works.
You have seen it working.  You agree that it justifies its
name?"  He waited for the assent, and went on: "Possibly
if I had described it as an aërial drag-anchor, I should have
explained its uses more clearly.  It is no good at all when
your machine isn't flying level—of course you understand
that?  If you were ass enough to try to dive without cutting
out the power that drives the horizontal screws you would
drop to the ground like a plummet and break into a million
of little bits—or dig a hole in the earth big enough for a Tube
Station.  But—keeping an even line of flight—when you
switch it on it pulls against the tractor just sufficiently to
give you—not immovability—but poise.  Sufficient to take
a photograph or drop an explosive with a good deal of
accuracy."

The small boy lying outstretched on the warm turf near
them, thought dolefully:

"*Dummer Teufel* meant 'stupid devil' in German.  But
this talk is dreadfully business, I can't stow away much.
Man alive!  I wish Roddy Wrynche or some other fellow
with a top-hole memory had got this job to tackle.  And
yet the Chief trusted it to *me*!"

All this, while Sherbrand was explaining.

"M. Jourdain declared himself completely satisfied.  His
observer said that I maintained poise and stability for five
minutes longer than the stipulated twenty-five.  He looked
at the altimeter and said I should receive a definite answer
within a couple of days....  Unlucky brute!  Someone
must have run over him!"

The shrill yelp of a hurt dog had evoked Sherbrand's
exclamation.  The sufferer's plaint came from the Collingwood
Avenue, on the other side of the fence.  Thrice the
excruciating sound ripped the ears, then died out in a
sobbing whimper....  *That was for me!* Bawne told
himself, as von Herrnung went on:

"Still, you are not pledged.  There is no definite
understanding.  In the interests of the wealthy firm I am asked
to represent—solely as a matter of courtesy, because they
have been immensely civil to me in business,—you would
not refuse me a test?"

Sherbrand said, drawing off his left glove and showing
blood oozing from under bluish-looking finger-nails:

"I found it uncommonly parky to-day at 10,000 feet.
There was a nor'-east breeze, a regular piercer.  Found
myself spitting blood rather badly, and to be candid, I was
uncommonly grateful that the French Consul declined my
offer, in case he was not satisfied, to do the thing again.
The fact is, the operation, slight as it was, has weakened me
a little.  I wouldn't care to repeat the performance without
a good night's rest to buck me up."

Von Herrnung shrugged and agreed:

"That it is cold at 10,000 I can credit easily.  I have had
the oil in my own gauges frozen at 7,000 in midsummer.
*Da ist nicht zit strassen*.  Hæmorrhage and dizziness are
the chief enemies of the aviator.  One's stomach betrays
one also, the cursed beast!—after a good hearty
meal!"

"I don't give mine the chance!" Sherbrand returned,
"but stave off the pangs of appetite with milk-tablets and
meat-lozenges.  Do all my flying on these and chocolate.
Keep a little store of the things and a Thermos of hot
coffee, in a *cache* I've made for them, under the map-desk on
the left of the instrument-frame, facing the pilot's seat.
If you will come over to the Bird I'll show you, and explain
the working of the gyroscopic hoverer."  He added, looking
squarely at von Herrnung: "Of course the cutting of the
double screw is the chief thing about the invention.  I've
registered every way I know and got a trade-mark.  They
tell me at the Patent Office that my international rights
are secure!"

"They should be, if you have those precautions taken.
It does not do to trust," said von Herrnung, "too much!
The monkey proverb is law for most men."  He shrugged.
"It comes, by the way, from Namaland in German
South-West Africa.  '*Nuts in your pouch are nuts in
mine!*'"

The freemasonry of their calling had established a degree
of friendliness between them.  They were laughing over the
monkey's philosophy as they went over together to the Bird.
The small boy who had been idly sprawling on the hot turf
near them, with his tilted hat shielding his face from the
westering sun-rays, got up and trotted after them like a
collie pup.

"Coming too, young man?" Sherbrand said, glancing
back and smiling.  The boy nodded in answer, and thence-forward
kept close at the heels of the men, his ears industriously
drinking in their conversation, while his eyes were
glued on the brown leather satchel depending from the
German's gloved left hand.  Both men, now leaning over
the side of the pilot's cockpit, examined the gearing of the
hoverer, protected by a transparent casing set in the tough
ash, copper-riveted planking of the fuselage.  Then with
the aid of sulky Davis they tilted the Bird, and inspected
the pair of thin circular plates of toughened steel with
flanged edges that, revolving at high velocity in different.
directions, constituted the horizontal screw.

"Driven from the engine, as you see, by an endless
chain-drive arrangement.  By manipulation of levers, you can
throw the tractor out of gear, and hover, under favourable
circumstances and in still weather, by means of the horizontal
screw alone.  But as a rule you keep the tractor working,
and the screw acts in one as a lifter and floating-anchor.
That's about all it amounts to!—I've said I don't pretend
to hang immovable in the air like the albatross and the
condor, not to mention the gull and sparrow-hawk and
dragon-fly!  While I hover I am making way—but way to
an inappreciable amount.  One of these days we shall find
out the big Secret of Stability.  Until then we must rub
along as best we can!"

Von Herrnung returned:

"I am hellishly interested in your invention.  It now
occurs to me that as you happen to know my flying record"—he
shrugged his great shoulders and smoothed his tight red
roll of moustache with a well-manicured finger-tip—"that
it is possible you would have sufficient confidence to allow
me to test your gyroscopic hoverer myself?"  He laughed
again pleasantly as he finished: "Whatever else I may do, I
give you my word of honour I shall not pile up your machine.
Will you consent?  It may lead—supposing you do not
close with the French offer—to big business—done with my
friends!"

Sherbrand had looked doubtful, only for an instant.
Before the twelve-year-old eavesdropper had recovered
from the shock that had set his brain spinning and his heart
thumping, the situation had been accepted by the owner of
the Bird of War.  He held out his left hand, and von
Herrnung gripped and wrenched it, noting with inward amusement
that his grip had brought fresh lines of blood creeping
about the edges of Sherbrand's finger-nails.

"You shake hands with the left," he commented, smiling.
"Not for the first time have I noticed the peculiarity in
Englishmen of the younger breed."

"It is a custom," Sherbrand answered, "with—members
of an organisation to which I had, and still have, the honour
to belong."

His eyes, in speaking, went to the bright-haired boy in
Scout's uniform standing near them, but von Herrnung's
glance had not followed his.  The boy was staring wistfully
at the round-faced clock on the front gable of the café
restaurant—ten minutes to the half-hour and no sign of the
Chief's returning.  Bawne's courage began to ooze away at
the ends of his fingers and toes.

"Then," von Herrnung was beginning impatiently, when
a sallow, undersized young man, whose hollow chest and
inky paper cuffs advertised his clerical employment, came
up, touched a pen sticking out from behind his ear, and
said as Sherbrand turned to him:

"Beg pardon, sir, but the telegraph-cabin is locked up
proper, and Mr. Macrombie 'as carried orf the key."

"Out of sorts to-day, is he?" Sherbrand asked meaningly,
and the telegraph-clerk answered:

"I've never seen 'im so bad before—in the middle of the
month!"

As Fate would have it, Macrombie, ex-Petty Officer
Telegraphist of the R.N.—from whose sleeve the golden
Crown and thunderbolt had been reft by reason of his
anti-teetotal habits, had received a visit that morning from a
friend who had repaid a debt.  Hence the licensed operator
of Fanshaw's experimental and educational Wireless-station
had succumbed to an attack of his intermittent complaint.

.. vspace:: 2

Hear Macrombie's assistant continuing the recital:

"He's left the aërial connected to the transmitter and
gone out for lemon-squashes four times since one o'clock
grub.  'That's the drink for men who have souls to save, ye
little fag-eater!' he says to me; 'Salvation for soul and body,
sucked through a straw!  If thae deboshed and hopeless
drunkards at the Admiralty could be induced to swear off
their cursed alcohol and take to it, I wad no longer be
deaved to the point of steeping my tongue in profanity, by
the kind o' eediots' gibberish that is yammering at my
lugs!'"

"He'd been raking a lot of Admiralty strays in?" Sherbrand
queried.  Von Herrnung, who had been grinding his
heel into the turf and gnawing his lip with ill-concealed
impatience, turned his head sharply, and listened to the
colloquy with all his ears.

"Not so much X's as definites, sir," responded Macrombie's
assistant.  "He was upset about ten minutes before he
broke out by getting an 'Urgent' without a Preparative
Call.  Then comes 'Important' in International Code, and
'Administration' and 'Emergency.'  Then 'War Office,'
and 'Documents,' and 'Enforcement of the Law.'  By
that time 'e was purple in the face and 'arf crazy.  'If I
had my way wi' you, ye bung-nosed intemperates,' he says,
groaning-like—'I wad keep ye on grits an' caller watter
for a fortnicht!  Oh, that men, as auld Hosea says in the
inspired Screeptures'—an' I 'appen to know myself it was
Shakespeare—'should pit an enemy intil their mooths to
steal awa' their brains!'  An' 'e snatches off the telephone
'ead-band and chucks it into the corner, and just as my own
instrument starts to tick out a call, he ketches me by the
neck as if I'd bin a tame rabbit, an' slings me out o' the
office an' locks the door.  'Out o' this!' 'e says, puttin' the
cabin key in 'is pocket.  'I will no' have your lugs, dirr-ty
as they are, polluted by the unclean counsels o' the wicked.
I'm awa' to cool the wrath o' the righteous wi' anither
lemon squash!'  An' the winder is blocked by the Morse
key instrument, an' even if it wasn't, it's too small for me
to get in through!"  Macrombie's victim ended, with an
injured sniff.

"Well, well!  Better hang about the cabin a bit and
possess your soul in patience.  If any pupils drop along, tell
them they'll have to wait!  Perhaps Macrombie'll turn up
sober enough to take them on by-and-by.  As for the message
in transmission, I daresay it will keep.  Mr. Fanshaw's
not expecting any particularly important communication
that I know of.  Oh, hang it!"  Sherbrand whistled
dismally.  "I'd forgotten.  That's just what I am!"

"Shall I go and see if I can find Rumball?" suggested
Macrombie's assistant helpfully.  "He's at the engine-sheds.
He's been a locksmith.  'Twouldn't take him more than a
sec. to open the office door!"

"Cut then!" acceded Sherbrand, and the telegraph-clerk
touched his pen—discovering by a jab of the inky nib that
he was wearing it—and set off at a trot in the direction of the
engine-sheds.

You are to suppose that von Herrnung's sharp ears had
gathered the pith of the communication.  Some meaning in
the isolated words the clerk had repeated had had a
palpable effect upon his nerves.  His face looked bluish-grey
and streaky, as he said to Sherbrand, stammering in his
eagerness:

"So then, it is agreed about my flying your machine?"

"I see no objection."

"*Gut!*" Von Herrnung went on, concealing a huge joy
under a careless camaraderie: "Can you lend me a cap
and coat and a pair of *Schulzbrille*?  Goggles you call them,
yes!  The coat should better to be a large one"—he
stumbled in his English now through sheer excitement—"I am
so much a bigger man than you!"

"Certainly.  We keep Flying rigs in all manner of sizes.
It's in the way of business," Sherbrand said.  Then his
glance fell upon Davis, whose little black-avised
countenance wore an expression of sulky resentment, and he
uttered a slight exclamation.  "I forgot, Davis!  I really
am very sorry!"  He turned to von Herrnung and explained
in a tone of finality that enraged the hearer:
"This is Davis's afternoon off.  I cannot ask him to
repeat the climb."

"It is hellishly annoying!  But see!  Listen, my fellow!"  He
addressed himself to little grimy Davis, unhelmeted and
unbuttoned, leaning against the Bird's flank with his hands
in the pockets of his oily overalls, chewing a blade of grass;
"You will go up with me if I tip you?  A sovereign!  Come
then!  The gold does it!  You will go up with me, will you
not, yes?"

Davis spat out grass and delivered himself:

"Not even for my young guv'nor—and a Bank of England
finnup, do I do the soaring heagle hact again this
blooming Wednesday."

Welsh Davis had come to London from a mountain farm
in Merioneth, speaking nothing but his native Cymric, and
had culled his Sassenach from Cockney lips.  Von Herrnung
bid another sovereign, and then two more, ineffectually.

"Naow!"  Davis was rock.  "I've done my day's stunt
an' I'm nuffy.  D'yer tumble?  Nuffy!  Yer knaows wot
that means—if you're a Flying Bloke!"

"Damn you, I will gif you ten pounds!"  Von Herrnung's
face was wrung and streaked with passion.  He breathed
hard, and the brown leather satchel jumped and wobbled
in his shaking hand.

"It isn't any use," said Sherbrand, "really!  Money
doesn't count with Davis where his off-time's concerned.
Davis doesn't want to go up again, and I've not another
man of his weight available.  What do you turn the scale
at?  I should guess 16 stone or thereabouts?"

"I weigh 16 st. 8 lbs. in my ordinary clothes."

"Well, I tot 11 st. 6 lbs. in the fullest of flying-rig, and
Davis only 8 st. 5 lbs.  And the Bird is built to carry in
addition to her engine—what with the instruments, so forth,
and man-freight, a cargo of something like 22 stone.  You
see, even with Davis, you'd load the machine a good bit
over her"—he smiled at the conceit—"her Plimsoll mark.
Again, I'm sorry.  It's your luck!  No flying for you
to-day!"

"It is damnably annoying!  But"—von Herrnung's
red-lashed blue eyes were busily scanning Bawne's face and
figure—"but suppose I could get a boy of 6 stone to go up
with me?  Merely as ballast, for I do not require an
assistant—the difficulty might be got over in this way?  What
you say, my little English fellow?"  He turned on the boy
with a great air of jovial patronage.  "Are you plucky
enough?  Shall we go for a voyage together in the sky?"

"Yes—please!"

The dark blue eyes met the hard light ones bravely,
though every vestige of colour had sunk out of the young
face.  Then back to lips and cheeks the banished colour
came racing.  Bawne flushed crimson, as von Herrnung
held up a bright bit of gold, and sharply shook his head.

"*Was*?  Will you not take the sovereign?" von Herrnung
demanded.  "Are you a faint-heart after all?"

The boy bit his lip and said, clenching his small fists
desperately:

"It's against the rule for Scouts to take tips.  So I don't
want the money.  But I'm ready to come with you!"

"Look here, old fellow!" Sherbrand was beginning
anxiously.  The boy stopped him with:

"Really and truly I'm not funky—and you said I was to
have another flight."

"So I did, and so you shall," agreed Sherbrand.  "But
this won't be just a 'bus trip around the aërodrome.  It will
be climbing and spiralling and hovering, and all the rest!"

Bawne persisted:

"You could strap me in.  And I'm not afraid—really!"

"And," von Herrnung interposed, "I shall not ascend
higher than three thousand.  Probably less will do for my
purpose.  The boy will be quite safe.  Surely you are able
to trust him with me?"

Sherbrand hesitated, then said to Bawne in a relieved tone:
"Well, there's the Doctor talking to a tall lady in white
with a hat that glitters.  Run across to your father and ask
him whether you may go?"

"I'd rather you asked him—if you must—and let me stop
here!"

"*Gut!  Sehr gut!*"  Von Herrnung's tautened nerves
would have been relieved by some hard Prussian swearing.
He jangled out a laugh instead.  He caught hold of the boy
under the armpits and lifted him high above his head.
"What is your weight?  Six stone?  Come now, have I not
guessed nearly!"  He had not relinquished his grip on the
leather satchel, and as it banged against his ribs, Bawne
realised that it was quite light.

"Papers inside!" he said to himself.  Something quite
hard was under the leather at the corners, perhaps the
thinnest of metal plates.  Its contact with the boy's body
seemed to sober von Herrnung's exultation.  He dropped
Bawne unceremoniously, and straightened himself again.

"How much petrol has been used?" he asked hastily of
Davis, going over to the Bird and mounting on the landing-carriage
to look at the gauges.  "Because when I fly I never
take risks.  You will have to fill up the tank again.  Do
you hear, my fellow?"

"If Mr. Sherbrand orders me," Davis spat out another
piece of grass, "dessay I shall do it!"  He eyed von
Herrnung with surly disapproval as he craned over the Bird's
fuselage, while audibly commenting to an acquaintance
who had strolled up:

"Sheer blinders, I call 'em, these ere Fritzies!  Walk
into Buckingham Pallis next minute and ask to look into the
Privy Puss.  'Ope the Governor comes back before 'e gits
Nosey Parkerin' into the 'orizontal 'overing gear!  Perish
me if I ever met a bloke with such a nerve!  Watto, old
sonny?"  He addressed himself to the boy.  "Ain't you
feelin' up to the posh?"

"I am quite all right, thank you!" Bawne responded,
while his heart bumped against his ribs.  In his brain
words and sentences kept forming:

"I'm only a little chap.  And this is—a Big thing!
Bigger than the Chief expected, perhaps!  And he said he'd
be back in half an hour."  Half an hour meant thirty
minutes.  He glanced at the big round white-faced clock
above the entrance of the café restaurant.  More than
fifteen minutes of the half-hour had gone.

To stick to the big, brutal German was his—Bawne's—Secret
Mission.  And the inspiring, uplifting voice that
thousands of boy-hearts thrill to all the big world over had
said to him:

"Quit yourself like a man!"





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`THE REAPING`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER XXX


.. class:: center medium bold

   THE REAPING

.. vspace:: 2

To Patrine, when the shadow of the familiar figure of the
Doctor mingled with hers upon the dry green grass, and
Saxham's voice called her by her name, it was as though his
presence had a weight that physically oppressed her, and his
scrutiny seared her flesh like the approach of white-hot iron.

Through her mind passed swift sentences: "*Yet another
of us has disgraced him!  My father and mother are not the
only traitors of our name!*"  In the rawness of her mental
anguish every sense was unnaturally exaggerated.  The
ticking of Saxham's watch, that the furious beating of her
heart could not drown, tormented by its iteration.  And
worst of all, was the consciousness of defilement in the
physical sense.

.. vspace:: 2

"Did not your mother give you my message?"

Always pale, her pallor did not demand particular attention,
save that under their ruddy salve the edges of her lips
showed white.  She answered, forcing the lips to smile,
compelling her eyes to meet Saxham's.

"About coming to see you?"  She remembered and drew
from her gilt-chain vanity bag the letter she had not posted:
"This was written to you to-day.  Then I thought I would
have been able to look in at Harley Street, and in the
end——"

"In the end you neither paid the visit nor posted the
excuse.  Well, be more considerate in future to those who
love you.  Sincere, clean love does not grow on every
gooseberry bush, my dear!"

The curt speech, made in the Doctor's brusquest tone,
conveyed to Patrine an impression of exquisite kindness.
So many boons, so many benefits had been conferred in that
grim, curt way.  She had wept and would not weep again,
but her hard bright eyes grew misty as she thanked him, and
asked after Lynette, with a touch of wistfulness that
recalled to the Doctor that unforgettable time when greedy
Death had threatened to rob him of his joy.  He answered
her cheerfully, and they found themselves chatting of
familiar, everyday matters across the gulf that yawned
between.  And then, warned by some swift change of
expression in her face, Saxham glanced up to see Sherbrand
approaching.

"Doctor!" he called.  "Sorry to interrupt, but would
you listen a minute?"

The tall, lightly-built, lightly moving figure came swinging
towards them.  He still carried the eared cap with the
goggled visor, his thick, silvery-blonde hair was darkened at
the temples with the dampness generated under the close
covering of waterproof.  His light grey-blue eyes were
smiling, yet there was a pucker of anxiety between his
eyebrows, as he put von Herrnung's case.

"So," he ended, "instead of taking a second flight in the
Bird with me as we arranged, would you trust your boy to
this foreign crack who's in a hole for a passenger?  He is
Captain von Herrnung of the German Flying Service—winner
of the two-days' flight from Hanover to Paris in
April—a famous run!"  He added, "I need hardly say
that with such a record as von Herrnung holds you cannot
be apprehensive of any rashness or neglect on his part.
But I'll own I would rather take Bawne up another day
myself.  Still, von Herrnung——"

"I am aware of the reputation held by the person you
mention.  I am going now to speak to him."

The Doctor's face was devoid of all expression.  But he
battled, as he spoke, with a masterful desire to forbid
Bawne the expedition.  To assert parental authority on
this point would have been the mode of dealing approved
by one of the two men who dwelt within the Dop Doctor.
The other Saxham said "Hold!"

Dare you place your paternal love, that other Saxham
asked—between your son and his duty?  Because it would
be so easy to do it, is the reason why you should refrain!
The Doctor had walked a few paces towards the object of
his troubled reflections.  He wheeled abruptly, returned,
and presented Sherbrand to his niece.

.. vspace:: 2

A faint blush rose in Patrine's white cheeks as her eyes
met those of the tall young aviator.  They looked at her
without any sign of recognition, and the conviction, "*He
has forgotten!*" shot stingingly across her mind.  "*He did
not think me worth remembering*" came next.  And then she
could have laughed, recalling that she had dismissed him
from her own thoughts on the discovery of his connection
with Fanshaw's.  She had made so certain that a teacher of
Flying couldn't be a gentleman.

Now, face to face with him again, in his upright easy bearing,
in his straight and fearless regard, in the pleasant
well-bred voice that addressed her in a brief conventional
sentence or so, she read his patent of gentlehood.

From whatever root it sprang, the flower was noble.  Her
swift eyes shot a glance at the bigger figure in grey.  What a
hoggish knight of the dunghill, what a high-born clown had
she not distinguished by her choice and selection.  The
smile of scorn that curved her mouth was suddenly banished
by the sudden recollection of Bawne.

"Uncle Owen, you have not yet told Mr. Sherbrand
whether Bawne may go up again or not.  I am sure—if you
won't think me—if you don't mind my saying so!—that he
has had enough for to-day!  I think it would be better if
you would not——"

It was not the deep warm voice of Patrine's characteristic
utterance, but a weaker, thinner voice that hesitated and
faltered and trailed away.  It recalled nothing to
Sherbrand.  He looked at her and transferred his gaze to
Saxham, who asked:

"Does this German officer intend climbing to any high
altitude, or perpetrating anything in the nature of a display?"

Sherbrand explained:

"He does not want to go higher than three thousand.
Just to try the hoverer, regarding which some business
friends of his are bitten with curiosity.  My mechanic is not
able to go up with him, and he wants a light-weight
passenger.  He is over sixteen stone himself, and the Bird
has been built to carry me with Davis.  I calculated her
wing-area to——"

Sherbrand travelled into the realm of technicalities, using
terms that were Volapuk and Esperanto to Patrine.  He
had supple, finely-shaped hands, and used them as he talked
with vivid illustrative gestures.

"So," he ended, "as your plucky youngster asked to go,
it seemed a way out of the difficulty, provided you weren't
dead against the thing.  Of course we'll swadd the little
chap in a sweater or so under the pneumatic jacket.  It'll
be a bit parky, even at three thousand, now the sun's
beginning to down."

He added:

"I'll see to the strapping myself.  You may rely upon it,
Doctor."

Saxham said with a look of kindness at the handsome face
with the clear candid eyes:

"I am sure of that!"  He added, mastering that inward
impulse: "I shall not forbid the flight if Bawne is set on
it.  But first, I must speak to him!"

And the great form with the stern thoughtful face and
scholar's stoop moved across the greensward, followed by
the tall young figures of Sherbrand and Patrine.  Of the
two, the man was by a bare inch the taller.  This Patrine
realised in a swift side-glance.  Certain featural characteristics
of him, personal impressions received half-unconsciously,
retained their clear sharpness then and for
many days....

The silvery-yellow hair toning into the pale brown skin.
The powerful sweep of the brows over eyes set flush with
their large orbits, prominent, brilliant, mobile as the eyes of
a bird of flight.  The nose, arched and jutting like a kite's
beak, with large sensitive nostrils, the somewhat sunken
cheek and the sharply-angled jaw, the little ear and the
rounded skull superbly set upon the full muscular neck
rising out of the collar of the gabardine, made up a
portrait upon which some happy woman might well dote and
dream.

It was five o'clock and the breeze that smelt of heather
and clover-hay and strawberries blew more strongly,
straight from under the westering sun.  Patrine drank in
deep draughts of the buoyant sweetness.  The leaden
gyves had fallen from her limbs, the leaden weight had
lifted from her bosom.  She had recovered something of
her old, elastic grace of movement, that even the sheath-skirt
could not spoil.  Looking at her, Sherbrand said to
himself:

"She walks like a Highland hill-woman or a native girl
of the Philippines.  And—did Heaven or a Bond Street
specialist give her that extraordinary hair?  I rather hate
it, and yet I have to go on looking at it.  Does she know?
I wonder if she knows?"

She felt his eyes on her.  And the buoyant sense of well-being
that his presence brought to her was mingled with an
agony of apprehension.  Her heart clamoured, like a
brooding thrush attacked by the owl, that Bawne should not be
permitted to risk himself with von Herrnung.  "*Does any
other living being know him as I know him?*" she asked
herself.  "*If by some misadventure it came to a question of
one life or the other, would he scruple—no! he would not scruple
for an instant to sacrifice the child?*"

Three words to Uncle Owen—if one only dared to speak
them—would have put the thing out of the question.  But
at the thought of the dreadful avowal to which such an
utterance might lead, Patrine was stricken dumb.  She
could not face the music.  This was one little ear of wild
oats out of the full field that waited for her reaping, sown
in the hours that lie between the midnight of pleasure
and the dawn of the Day of Remorse.

Perhaps she and Sherbrand had walked more slowly
than it had seemed to her.  She saw Saxham and his son
meet, heard, indistinctly the exchange of a few brief
sentences, and then the boy, with a jump to hug his father
round the neck, ran to her as she came up.

"Cousin Pat, I'm going to get into my flying-kit in a
minute."  His heart was thumping so that it shook him,
and the short upper lip with the gold-brown dust of freckles
on it quivered, hard as he tried to keep it stiff: "One
doesn't do it before people generally—but I'd rather like
you to kiss me now!"

"My precious, a dozen times!"

She said it impetuously in the deep womanly baritone
that Bawne loved, and Sherbrand started as he heard it.
She dropped her tall-sticked sunshade, and caught the little
boyish figure to her broad womanly bosom, hugged him
until he panted, and kissed his pale cheeks red.  You do
not need to be reminded that Patrine was a galumpher.
"Don't go! don't go!" she whispered in her darling's neck.
"I hate your going! and I don't believe Uncle Owen likes
it....  Say you've been up once and you're 'nuffy!
Pretend you funk it.  Do, for my sake!"

"I—can't.  Ouch!  You tickle!  Please let me go.  This
is business!"  He squirmed, and she burst out laughing,
and released him.  The act was a wrench that tore her
bleeding heart anew.

He bounded instantly after Sherbrand, seeing him go
forward to join von Herrnung, who was standing watching
Davis fill the Bird's tank with petrol, and her reservoir
with oil.

There was no spurring these lazy devils of English into
movement....  The accursed pig-dogs, the stupid sheep's
heads!  If that fragmentary Wireless message had really to
do with *the business*, within the next ten minutes everything
might be ruined.  One walked perilously, as amongst
pebbles, holding a watch-glass of High Explosive in one's
hand.  Here came the man and the boy.  He joined them
with a noisy burst of forced laughter.  Presently you saw
all three moving in the direction of a building where the
"flying-kits of all sorts and shapes and sizes," of which
Sherbrand had boasted, were kept for the use of the patrons
of Fanshaw's School.  As they went in, Bawne cast a wistful
glance up at the clock on the front gable of the café
restaurant, now supplying afternoon tea served in brown teapots,
and rolls and butter on thick white platters, to a thin
sprinkling of customers.

"Three minutes to the half-hour," said the clock.

Would the Chief come, or must this thing be carried out
by a small boy whose heart lay, a palpable lump of cold lead
in the pit of his stomach, and whose knees were turning to
jelly as he went?

If Cousin Pat, when she begged him not to go, had known
how badly he, Bawne, had wanted to hold her round the
neck and beg her not to let him, he would at this moment
have been unheroically safe.

She was so big.  He had most dreadfully wanted to cling
to her and cry—imagine a fellow of twelve doing anything so
kiddish.  But he had swallowed the unmanly tears, and
wriggled out of her strong protecting arms.

He looked back and saw her tall white figure, standing
near the hulking black-clad shape of the Doctor, who had
pulled his hat-brim low down over his eyes, and did not
seem to be talking or laughing at all.  Davis was doing
something with a spanner to the Bird's under-carriage,
and the long, thin shadow of her in combination with the
squat shadow of the little stooping Welshman, stretched
eastwards over the dry green grass.

He heaved a big sigh and followed his man in.  Von
Herrnung was already trying on pneumatic coats, swearing
in nervous German when they were not big enough.  At
last he was caparisoned, in a heavy suit of flannel-lined
Carberrys and a buttonless hooded jacket.  He had stripped
the burst glove from his wounded hand, thrown it away,
and replaced the magpie pearl ring upon his little finger.
He had put on a woollen helmet and tied over that a flapped
cap with goggles and ear-pieces.  While he attended to his
outfit, the leather satchel lay at his feet, or sometimes
between them, or he would keep a boot-toe on a corner of it.
And his hard blue eyes were vigilantly watchful against
surprise.

Sherbrand and the dresser—who presided over a long
room of shelves and pegs laden with queer garments, and
who looked like a washed mechanic in spotless blue
overalls—put Bawne into a woollen sweater, and added to the
panoply he had worn already that morning, and which
consisted of leggings, slip-strapped to a webbing waistbelt, a
pneumatic jacket, a knitted helmet such as von Herrnung
wore, and a pair of goggles.  They looked like the Eskimo
hunter and his little boy in the "Book of The Arctic"—a
volume specially beloved of Saxham's small son.

It was five minutes past the half-hour when they emerged
from the dressing-shed.  Saxham came to meet them,
turned and walked by his son's side.  Davis, whose
weakness as regards the sex we know, had pinched from the
visitor's enclosure a green-painted iron chair for Patrine.
She half-rose, stung by an impulse of escape, when she saw
von Herrnung approaching, and then controlled herself
and sat down again.

Nothing escaped her long eyes.  They saw Sherbrand
glance from Saxham to von Herrnung, and read the intention
of an introduction in his look.  He had just begun:

"Doctor, I don't think you have met Captain——"
when von Herrnung lengthened his long stride, outstripped
his companions, and went over swiftly and stood beside
Patrine.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`VON HERRNUNG BAITS THE HOOK`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER XXXI


.. class:: center medium bold

   VON HERRNUNG BAITS THE HOOK

.. vspace:: 2

She knew that he had interpreted her movement as an
invitation.

He saluted her and said, speaking thickly:

"It is necessary that I have a word with you.  Walk with
me for one moment.  I shall not keep you more!"

He bulked huge in his rig-out, but looked thoroughly at
home, and deadly workmanlike.  He pushed up his goggles
as though conscious that they discounted his personal
attractions, and his blue eyes were stony and glittering,
and his full mouth showed pale and hard-set under the
scarlet roll of his moustache.

"I shall not see you again to-day, and I have something
important to tell you."  He spoke rapidly and his breathing
was harsh and loud.  "I have been recalled by my Chiefs and
return to Germany in—another two or three days.  That
we do not meet again before I leave is possible, therefore I
wish to give you my address."

She did not look up.  A white hand with red hairs growing
thick on the back of it offered her a pencilled card.
She made no movement to take it.  He said, thrusting the
card underneath her eyes:

"It is printed here in German letters.  You read and
speak my language badly, so I will translate for
you—'Squadron-Captain-Pilot Count Theodor von Herrnung,
Imperial Field Flying Service, Flight Station XXX.,
Taubefeld, near Diebrich, West Hessen, Germany.'  Write
your letter to me in English.  The address copy from this.
Will you not take the card?"

"There is no need to.  I do not mean to write to you!"

"*Danke*.  You are candid," he said, "at least.  You give
me to understand that whatever happens—" he repeated
the words with a singular inflection "*whatever
happens!*—you will have no more to do with me?"

"Have I not told you so twice already?"

He gritted his teeth and said, controlling furious anger:

"*Erklären Sie*!  *Was giebt es*?  Why are you so—rottenly
furious with me?  You have yourself to thank for—what
has happened!  You led me on.  You made me crazy
about you.  And the devil of it is I am so still!  The sight
of you maddens me!  Listen!  Do not be stupid—unkind
to yourself and to me!  In three days from now, you will
get an envelope at your Club with plenty of money.  Join
me at my headquarters at Taubefeld and then—you will
see!  We will be happy—you shall have plenty of money
to throw about when we visit Berlin and other big cities,
and jewels, dresses, pleasure, admiration—everything a
beautiful woman wants!  *Grosse Gott*!  Can I offer anything
more tempting?  What are you saying?  'Yes!' or 'No!'"

Her narrowed eyes looked like long black slits in her
white face.  The pale lips barely moved to answer:

"Neither!  Are you proposing to marry me?"

He laughed woodenly, and repeated:

"Marry you!  Ha, ha!  What *verdammt* nonsense are you
talking?  What has love to do with getting married?
Nothing that I have ever heard!  Of course I shall
marry—my family have arranged all that for me.  But my
Countess will not interfere with my mistress—that I
promise you!  Come, be kind, my beautiful Isis!  Whisper
now that you agree!"

He bent his head to hear.  The whisper came from the
pale lips:

"I will see you in Hell first!"

He started, taken aback.  Her own utterance had
shocked her.  "Am I a street-walker already," she asked
herself, "that I begin to curse and swear?"

A whistle trilled.  He started and said:

"So then, all is over between us?"

She bent her head assentingly, and her glance fell guiltily
on Bawne who was standing near.  Von Herrnung, aware
of him at the same instant, turned on him with a scowl and
the harsh demand:

"What is this?  Do little English boys pry and listen?"

Bawne returned, looking at the other squarely:

"Beg pardon, but Mr. Sherbrand's calling you.  He says
it's getting jolly late."

"*So!*"  Von Herrnung glanced at his wrist-watch, in the
act lifting the brown leather satchel into fullest view.  The
boy queried with open-eyed innocent curiosity:

"Shall I carry that?  Are you going to take it with you?"

"*Es mag wohl sein*," von Herrnung answered.  Then he
clicked his heels and bowed formally, and kissed Patrine's
cold and heavy hand.  She felt his teeth grit as he did it.
She knew he was swearing in his way.

"Adieu, then," he said, smiling at her maliciously.  "Will
you not wish me *Angenehme Reise*?"

"Certainly.  A pleasant voyage, and a safe landing!"  Her
eyes fell on Bawne's little, oddly garbed figure and her
woman's heart spoke in spite of her.  "Take care of my
dearest!" broke from her, and von Herrnung answered:

"He is your dearest?  Ah yes!  I will certainly take
very good care of him!"

He bowed, wheeled about and walked from her with his
long strides, and the boy, with a face all flushed and
quivering, suddenly jumped at her neck and hugged her; bringing
with the rough little embrace the queer scent of water-proofed
material and dubbined leather, knocking the silver-spangled
hat awry, loosening divers tortoiseshell hairpins
and an amethyst slide-buckle holding up the heavy tresses
of the dead beech-leaf coloured hair, as he whispered:

"Remember I love you, Pat.  Don't mind!"

And she shuddered as he freed her, and ran from her,
asking herself: How much had the child overheard of von
Herrnung's proposal?  What had he comprehended of
what he had heard?

Next, she was aware of the pleasant voice of Sherbrand
calling, and saw von Herrnung imperiously beckoning.  A
cold sickness of dread assailed her, and her knees trembled
underneath her weight.  A mechanic came running past,
carrying away the chair Davis had brought her.  He set it
down at a safe distance from the aëroplane, and she staggered
to it, leaning on the long staff of her sunshade, and
sat heavily down, feeling chilly and old....

.. vspace:: 2

Saxham had squeezed Bawne's shoulder and kissed him,
and then withdrawn to a distance whence he could see all
that took place.  He watched Davis and Sherbrand help
the boy into the forward cockpit, and fasten about him the
safety belt attached to the fuselage on either side of the
fixed bamboo seat.

.. vspace:: 2

"You are sure you really want to fly again?  Mind, I
believe you're as safe with him as houses, but if you don't
want to go, say the word, and you shan't!"

Sherbrand whispered the words as he busied himself
with the boy.  And Bawne set his small teeth and squared
his sturdy boyish shoulders, registering an unspoken vow to
go in spite of all....

One had been told to drop a word to Sherbrand if one
found oneself in a tight place.  But could one ever hold up
one's head again before the Patrol, if one did this?  To
share one's Mission with another when the Chief had said
"I'd rather you'd carry through on your own" wasn't to be
thought of.  Mother—he swallowed hard at the thought of
her—would say so too.

It troubled his faithful little soul that he could no longer
see von Herrnung.  He heard him talking in his guttural
English, to Davis, whom Bawne could not see either—as
he stood near the nose of the machine, in readiness to start
the tractor—any more than the two mechanics who steadied
the Bird, pressing each a toe on the axle of the under-carriage
as they held on to a steel rod that ran along under the
rearward edges of her single plane.

His final directions sharply given, von Herrnung stepped
up on the under-carriage, threw a long leg over the bulwark
of the fuselage, and stepped into the pilot's pit.  Bawne
screwed his head round and saw, through and over a low
talc wind-shield, the upright torso of the German, big, hard,
and indomitable, the leather satchel still gripped in his
strapped-up left hand.

"Are you going to take that leather case along with
you?"  Sherbrand's voice had a note of surprise in it.  "You'll find
it a handicap, let me say.  You can't sit on it or lean against
it, and if you tried to put it under you, you'd find it
dead-certain to foul the controls."

To Sherbrand's voice, von Herrnung's answered harshly
and rather angrily:

"Surely I shall be able to carry this?  It is nott-thing
but a folding camera, with a telephoto lens made especially
for Survey and Reconnaissance.  There is still a good light.
If I fly with the sun behind me, I shall be able to take quite
a panorama of London North-West.  It is not
forbidden—no?  Your Government would not object?"

"I don't suppose my Government would care a little
hang!" Sherbrand's voice answered.  "But—this isn't
one of your German Army Albatros's or Kondors, and I
don't see where you're to stow your camera, unless in the
observer's pit.  Of course the hovering installation takes
up a lot of room, and I can't possibly risk your hampering
the controls."

"*Ganz recht*!  Very good!" came von Herrnung's voice,
giving in with simulated heartiness.  In another moment
his long legs, followed by his great body, came scrambling
into the forward cockpit, and his hands busied themselves
about the stout belt of pig-leather that secured the boy in
the observer's seat.

"Look here, my fellow!  You will take care of this for
me?  See, I have passed the belt-strap through the handle.
Do not touch it!"  The guttural whisper had menace in
it.  "I shall be sure to know if you touch it, or try to
unbuckle the strap."

"What's up?"  Sherbrand's head and shoulders came
thrusting over the other side of the cockpit.  "Why did you
unstrap him?" he demanded brusquely of von Herrnung.
"Don't you know that he is my friend's son, and that it is
my business to see to this?"  Sherbrand's hand felt over
Bawne's belts and bucklings before his head and shoulders
vanished.  Then von Herrnung's big body withdrew itself.
His voice, sounding from the pilot's pit on the other side of
the low wind-shield, gave a peremptory order, and the
tractor began slowly to revolve.  An instant later, with a
blinding flash, it began to roar and whizz round furiously.
The Bird, freed from the hands that detained her, leaped
forwards, hurtling over the smooth turf at the speed of a
racing motor-car.  The smooth floor of the cockpit
unexpectedly tilted up, and a rough cold wind buffeted Bawne
about the head and shoulders, sent eddies down about his
dangling feet, bellowed in his covered ears and made him
gasp for breath.  Then—houses and people, trees, and
hangars fell suddenly away, and he knew that the Bird
was rushing upwards at the bidding of its "Gnome"
motor—long superseded now, but then the latest marvel in
aërial engineering—towards the blue sky with its lines of
gilt mackerel clouds.  On each side of the roaring, flashing
whirl that meant the tractor, spread North Middlesex,
with its fields fast diminishing to the size of billiard tables.
That patch no bigger than a garden-lawn, with a row of
wooden things like dog-kennels and chicken-coops, must
be—Bawne knew that it was—the aërodrome.  Deafened
by the noise and a little sick, for the roaring, striving,
hurtling Thing in whose body he sat fastened, stank horribly
of castor oil, and seemed to agonise and call on Bawne to
suffer with it—he looked up and took courage from the
warm, blue, beautiful, cheerful sky.

He was quitting himself like a man.  Nobody could say
otherwise.  How high, how much higher was the Bird going
to climb?





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`ADVENTURE IN THE AIR`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER XXXII


.. class:: center medium bold

   ADVENTURE IN THE AIR

.. vspace:: 2

He looked down, and under his feet, left of the long
transparent case that housed the horizontal hovering gear,
was a little steel-framed glass port.  Seen through this, the
ground with its trees, fields and houses, hurried along
beneath him as though a comet, travelling in the opposite
direction, had been harnessed to our old earth, and was
towing her away.

The floor of the cockpit suddenly altered its angle.  It
had tilted upwards.  Now it tilted all to one side.  Sick and
dizzy, but secure, the boy hung in his straps as she lay over,
and saw on his left hand a wing of the Bird rising and
blotting out the heavens, while on his right hand the earth
reared up so horribly that Bawne could only shut his eyes
tight and hold on to the arms-straps of his seat, and gasp
out a little prayer.  Then the cockpit floor became more
level, and the wind buffeted less.  The roar of the tractor
and the twanging drone of the wires made one's bones hum
and tingle to the very ends of one's teeth and finger-tips.
But nothing had happened.  Perhaps nothing would!

He drew a great breath of relief, and his heart left off
bumping.  His mouth was cold inside and his tongue felt
dry and stiff.  Only Our Lord and Our Lady and his
guardian Angel had seen him funky, and for this Bawne was
grateful.  They understood, and—people—would not.

He guessed it about a quarter to six o'clock.  By the
genial warmth on one cheek and shoulder, and the way his
shadow stretched over the pale grained ash-wood that lined
the cock-pit, he knew the west must be upon the left.

He raised himself, craning his neck, and through the low
wind screen behind him, against the background of a sky all
flaming and boiling with molten gold and liquid amber, he
saw the wide square shoulders and tall helmeted head of
von Herrnung, the hard eyes staring unflinchingly through
their round glass goggles, the mouth set in a straight
inflexible line under the tight red roll of the moustache.

The red-moustached mouth opened, and von Herrnung
shouted something.  Nothing reached the boy but a sort of
muffled roar.  He shook his head vigorously, and then—one
does not wear the Signaller's Badge for nothing!—released
a stiff little gloved hand from its grip on the arm-rest,
and rapped out with his clenched right fist on the edge
of the fuselage:

"*I—can't—hear!*"

The Code was understood.  The helmeted head, some
four feet distant, nodded.  One of von Herrnung's gauntleted
hands freed itself from the steering-bar.  Its knuckles
drubbed out the question:

"Have you the brown satchel?"

Bawne had quite forgotten the brown satchel.  He
screwed back his head and looked down and there it was,
lying on the numb knees of him, buckled to him by the
tough strap of pigskin that held him in his seat.  He
nodded assent, and signalled:

"All right!"

"Good!" von Herrnung signalled back through the
hurly-burly of the Bird's transit.  Bawne mustered courage
to knock out:

"Where are we?  When shall we go down?"

Von Herrnung's right hand lifted itself, and described
a sweeping half-circle.  The brusque gesture answered
Bawne's first question, bidding him look and see.

The boy, impeded in his view by reason of his small
proportions, wriggled in his straps so as to get his chin well
over the gunwale of the Bird's fuselage and the buffetting
wind that was dug up and spaded over her bows by the
dizzying revolutions of the tractor, got hold of him and
pummelled and buffetted him again.  Her course was still
north, the sun was setting in great smoking lakes of gold and
sulphur on her left as she flew.  Thick patches of dark
green bushes that probably were woods, reddish-green
blotches that might be heathy commons, shiny, square
patches that he guessed at as reservoirs, toybox villages
that were thriving suburban boroughs, specks that were
villas, glittering ribbons that suggested canals, and one
broad shiny stripe that was a river with tiny boats upon it,
were swirling from right to left, sweeping along in the
opposite direction, under the rushing body of the winged thing
that bore him, ruled by the hand of von Herrnung upon the
steering-wheel.

Behind her a chaotic, formless greyness brooded on the
horizon, innumerable spires rose out of it and a glittering
haze hung over all.  That was London, the great grimy
Mother of Cities tearing away from her little son at eighty
miles an hour.  The shriek of an engine and the rumble of a
train reduced by distance to infinite tenuity pulled the boy's
eyes downwards.  A weeny mechanical toy that meant one of
the double-humped colossi of steam traction, dragging a
string of match-box goods trucks, raced another locomotive,
towing a crowded passenger-train neck and neck along the
spider-fine perspective of gossamers that meant the Great
Eastern Railway.  Now fear was swamped in the sheer joy
of the experience.  This thin air that kept you perpetually
gulping and swallowing saliva, made you feel more than ever
how good it is to be alive.

Billows and billows of green, interspersed with patches of
purple heather, meant Epping Forest, though he did not
know it.  A great aggregation of grey walls and housetops,
looking like a section of an old wasp's nest, stood for
Waltham Abbey as the Bird drove on.  Quite a tangle of the
shiny grey-blue streaks that were rivers meant Lea and
Orwell, Ouse, and their trouty tributaries.  East England
rolled away underneath like an endless carpet woven in
irregular patches of many hues.  Green and brown, grey
and yellow, and innumerable shades of these, so tempting in
their suggestions of good things to eat that a most unheroic
hunger reminded the schoolboy of tea-time, hours and hours
gone by.

He looked round in search of von Herrnung, who maintained
unchanged the same attitude, his shoulders level, his
unseen hands steady as rock upon the wheel of the steering-pillar,
his mouth shut tightly, his hard eyes ranging ahead
or lowered, as he conned his course in masterly fashion by
aid of the roller-map, protected by its transparent, rainproof
casing, or the compass, clock, altimeter, and other instruments
gimballed in the wooden frame in front of the pilot's seat.

"How long?" the small fist rapped out.  Von Herrnung
detached a hand and signalled in answer:

"One hour!"

"When do we go home?"

"We go home now!" the hand signalled, and the boy
settled down in his seat to wait.

.. vspace:: 2

Between hunger and weariness he dozed, and soon slept
soundly, his hands hanging laxly over the leather arm-rests
and his head nodding over the brown satchel lying on
his knees.  It figured in his dreams as something huge,
oppressive and uncanny, that suddenly took to itself
malevolent life, spread a pair of wide leathery bat-wings,
and would have flown away but that he gripped it fast.

"No, no!  You shan't!  I promised!" he heard himself
crying, and suddenly the thing collapsed limply in his grasp
and became nothing but a satchel, and he was awake.
Awake and very stiff and rather sick and sleepy, and with
the salt smell in his nostrils and the salt taste in his mouth
that meant—that could only mean the Sea.

He looked over the gunwale and cried out in astonishment.
For a vast carpet of rounded woolly-grey-white clouds lay
spread beneath.  The carpet beginning to rise and the
cockpit floor to incline downwards, a thin clammy fog suddenly
blotted out everything.  The Bird had dived through a
field of woolpack mixed with ground-fog.  Now flying some
hundred feet beneath it, she regained her level, in the clear
light stained by the sunset as water in which a dash of red
wine is mingled, the light that is the aftermath of a radiant
summer's day.  And, with the smell of the sea sharper in his
nostrils, the boy became aware of moving, muddy-grey
water, with ships and boats and steamers on it, far down
below.

Now the southerly breeze that had steadily tagged on
some twenty-three miles an hour to the Bird's eighty odd,
began to veer and come in strengthening puffs and gusts
from the north-west.  Swirling eddies of air came upwards
from the water, rocking the machine as a swell takes a boat
at sea, and splashed upon the frail, silk-covered wings of the
aëroplane in deluges of invisible spray.

On the right hand and the left were wide stretches of
muddy grey salt water, banks of sand, and drain-piped
foreshore merging in patches of potato and swede and yellow
squares of unripe corn.  Clusters of white dots, where
shingle and sea-walls bordered the drab, restless water,
were fishing hamlets, villages and little coal-port towns.
Upon the north bank, rapidly receding in distance, could be
dimly sensed, beyond a dense fringe of masts standing
close as pins in rows upon a pincushion, the oblongs and
squares and rectilinears of docks and shipyards, stone
quays, and piers and tide-basins, mixed up with blocks and
streets of sheds and warehouses, stations and goods-yards,
and huge, many windowed factories, whose towering
chimneys yet belched forth thick black smoke-gouts, licked
by red tongues of flame.  Though even if the Saturday noon
steam-siren had not silenced the throbbing of pneumatic
rivetting-hammers and the roaring of steam coal-shoots,
hydraulic grain dischargers and oil-pumps, and all the hellish
hubbub accompanying the huge export and import trade of
Yorkshire and Lancashire with North Europe and the
Continent, these sounds would not have reached the ears of
the boy in the aëroplane save as a dull and muffled murmur,
vaguely sensed, through the musical moaning of the
stay-wires and the racket of the tractor-screw.

Now the sunset was behind.  The land was rushing back
upon the right and left-hand.  The two-mile-wide river was
broadening to a great estuary, vaster than the Thames,
between Fort Victoria and Shoeburyness.

Long crawling strings of linked-up barges, sailing vessels
of the old windjammer type and yachts of the latest rig,
battered tramp and collier steamers, high-sided rusty
looking oil-tankers, pilot-cutters, coastguard motor-launches,
whole fleets of steam-trawlers, thrashed up and down its
broad south side fairways or cannily negotiated the treacherous
channels of the north bank.  Ocean-going giants of the
Merchant Service, flaunting the White Bordered Jack, or
the Red Duster, or under Admiralty Warrant, displaying
the Blue Ensign.  Behemoths of the North Sea passenger-service
showing the three-striped merchant-flag of Germany—or
the tricolour of the Netherlands, or the Crosses of
Norway, Sweden and Denmark—with more rarely some
big grey armoured cruiser upon harbour and Coastal
Defence Service, or a brace of stumpy, square-ended
patrol-boats, or a trio of the stinging black hornets we have
learnt to call torpedo-boat destroyers, ranging in company
upon some business of the Powers that order Britannia's
naval affairs.

Fascinating, wonderful to look down upon.  Alike, however
diverse in size, shape or uses, in the impression of
flat unsubstantiality conveyed to you—together with the
doubt that the emmets crawling upon them could possibly
be life-sized men.  A drifting daisy-petal meant a smart
private steam-yacht.  You looked down from two thousand
feet above, on the open-lidded snuffboxes that signified
the fire-control and signalling-stations of some Leviathan
of the Home Fleet, and a string of black holes jabbed in an
oval of floating white millboard represented her funnels,
black discs or white alternately stood for her ventilators;
and her imposing deckworks, her turrets or barbettes, her
gun-houses and casemates, and the terrible monsters bloodthirstily
nosing out of them, were reduced to a more or less
symmetrical arrangement in thick or thin black lines.

The rosy light was greying.  The gusts came more fitfully.
To the south, upon the right hand, were stone-built
fortifications with black muzzles of big guns poking from the
ramparts, over stretches of salty marsh, drab-coloured
mud-flats, and slimy rocks covered with blackened seaweed,
sticking up from pale silvery sand-shoals, licked by the
restless white tongues of the outgoing tide, and bumped by
stranding buoys.  Black dots and grey dots wheeled and
scurried and settled.  Crows and gulls were feeding ravenously
as the tide drew off the flats and sand-shoals.  And
by the queer sensation in his empty stomach, Bawne knew
that he too was ravenous.

From the beaconed north shore of the vast estuary basin,
edged now by low rambling cliffs, and belts of shingle and
sand, a long curving headland with two lighthouses at the
crook-end, rushed now towards the Bird at what seemed the
speed of an express train.  Bawne winced as the tall granite
towers, topped with helmet-shaped domes of rust-red iron,
rose up like twin giants threatening to destroy.  An iron
balcony with a flagstaff and signal-mast ringed the base
of each dome-top, a stairway spiralled round each shaft to a
railed stone platform well above high-water mark.  And a
shrimp-sized man in a red guernsey waved a speck of blue
handkerchief, and bellowed a disproportionately loud
greeting through what was presumably a megaphone.  In reality
the lighthouse-keeper was indicating the M. O. cone
storm-signal which hung point downwards from the west end of the
yard-arm, presaging a south-west or north-westerly gale.
Whether or no this warning was lost upon von Herrnung,
proof of its value followed.  For a great upleaping billow of
brine-tasting wind caught the Bird as she flashed past the
twin lighthouses upon the headland, tossing her upwards
like a withered leaf.  And a curved iron shutter in the
nearer of the two rust-red dome-tops rolled down exactly as
the nictitating membrane of a bird's eye does—and with a
wink of glass from the prismatic reflector, a broad triple
beam of blinding-white acetylene light leaped north, east
and south.  In the same instant upon each side of the
flashing tractor, the boy sensed a vast, shimmering, liquid
restlessness.  Here was the Sea, the very Sea.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`BAWNE LEARNS THE TRUTH`:

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   CHAPTER XXXIII


.. class:: center medium bold

   BAWNE LEARNS THE TRUTH

.. vspace:: 2

Something in the blood of the child answered to the call
of the Ancient Mother.  He cried out, half in terror, half in
delight, and the cockpit tilted so suddenly that he was
violently jerked against the seat-back and the canvas bulkhead
behind him.  Looking up he saw a large old moon of
luminous yellow, sailing away overhead through a sky all shot
with pink and grey as though hollowed out of a fire-opal.
The Bird was rushing through space at ninety miles an hour,
and great lumps of cold salt wind splashed over Bawne and
took his breath away, and his hands were numbed with
bitter cold and his legs were legs of ice.

So brave a spirit dwelt in his little breast, that the sob
that heaved it and the tears that stung his eyelids and
dimmed his goggles, were swallowed and blinked away as
soon as shed.  The cockpit became level, and there was an
imperious rapping behind him, on the upper canvas deck.
He turned his head and met the hard unflinching stare of
von Herrnung, who held in the hand with which he had
rapped a bitten piece of chocolate.  Still munching he
signalled:

"Hungry?"

He smiled grimly as the boy nodded in the affirmative,
stuffed the bit of sweetstuff into his mouth, produced
from its cache below the level of the upper deck another
square of chocolate, tore off the silver foil with his teeth,
and crunched it greedily.

He smiled, because of a queer tickling pleasure he felt as
he did this, akin to the sensation experienced when his
taunts had tortured Patrine.  "Take care of my dearest!"
he fancied he could hear her saying....  Not until she
had committed herself to that incautious utterance, had he,
von Herrnung, realised what rich vengeance on the desired,
hated woman might be wreaked by the simple act of carrying
off the boy, whom he had regarded until then as a mere
bag of ballast; less useful, but certain to prove less
troublesome, than the Cockney-tongued Welshman, who might or
might not carry a cheap revolver in the hip-picket under his
overalls with which to enforce his protest against being
taken away.

Von Herrnung was himself armed with a Browning automatic
pistol.  A deadly shot, he would have been capable of
dealing with half a dozen Davises upon the solid ground.
But, no lover of avoidable risks, he saw himself steering with
one hand and shooting with the other, while Davis sat
astride the chair in the observer's cockpit, and argued
with an eighteen-and-sixpenny Birmingham four-chamber,
loaded with the cheap little cordite cartridges, whose
pea-sized bullet can kill a fine big man.

"What is this?  You are sick?"

Even while keeping his ears open and his eyes skinned,
as he negotiated the Bird through a choppy cross-current,
conning his course between the compass and the roller-chart-map,
now illuminated by an electric bulb, his great
shoulders shook with merriment as he saw the boy's head
sink helplessly against the side of the fuselage, and his small
body convulsed by throes of the sickness that is
indistinguishable from the dismal malady of the sea.  He had
shut off the engine to shout to him.  And in the sudden
cessation of the tractor's racket, the deep organ note of the
waters rolled in upon the hearing, mingled with the shrill
piping of the wires and the ruffle of the freshening wind.  As
he switched on power once more, the broad white ray from
the Bull Light leaped forth again and caught them as it ran
eastwards over the tumbling white-crested billows, flinging
a huge shadow of von Herrnung over the canvas-covered
space of deck before him and showing him to the white-faced
boy who had twisted round once more to look at him,
as a featureless human torso shaped out of solid ebony with
diamond specks for eyes and gleams of grinning ivory
teeth.

"When are we going home?  Why are we over the sea now?"

Von Herrnung shut off again for the luxury of hearing and
answering:

"I have told you because we are going home.  Our home
is—Germany.  You will not be an English boy but German,
once I have got you there!"

The shrill cry of anger that came from the open mouth of
the white face was lost to him in the necessity of switching
on the engine.  He nodded pleasantly to the white face and,
in the darkness of his own shadowy visage, there was the
glimmer of a laugh.  Then he applied himself to other
business, for the tide would turn in an hour, and then the
wind might blow hellishly from the nor'-west.  Flying
lower, he knew his course the true one, for the white
headlight and green starboard-lights of a big steamer pricked
twinkling holes in the thick grey dusk to northward on his
port beam.  He told himself she was one of the Elbe
Company's big bluff-bowed liners making from Newcastle for
Hamburg Docks.  The stern-lights of a sister-ship hailing
from Grimsby, by her steerings, were also discernible in the
mirk ahead, while the lights from her tiers of cabins made
her look like a black water-beetle with golden legs,
hurriedly scuttling over the sea.  Following the course of the
Hamburg-bound liners, even if one failed to make connection
with one's accredited pilot, it would not be long before
one picked up Borkum Riff Lightship and in due course,
spiring silver grey against the pink-and-golden sunrise—the
twin towers of Nordeich Wireless—marking the journey's end.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`THE BROWN SATCHEL`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER XXXIV


.. class:: center medium bold

   THE BROWN SATCHEL

.. vspace:: 2

The journey's end.  A gust, tearing the mist that veiled
the livid waters, showed the shadowy shapes of a procession
of battleships, steaming southwards in single line.

You see the German assailed by the wind, now hard on
the aëroplane's port beam, craning over, counting the
speedlights passing diagonally underneath.  Eight steel
Leviathans, stabbing bright points of electric light through
fog and funnel-smoke, with an effect of diamonds seen
against a background of dull grey plush.

Eight rushing, neutral-tinted shapes—conveying a formidable
impression of grim power, and force, and ruthlessness.
A Squadron of Battle Cruisers of the British Home
Fleet, new from the brine of Lerwick Waters, or the fierce
green surges of Scapa Flow.  Bound for Harwich Roads or
Sheerness, or the Solent, to figure in the huge pageant of
steel and steam, electricity, and man-power that would be
called the King's Review.

What a chance, supposing *Der Tag* were come already, for
the delivery of a consignment of bombs!  It warmed like
a draught of wine, to think of the devastating effect of a
couple of such German love-gifts, exploded in the bowels of
one of those steel monsters, packed with complex machinery,
high explosives, and inflammable oil.  True, there might
be a reverse to the medal, damping even to the spirits of a
Superman.  Wireless signals would go forth at the order
of one amongst a little knot of dark figures on the forebridge
of the Flagship, warning each of those grey monsters of its
danger.  Not an armoured cruiser scouting for them on the
horizon, not one of all the torpedo-boat destroyers in their
vicinity, not a submarine nosing in the thick cold darkness
below the restless white crests, but would join in the
man-hunt that must ensue.

How the dusk would spring alive with the eyes of foes,
and long rays of searchlight would go probing, and the
mobile noses of guns great and lesser would be thrust from
their hoods of proof-armour, sniffing bloodthirstily for the
enemy up in the sky.  While from the Flagship's mothering
side, a Navy seaplane, armed with a Vickers' machine-gun,
might swing out and plop upon the water, rise from the
white snarl of waves with a vicious scream of her propeller,
and, keen as a gull-hunting sea-hawk, launch herself in
chase.

*Pfui*!  The thought made one sick at the stomach.  Cold,
isolation, and darkness tried a man, no matter how courageous.
Buffeted by the bitter wind, aching and stiff with
weariness, lonely with the loneliness of some small bird
of the migratory order, outstripped by its companions on
the wild journey over the North Sea, the Kaiser's messenger
drew energy and cheer from the conviction that the
dispatches entrusted to him by Imperial favour were such as
would hasten the arrival of The Day.

The Day, to which all good German officers devoted the
second toast on Mess nights.  When the Black Eagle would
swoop, and the nodding witch-hag Britannia would awaken
from her whisky-dreams of World-Dominion to find her
armour obsolete, her sword rusted in its scabbard, the
trident of Sea Power stolen from her hand.

Hurrah! for The Day when the programme arranged by
the All Highest War Lord and his War Chiefs should be
carried out in the complete overthrow of British Supremacy,
the seizure and domination of British territory, the solution
of the Great German Race Problem, in the transformation
of the United Kingdom into a German dependency,—the
annexation of India and the British Colonies—and the
forcible Teutonisation of the hated race.

Aha!  Much to be locked in an Imperial messenger's
letter-bag, thought von Herrnung, greedily.  What in the
way of guerdon might not be lavished by a gratified All
Highest upon the danger-braving and to-duty-fearlessly-devoted
Flying Officer who should accomplish the Secret
Mission, and lay the brown satchel at the Imperial feet.

Probably the Second—tchah!—the First Class of the
Iron Cross—with military promotion, and a handsome sum
in hard cash.  Laudatory articles in the State-inspired
Press organs and Service Gazettes presently.  Meanwhile,
was it fitting that the future of von Herrnung should lie,
not upon the knees of the gods, but on the lap of a little,
seasick English boy?

True, the brown satchel was firmly strapped to the boy,
now lying in an attitude of complete exhaustion, with one
arm thrown over the gunwale, and his small round head
feebly nodding to and fro.  The child knew nothing of
the Imperial dispatches.  And yet—one would have been
wiser to keep the bag about one, in spite of the danger of
fouling the controls.

It will be gathered that a chilly premonition of imminent
disaster crawled in the veins of the Kaiser's messenger.
Hunger and fatigue were spurring von Herrnung to
imaginativeness unworthy of a Superman.

Now he knew his frail winged craft beset by cunning,
treacherous enemies; the invisible air that cradled and
supported her, only waiting to destroy.  Other elemental
forces, Gale, Lightning, Hail, Waterspout—in collusion to
bring about her swift and speedy ruin.  The Sea, no less
than these, was an implacable adversary, reaching up
innumerable greedy hands to drag her down and drown.
The hawk-hoverer would have been a help at this juncture
if one had had some previous experience in the use of it.
As things were, it was wiser to leave the Englishman's
invention alone.  A labouring beat admonished the man's
quick ear of impending engine-trouble.  Ah, if the motor,
that was the living heart in the aëroplane, should break
down at this juncture, or the human intelligence perched
behind the roaring tractor falter, the game was up.  Kaput
for von Herrnung, he very well knew.

As though the very fear had brought on the catastrophe,
the revolutions dropped.  Below 1000, said the indicator's
trembling finger, and there was a miss.  The bang!—bang! of
a back-fire followed.  If one had believed in God, now,
this would have been the time to pray to Him.

But now the aviator's keen eye, peering downwards
through Sherbrand's binoculars, picked up something that
had emerged with a sudden yeasty swirl among the white-crested
waves.  No handsomer nor bigger than an under-sized
steam-trawler, the casual observer might as such have
accepted her.  But a moment more, and fore and aft of the
stocky little pseudo-steamer, stretched the long snaky,
whitey-brown hull of a submarine.

U-18, on observation-service off Spurn Head, or a
Britisher?  An Evans signalling-pistol, loaded, and with a
supply of spare rockets, was fixed in a cleat beside the
instrument-board, within reach of the pilot's hand.  The
altimeter, illuminated by the electric bulb, gave an altitude
of six hundred, as von Herrnung snatched the pistol, and
fired, aiming towards the sky.

The shot was followed by a second detonation, and a brilliant
crimson light illuminated the grey welter, throwing up
orange balls of fire as it ascended, to burst in showers of
incandescent sparks.  Switching off, von Herrnung strained
both ears and eyes for an answer to his signal.  With the
cessation of the motor the diapason of the North Sea rolled
upwards through the twilight with a threatening of storm.
As the weather-cone had presaged, a gale was coming.  It
blew strongly from the north-west.  The engine back-fired
again, and von Herrnung swore at it, trying to make out
the nationality of the submarine running on the surface six
hundred feet below.  There were half-a-dozen tallish figures
on the narrow man-railed catwalk running along her hull
forward, and one upon the screened-in platform of her
humpy conning-tower.

Then the blue-white ray of a searchlight leaped forth
illuminating her bows and forward torpedo-tubes—revealing
the long neutral-coloured hull with the Wireless mast
raised for use and soapy seas hissing off the armour-plate.
A backwash of brilliance picked out the black-white-and-red
Jack of Germany, fluttering from a short pole-mast
sternwards.  Signal-lights of white and two colours broke
out upon another slender mast aft of her conning-tower,
and winked and jabbered.  U-18 was in touch with her man.

It was quite time, for the Bird's engine hiccupped more
and more disastrously, and her pilot's frozen hands could
only guess the steering-wheel.  He grunted relief.
*Sapperlot*!  One's star had not deserted one.  Once more the
Prussian Field-Flying Service would, with reason, quote
von Herrnung's hellish good-luck.

Meanwhile the submarine's three lights chattered volubly
in German Navy Code.  Do Not Attempt Make Harbour.
Heavy Weather Coming.  Original Orders Cancelled.
Heave To.  Will Stand By To Take You Aboard.  To
which von Herrnung, keeping pace with U-18, replied with
long and short flashes of an electric signalling-torch.
Understood!  What Is the Sea Like?  Keep Off and On.  Am
Coming Down!

And he came forthwith.  The Commander of U-18,
standing on the little platform over which furious seas were
slashing, watched him critically through a pair of Zeiss
binoculars.  You, too, are asked to see him; pulling round the
Bird's head into the teeth of the nor'wester; shutting off her
hiccupping engine, implacably thrusting her nose seawards,
and diving with a splendid swoop into the widening paths
of spirals that ended amidst the angry surges below.

Hitting the North Sea with so shattering a slap that the
Bird's landing-carriage crumpled and buckled, and the
frail spars of her wings crunched like the bones of a small
bird in the jaws of a hungry cat.

A fierce green sea leaped, towered, and broke, dumping a
ton of water on von Herrnung, and knocking the breath out
of the man.  He tore open the safety-belt as consciousness
left him, and recovered in the warm benzine-flavoured
stuffiness of the officer's cabin aboard the U-18, to the
stinging of schnapps in his mouth and gullet, and the cheer
of German words in his ear.

"Hey now, hey now, we are coming about.  That is well!
Drink another draught, comrade!  You have had a hellishly
narrow squeak.  Another time, when flying oversea with
dispatches, start early, pick your weather, and ship a
life-belt, if you are wise!"

Thus Lieutenant Commander Luttha of Undersea-boat
No. 18.  You see him as a spare, weather-bitten, black-bearded
officer in a full panoply of yellow oilies, and a sou'wester
shading little eyes, sharp as lancet-points and now
twinkling with his bit of fun.

But the word "dispatches," coupled with the jest about
the life-belt, volted through von Herrnung like the discharge
from an electric battery.  He gulped and choked, collecting
enough tinned air to talk with, and at last got out:

"The boy—the boy, with the satchel!  Where is he, in
the devil's name?"

Thus adjured the Commander answered pithily:

"If you mean the half-drowned little English rat Petty
Officer Stoll found washing about in the bows of your
aviatik, he's alive.  Don't worry about that!"

Through the churning foam upon his lips, von Herrnung
spluttered furiously:

"*Himmelkreüzbombenelement*!  What is the *verdammt*
boy to me?  It is the satchel that was strapped about the
boy's middle I am asking for—the Emperor's—*Herr Gott!*—I
shall go mad!"

He staggered to his feet, hitting his head a stunning crack
against the low white painted overdeck.  The incautious
reference to the Emperor electrified those who heard,
squatting on the little folding bunks, or kneeling on the
palpitating deck of the little officer's cabin, into desperate
activity.  Von Herrnung found himself boosted up a ladder
and through a manhole, guided along a narrow slippery
catwalk, washed by the surges of the North Sea, to where a
collapsible boat was being emptied of a lot of shipped salt
water, and the battered wreck of the Bird of War, lashed to
the U-18's forward man-rail, was waiting the Commander's
order to be finally abandoned to her fate.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`NUMBER EIGHTEEN`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER XXXV


.. class:: center medium bold

   NUMBER EIGHTEEN

.. vspace:: 2

They launched the collapsible, and ransacked every
cranny of the Bird's waterlogged fuselage.  Not the ghost
of a brown leather satchel rewarded their feverish search.
In the forward cockpit the belt swung loose, the patent
fastening had been opened by pulling the pin out.  Clearly
the boy had released himself when the Bird hit the sea.

"Let us go look at this boy!" suggested the Commander,
on receiving the news that the Kind had breathed, and
vomited sea-water.  Luttha promptly led the way to the
men's cabin, where Petty Officer Stoll and an earringed
first-class seaman were working over a little limp naked body,
outspread on the jiggetting deck-plates, in the raucous
glare of the electric light.

Bawne was questioned, but nothing could be got out of
him just then, except North Sea, so they wrapped him
in a blue Navy blanket, and left him in charge of Petty
Officer Stoll.

"This is hellishly unfortunate, you must know, Count,"
said the Commander, alone with von Herrnung in the
vibrating steel box over the upper accumulators, called the
officers' cabin, and separated from the men's quarters by a
paper-thin sliding bulkhead of painted steel.  You are
asked to consider it furnished with seven narrow folding
bunks, a trestle-table about as wide and long as a coffin-lid,
some folding chairs, a marvellous array of charts on
spring-rollers, fixed against the steel walls, a row of wooden
lockers, a chronometer and auxiliary gyro-compass, several
cylinders of oxylithe for respiratory emergencies, an electric
stove of small size, a log-book and writing materials, a shelf
of German literature, chiefly nautical reference-books; sets
of dominoes, a violin and a cornet, speaking-tubes and a
telephone, a gramophone and a giant cuspidor.

Von Herrnung, having swapped his water-logged flying-kit
and soaked underclothes for dry flannels lent by the
Second-in-Command, topped off with a pair of the
Commander's spare trousers, and a guernsey frock belonging to
the biggest man on board.  You can see him supplementing
the shortness of the trousers with a pair of long sea-boots:
thrusting his huge arms into the guernsey, beginning already
to be superior to his rescuers upon the strength of his family
rank and wealth and his flying-record, his bulk and
handsomeness, and his magpie pearl.  He was of the Prussian
top-dog breed and let others know it, even whilst smarting
under his loss.  That he felt it was shown by the livid pallor
testifying to mental disquiet and physical exhaustion.  But
he judged it wisest to bluff, and did.

"The cursed machine would have drowned me if you had
not arrived in the nick of time," he said suggestively,
smiling under the red moustache that hung uncurled over his
full sensual lips: "Suppose you say you found me swimming
in the water—the aëroplane having foundered—it is
merely rewording a report!"

"So many thanks!" ... returned the Commander,
chewing hard at an unlighted cigar, sending a jet of saliva
into the cuspidor, and smiling in a wry and dubious fashion.
"But when I said things were hellishly unfortunate, I
meant unfortunate for you!"

He moved to the green baize-covered plank that served as
a cabin table, and took from a weighted document-file a
pencilled paper-slip.

"As far as they concern you I will read you them as taken
down by our Wireless operator.  'To Undersea-boat No. 18,
on observation-duty off Spurn Head.  Stand by to get in
touch with, act pilot, and render aid if necessary to German
Imperial Secret Service Messenger, crossing to Nordeich in
British aëroplane.'  The message comes from the German
Embassy in London and the sender is Grand Admiral Prinz
Heinrich.  I have carried out my instructions to the letter.
There is only *one* man going to be broken over this affair!"

Von Herrnung knew who the man was.  The Commander
chewed some more of his cigar, picked his oozing yellow
oilskins off the deck, thrust himself into them, crowned himself
with his sou'wester, and said, taking a farewell shot at the
cuspidor:

"And to brew more thunder-beer for you is not my desire!
I am sorry for you, *bei Gott*!  But to make game of those
who command me is not the purpose for which I am
commissioned, Herr Count.  Nor have I any experience in
doctoring reports.  I rate only as Lieutenant in the
Imperial German Navy—a man born of plain people—without
fortune or even *von* before my family name!"

Von Herrnung sensed that he had bitterly offended the
only human being who could help him.  He apologised
subserviently, and catching at the straw afforded him by the
Commander's admission of poverty, offered him the
pickings of the wrecked aëroplane.

"For her instruments and signalling outfit—the seats and
vacuum flasks even—are well worth the having, and her
engine and tractor will sell for——" he named the sum in
marks.  "There is a patent stabiliser under her belly that I
reserve for Majesty—the French have bought it or think
they have!"

The speaker rubbed his hands.  The hoverer might yet
prove a sop for the All Highest.  Imperial displeasure thus
averted, all would go well.  He added, feeling that he might
actually afford the luxury of grumbling:

"As for me, I am what the English call 'fed up' with
special missions.  Conceive it.  I am at a Hendon Flying
School,—chatting with a handsome Englishwoman who has
taken me for her lover—as I am waiting to get an inkling of
the sort of invention the French War Ministry think worth
buying for use in their Service Aëronautique.  I am
summoned by a groom of our Embassy to speak to some
Excellencies—I follow and find myself clicking my heels before
Prinz Heinrich, von Moltke, and Krupp von Bohlen in an
Embassy auto-car—to be sent off at a moment's notice in
a little cranky devil of an English monoplane—with secret
dispatches for the All Highest—on a journey over the
North Sea.  With the barometer falling and the hour past
five meridian.  That's my luck!"  The speaker paused for
breath.

Luttha said, pulling his black beard through his fingers
with a crisp sound, a trick of his when in meditation:

"There was no time to lose.  And you have a wonderful
record for long-distance flying.  And luck it was!—if you
had been of my mind.  Tell me, did not *they* give you plain
instructions?"

"Do 'they' ever speak plainly?" von Herrnung scoffed;
and Luttha answered calmly:

"Yes, to an ordinary man, who does not understand
obscure language, they would have said: 'Lieutenant
Commander Luttha, here is a brown leather satchel, with
something inside it belonging to the Emperor.  You will convey
the satchel to Nordeich and deliver it to His Majesty's
hands.  And from the moment I entrust it to yours, it shall
be close as your very skin to you.  If you meet Death upon
your errand, die with it next your heart!'"

The speaker added with a wounding accent of irony:

"Perhaps that marks the difference between a plebeian
and a nobleman!  I would have lashed it to my body, under
my clothing.  You strapped it about the boy!  By the way,
what is the boy?"

"The boy! ... Nothing! ... A piece of ballast, merely!"

Von Herrnung, warmed by dry clothes and exhibitions of
schnapps, was fast recovering his characteristic arrogance.
He added, with a shrug and a wave of the hand:

"As for the lost satchel, it may well be that duplicates of
the dispatches contained in it have been sent to the
Emperor by another messenger.  That is the usual method,
perhaps you are not aware?"

"Duplicates exist, but in only one place on earth will you
find them, and that place is the London War Office!"

The Commander pitched his cigar-butt into the cuspidor,
snapped the three stud-clips that secured his yellow oilskin
storm-coat, and dug his piercing little eyes into von
Herrnung's as he asked:

"Have you never heard of the War-engine of Robert
Foulis, the Scottish sea-captain who first suggested to the
British the use of steam as applied to battle-ships, and
invented the screw-propeller and the big devil knows how
many other things besides the mysterious, secret weapon
that Great Britain has kept hidden up her sleeve a hundred
and twenty-six years!  It was offered by Foulis, then Earl
of Clanronald, in 1812, to the British Government, and it
frightened people like the drunken Regent and the Duke of
York and Lord Mulgrave into refusing it.  It was offered
again to their War Office at the time of their Crimean
War,—taken into consideration by the Duke of Newcastle and
again ejected,—because—*Grosse Gott!*—it was too inhuman!
As though a weapon that could end a War in a twinkling by
sheer deadly effectiveness could be anything but a boon to
mankind.  *Pfui*!  Such hypocrisy makes me vomit worse
than thirty hours of submergence.  Not because of its
inhumanity has Britain stored up the old man's war-engine.
Out of diplomacy, to brutalise the great Germanic nation
into subservience under the rod of Fear!"

Luttha and von Herrnung, otherwise antagonistic, were
alike in their rabid hatred of Great Britain.  Luttha had
talked himself plum-coloured and hoarse by now, but he
went on, pounding the air with a knotty, clenched fist:

"Thus it was well done on the part of the Kaiser's secret
agents to steal Clanronald's War Plan, on the brink of The
Day to which we have drunk so long!  Not the duplicates
buried in the Whitehall strong-vaults, see you!—but the
originals from the muniment-room of the Welsh castle, the
country-seat of the present Earl.  Less than an hour after
you took flight from Hendon, London was alive and buzzing
with the tale! ... How do I know? ... Does not a
man know everything with Wireless?  And you, with no
inkling that you carried for Germany—Victory in the
World-War that is coming—you who have lost Clanronald's
secret, are a ruined man, *bei Gott*!"

He added, as von Herrnung broke out cursing and raving:

"As I have said, I pity you!—though you have tried to
bribe me!—but it will not do to talk of suicide, for I shall
prevent that!  Your cartridges are wetted—your revolver
will not serve you.  And you will not get a chance to drown
yourself, for I am going to submerge.  My fellows have got
the flying-motor out of the stirrups and stowed it away,
with the auto-hoverer and the other things for the Emperor,
whose property they are!  Then we run, only periscopes
showing, for the Gat of Norderney.  There is a
clear-dredged channel to Nordeich Harbour, navigable in any
tide.  You have to account there to the All Highest for the
satchel, or I, *bei Gott!* must account to him for it and you!"

And Luttha slid back the steel door, passed through the
narrow gangway and shot up the narrow steel ladder to
attend to affairs on deck.  Two of his subordinates
instantly replaced him.  On no account was von Herrnung,
the living proof of the Commander's fidelity to his
instructions, to be left alone, you understand.

One would have said the Superman believed in God, he
blasphemed Him so industriously.  When he was quite
spent and voiceless, the lieutenants offered him practical
sympathy in the shape of gingerbread and lager beer.  He
accepted the beer, and sat on one of the sofas drinking it
and brooding lividly, while Undersea-boat No. 18, with
hermetically-sealed hatches, folded down her signal and
Wireless masts, shut off her 2000 h.p. Diesel oil engines,
sucked water into her ballast-tanks, and with only her
periscopes showing above the surface, ran under her
electric-motor power for Norderney Gat and Nordeich quay.

Behind her as she sped, a red stain upon the angry waters
gave back the last rays of stormy sunset, smouldering out
behind bars of drift-wrack, beyond the bleak east-country
beaches and the long blue-black, desolate worlds.

Von Herrnung's private, personal sun was setting somewhat
after the same fashion, amidst sable clouds of Imperial
wrath.  It was to sink below the horizon in deepest
disfavour, rise again in The Day's gory dawning, and fall, its
evil fires quenched in a drenching rain of blood.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`HUE AND CRY`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER XXXVI


.. class:: center medium bold

   HUE AND CRY

.. vspace:: 2

Even as petrol and air mingled in the Bird's cylinders,
and Davis rotated the tractor and nimbly leaped out of the
way of sudden death, the buff broadsheets of the *Evening
Wire* edged the kerbs of Fleet Street and ran up Kingsway
to High Holborn.  And from Ludgate Hill to Charing Cross,
Pall Mall, and Piccadilly Circus, the raucous voices of
newsboys yelled through a pelting hail of pence:

.. vspace:: 1

.. class:: center white-space-pre-line

   AMAZING THEFT OF A FAMILY SECRET.
   STOLEN FROM GWYLL CASTLE
   THE CLANRONALD WAR-PLAN.
   AN ECHO OF CRIMEAN DAYS.
   THIEF KNOWN.  POLICE SANGUINE.
   "COMMON CRACKSMAN'S ENTERPRISE OR DIPLOMATIC
   STROKE?"

.. vspace:: 2

Strings of news-carts laden with bundles of papers were
rattling east, north, south, and west.  Trains were taking
in the story by bales of thousands and disgorging it at every
stoppage, as Von Herrnung opened the throttle, and the
Bird raced a hundred yards or so, bumping like a taxi going
over a bad road, then rose into the air, as gracefully as a
mallard, and launched upon the first wide spirals of the
aërial ascent.

The small audience interested in the aëroplane, her freight,
and her behaviour, watched her as she dwindled in the sight
and died upon the ear.  The spectators in the enclosure had
departed in dribbles, the last three-seater air-bus had
rounded the aërodrome, landed and deposited the last
passengers.  Two or three over-enthusiastic students
lingered, but the rest had shed their grimy overalls and
betaken themselves home.

The mellow light of late afternoon lay sweetly on the wide
expanse of treeless greensward and on the woods that tufted
the horizon-line.  Rooks and starlings were wheeling over
distant tree-clumps, the bands no longer brayed or tootled,
the mechanics were leaving the sheds and hangars, the
waitresses were hastening to other employments, such as
programme-vending at suburban music-halls and picture-theatres,
the selling of stale *boutonnières* about the entrances
of restaurants, the serving of drinks and suppers at
night-clubs and so on.

On the verge of the white-marked oval from which
the Bird had taken her departure, Saxham was standing
with Patrine.  Their faces were lifted to the sky as
they talked together, and Sherbrand's eyes were irresistibly
drawn to them, so heroic in mould, and so curiously
alike.

There was a puzzled line between the Instructor's thick,
fair eyebrows.  He was ready to swear it was the same girl.
But the face that had looked into his that night in Paris was
somehow softer, younger....  It was not only the alteration
in the colour of the hair....  If you had taken the big,
hearty, smiling young woman of the Milles Plaisirs, and
dipped her into a vat of hydrogen peroxide, so that not
only her hair but her whole body had been bleached, you
would not have accomplished such a transformation—unless
the chemical had possessed the power to change the colour
of her mind and soul.

The girl of the Milles Plaisirs had looked at you frankly,
and spoken to you like a pal.  In that atmosphere of sexual
excitement, amongst those crowds of men and women,
flushed with meat and wine and the desire of sensual
pleasure, she had appealed to Sherbrand like a heather-scented
breeze from the North.

Beautiful and big and sisterly, she had seemed to him
who had no sisters.  He had often wondered how she
came to be in that place.  But it had never occurred to
him to lump her with the ordinary pleasure-seeker.  He had
read—more correctly than von Herrnung, who believed her
from the first to have bitten deep into the Fruit of
Knowledge—Purity if not ignorance, in her wide curving smile,
and honesty in her clear unshadowed eyes.

What eyes they were, long, brilliant, blackly-lashed,
browny-green as agate.  What a wonderful voice came out of
the depths of her splendid chest.  The arch of her breastbone
reminded you of a violoncello.  How splendidly her head
was set upon its column of warm, living ivory!  Her firm
round chin had a dint in it that the old Greek sculptor had
failed to bestow upon the glorious Venus de Melos, the Lady
of the Isle of Music.  Everything about her was planned
on the scale of magnificence.  Six feet tall, she walked the
earth like a goddess, or as women must have walked when
the Sons of Light mated with the daughters of men.

Thus Sherbrand, meditating on his Fate to be, while
Destiny limped towards him in the person of an undersized
telegraph-clerk whose complexion, previously pallid, had
deteriorated to dirty green.  He began, extending a shaky
hand, from which dangled a slip of limp paper:

"For you, sir.  Rumball 'adn't got a picklock among his
tools, so 'e burst in the door with a No. 10 spanner.  They
rung us up about twenty times while he was at the job.
And the message is important, sir!"

"I'll see!  Thank you, Burgin!"

Sherbrand took the telegram from the jerky hand and
read:

"*Your—German—acquaintance—suspected—agent—
robbery—documents—national—importance.  At—all—
costs—keep—him—until—I—come.*"

The Chief's name at the end was the nail that clinched the
thing.  But the cry of Macrombie's undersized assistant
was the hammer-blow that drove the nail to the quick.  His
sharp eye, following the climbing aëroplane, had seen her
flatten and swing about and leap forwards, exactly as the
carrier-pigeon strikes out its line of flight for home.

"My Gawd," he yelped out.  "See there!  Blimy, if the
—'s not done us!  Bunked it by air to Kaiserland while I
was spellin' out the screed.  Gone with the Bird—the Bird
and the 'overing gear.  My Gawd!  Wot's to be done?"

"Shut your head on what you know!" said Sherbrand's
voice in the pale clerk's ear as Sherbrand's hand fell
ungently on his shoulder.  "You've done your best!  It's not
your fault if luck was on the other side!  But—"  His eyes
went to the Doctor's great figure standing beside the tall
white shape with the hat of twinkling silver.  "But the
boy!"  A sickness swirled up in him and a dizziness
overtopped it.  He caught at and gripped the clerk's thin
shoulder to keep himself upright.  "My God!  How shall
I break it to the Doctor," Sherbrand asked himself, "if
that German fellow has carried off the boy?"

"Steady-O!  Ketch on to me, sir....  Nobody's looking!"
said the telegraph clerk.  He was a hero-worshipper on
a robust scale and Sherbrand his chosen deity.  "This ain't
our young Boss givin' in, but just his empty inside playin'
tricks on him," he assured himself.  To Sherbrand he said
humbly: "If you'd come over to the cabin there's hot cocoa
and toke there.  Grub'll steady you, if you'll excuse me
taking the liberty of saying so—and you can't do nothing
till he comes!"

The person to whom Burgin referred had passed the
entrance-gates, almost before the sentence left the lips of
the clerk.  Now his alert, upright figure came in sight,
briskly turning the corner of the restaurant, and wrought to
the point of ironic merriment by the greatness of the blow
that had fallen on him, Sherbrand shook off his dizziness
and faintness, straightened his tall body, clapped both
hands to his mouth, and gave the huntsman's view-halloo:

"*Stole away!  Stole—awa-aay!*"

Small cause for mirth, and yet he laughed, pointing to the
dwindling speck high upon the north horizon that represented
the worldly prospects of Sherbrand, and a handsome
sum in cash.  The Bird, just then entering a broad belt of
gold-white mackerel-cloud, was lost to view in another
instant.  But the Chief had wheeled upon the pointing
gesture, and seen, and understood.

Then he was upon them, saying in accents jarred with
anger:

"How was this allowed to happen?  You were warned.
You had my wire?"

Sherbrand's mouth was wrung awry with another spasm
of mirthless laughter.  He fought it back and held out the
crumpled slip of paper, saying:

"I did, but luck was on *his* side.  Thanks to a relapse on
Macrombie's part, I got this after the Bird had flown."

"The Bird..."

The blue-grey eyes and the keen hazel met, and struck a
spark between them.

"'The Bird.'  He has taken French leave—or, more
appropriately, German—by the help of your machine?"

Sherbrand nodded, setting his teeth grimly.  The wailing
voice of the pallid clerk came in like a refrain:

"'Ooked it.  Bunked—so 'elp me Jimmy Johnson!
With our young guv'nor's mono', and the gyro 'overer!"

Said the Chief, moving sharply towards where the
Wireless mast straddled over the telegraph-cabin:

"He has adopted the only means of exit by which it was
possible for him to escape.  All railways stations are being
watched, all highways patrolled by our agents, travelling in
high-powered motor-cars.  We are on the look-out for him
at every ocean shipping-port.  One road we left open, not
having the means to block it—and that is the road of the
stork and the swan!  Decidedly, I might have guessed that
he would play Young Lochinvar after this fashion.  But
until I left the ground an hour ago I did not know of the
theft of the Clanronald Plan."

"The Clanronald—" Sherbrand was beginning, when the
Chief cut him short.

"I had forgotten that you are as little wise as I was
an hour back.  Better glance at this paragraph while I
make use of your O. T. installation and Wireless, and put
the fear of Heaven into Macrombie, incidentally and by the
way."

He thrust a tightly-folded copy of the *Evening Wire* upon
Sherbrand and vanished into the rum-flavoured stuffiness of
the cabin, with the pallid telegraph clerk close upon his
heels.  And upon Sherbrand, in the act of unfolding the
newspaper, rushed his Fate, in a hat of silver spangles:
challenging the knowledge in him with blazing eyes well
upon the level of his own.

"Mr. Sherbrand....  Tell me what has happened?
Why do you look so—queer and—white?"

She herself was whiter than her narrow dress, and the
mouth the eager rush of words poured from was pale under
its rose-tinted salve.  She hurried on breathlessly:

"They show no signs of coming back—it fidgets me
horribly.  And—I was looking—from over there, where I was
with Uncle Owen,—when you called out, 'Stole away!' and
waved your arm."  She glanced at the sky, shuddered
and looked back at him.  "Am I silly?  But all the same,
the General told you something!  I don't ask what!  But I
funk—I don't know why, but it's beastly—the sensation!
Tell me I've nothing to be afraid of—I swear I'll take your
word!"

That she was just then a creature full of fears was written
large upon her.  She might have quoted Queen Constance,
who I think was also a galumpher, meaning a woman of big
build and sweeping gestures, and an imperious temper
withal.  Sherbrand feared also, and the pang of solicitude
for the pretty boy so unexpectedly dragged into the vortex
of a diplomatic and political felony was, to do him credit,
quite as sharp as the pang caused him by the rape of the
Bird.

He answered:

"Miss Saxham, I do not believe that there is any danger
of an accident.  But—that there will be delay—I shall not
try to disguise.  The fact is——"

A guttural, Teutonic voice said close at Sherbrand's
shoulder.

"*Gnädiges Fräulein* will wish to return home?  It is getting
late, so very late!  I haf instructions from my master to
drive the *Fräulein* back to her address."

Sherbrand wheeled, to be confronted by the thickset
figure of the moustached and uniformed attendant who had
occupied the seat beside the chauffeur of the big blue
F.I.A.T. car.

"Who is this?" he demanded in a look, and Patrine, her
pallor drowned in a scarlet blush of horrible embarrassment,
stammered:

"I really—haven't the least idea!"

"You hear!"  Sherbrand's tone was not pleasant.  "The
lady does not know you—that ought to be enough!"

Patrine felt herself drowning in chill waves of horror.
The man persisted:

"The lady is a friend of the gentleman who brought her
here....  I haf my orders to drive the lady home in the
yellow car!"

In his muddy eyes there flickered a leer or a menace.
Patrine saw the Doctor coming and flew to his side.
Sherbrand said, looking sternly at the German:

"You understand, your orders are nothing to the lady.
She does not choose to be driven home by you!"

The man protested:

"But my master——"

Sherbrand demanded:

"Who is your master?"  Then a sudden light dawned
upon him, and he turned and knocked sharply at the cabin-door.
At which the liveried attendant, as a man who finds
hesitancy a double-edged weapon, wheeled in military
fashion and retreated, casting a surly glance over his
shoulder, and quickening his heavy footsteps to a jog-trot as
the General's active person appeared at Sherbrand's side.

"That man, Sir Roland!"  Sherbrand's slight gesture
indicated the thickset figure now getting hurriedly into the
yellow Darracq.  He added, as the car swirled round the
corner of the restaurant and vanished in the direction of
the entrance-gates, "Ought I to have grabbed the brute,
and hung on to him?  He was certainly with a party of
foreign-looking people, who interviewed von Herrnung just
before he got away.  You saw them?"

"I certainly saw them.  And I agree with you that their
unexpected appearance has had to do with their countryman's
sudden departure," said the Chief.  "But to grab an
orderly of the German Embassy would be—only less risky
than grabbing a Kaiser's messenger, on suspicion of his
carrying stolen War Secrets in his official bag."

"A Kaiser's messenger!" Sherbrand's mouth shaped a
soundless whistle, "Why, now I remember, he had a
dispatch-case or valise with him.  Wouldn't hear of leaving
it behind!"

"I—daresay not," the Chief's dry smile commented.

Sherbrand went on:

"I developed muscle in persuading him to let it go in the
observer's cockpit for fear of it fouling the warping-controls.
No wonder he stuck to it.  War Secrets!"

"It is plain you haven't glanced at the *Evening Wire*.  It
tells the story rather pithily, beginning with an outbreak of
fire on Tuesday night at Gwyll Castle, Denbigh, caused by
a short-circuit in the electric-lighting apparatus of the
North Tower."

He went on:

"I waste no time telling you, for all that's possible has
been done now in setting our agents on the track of the
flying thief!  The North Tower at Gwyll holds the priceless
Clanronald library, and the Muniment Chamber, where they
bottle up the original MSS. detailing the War Plan of the old
Earl.  The short-circuit that set up the blaze was—the kind
that any amateur can arrange for with rubber gloves, a pair
of pliers and a bit of soda-water wire."

"Is it known who the amateur was?"

"There is reason to suspect one Heir Rassing, an
under-librarian of German nationality, who behaved like a hero,
according to the local Fire Brigade!  He it was, who
suggested—Clanronald being absent on a yachting-cruise in the
Fjords of Norway—that the contents of the Muniment
Chamber should be transferred to the strong-room in the
basement of the East Wing.  He superintended the
removal, armed with knowledge, enthusiasm, and a large-sized
Webley Scott revolver, with which he volunteered to
keep solitary guard till morning, outside the strong-room
door!"

"And when daylight came—" hinted Sherbrand.

"It discovered the zealous Herr Rassing to be missing,
and a corresponding hiatus in the treasures of the Muniment
Chamber.  Item, a sharkskin case inlaid with ivory figures,
Japanese, antique and valuable,—containing the original
diagrams—chemical *formulæ* and so on—embodying the
famous Plan."

Sherbrand asked.

"Was it as tremendous as they tell one?"

The crisp voice answered:

"Tremendous it not only was, but Is.  The most terrible
and effective method of annihilating an enemy, that has
ever been conceived by the brain of man."

Sherbrand said, drawing a deep breath:

"And that is what von Herrnung carried in the brown
leather valise-thing that he took away with my machine!
Not that I trouble about the Bird.  She was old, and I've
got the stuff to build a new one.  But my patent—the
hawk-hoverer—that's another pair of shoes!"

"The hawk—!  Phee-eew!"

The Chief whistled a rueful note and his keen eyes
softened in sympathy:

"I had forgotten your invention.  So von Herrnung has
scooped for Germany the gyroscopic hovering-apparatus
that the French War Ministry were proposing to buy.
Now I understand the something about you that has
puzzled me.  You wear the look of a father, Sherbrand,
bereaved of an uncommonly promising son."

Saxham's stern face rose up in Sherbrand's thought,
stamped with that look, and his throat contracted chokingly.
The Chief asked:

"What sort of man is the mechanic von Herrnung has
commandeered?  A fellow easy to bribe, or intimidate?  It
would be worth while to know?"

"It's a boy—not a man!" broke from Sherbrand,
hurriedly and hoarsely.  "General, no more unlucky thing
could have happened! ... Dr. Saxham's twelve-year-old
nipper took a tremendous shine to von Herrnung, and—and—he's
gone with him!  That's the news the Doctor's got
to hear by and by!"

There was a silence.  The Chief's face was turned away.
Then he said quietly:

"There was no question of 'a shine.'  My Scout was
obeying an order.  His Chief Scout had said, 'Keep this
man under observation; and if he leaves the Flying
Ground—follow him, if you can!"

Sherbrand could not speak for pity of the small white face
that had grinned at him out of the clumsy woollen helmet.
He understood now, that when he had bent to strap the
safety-belt about the little body swathed in the flannel-lined
pneumatic jacket, he had felt a terrified child-heart
bumpity-bumping under his hand.  And he struggled with
his grief and rage in silence, broken by an utterance from
the other man.

"So he followed him into the air, seeing no other course
before him.  My old friend Saxham has good reason to
chortle over such a son.  I said to-day, 'I am proud of my
Scouts!'  Well, to-night I am ten times prouder.  I shall
tell the Doctor this—when I get a private word with
him—and wind up with: 'Thanks to Bawne!'"

"Then the Doctor—" Sherbrand began, a weight lifting
with the hope that the news might not have to be
broken:

"The Doctor knew.  I had said to him, doggily: 'I'll give
your pup a fighting chance to prove his Saxham breed.'  It'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."

Could *she*, Sherbrand wondered, letting his eyes travel to
the tall white woman standing by the Doctor, as the Chief
went over to them and grasped his old friend's hand.  Then
both men moved away across the dusky ground together.
Those words of thanks and praise were being spoken.
Coming from such a source they must be heartening to listen to.
But presently when their glow had paled and faded, and the
boy did not come back...

Presently, when the empty chair and the vacant bed, and
the little garments hanging in the wardrobe should be filled
and occupied and worn only by a shadow-child wrought of
lovely memories.  By and by, when the silence in the house
should clamour in the tortured ears of the woman and the
man...

Then, Sherbrand knew no praise of their lost darling
would console Bawne's parents....  Dry-eyed they
might smile until their lips cracked, but their hidden hearts
would weep.  Their tongues might be silent, but their
hearts would cry always; Did we wish our child to be heroic?
Had he been a craven we would have had him now beside
us!  Give us our living boy again!  O! keep your empty
words!

.. vspace:: 2

A cry from Patrine prodded Sherbrand to active sympathy.
So at last they had told her.  She knew all.  And
true to her type she was raging at the Doctor and the Chief
like a very termagant; upbraiding them with a spate of
words rushing over her writhing lips and lioness-frenzy in
her blazing eyes.

"I begged you not to let him go!"  This was to the
Doctor.  "Faint!  Do you take me for a bally idiot—to
faint when there's something to be done!  Follow that man
and get him back!  If he takes him away to Germany—don't
you know we shall never see Bawne again!  Oh! why—why
can't I make you understand!"

The raging voice grew hoarse with sobs, though her furious
eyes were dry as enamel.  She added with an inflection
that made Sherbrand blink and gulp:

"Don't you know—don't you *know* it will kill Aunt
Lynette?  And I shall be guilty—I who love them so!  Oh,
God, I must do something or die raving mad!"

The Doctor's great arm held her firmly round the body.
Saxham was strong as an oak-tree, but who can control a
woman in the frenzy of hysteria, standing six feet tall in
high-heeled No. 7 shoes?  She wrestled and fought, and her
tawdry hat of silver spangles tumbled off, and her superb
hair shed its pins of tortoiseshell, and rolled, yellow-tawny
as a South African torrent in flood-time, down over her
heaving shoulders, over the supple back and writhing loins,
reaching nearly to her knees.  Then her strength went
from her, and her tears came.  She dropped into a chair
Sherbrand had got her, and crumpled up there, crying
bitterly.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`PATRINE CONFESSES`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER XXXVII


.. class:: center medium bold

   PATRINE CONFESSES

.. vspace:: 2

With her hat off and her hairpins out, and her
tawny-coloured mane tumbling over her heaving shoulders, the
superb illusion of maturity vanished.  The three men
viewed Patrine with clear, unprejudiced eyes.  Stripped of
the magic cloak of Circe, here was no transformer of Man
into the hoofed and rooting mammal, but a great galumphing
schoolgirl, pouring out a heartful of trouble, without the
least concern for her complexion; mopping her streaming
eyes with a little sopping handkerchief; temporarily ending
its brief career of usefulness with a dismal blast upon the
nose.

"Take mine!" said Saxham, thrusting the large-sized
square of cambric upon her.

"Th—thank you, Uncle Owen!"

She said it in the voice of a child.  The torrent of tears,
so different from those shed earlier, had washed her heart
clean.  Something hard and cynical and evil had passed out
of her.  She was Bawne's dear Pat again.

A lean brown hand that wore a chipped and ancient
signet was next held out to her.  She grasped it and was
straightway hauled upon her feet.

"Are you better?" said a friendly voice, in a crisp way.

"I—think so.  Thank you, Sir Roland!"  She added in
a tone as tear-soaked as her handkerchief, while Saxham
offered her her hat, and Sherbrand tendered tortoiseshell
hairpins:

"I'm awfully afraid I have behaved like a fool!"

"Like a woman!" said the friendly voice even more
crisply.

"Do you think women are fools?" she was beginning,
when she caught his eye and broke off.  For she had met
Sir Roland's mother and she knew his young wife quite well,
and her Aunt Lynette, the one living being whom she
worshipped, was one of his closest friends.  No!  To this man
women were sacred.  Why had she uttered such a banality?
For the life of her she did not know.

She drew a sobbing breath, and looked about her vaguely,
and suddenly a mist rolled away from her brain.  The net
of Tragedy whirled high and fell upon her, and the steel
trident was driven deep between her ribs again:

"I—had forgotten!"  She stared upon them.  "What
must you all think of me?"

Saxham's arm came round her, and Saxham's voice
answered:

"Nothing, my dear, but that you are human, and have
had a tremendous shock!"

She leaned against the Doctor's great shoulder, sighing:

"Thank you! ... I'm all right now!  Not going to
cry any more....  But Bawne!  If we wait long enough
there will be news of him?  We—shall get him back?"

She felt Saxham's iron muscles jerk, and his ribs heave as
though the trident had found a home between them.  Perhaps
he could not find his voice, for it was the Chief who
said:

"We are doing everything possible.  Mr. Sherbrand is
helping.  He has been good enough to place the telegraph
installation at our disposal and the Wireless also.  A call,
Burgin?"

The undersized clerk had waved a hand from the threshold
of the cabin.  The Chief vanished.  Patrine sighed:

"Oh, if there should be news!"

"You are too sensible to be bowled over if there happens
to be no news," said the Doctor's voice.  But his arm was
tense about her waist and she felt the beating of his heart.

"Uncle Owen!"

Sherbrand had withdrawn out of earshot.  She squeezed
the kind responsive hand, turned her mouth towards the
Doctor's ear, and whispered tremulously:

"Uncle Owen!  You don't know *him* as I do.  That's
why I am so—horribly afraid for Bawne!  He would be
cruel to anyone you liked, if he hated you.  And he is
furious with me!  I have thwarted him in—something he
wishes!  He is bad!—dangerous!—do you understand?"

"He cannot be a bad pilot with such a record.  And in
such calm weather there is little danger of an accident.  We
must be patient; there is nothing else to do at the moment,
but wait!"

Saxham had feigned to misunderstand her, for very pity,
you can conceive.  Blurting out her miserable secret in this
moment of unselfish sorrow, his heart was wrung in him to
an anguish of compassion for Patrine.  But no less was he
wrung by the truth her words conveyed.  His son and
Lynette's was in the power of an evil man!  What was
David's daughter saying?

"Uncle Owen!"  The tall figure of Sherbrand had moved
away into the reddish twilight, and a wild desire of
confession spurred on the girl to desperate frankness of speech.
She hurried on, nerving herself to the change that would
presently show in Saxham.  "Uncle Owen!  I think you
had better know!  Since I met *him* in Paris I——"

"Stop!" said Saxham.  But she would not stop.  She
had his blood in her, and went on, though to have set her
naked foot on glowing iron would have been easier than to
tell.

"I have flirted with him!—gone alone with him to
restaurants and music-halls!—let him take me to the
Upas!"—there was a tightness like knotted whipcord about her
throat; "That's—not the worst!"

"I guessed it.  Stop!" Saxham repeated:

"Who told?"—she faltered brokenly, and shivered at the
deep stern whisper:

"No one told, but the reputation of the—man is known
to me.  His type does not hesitate where a woman's virtue
is concerned."

A great sigh burst from her.  "And you can speak to me
and touch me kindly—you don't hate the sight of me?"

"No, my poor girl, God forbid!"

"How good!—" she began, broke off and said, shuddering:
"But—Aunt Lynette!  How could I bear it, if she
were ever to know——"

Saxham said harshly:

"She shall not know!  Who do you dream will tell her?
Not I!  So set your mind at rest, my girl.  You are a
girl—though you talk like a woman of thirty!"

She said with a miserable catch in her throat:

"Nineteen *is* rather young, isn't it?  Perhaps things
would have been different if only Dada had lived!"

The utterance was as inapposite as it was sentimental.
If David had still been in existence his daughter would
have had no less cause for regret.  But Saxham, inwardly
quivering and wrung with pity, could only acquiesce:

"Perhaps things would!  What you have got to do now
is—Forget!  Do you hear me?  I order you, and I will be
obeyed!  And I will have you leave this titled lady who
employs you, and who is all kindness and no discretion.
Resign your post to-morrow!  You need not return to your
mother.  My house is your home!"  He went on in his
rare tone of tenderness, "You need no telling that I care
for you as a daughter.  Come to me, and to Lynette who
loves you dearly.  She will want comfort—now that—"  His
voice broke and his mouth twisted.  He fought with his
anguish, in silence, turning his grim white face away.

"Who will tell Aunt Lynette?  Oh!  who will tell her?" he
heard Patrine whisper.  He commanded himself to answer:

"For the present, I have telephoned her that we may be
detained here until late.  Suppose you twist up your hair
now, and put your hat on.  Sherbrand!"

A sweet, manly voice answered out of the dimness of the
Flying Ground: "Here, Doctor!  You called me?"

In the madder and umber light of the dying sunset
Sherbrand's tall brown shape came towards them.  Saxham said
as Patrine swept her tawny tresses into one rough rope:

"I am going to ask you to find out whether the people at
the refreshment-place could give my niece something by
way of substitute for dinner.  A cup of coffee, or cocoa with
milk, a roll and butter, and a slice of cold beef or ham?"

Sherbrand said eagerly:

"I am sure Miss Saxham can get anything like that.
Mrs. Durrant keeps open house till nine o'clock, or later,
if there is reason.  She caters for the School Staff, respectably,
by contract.  I lodge—a very decent berth—over the
dining-room, where I have my grub.  Noisy by day but
quiet enough at night-time.  Will you come this way, Miss
Saxham?  You too, Doctor?"

Saxham declined.  They left him standing there, in the
wide expanse that was filling up with brooding shadows,
with his back to the dying rose of the sunset, looking fixedly
to the north.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`THE REBOUND`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER XXXVIII


.. class:: center medium bold

   THE REBOUND

.. vspace:: 2

Patrine, that magnificent animal, had passed unknowingly
through the painful ordeal which accompanies in the
human the evolution of a soul.  No doubt she had had one
before without suspecting it.  Now she was conscious of
the presence of the guest.

Through the big barbaric halls of her nature, glittering
with tinsel over plaster backed with canvas, thronged with
vanities, appetites, desires, and ambitions, jostling at the
glittering fountains, buying at the tawdry counters, flocking
to the dubious restaurants, swooping down the water-chutes,
wandering through the painted landscapes, drinking in the
dubious atmosphere, had passed a ray of light, pure,
vivifying and cleansing, had blown a breeze of crystal mountain
air.  And through the blare of brass a note had sounded
that would never cease to vibrate in Patrine's ears.
Having partially confessed, she experienced a disproportionate
rebound of spirits.  Her fears for Bawne weighed on her less
heavily, Saxham's reference to cold ham had awakened in
her the pangs of healthy appetite.  The proximity of
Sherbrand was a vividly keen pleasure.  She had always wished
for a brother, and here was the very *beau ideal* of one!  She
meant to ask him if he had sisters—she was sure they would
be awfully nice girls!

One or two electric lights were switched on in the big room
full of little white-covered tables, with the counter at the
far end piled high with thick white plates.  The big nickel
urns were cold and empty, but Mrs. Durrant, the stout and
smiling proprietress of the restaurant, produced hot coffee
and milk in a twinkling, bread and butter, the cold ham,
and a cold pigeon-pie.

With her own very fat, very pink hands Mrs. Durrant
ministered, voluble the while in sympathy....  The lady
had been upset because the dear little boy hadn't come
back.  People were sometimes kept for hours through a
Loose Nut, or a Slack Wire, or a Carburetter, or some little
thing or another going wrong.

"You remember when Under-Instructor Davis took Mr. Durrant
for an Air Beano all the way to Upavon, Mr. Sherbrand?
Flares burning 'alfway through the night, and pore
me!—new to the Flying then—wasn't I, Mr. Sherbrand?—going
from one fit of astericks into another, and running out
to meet Durrant, when he dropped down calmly 'Ome at
four in the mornin', with my hair all untidy and hangin'
about me—"  Patrine swiftly put up a hand to assure
herself that her own tawny coils were securely fastened—"for
all the world like an Indian Squawk."

"Wives had their feelings, it was only to be expected,"
said Mrs. Durrant.  Mothers had also theirs, and, that was
natural too!  Patrine found the idea of her own maternal
relationship to Bawne so firmly fixed in the mind of
Mrs. Durrant, it was barely worth the trouble to endeavour to
explain it away.  Mrs. Durrant had none of her own, worse
luck! but here, just coming with the salad and some fried
potatoes, was Mr. Durrant's married niece, Ellen Agnes,
and nobody knew better what it was to lose a darling child.

Ellen Agnes, wan-eyed, anæmic, slipshod, and overworked,
supported the statement.  Only in April it 'ad
'appened, and Ellen Agnes 'ad never 'eld 'er 'ead up
properly since.  And little Elbert the 'ealthiest of children.
Rising three and never a nillness till the pewmonia carried
'im orf.  'Ad only 'ad 'im phortographed three days before
it 'appened! with 'is lovely little limbs and body naked,
sitting on a fur rug, the blessed dear!

Ellen Agnes not appearing to recognise any connecting
link between the nude pose and the pneumonia, Patrine
suppressed the obvious suggestion.  Both women meant
well, but their talkative sympathy oppressed her.  She
imagined how, when Sherbrand ate alone, the stout aunt and
the thin niece would hover round his table, assailing his
ears with their Cockney voices, making their common,
vulgar comments on the happenings of the day.

Perhaps her disrelish showed, for the kind women presently
slackened their attentions.  There was nothing then
to divert Sherbrand's attention from his guest, beyond
the undeniable attractions of the hastily spread board.

So they ate the pie, all of it.  Patrine cried, in frank
astonishment at the evaporation of her second plateful:

"But I am a wolf or something.  No!  Not even salad.
What must you think of me?  Crying my eyes out one
minute and stodging pigeon-pie the next!  Do the rest of
the friends you feed here behave as badly as that?"

Sherbrand returned, ignoring the mention of other guests:

"Now, what should I think?  Nothing but that you
wanted something to buck you, and I was pretty ravenous
myself.  It was pretty parky up there at 10,000."  He
answered to her question how high that was: "Why,
comparatively, you might imagine it about nine times as high
as the top of St. Paul's Cross from the level of the ground."

Little the speaker dreamed then of aërial battles to be
fought at 20,000.  She asked whether he had "felt giddy"
and he shook his head, saying:

"If I had felt inclined to giddiness I should have put off
climbing until I felt fitter.  I sympathise with Opera Stars
who disappoint full houses, because some high C or lower
G is a hairsbreadth off the bull.  The singer can't afford a
false note.  It's death to a reputation.  And the Flying
Man can't risk brain-swim, because it means possibly nose-dive
and smash.  So I stay out of my sky unless I'm sure of
myself.  There's nothing on earth like being sure."

He had a way of saying "my sky" that was queer and
rather beautiful.  Just as though he had been a lark,
occurred to Patrine.  And indeed, in the beaky, jutting
nose, and the full, bright eyes set forward and flush with the
wide orbital arches, there was some resemblance between
the man and the bird.

Patrine sunned herself in the lighter moment.  She who
had lain through the night sleepless—had risen still a
bond-slave—realized that her fetters were broken now that her
evil genius had flown.  Taking with him her beloved, she
fully believed in malice.  Piercing though that knowledge
was, it could not mar the blissful sense of freedom, mental
and physical.

Bawne would be brought back.  Meanwhile, one's blood
sang through one's being, mere living was riotous ecstasy,
mere breathing sheerest delight.  The joy of life radiated
from her.  And to Sherbrand, sitting opposite at the little
coarse-clothed table, she grew momentarily more and more
like the girl of the Milles Plaisirs.

True, instead of cloudy black, her hair vied in tone with
the banner of coppery flame that streams from the crater of
an active volcano, or burns above some giant crucible of
molten metal ready to be poured forth.  Her long eyes
under her wide level brows looked the colour of peat-water,
in the electric light that contracted their pupils to pin-heads,
and brought out against the yellow-distempered walls the
creamy whiteness of her wonderful skin.  When she leaned
her round elbows on the table-cloth and smiled at him,
it was the frank, generous smile that had warmed his
heart when he stood solitary and unfriended on the
rose-pink carpet near the gilt turnstile on the Upper
Promenade.

He would put it to the test.  He beckoned the pallid
Ellen Agnes, asked for the bill, slipped his hand into a
breast-pocket and drew from it a tiny white silk purse.

"Oh!  You found ..."

With an indescribable emotion, half pain, half pleasure,
she saw her missing property in the broad extended palm.
He said:

"It flashed on me, even as I blackguarded Davis, that you
must have paid that Commissionaire-fellow at the turnstile
or he'd have been breathing vengeance at my back.  So I
ran back to find you and ask for an address where I might
send the money.  You were gone!  He had got this purse
in his hand.  So I—bluffed the brute for all I was worth,
and got him to give it me!—a stroke of luck—for I'd no
money left to bribe him with!  Be kind and tell me how
much you gave the fellow!"

The deep dimple Sherbrand remembered showed in the
full oval of one of her white cheeks.  Slowly the pale
rose-flush sweetened and warmed the whiteness.  Her eyes were
dusky stars under the barbaric wealth of beech-leaf tresses.
A slow smile curved her mouth, the scarlet lips parted
widely, showing two perfect rows of gleaming teeth.

"Two half-jimmies!" said the rich, mellow woman's
baritone.  Why did it talk such awful slang?  "Half my
screw for one whole week of letter-writing, running errands,
doing shopping, and generally sheepdogging for my friend,
Lady Beauvayse!"

"Then please take this!"  This was a fat bright sovereign.
"And be kind and say that I may stick to the purse?"

"If you care to—" Patrine began, dubiously.

"I care—most awfully!"  He went on quickly.  "Lady
Beauvayse—your friend—I've seen her—if she's very
pretty and tremendously American?"

She nodded.

"You've spotted her!  That's Lady Beau—the dear
thing!  But she only talks Yankee Doodle to bounders or
fogies, or people who seem to expect it from her.  Her
English is as good as mine."

"You don't mean it!"  His keen face crinkled with
laughter.  She was superbly unconscious of its cause.  He
went on, rather ashamed of having made fun of her: "That
accounts for the Old Kent Road-*cum*-Whitechapel I've
heard from the august lips of British duchesses.  At
cricket-matches when Eton and Harrow were playing 'Varsity."

"Does it?  I think not!  The duchesses weren't amusing
themselves, or trying to snub swankers.  They were
just mothers—*real* mothers—trying to talk cricket to their
boys.  And the boys—the sweets!—grinning up their
blessed young sleeves, and saying 'Yes'm!' and 'No'm!'  How
I do love boys!  Don't you?"  Her smile contracted
with a spasm of anguish.  "And I'm sitting here,
gobbling and gabbling, when my darling!—"  She rose taller
than ever, from the little table, caught up her feather stole
from a chairback near and slung it vigorously round her,
straightened the tinsel hat with a side-glance at the strip of a
looking-glass nailed in a frame of cheap gilt beading on the
matchboarded wall at her right hand, picked up the vanity-bag
and the long-sticked sunshade, and declared herself
ready to go.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`A NIGHT IN JULY`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER XXXIX


.. class:: center medium bold

   A NIGHT IN JULY

.. vspace:: 2

She reached the door before him.  He had turned to say
considerately to the good woman of the restaurant:

"We shall be late....  Frightfully, I expect!  Promise
me you won't sit up!"

"Oh! but I can't promise!  One never knows!  Best to
have people up an' ready when there might be need of 'em!"
Patrine heard, as she wrenched at the handle of the green
curtained glass door.

"No—no!  Let me!"

His hand touched hers and she drew it away, not before a
keen, sharp thrill had traversed her.  "*Vile, hateful
creature!*" she said to the Patrine von Herrnung knew—the
other woman within her, whom she loathed.  "*Is not it
enough that you have done what you have done?*"  Then as
she passed out into the night, feeling beneath her feet the
roughness of the gravel walk that led between grass-plats
studded with green painted chairs and little iron tables, a
strange roaring filled her ears and hellish tongues of fire
licked a sky of vivid blackness.  She recoiled, saying in
awed and shaken tones:

"Why!  What has happened?  What does it mean?
... How horrible!"

The door had shut behind them.  Now the round dome of
the sky showed not black, but velvety purple.  Away in
the south-east a fierce red moon drifted like some derelict
vessel burning away to embers on a waveless midnight sea.
And sheaves of dazzling blue-white flames, leaping and
roaring, fenced in, or seemed to fence, a dreadful lake of
Stygian darkness, upon the surface of which figures—were
they men or devils?—moved....

"Don't be scared, Miss Saxham!  It's nothing ... though
I ought to have wanted you...!"

Not with intent, her heaving shoulder pressed against the
breast of the man who had followed her.  Perhaps the
contact thrilled him, for his voice was unsteady as he went on:

"I was rather a brute to forget! ... It's a night-flare
to guide—possible home-comers! ... Wads of tow dipped
in petrol, burning in iron buckets round our landing-place.'

"I ought to have guessed," she said ruefully.  "Forgive
me for being such an idiot!"

His answer was unexpected.

"On condition that you'll leave off saying 'Great Scott!'
and things like that."

"All right!  But what's the matter with the expression,
anyhow?" she demanded.  "Do you always get riled when
women use slang?"

They had been standing within the gate that led upon the
Flying Ground, still girdled by its Valkyr-ring of leaping
flame.  He said, holding open the gate to let her pass
through:

"I use slang myself, habitually, like every other man I
know.  But I don't know a man who really likes to hear his
wife or sweetheart copy him in that respect.  For myself
who have neither wife, sweetheart, nor even sister, I can
only say what I feel.  It is—that a beautiful woman should
use beautiful language.  One of the old Greek poets put the
whole thing into two lines.  I've forgotten the original, but
the translation runs like this:

   |  "From the goddess the speech of Olympus,
   |  From the herd-maid the language of the cows."

.. vspace:: 2

"I'm no goddess, God knows!" said Patrine, sorrowfully
and sincerely.

Then a light scorching flame seemed to envelop her whole
body.  She felt Sherbrand's breath upon her cheek....
He said, speaking swiftly, and close to her ear:

"No, you are not a goddess, but something far better!
You are a woman one could worship!  You could hate
magnificently and forgive greatly, and love to the very
verge of death!  That was said to me of the Doctor, and you
are like him!"

"Don't!" she said, wincing.  "You don't know me!"

He answered firmly:

"But I do know you!  I knew you the moment I saw you
in Paris.  You're the girl I have been waiting for ever since
I read Morris's 'Eredwellers'.  You're The Friend!  Now
I've found you I shall never let you go again!"

What midsummer madness was this, prompting him to
sweet audacity?  His, "I shall never let you go!" had a
convincing, manly ring.  She quickened her steps, wading
through a shallow sea of shadows, through which the warm
short turf came up to meet her feet.  He kept by her side,
and together they moved towards the Valkyr-ring of fire,
changing as they advanced into isolated pillars of towering
flame outlining the huge white oval of Fanshaw's landing-place.
Here and there the goblin-like shapes moved, stirring
the flares with rods, feeding the blaze with something
from vessels they carried.  And two other figures stood in
talk by the telegraph-hut, recognisable, outlined against the
oblong of electric radiance framed by the doorway, as
Saxham and the Chief.

"This is a bit previous, you think?  Headlong—ill-considered
on my part—to have spoken like this to a girl
I've only met once before?  You must understand—a man
who follows a risky profession gets into the way of not
waiting for to-morrow, because to-day may be the wind-up.
Say you are not angry!" Sherbrand pleaded.

"No, you poor dear boy!  But you're so awfully
mistaken!"  There was a rich and exquisite tenderness, it
seemed to Sherbrand, in the deep, full, breathy tones.
"I'm not a bit what you think me!  There is nothing
worthy of worship in a woman like me," said Patrine.

He asked, as they walked side by side from patches of
brilliant blue-white light into deep oases of shadow:

"May I say more?  May I tell you that I've thought of
you ever since that Paris night....  What things I've
called myself—if you only knew!—for not getting your
address.  But I swore I'd find you somehow, and I would
have!  I'd know your voice among a thousand.  If I were
blind, and forgot other people's faces, I should always see
yours painted against the dark.  At night—now! when I
shut my eyes ... there it is!  You are not angry?"

"No—I'm only sorry for you!" she said in her deepest,
sweetest tone.

"Sorry?"  There was keen anxiety in the face that was
illuminated by the petrol-flare they were passing.  "You're
not—married—or going to be?" he asked.

"Neither!"

"Thank God!" said Sherbrand simply and sincerely.
"Now I'll go on!  My rank bad luck gives me a kind of
right.  This morning I got up solid in the conviction that
you and I were meant for one another; that we should
somehow be brought together; that the French Government
would make it possible for me to marry you by buying my
hawk-hoverer—for with only the two hundred a year my
uncle left me, and the two hundred my Instructorship here
brings me—how could I possibly have the nerve to ask you
to be my wife?  And—"  He caught his breath, "And
everything I'd dreamed came real.  The test succeeded!  I
dived down out of my sky to find You!  Miracle of miracles.
And not twenty minutes later—I found myself nearly, if
not quite—a ruined man.  For if my invention has been
swiped off to Germany, France will never buy, for
money—what her neighbour gets for nought!"

"I understand.  My poor Flying Man, you've been
plucked of some of your wing-feathers!"

"I don't care, if you'll wait for me until they grow again!"

How grim a day had been followed by this night of
wonder!  Woven of the shining stuff of dreams it seemed,
then and for long years after, to Patrine.  Their intimacy
grew and ripened like a magic beanstalk in the light of the
red moon and the fierce blue petrol-flares.  She said with a
catch in her breath—like Sherbrand's:

"You must be serious!"

"I never was more so!"

She amended:

"We must be sensible!  Oh! but this has been a close-packed day!"

"Hasn't it!" Sherbrand agreed, as they moved on side
by side, from islands of raw, glaring light into broad pools
of lustreless darkness, their tall heads level, for Patrine
carried her hat of silver spangles swinging from the top of
the sunshade with the lengthy stick.  "Sometimes, for
weeks, the days slip by smoothly as the beads of a Rosary
over a baby's finger.  Then—bang-bang-bang! they explode—like
a rocket fired by a signal-pistol—until things fizzle
out into dulness again."

"It's true!"  Her bosom rose in a sigh.  "But it's possible
to get awfully fed up with banging and fizzling.  One
can learn to long—just for a little dulness, as long as it
means quiet and rest, and peace of mind."

That Patrine should voice such an aspiration was incredible
even to the speaker.  "*How changed I must be!*" she
said to herself, as Sherbrand answered her:

"With heathery moors and towering scaurs, and galloping
trout-rivers brabbling over lichened boulders—and Somebody
one loves to talk to—one calls that kind of dulness a
happy honeymoon!"

She thrilled as his hand, swinging freely by his hip,
touched hers, lightly, enclosed, and then released it.  He
was no tardy lover, this Flying Man.  He knew a thousand
times better than von Herrnung how a girl should be courted
and wooed.  For, with her heart in joyful tumult, and her
usually pale cheeks warmed and rosy with shy blushes, it
was a girl who walked beside Alan Sherbrand that night.  I
am sorry she could forget so easily the slip that had led her
over the frontier line, the Rubicon that can never be
recrossed.  But in fact she did forget, just as a young man
would have forgotten.  Though she was to remember as
only a woman can remember, and to suffer as only a woman can.

In the midst of the new, wonderful happiness, so strangely
threaded not only for Patrine, with bitter loss and tragic
possibilities, she suffered a quite intolerable twinge of
memory in the sudden recollection of the boldly-scrutinising
look cast upon her by the bearded man in the white
Naval uniform.  She did not realise that an imperious
gesture of the brown hand, whose wrist had sported a
massive gold watch-bracelet, had whisked von Herrnung off
the scene.  But she guessed that the huge red-haired
Prussian, bowing at the side of the big blue F.I.A.T., had
clicked his heels before a master who could break him at his
will.

He had boasted....  They *knew*!  Not only the
bearded man whose look had stung so, but the close-shaven
old Colossus with the tortoiseshell-mounted pince-nez on his
thick heavy nose and the huge wart on his yellow cheek.
And the sallow diplomat in the Homburg hat shadowing the
sly glance and the moustache tucked up by a sinister smile
under his drooping Oriental nose.  They all knew....
Even the servant had worn the leer that is born of
knowledge, as he said in his Teutonic gutturals:

"The lady is a friend of the gentleman who brought her
here..."

Horrible!  But she would not remember.  She banished
the hateful, knowing faces with a gallant effort and turned
to Sherbrand, asking whether he had been an Eton, or
Rugby, or Harrow boy?

For had her Flying Man borne the cachet of the Public
School Patrine Saxham would have infinitely preferred it.
That it is possible to be a snob even in the most tragic or
romantic moment of one's existence, she had not realised
before she discovered herself to herself in this way.

"Downside was my school," he said quite proudly.
Patrine had no acquaintance with Downside.  "My father
would have liked me to go to Harrow; but my uncle—my
mother's brother—who paid for my education!—being a
Catholic, naturally preferred the place where the Faith
was taught.  And my mother—as naturally—shared his
preference.  I was happy at Downside.  The Fathers were
thundering good to me.  I worked hard—and I played
hard—and when it wasn't Swot, or cricket, or football, or
fives, or boxing, it was the making of flying-sticks, just
shaved laths with paper wings, at first—and then a dodge
much more ambitious, a model Wright in varnished card,
with a propeller worked by a rubber release....  My
father was pleased at my being a chip of the old block in
my turn for mechanics.  But when I wouldn't go up for
Woolwich—when I entered at Strongitharm's College of
Engineering on Tyneside, and spent two years at Folsom's
Works at Sunderland—he rather gave me up, I fancy, as a
low-minded kind of cad."

He shook himself as though to shake off the adverse
paternal judgment.

"I had my reasons for not going in for the Army, though
I love it.  They weren't easy to explain, and so I didn't try.
But my father never liked the idea of my being a civil
engineer.  Even my mother, and my uncle—dear old
fellow—he understands me better now!"

"Why?"

"Because he's dead!" said Sherbrand simply, "and the
Holy Souls know everything!"

"The Holy Souls?"  By the glare of the flare-light her
puzzled eyes questioned him.

"The Holy Souls in Purgatory.  They're privileged to
help us.  We help them—by praying for them.  It's—a
spiritual intercommunication—a kind of endless chain.
A circuit of influence, received and transmitted, not by
etheric flashes, but by a medium more subtle.  Prayer—in
a word!"

His bright-winged intellect had outstripped her heavier,
duller intelligence.  She suddenly felt like a caterpillar on a
cabbage-leaf, slow-moving, groping, but dimly conscious of
a distant affinity with the jewel-winged butterfly hovering
high in golden air....

"*Prayer*," she repeated dully, "do you believe in prayer?"

"Naturally!" said Sherbrand—"since I believe in God.
Do not you? ..."

"I hardly——"

In the ensuing pause Patrine had a brief retrospective
vision of the curate who had prepared her for Confirmation,
and who had talked of the Almighty as though He were a
crotchety but benevolent old man.  And last time she had
been to Church—a fashionably attended High Church in
the West End—another curate in a black cassock and tufted
biretta had preached about the 'Par of Card, the baptismal
dar of Grace, the bar of flars,' in which our first parents
dwelt in Eden, 'the fatal ar' in which they sinned, and the
'shar of tars' with which Eve lamented her fall.

"No," she said bluntly, "I don't think I believe in God at
all now, though it sometimes seems as though there must
be Somebody behind things!—Somebody who punishes—Somebody
who laughs!  As for a religion, I don't suppose
I've ever had one.  Oh, yes!—my religion is Aunt Lynette!"

A mental picture of Lynette, years ago in the Harley
Street nursery, teaching a curly-headed baby Bawne to say
his evening prayer, while a great galumphing girl stood in
the doorway and looked and listened, rose up and brought
with it the horrible choking sensation.  She fought with it
as Sherbrand said:

"I think you are speaking of Mrs. Saxham?  Well, one
must have a star to hitch one's waggon to.  And she is a
star—if ever I saw one!  A woman with a face like a Donatello
Madonna, or a tall lily growing in the garden-cloisters
of some Italian mountain-convent, and who has the Faith,—ought
to be able to teach you to believe in God!  Why not
ask her?  I once knelt in a Church near her, and saw her
praying.  She seemed—very close to what Norman or
someone else called the Eternal Verities."

"She will be nearer still," said Patrine with sudden,
savage roughness, "if anything happens—if Bawne is killed!
She will die of a broken heart!"

"Then why not pray," argued Sherbrand, "that she may
get him back again?  Why not try it?  There's nothing else
that helps so well!"

"Pray!"  The tall girl stopped short and swung round on
him, facing him.  A moment since they had walked like
lovers.  Now the spell was broken—at all events, for the
time.

"Pray—pray!" she mocked.  "Am I a sneak?—to pray
when I don't believe in prayer!  And if I did believe,
God—if He exists—would not hear me.  Even the parsons own
He has His favourites.  I am not one of them....  I am
one of His forgets!"





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`MACROMBIE IS SACKED`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER XL


.. class:: center medium bold

   MACROMBIE IS SACKED

.. vspace:: 2

Tall, lithe, vigorous, masterful, they confronted each
other across the gulf that suddenly opened between
them—the bottomless chasm that yawns between Faith and
Unbelief.

In the fitful uncanny light, the darker side of Patrine
started into sinister prominence.  Her defiant face was
masked by shadow, but the fierce vibrating voice and
towering shape had something of the fallen angel.  Had
wide sable pinions sprung and bannered from her shoulders,
Sherbrand would hardly have been surprised.

"Let us draw the line at that.  If we are to be friends—and
I would like us to be!—agree to it!  But since you have
what I have not—you would call it Faith, no doubt," he
guessed the wide mouth curving in a jeering smile, "there is
nothing to prevent *you* from praying for Aunt Lynette and
for Bawne too!  Unless you are the kind of physician who
draws the line at taking his own drugs!"

If she had thought to disconcert Sherbrand she erred.
He said instantly:

"I give you my word of Honour that I will pray for them!
But there is one other person much dearer to me than either.
You don't ask me for *her*, but all the same..."

"You kind, dear boy!  Pray for me all you want to!"

She was his big, smiling girl of the Milles Plaisirs, and the
Pat young Bawne worshipped, as she stretched out her
beautiful, massive arm and offered him a cordial hand.

"Shake, Mister!  Making love to me one minute and
bally-ragging me the next! ... Great Scott!  Ah!—I've
said it again—and I gave you my word I'd not!"

He took the hand in a close grasp, sought for the other
and took it also....

"Thank you!  Why, how you're shivering!  You have
nothing but that feather thing over your thin gown!  Wait
half a minute—I'll get you a wrap!"

He was gone in an instant, leaving her standing on the
border-line of one of the oases of black-velvet shadow,
swayed by the violence of her emotion as some tall young
birch might have been shaken by the fury of a south-west
gale.

His touch....  She had not dreamed....  Her head
drooped, and a long sigh went fluttering after him into the
darkness, like some night-moth whose wings are wrought of
hues more gorgeous than the peacock butterfly's, whose
scent is on the alert, and whose diamond eyes pierce the
blackest midnight in search of the partner of its kind.

.. vspace:: 2

A footstep she knew approached.  A familiar voice called
her:

"Uncle Owen."  The spell broke.  Her mind leaped up
alert and quivering.  "Have you any news—of Bawne?"

"I have news!"

"Not——"

"Not the worst news," said Saxham's harsh voice, "but
not—hopeful!"

"They are not coming back?"  She strove to set her heel
on the treacherous hope that he would say No!  For how
could she bring herself to desire the enemy's return.  And
yet the thought of Bawne was a stab of anguish in her
bosom.  What was the Doctor saying?

"The last definite intelligence received of them confirms
the certainty that Captain von Herrnung is now over the
North Sea.  He alighted nowhere; that we have positively
learned from many different news-centres.  A tractor-monoplane
answering to the description and carrying two-passengers
passed the Bull Light on Spurn Head, at a few
minutes before eight.  The lighthouse-keeper signalled that
bad weather might be expected.  The pilot paid no
attention.  And later on——"

As Saxham spoke, with that strange hoarseness, Patrine
took his arm tremblingly.  Her heart plunged as though
it would burst its prison as the Doctor went on:

"An hour or more later a Wireless came in.  It had been
sent on to Sir Roland from the Admiralty!—I will not
puzzle you with technical details.  But at 8.30 the officer
on duty on the upper-bridge of the second-in-line of a
Battle Squadron steaming through Northern Waters on the
way to a Southern rendezvous, reported having heard an
aëroplane pass overhead, crossing the course of the
Squadron diagonally—apparently flying due east——"

Saxham added:

"The aviator made no signal for assistance.  But the
engine-beat told of trouble developing....  There is
nothing to do but wait and hope!"

.. vspace:: 2

What had really happened on board H.M.S. *Rigasamos*,
maintaining her appointed speed of fifteen knots, and her
statutory two-cable-lengths from the stern of the Flagship
ahead, and the bows of the sister-ship following her, had
been that as the ship's band struck into *The Roast Beef of
Old England*, and the Owner took his place at the head of the
Ward-room mess-table, his Second in Command on the
fore-bridge got a speaking-tube message from the Navigating
Lieutenant on the upper-bridge, to say that the drone
of an aëroplane, flying at about four hundred overhead,
had been picked up by Warrant Officer So-and-So, of
the gun and searchlight control, *per* medium of the
microphone.

The Second in Command called back through the voice-tube:

"An aëroplane....  You're sure?  Could hear her
racket myself, without assistance.  But put it down to a
Fleet Seaplane taking a flip round the Squadron for
exercise, or one of the Goody-Two-Shoes from the R.N.A.S. Station
at Rosforth, blown out to sea doing Coast Patrol."

An answer rumbled down the pipe:

"It was an aëro all right, sir!  The rattle of her floats 'ud
have given away a Goody....  Travelling east against
the side-drive of a forty-mile-an-hour north-west gale....
And with engine trouble well developed.  Missing and
back-firing like the gayest kind of hell!"

The Second in Command took his ear from the mouth of
the speaking-tube, and with a glance that included the
figures of his Sub-Lieutenant, the Midshipman, signalmen,
and lookouts at their posts swung into the chart-house and
logged the occurrence in the plain language of the sea.  The
clock told 8.35 P.M. as he finished, capped his fountain pen,
and slipped it in an inside pocket, soliloquising:

"Travelling east against a forty-mile-an-hour gale from
the north-west, and with engine-trouble to top up with
... Little Willie will be seeing the angels pretty soon at
this rate!  Or piling himself up somewhere on the coast of
Holland!  Wonder who the bally idiot is?"

.. vspace:: 2

Saxham continued, and now he croaked as hoarsely as a
raven:

"Sir Roland has little doubt that the aëroplane heard on
the *Rigasamos* was Sherbrand's 'Bird of War.'  If so, there
would be very little hope left, unless it had been previously
arranged that a vessel belonging to—a foreign Power!—was
to watch for and give help if she should require it.  Now
you know as much as I do.  I have telephoned to both Lady
Beauvayse and your mother that you return with me to
Harley Street.  We shall go presently.  First, I want you
to speak on the telephone to Lynette."

"To—Lynette!" Patrine breathed.  The Doctor told
her: "I have kept the worst from Lynette hitherto....
I shall do so until the ultimate hope is abandoned.  My
wife knows my voice so well....  You understand....
She would suspect something ..."

His voice stumbled and broke.  And clinging to the arm
of the big man standing quietly beside her, potent in inertia
as a lump of raw iron, Patrine realised that her anguish
was a drop in the ocean of his.  She took his hand and said
in a tone he had never before heard from her:

"Come, dear!  We will go and speak to her now."

.. vspace:: 2

So they went across to the telegraph-cabin, raw with
unshaded electric light and littered with papers.  The
Chief was there, looking livid and careworn, leaning one
elbow on the edge of the stand that supported the Wireless,
and wearing the telephone head-band with the ear-pieces,
as he dictated to the pallid clerk who occupied a Windsor
chair at a stained deal desk, and wrote with a spluttering
pen on a depleted paper-pad.  At first sight there seemed
to be nothing else in the place but a low voice speaking, a
Railway Key instrument, a file for telegrams and an
overpowering odour of rum.

The odour of rum consolidated to Patrine's view into a
stocky thickset man with a square heavy yellow face set
into a tragic mask of despair.  It was Macrombie,
ex-Petty Officer telegraphist, whom the Royal Navy had
spat forth for being D.O.D. fifteen full years before.  Sacked
now from his civil employment, for the old glaring, unblinkable
offence.

The liquor had barely faded out in him; his breath came
across the little cabin like a flaming sword, and his eyes
under their beetling coal-black eyebrows looked burnt-out.
He rose from the debilitated office-stool he had been sitting
on, saluted Patrine stiffly and said:

"Mem, this is no place for a leddy, wi' a drucken wastrel
like mysel' in it.  Ay!  I hae lat ower a drap too mony, I am
awa' the noo wi' my weicht o' wyte.  But no wi'oot a
warstle have I yielded to the Enemy!"  His anguish broke
the flood-gates in a rumbling roar.  "Like Job I hae cried
oot in the nicht-watches to my Creator, speiring o' Him
why He made weak men an' strong rum?  He didna' gie
me ony answer—and I am ganging down the Broad Road's
fast as my bluidy thirrst can carry me—a disgraced and
ruined man!"

"Mr. Sherbrand will give you another chance.  I know
he will!—I'll ask him!" came impetuously in the big warm
womanly baritone.

"You're a grand woman to luik at, and the lad'll gie in—an'
the haill deil's dance to begin ance mair....  Na, na,
my bonny leddy!" said Macrombie, "ye can never lippen
to the promises o' a drunkard.  Best lat me gang my gait
to muckle Hell.  Ay!  I'll no' be lonesome there for want o'
company....  Toch! what a regiment o' Macrombies
deid an' damned will answer 'Present' to auld Satan's
rollcall!  Guid-nicht, my leddy, an' thanks to ye a' the same."

He took his cap from a peg, and from the corner a bundle
of miscellaneous possessions, rolled up in apparently a worn
alpaca office-coat, and girt about with knotted string.  He
saluted the Chief and Saxham, and nodded to the telegraph
clerk, and went out of the cabin in a plodding kind of hurry
as though no grass should grow under his feet before he set
them for good upon the dreadful downward Road.

His vice had played into an enemy's hands, and he would
trust himself no longer.  He meted out judgment to
rum-soaked Macrombie, assuming for himself the prerogative of
the One Judge.  But he got his chance in spite of himself,
when Britain's Hour came.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`SAXHAM LIES`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER XLI


.. class:: center medium bold

   SAXHAM LIES

.. vspace:: 2

At Saxham's nod Patrine rang up Lynette, and the
familiar voice that came back, spun out to a spider-thread of
sweetness across the distance, stabbed the listener to the
heart like a delicate blade of gold-wrought steel.  It said,
with a quiver in it:

"Of course, I am not nervous at all.  And I know how
much Bawne would enjoy the night-flying.  But if Owen
were not there, perhaps I might be—afraid that something
was wrong.  Owen!"

"Say that I am here," the Doctor signed, and Patrine
obeyed.

"Tell my darling to speak to me," said the voice, and
Patrine, dropping the microphone from suddenly useless
fingers, saw Saxham take it and force his stiff white lips to
speech:

"It is not possible—just at this moment.  You forget——"

"Of course ... The fireworks!"

"Just so.  The fireworks.  Expect us in another hour.
And—Patrine is here and coming back to Harley Street.
To stay.  Please tell Mrs. Keyse and Janey to get a room
ready."

The cordial answer came:

"I will at once.  Dear Pat! how glad I shall be to have her!"

"This is Patrine speaking now!"

.. vspace:: 2

Saxham's steady hand touched Patrine's in transferring
the receiver of the telephone, and the chill of it stung like
the touch of death.  She could not control her trembling as
she answered:

"You are always so kind to me, dear Aunt Lynette!"

"No, dear!  In an hour, then?  Take care of my
precious," the sweet voice pleaded, "until I see you
both..."

"Yes—yes!"

Saxham's hand hung up the receiver, rang off, and
steadied Patrine, whose knees were melting under her
weight:

"Don't ask me ... any more ... I—can't!" she
begged of him brokenly.  He said, and with those deep lines
that showed in his hard grey face, and his light eyes staring
haggardly from caves that grief had dug about them,
Saxham looked older by twenty years:

"I know it was hard, but the thing had got to be done.
How could I bludgeon her with the truth, whispered over a
wire?  Once face to face, the first glimpse of me will show
her that I have lied to her.  God help me!" said the Dop
Doctor; "I told her I had stayed on here with Bawne to give
him the treat of seeing a night-flying display."

"How—horribly clever of you!"

"So clever," Saxham answered harshly, "that I shall
probably regret it to the end of my days.  In the whole of my
practice I have never known a well-meant deceit do any
good—rather the opposite.  Consequently, I preach to
my patients Truth before everything—and break down and
lie when my own turn comes—like the damned coward I am."

"We shall leave here now in a few minutes," went on the
Doctor, glowering at his chronometer.  "I sent Keyse away
with the car upon a message.  He will be here to take us
home to Harley Street at half-past nine.  You have ample
time to telephone to Berkeley Square for your clothes and
so on....  Lady Beauvayse's maid can pack them for
you, I presume?"

"Oh, yes.  She's decent in the way of doing things for me."

"Very well."

The Doctor left the telegraph-hut, and Patrine 'phoned to
Berkeley Square.  Then, with a sudden recollection of an
appointment which must be cancelled, she gave the number
that meant Margot's newly-furnished mansion, and
presently heard the little bird-like voice chirping:

"Yes, this is 00, Cadogan Place.  I'm Lady Norwater!
... Is that you, Pat?  Yes?  What cheer? ... I'm
having a long, deadly domestic evening.  Franky's reading
an improving book aloud to me—at least he was when you
rang up—'Matrimony for Beginners.  A Handbook to
Happiness,' it's called.  But I don't believe the man who
wrote it ever had a live wife."

"Probably not.  Margot, pet, I can't possibly lunch with
you to-morrow!"

"Don't say you back out because of the book!  Fits has
got it now under the sofa."  Fits was Franky's lady
bull-terrier.  "And by the time she's done with it there won't be
much left.  Say you'll come!" Margot urged.  "Franky's
got to test a new car—so Rhona Helvellyn's coming with
two or three Militant pals of hers.  I'll give you lobster
*Américaine* and cold lamb in mint aspic—and strawberry
mousse.  There!"

"I'm frightfully sorry, my dinkie, but it simply can't be!"

"What tosh!  And we're going to talk over ideas for
speeches at the Monster Meeting of Women in October at
the Royal Hall.  And Rhona has a Grand Slam in the
way of surprises—did she say anything to you about the
Mansion House Banquet demonstration she's thought of
for Monday night?"

"Yes, and I'm down on it—like houses!" declared
Patrine.  "Is Rhona really spoiling for a taste of skilly and
yard-exercise?  Don't you get mixed up.  Think of Franky
reading the paragraphs: 'POPULAR YOUNG PEERESS ON THE
SUFFRAGE WAR-PATH.  SOCIETY BEAUTY HECKLES THE
LORD MAYOR!  VISCOUNTESS NORWATER BURSTS UPON
BANQUETING BISHOPS, IN THE CHARACTER OF A WOMAN
WHO WANTS A VOTE!'"

Patrine called good-bye and rang off, turning with the
smile upon her lips to see Sherbrand standing behind her
with a long white coat upon his arm.

"I have brought you a wrap.  A lady forgot it here the
other day.  Let me help you to put it on."

Patrine shivered as he drew the large loose garment round
her.  It was a white Malta blanket-coat, very soft and
fleecy and warm.

"Shall we have another turn on the Grounds before the
Doctor's car——" Sherbrand was beginning, when the
Chief removed the Wireless head-band and came forward.

"Miss Saxham, I must detain you for a minute, I am
afraid."

Sherbrand went out of the hut.  At a sign the pale clerk
evaporated.  Sir Roland moved nearer to Patrine.  How
old he looked! she thought.

"You are done up!  *Esquinté*, aren't you?'

"I am tired, but neither done up nor the other thing.
Miss Saxham, you just now put me in possession of the
details of a Suffragist plot.  The friend of a friend of yours,
backed by some other viragoes of the militant order,
intends—I quote your own words!—to a bid for a diet of skilly,
and prison-yard exercise, by interrupting the after-dinner
speakers at the Mansion House Banquet on Monday night.
Kindly let her know from me that the stewards will be
prepared to prevent her doing so,—and tell her that women will
never make successful conspirators until they learn to hold
their tongues!  Now, good-night.  Your incautiousness
has rendered Miss Helvellyn a service.  She will bless it
one day if she doesn't now."

He took Patrine's hand in his frank, strong clasp.  The
haggard lines on the keen bronzed face did not mar the
beauty of its kindliness.

"You have given her a chance.  Let's hope she makes
the most of it.  To herd with the—wild she-asses isn't the
way to serve her sex.  Rowdiness and shrieking will never
get the Vote for Women.  Burning down empty country-houses
won't land a female Member in the House of Parliament.
It isn't Propaganda to—behave like an improper
goose.  Mind you tell her!  That you, Saxham?" as a tall
figure came towards them out of the glimmering darkness
fitfully splashed by the petrol-flares now burnt down and
dying out.  "Best take your niece home to Harley Street,
she is thoroughly tired.  Sherbrand and myself and
Mr. Burgin here are good for hours yet."





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`SAXHAM BREAKS THE NEWS`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER XLII


.. class:: center medium bold

   SAXHAM BREAKS THE NEWS

.. vspace:: 2

"Owen! ..."

Lynette was dressed in a delicate, filmy black chiffon
dinner-gown, and as Saxham's latch-key clicked in the front
door-lock and she rose up out of the tail carved armchair
that stood beside the large hall fireplace, her paleness
seemed to diffuse light, like the whiteness of the moon.

"Owen ... He is not ... What ..."

Her wide bright glance went past the tall wrapped-up
figure of Patrine to the taller shape that bulked behind her.
No small active boy-form danced in its wake.  She put out
her arms, groping blindly—swayed and would have fallen,
but that Saxham strode past Patrine, caught the slender
figure in his powerful embrace, turned and carried his wife
away down the short corridor that led to the consulting-room.

"Miss Pat, my dear!  There's cold supper all laid an'
ready waitin' in the dining-room.  By the Doctor's special
orders, and I was to see you eat."

Thus Mrs. Keyse, now for years housekeeper at Harley
Street, a little light-haired woman, common of speech and
innocent of grammar, but a pearl of price in the Doctor's
estimation and her mistress's right hand.

"Don't say they fed you at 'Endon on 'am and salad an'
pigeon-pie.  Trash is the word," said Mrs. Keyse, "for
resturong pastry, and them there piegeons, if language
could be given 'em, would bear me out in what I say."

But Patrine refused baked meats, submitting to be
escorted to her room and tenderly fussed over by the kind,
Cockney-tongued little woman, and yellow-haired
pink-cheeked thirteen-year-old Janey, out of whose small
triangular face looked the honest grey eyes of W. Keyse.

Both Mrs. Keyse and Janey had been crying, for Keyse,
who acted as the Doctor's chauffeur, had broken bad news
in the kitchen-regions.  Master Bawne, according to Keyse,
had been taken for a trip in one of them Hairos by a German
flying-bloke, and it was feared—not having returned or
been heard of—that Something or Other had gone wrong.

Mrs. Keyse, a born optimist, rejected the idea of accident
or casualty with ringing sniffs of incredulity.  Master
Bawne, the blessed dear! had prob'ly bin kidnup' by some
foreign Nobleman wanting a Nair.  Trust a German,
Mrs. Keyse would never! having when a young woman in service
at Alexandra Crescent, Kentish Town, N.W., been treated
something frightful by a young man who travelled in
shaving-sets of German silver and other fancy articles of Teuton
origin.  Keyse must often have heard her mention That
There Green?

Keyse responded, lighting his pipe, for his wife and
daughter had accompanied him to their own private
parlour in the basement, looking out across the yard to the
garage over which Billy and Janey had been born:

"Twice a day since you and me stood up before the
dodger to git married.  But you never tipped me as 'ow
the bloke was a bloomin' Fritzer before.  'Ow do you make
it out?  Switch me on to the notion!  'Cos o' somethink
in the German nickel 'e drummed in gettin' into 'im an'
affectin' 'is blood?"

Mrs. Keyse, impervious to sarcasm as incapable of
grammar, maintained that the subject under discussion
had spoke wiv' a Naxent particularly noticeable when
upset.  Broken English, in moments of passion, with red
eyes and white 'air simpular to one o' them Verbenas, had in
conjunction with a decided bent towards bigamy, and an
appetite for other people's savings, distinguished That
There Green.

W. Keyse and Janey went off to bed, and the other
servants, instructed through the Doctor's consulting-room
speaking-pipe, shut up the house and retired, all save the
night-maid who answered the telephone, and attended to
the midnight rings at the hall-door.  But Mrs. Keyse did
not follow the household.  The Doctor and Mrs. Saxham
were still shut up together in the consulting-room.
Mrs. Keyse owned to herself that she had talked all that rubbage
about That There Green and cetra, to hide that her heart
was as water in her bosom, and that she trimbled and
shook all over after the fashion of them Fancy shapes of
Chicken in Haspeck, or Coffin cream, or Blue Mange
coloured with Scotch Anneal.

.. vspace:: 2

It grew late and later.  The flares on the Flying Ground,
many times renewed, had died down to greasy black ash in
the scorched and dented buckets, before there was a
movement or a sound in the dark consulting-room.  Then the
woman who sat in the chair sighed, and the long quivering
breath she drew, stirred the thick hair of the man who
knelt upon the floor before her, holding her in his arms.

"Owen!"

"My wife!"

The sigh that had escaped her seemed to flutter through
the unlighted room like some dusky-winged creature of the
darkness.  She leaned her face upon his brow, pressing her
lips upon the smooth place above the broad meeting eyebrows.
The first kiss she had ever given Saxham had been
placed just there.  Now the sweet lips were cold.  He could
feel how the delicate white teeth were set behind them.
Had she relaxed her grip upon herself he knew she must
have cried aloud.  Nor could he help her save by his
sustaining hold, and the silence of a grief only equalled by her
own.  Thus they had remained, speechless through the
hours; drawn closer than ever by the anguish of mutual loss.

Now she stirred in Saxham's arms, and spoke collectedly:

"Tell me Bawne is not—dead!  Give me courage to go
on waiting.  And yet, do not help me to deceive myself or
you, with a false hope."

"If the worst had happened," said Saxham, almost
appealingly, "should we not have known it?"

She breathed between stiff lips, trying to control her
shuddering:

"Twice to-night I have heard him call me: '*Mother!*' and
then again, '*Mother!*'  Now I feel"—she closed her eyes
and opened them widely, staring through the darkness—"that
he is wanting me!—wanting you!—as he never has
before.  We were always near till now—he could not realise
what parting meant!"

She fought with sobs, and the tears she could not keep
back fell in the darkness on her husband's face.  His own
were mingled with them.  Perhaps she knew it, as she wiped
them away with a touch that was a caress, saying:

"We must not give in!  We must not fail him!  To
abandon hope too soon would be to fail!"

Courage had come to her with the paling of the stars and
the greying in the East that meant the dayspring.  She
was full of solicitude for Saxham's weariness, as he rose up
stiffly as a knight who has watched his armour through the
long hours, kneeling on the threshold of the Sanctuary, and
knows with the waning of the flame in the lamp before the
Tabernacle that his vigil is over and done.

"You are tired—so tired!  Dear Owen, go to bed now, if
only for an hour or two.  There will be news of him very
soon now—there *must* be news!"

Saxham took a delicate fleecy wrap from a chair and put it
about her, for she shivered in the raw chill of the unsunned
morning air.  Then he touched the blind, and it rolled up
upon a vista of backyard and garage.  The shriek of an
engine and the vibrating passage of an early train through
Portland Road Tube Railway came into their ears, standing
together at the open window, as Dawn in her streaming
crocus veil peeped shyly through the vast smoke-bank that
broods upon the morning face of London, engendered by the
innumerable little fires of those among her five millions who
must rise and eat, and go forth to labour ere yet it is fairly
day.

"Owen, tell me!  What is coming?  What is it I feel,
here and here?"

She turned upon her husband suddenly with the question,
touching her brow and heart lightly and fixing on him
her widely opened eyes.  The haunted look of Beatrice had
come back to them.  His wife's strange likeness to the
Guido portrait in the Barberini Palace Gallery—the tragic
face with the wistful eyes, that despite the asseverations of
the learned and critical will be associated as long as its
canvas hangs together with the Daughter of the Cenci—leaped
up in her at this hour to startle him afresh.

"What is in the air?" she asked.  "What changes are
taking place about us?  What great and horrible Thing is
moving,—moving towards us as we stand together here?"

Saxham's powerful arm went round her protectingly.  He
answered:

"You shall know, my love, my comrade.  In confidence—I
am permitted to tell you this much.  We stand upon
the very brink of international War!"

She looked at him and in the golden eyes he read courage,
endurance and tenderness.  Love that would be changeless.
Fidelity through life beyond Death to the Life that is for
evermore.

"You mean that Austro-Hungary will attack Servia, and
that Russia will intervene?"

"As Austria intends, no doubt," said Saxham shrugging,
"prompted by her Mentor and Ally at Berlin.  In him we
have a personality blatantly vain, immensely egoistic,
feverishly energetic, imbued to the verge of monomania
with the idea of his own appointment by the Almighty—as
they understand Him in Germany—to be Imperial leader
of nations and arbiter of the destinies of Kings!"

He went on:

"Suppose the Great Powers of the World a row of straw
bee-skeps, susceptible of being upset by a Hohenzollern
kick!  Will the mailed toe of Imperial Germany refrain from
giving it—invading France through the lost Alsace-Lorraine
provinces, the moment Austria-Hungary gets to grips with
the Russian bear?  Britain is France's ally, bound in
Honour to support her.  Now you understand what vital
questions the Chancellories of the world were burning
electric light and brain-power and eyesight over, the long
night through, while you and I——"

She stopped him:

"You make me think!—You have told me—That man
who has taken my darling is a German Flying Officer.  He
may have had some urgent, secret reason for quitting
England at once!"

"It is more than probable that he carried dispatches of
importance.  But I can answer no questions on that point.
I should be verging, if I did, on a betrayal of confidence."

Lynette Saxham looked at her husband earnestly, and the
change wrought in her by the long night's vigil of sorrow
sent a pang through the man's heart.  That line of anxiety
between the slender eyebrows and the bluish shadows
round the golden eyes came to him, like the sorrowful
sweetness of the exquisite lips, out of the past.

"Why do the Germans hate us?" she asked, and he
answered wearily and sombrely:

"As the nation with which Germany runs neck and neck
in military armament, national wealth and influence,
Germans pay us British the compliment of dislike.
German ambition, spreading rank and high, is checked in the
attainment of its ends even by our geographical position.
We carry in our veins too large a share of Teutonic blood, to
be ingratiating or subservient to our arrogant and domineering
neighbours.  What hatred is bitterer than racial hatred?
Where is enmity deadlier than that one finds existing
between women and men of kindred blood?"

The face of David, fair and debonair, rose up before
Saxham as he said it.  Strange! that even while he thanked
his stars for David's ancient treachery, the fact of the
betrayal should rankle in the Doctor still.

"Nowhere is there hatred more terrible.  Listen, Owen—there
is something I want to tell you——"

Lynette shivered and drew the fleecy shawl more closely
about her white bare throat, and the slender shoulders and
arms that were revealed through the laces of her filmy
dinner-gown:

"In the first days of the Siege of Gueldersdorp, a woman
from the native stad, the wife of a Barala herd, who came to
the Convent for medicine and soup for a sick *piccanin*—told
the Mother that long before the Orange Free State threw in
its lot with the Transvaal—long before Oom Paul and Vader
Steyn ordered that all *rooinek* soldiers sent by Groot
Brittanje to South Africa should quit the country—the Barala
could not sleep in their kraals at night '*for the going of the
creatures*.'  Not all the creatures of prey—the Eaters of
Flesh—the crows and the *aasvogels*, the wild dogs and jackals,
the *aard*-wolves, and hyænas.  But the hartebeest and
springbok and prongbuck and rietbuck; with the little
gazelles and tiny antelopes, the *dassies* and hares, and all
the shy, wild harmless things that are stalked and shot for
what is called sport, by most men and some women—they
passed away in multitudes each night until just before the
dawn.  Even the *meerkat* and the leopard went, the
baboons and snakes and the big lizards.  Barala trackers
followed the trails North to the Marches of the Okavango—and
farther still into the Mabunda country—the woman
told us—and their wise men had warned them that it was
a *teeken* of War to come."

Her wistful eyes strained towards the East, where
between the crowded roofs of the vast City and the shadowy
purple day-brow, showed a clear wide band of crocus-yellow,
melting into exquisite hyacinth-blue.

"Perhaps I am like the antelope and the hares and the
wild-bucks and the other creatures.  It may be that this
nameless Thing that I have felt coming nearer and nearer is
War," said Lynette.  Then she winced as though the net
had whirled and fallen, and the trident pierced, and cried
out irrepressibly: "If so—Bawne will be out there
unprotected—in the midst of it!  Owen!—do you hear me?  How
can you stand there so calmly when such a thing may be?
How—oh!—how could you consent to his going?"

Saxham's square face was set like a mask in the stern
effort for self-control.  He was in spirit with the Navigating
Lieutenant on the upper bridge of H.M.S. *Rigasamos*,
hearkening to the drone of an aëroplane struggling against
the thrust of a north-west gale....  He heard the double
knock of a back-fire, and heard men talking about
engine-trouble.  Even as he brought himself back to say
quietly:

"I did as you would have done in the same circumstances.
If the same voice that spoke to me had virtually said to you:
'*Here stands your only son, a child in years and yet a man for
England!  Will you let him go?*'  Would you not have
consented?  If you deny, I shall tell you that I know my wife
better than she knows herself!"

"'*A child in years—a man for England*....'"  The fold
between her slender eyebrows deepened and the delicate
sensitive upper-lip lifted, showing the white, slightly
irregular teeth.  "I do not understand," she said piteously;
"Was there any question of an order to be carried out?—a
duty to be done?"

"There was a question to be settled," said Saxham,
"involving Bawne's whole future.  Here and Hereafter—and
the question was this: Whether the son you have given me is
worthy of his mother, or whether he has inherited any twist
of brain, any degenerate and wretched weakness from the
father whom your pure hand saved and led back, my guardian
Saint, my heart's beloved!—from the very threshold of
the gates of Hell."

"Owen!  Don't speak so of yourself.  I will not hear it.
You had been so wronged—driven beside yourself by misfortune
and betrayal.  You were not responsible——"  She
covered the little ears with the slender hands.  He took the
hands down and kissed them, and held them in his own, as
he went on:

"That is what I should like to believe.  But—the truth is
very different.  There was—there is still, I suppose—a spot
of weakness in me.  A bubble of air in the casting—a flaw in
the wrought steel."  He looked like wrought steel as he
spoke; "I had to be sure our boy is sound, mentally and
morally as he is physically.  Fit—in the fullest and highest
sense of the word.  Rather than have the doubt," said
Saxham, "or the knowledge that confirms the doubt, I
would——"

"No, no!"  She tried to free her slender hands, but the
Doctor's hold was as inexorable as gentle.  "You must not
say—that!  I cannot bear——"

"Ah, my poor love, you, too, have feared lest the sins of
the father might some day be visited on the son!" said
Saxham with a strange mingling of pity and sorrow and
exultation.  "Well, now for your comfort, believe they will not
be.  Bawne is all yours, Lynette.  Young as he is, he has
learned to master Self and conquer Fear.  Obedience,
Duty, and Honour are welded into the metal of his
character.  If I had not been my boy's father, I should have
envied that man—knowing what I have learned to-day.
And therefore I do not grudge—I give freely——"

"You give—you do not grudge——"  She suddenly
wrenched away her hands and said in a tone that chilled
Saxham:

"Owen, do you speak like this because you believe Bawne
is—dead?"

The Doctor made answer:

"I believe that if God so decree our boy will yet be given
back to us.  As far as knowledge goes—except for one fact I
am little wiser than you."

"I must know what that one thing is!  You will tell me
now, and all!"

The sun was rushing up over East London in a gloriole of
golden fire.  To her husband's thought she was like some
slender Roman patrician at the stake, as she stood up
against the background of flaming splendour, and waited to
hear the worst.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`THE PLUNDERED NEST`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER XLIII


.. class:: center medium bold

   THE PLUNDERED NEST

.. vspace:: 2

If that story of the aëroplane over the North Sea in the
thickening dark, fighting East against the side-thrust of
the nor'-west gale, with the dropping revolutions and the
hiccuping engine, had seemed desperate before, it was
ghastly now.  Saxham's last hope died as he told.  When
he had done, Lynette said with strange, unnatural
composure:

"Perhaps I have loved our child too much, and that is
why he is taken from me....  And yet how can a mother
love by measure and by rule?  Did Our Lady withhold any
part of her love from her Divine Child?  Did not the dearest
of all earthly mothers say to me—in that waking Vision,
the God-given reality of which I have never doubted—'*Be
to a son of Owen's what I have been to you!*'"

Her strained composure gave way.  Her face quivered
and the tears broke forth.  She nipped her trembling lips
close and shut her quivering eyelids with her fingers, but the
fountains were unsealed, and she wept.  Perhaps it was
better so.  She dried her eyes presently, and yielding to
Saxham's persuasions in that she consented to go and lie
down, she came into his embrace and laid her arms about his
neck and kissed him with wifely tenderness, saying:

"I will answer now, what you said a little while ago.  You
shall see under the only leaf of my heart, Owen, that has
ever been folded down over a secret kept from you.  When
my boy was to be born, and I was weak and suffering, the
doubt—the dread, that has haunted and tortured you,
assailed me and made me wretched—for a little while.
Then I gathered together, jealously, every noble, true and
brave thing you had ever done for me or for others; every
good deed of kindness, every unselfish tender thought.  I
asked you to take me with you to visit your poorer patients.
I saw their hollow eyes brighten and heard them bless you
when you turned from their bedsides to carry comfort and
help elsewhere.  And I wrote down these things in a book.
They shine from its pages like jewels.  When I die it was to
be given to Bawne....  It will be if he lives to come back
to us....  There is a prayer at the end that, in His
goodness, God might give me in my boy a man like you!"

He went with her to the door and looked after her
earnestly as she passed down the corridor out of his sight.

Then he locked himself in, and went back to his chair at
the consulting-room table.  The bright boy had stood there
beside him a few short hours before.  He was there now,
pleading with a silent voice, coaxing with unseen looks,
tugging with invisible hands.  He always would be.
Though Time softened the mother's anguish of loss, there
would be no forgetfulness for Saxham, the grim stern man
whose nature was Fidelity.  Other children might yet call
the Dop Doctor father, but their little fingers would never
blur the imprint of the firstborn's babyish hand upon his
heart.

Perhaps you can see the man, wan and haggard and
unshaven, trying to attend to the pressing correspondence
that had accumulated since the previous noon.  Even as,
to the shrill crying of the Fleet bugles, a windy grey day
broke over the choppy Solent, showing the huge pageant of
Sea Power ready for the King.

Down forty-mile avenues of floating steel fortresses one
might follow Majesty, with a great muster of Naval
sea-planes and aëroplanes manoeuvring somewhat wildly
overhead.

As Saxham sat there with Fate's trident rankling in him,
those lights he had spoken of were burning behind
closely-curtained windows at the Admiralty and at the Foreign
Office, and at the Belgian and German Embassies.  In
Berlin and Vienna, in Brussels and Paris and St. Petersburg—later
to cast off its Teutonic name in loathing and be
Petrograd—similar phenomena might have been observed.
"Austria was going to take some step," as Prince Lichnowsky
had nervously stated to Britain's Foreign Secretary,
adding that he regarded the situation as very uncomfortable.
And the German Foreign Secretary ingenuously
confided to the British Chargé d'Affaires in Berlin that it
was the intention of Austria-Hungary to offer Serbia a pill
which she could not swallow, in the Note demanding the
removal of all officers and functionaries guilty of propaganda
against the Dual Monarchy, presented by Baron Giesel at
Belgrade, on the 24th of July.  The ultimatum was to be
accepted or rejected within forty-eight hours, a sweeping
proviso, in which one recognises the Hohenzollern touch.

The world trembled on the brink of Armageddon.  Men
even then were doubtful as to the issue.  It might yet, some
said, be Peace.  But if Man, who arrives at conclusions by
intellectual processes, was unsure, not so things that are
guided merely by Instinct.  Like the wise creatures of
Natal and the Transvaal and Bechuanaland in 1900, these
knew quite well that War was in the air.

It is on record that in these days preceding the Great
Calamity, huge droves of wild pig, great herds of deer and
small bands of the rarer elk, with bears, hares, martens, and
foxes, evacuated the forests of Bavaria and South Germany
for the mountain fastnesses of Switzerland.  Immense
flights of birds not usually migratory, partridges, pheasants,
grouse, plover, wild-doves and water-fowl went South with
the animals.  Under cover of night the colossal
game-preserves of East Prussia emptied into Poland—their
furred and feathered peoples passing into the labyrinthine
swamps of the Russian Dnieper and Dniester—spreading
the news, sending the alarm before them:

"*Man is coming, and with him War!*"

Man was coming.  That strange trembling of the earth
had warned its creatures, even before the tramp, tramp,
tramp of millions of marching feet, the rumbling that
betokened the slow but sure approach of Titanic death-engines,
told Fine Ears to seek safety in flight, before the
cataclysm of human flesh and iron and steel, and chemicals a
thousand times more deadly, rolled down to overwhelm,
and destroy.  Hence through those July nights the sound
of rushing wings above, and stealthy pads, and trotting
hoofs, and heavy bodies crashing through sedge and
brake and underbrush, hardly for a moment ceased.  Puffs
of sweet wild breath, and musky odours from hidden lairs;
tufts of hair upon the thorns, and crowded spoor upon the
dust of the forest-paths or the mud of the river-banks, told
of their going, to those who were skilled to read such signs.
But the same mysterious instinct that urged them to flight,
bade the eagle and vulture that prey upon carrion, the raven
and owl and crow, the wolf and lynx be on the alert, for the
table of Earth would shortly be spread for them as never
before in the whole History of War.  And their hoarse
croaking and hooting and baying and barking answered:
War, War, War!





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`PATRINE REMEMBERS`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER XLIV


.. class:: center medium bold

   PATRINE REMEMBERS

.. vspace:: 2

Patrine knelt beside the bed in her charming chintz-draped,
white-enamelled room at Harley Street, and clumsily
thanked God for having taken away von Herrnung.
She petitioned that darling Bawne might be quickly found
and brought back, and that if he were not, Lynette might
not die.  And she wound up with 'Our Father,' rather
imperfectly remembered, and got into bed wondering whether
Sherbrand would be pleased if he could know her not quite
as irreligious as she had boasted—and lay revelling drowsily
in the comfort of cool lavender-scented linen, until she fell
asleep.

She had not tasted sleep for nights: age-long nights of
broad staring wakefulness.  Now Somnos, the gentle
brother of Thanatos, took her and lapped her divinely round.
She felt herself drifting away on a wide-flowing tide of deep
sweet restfulness.  Then it was as though an electric light
were suddenly switched on in the dark galleries of her brain.
Insomnia, the malevolent hag-witch, jests thus merrily with
her victims, suffering them to taste sleep, and then whisking
the cup away.  Like many other practical jests, this ends
in breakdown and brain-fever, or drives its victims to the
chemist for sleepy drugs, and to the madhouse subsequently.

.. vspace:: 2

In the middle of the dazzling cocoon-shaped patch of
brightness thus created, Patrine recognized the outlines of
an ornamental fountain that occupied the centre of the
vestibule leading to the supper-room of the Upas Club.
Executed in the New Art style of sculpture, of white and
black, and tawny marble, it was shaded by tall palms with
gilded leaves.

On low pedestals rising from the rim of the shallow oval
basin of the fountain were three nude life-sized shapes
delicately tinted, with gilt hair, carmined lips, darkened
eyebrows, vague round eyes of pale blue.  They had the
flattened breasts and narrow hips of masculine adolescence with
women's faces and shoulders, arms and thighs.  One held
a finger hushingly on its lip; another was putting on a black
vizard through which its pale eyes peeped slyly, the third
was smiling over the rim of a golden drinking-cup.  The
Three were sharing a pleasant secret between them—or so it
had seemed that night to Patrine.

After complying with certain formalities, and paying a
heavy fee for admission, Patrine with her friend had passed
through to a wonderfully decorated supper-room with a big
grill at the end, where white-capped cooks were busy with
savoury things.  Wind and strings filled the room with
great waves of music.  Liveried attendants were serving
champagne in crystal jugs to men and women seated
supping at the daintily-appointed tables.  The hot eyes
and lividly-pale or purple-flushed faces of many of the
revellers, already told their tale of excess.

The champagne at a guinea a jug, a speciality of the
Upas, had seemed excellent to Patrine.  She was out for
enjoyment, and fizz made you feel top-hole.  They had
supped—was it lobster Américaine or grilled oysters that
had preceded the other things?—when there came a change
in the music.  The unseen orchestra sighing and thrilling
forth the amorous phrases of *Samson et Dalila*, leaped all at
once into another familiar theme.  To wit, the dance of
the Jaguars in the Jungle, with its wail, clang, clash and
growl as of strange, discordant, exotic instruments.

"Drums covered with serpent-skin, gombos of elephant-tusk,
human skull-rattles and all the paraphernalia of
Voodoo," to quote Lady Beauvayse.

Couples rose, and began passing out through a wide
curtained exit at the farther end of the supper-room.  The
music grew madder.  Patrine, laughing, took von Herrnung's
offered arm.

"Now," he told her, "you are going to see something
that is very *chic*!  We shall dance in the Hall of the
Hundred Pillars!"

"How frightfully ripping!" said Patrine.

Thus they joined the mob of people—a singularly quiet
mob,—and passed through the heavy, curtained entrance.
The much-talked-of Hall was merely a big circular ballroom,
lighted by groups of electric lilies, set about with
pillars of tinted glass, slanting from a dado of black marble,
ending at a broad frieze of black beneath the ceiling-dome.
Theatrical and tawdry, gaudy and glittering, the scheme
of decoration reminded Patrine of the inside of a solitaire
marble.  The walls of fierce bright orange were striped in
curving oblique and transverse lines of black-and-silver, the
silver dome was decorated with similarly curving lines of
orange-and-black.

To the strange barbaric music of the dance from São Paulo
men and women were gyrating and posturing, gliding and
pausing, as other men and women had done at the Milles
Plaisirs.  Presently Patrine and her friend were revolving
like the others, in the Valse with the hesitations and the
Tango steps in it.  You had only to know Tango and the
thing came easily—or you imagined it did, after so much
champagne.  Reflected in the wall and ceiling-mirrors the
girl had seen herself, twisting and twirling amidst the mob of
dancers, with her head thrown back, and her long eyes
blazing, and her wide red mouth laughing wantonly, before the
black-and-orange-and-silver walls, the silver-and-black-and-orange
dome spun giddily round her with the mob of dancers.
Dazed, she had shut her eyes.  She had felt herself being
hurried somewhere—out of the pillared dancing-hall....

.. vspace:: 2

She shivered, lying there in the sunshine remembering....
She recalled von Herrnung's face as they had passed
out of velvet-curtained, soundless darkness into a tapestry-hung,
softly-carpeted corridor.  The inner angles of the
eyebrows were lifted, the laughing mouth under the
red-rolled moustache displayed the big white teeth in a tigerish
way.  The pupils of his eyes were dilated, the irises pale as
water.  He had looked at her curiously, and said with a
strange accent:

"So, Isis, you are mine now!"

"I suppose so!"

"I did not suppose so.  The experience has been very
real for me.  Shall we go back—or would you prefer——"

She said with her face turned from him sullenly:

"I should prefer to go—to where I live!"

He had been loth to let her go.  Then under a promise of
renewal of those strange, shameful, secret relations, he had
wrapped her theatre-mantle about her, and helped her
arrange her lace scarf about her head, and taken her through
a passage back to the vestibule where the three ambiguous
statues stood about the central fountain, upon whose
restless jet of water played shifting lights of different hues.
By some arrangement of those who had planned the Upas,
there faced you as you issued with your companion from
the furtive side-passage the figure that had its finger on its
smiling, carmined lips....

And then—the stale air of London at dawn in midsummer.
In the shabby side-street where long ranks of private cars
stood waiting, von Herrnung had signalled the chauffeur of
one of them—could the man have been the German who had
leered at her that day at Hendon?—and then he had put her
in, and followed her, and taken her back to Berkeley
Square....

It irked her to remember that she had told to the sleepy
manservant who had admitted her at 3 A.M. an absolutely
supererogatory falsehood to account for her return at that
belated hour.  For Lady Beau wouldn't have bothered if
you'd arrived with the milkman, so long as you turned up
smiling at her bedside with your fountain-pen, and her
coroneted paper-pad, when she'd had her early grape-fruit,
and roll, and coffee, and was ready to tackle her morning
mail.

.. vspace:: 2

Patrine must be discreet.  Cautious.  Must tell no lies of
the unnecessary kind.  For even though von Herrnung had
been removed, just when his attitude had become formidable
and menacing—there might yet be pitfalls of her own
digging to brave and shun.

Pitfalls ... Perils ... As she lay wakeful, conscious
through shut eyelids of the white mouldings of the ceiling
her face was turned to, suddenly a keen sharp terror ran her
through.  She had heard her own voice say to von Herrnung:

"My God!  Can't you understand that I ask nothing
better than never to see nor hear of you again!"

He had mocked her with his hateful smile, and she had not
understood.

"Under no—possible conditions?  Just think a bit, my
dear!  Because—to burn one's boats behind one—that is
not prudent at all!"

And later:

"You give me to understand that whatever happens—*whatever
happens*—you will have nothing more to do with me?"

Idiot!—besotted idiot!  She leaped up in the bed, visualising
the peril, clearly as though a shutter had snapped back
within her brain.  Horror froze her, realising the shame she
might live to bring upon those who loved Patrine.  Uncle
Owen ... Lynette ... Bawne....

Mildred and Irma were minor considerations, shadowy
silhouettes, negative quantities.  Neither Irma nor Mildred
had ever loved Patrine.  Dad had though.  Poor, dear Dad!
She was glad he wasn't alive now.  And Margot ...
Would Kittums cut one if—that happened?  And—Sherbrand!
A blush burned over her, and she flung herself
face downwards, burying her scorching face among the
pillows, stifling the scream that the sheer torture wrung
from her, by nipping a fold of the smooth linen in her teeth.

So she lay and writhed on the red-hot griddle of her
anguished recollection, until a neat housemaid knocked at
the door and brought her morning tea.  And as she set
down the emptied cup, someone else knocked, and opened
the door softly, and Patrine turned—to meet the look of
Lynette.

And then, though her struggling conscience warned her
that she was unworthy to be held in arms so pure, she cried
out wildly, and felt herself enfolded, and the fierce emotional
tumult within her broke forth in wild sobs and drenching
tears.  She heard herself saying:

"I would have given my life over and over to have saved
you from grief like this!"

And yet these were not the words she would have spoken.
We are actors often and often when we least suspect
ourselves, even when Calamity with one swift stroke of the
scalpel has divided the palpitating flesh and quivering
nerves down to the living bone.

"I would have given my life!" she wept, and Lynette
seated by the bedside and bending over her, answered
tenderly:

"I know it, my kind heart!  You have always loved
him.  You wished him not to go—you begged Owen not to
allow——"

There was unutterable loyalty in the breaking of the
sentence: "He thought it best.  I trust my husband," said the
sweet voice.  "But yet I thank you, dear one, for your
loyalty to me."

"Don't touch me!  I'm not fit!" Patrine stammered,
resisting the mothering, encircling embrace.  But the cup of
pure sweetness was held to her feverish lips, she craved it too
much to thrust it from her.  You can see her coming out of
the bed in a galumphing outburst of passionate, remorseful
tenderness:

"Here is my place!—here!" she gulped out brokenly,
hiding her wet face on the elder woman's knees.  Together
they made a group not unlike Bouguerau's great canvas of
the Consolatrix, save that there was no dead, lovely boy
lying amidst the scattered petals of the fallen roses on the
stone.  Perhaps if there had been and the worst known,
Bawne Saxham's mother could hardly have suffered more.

Not to understand ... not to be sure.  To be bereaved,
and never to know just how the Beloved was taken from
you....  Can there be anything more fantastically horrible
than this, the fate of thousands of sorrowing women
since the beginning of the Great War?

It was Sunday morning, brilliant and hot even for July
weather.  The clangour of church-bells mingled with the
clashing of milk-cans, and the scent of pot-roses mingled
with the hot smell of London in midsummer.  Lynette
shivered in spite of the sultriness, and looked down at the
girl, spilt out at her knees under the meretricious splendour
of her dead beech-leaf hair.  She did not—how could
she?—fathom the secret of such wretchedness, but love and pity
flooded her heart, thawed out of its frozen misery by the
vital warmth of the contact.  She drew the unresisting
arms upwards and about her, and lifted the prone head and
took it to her bosom, saying:

"My poor girl!  My dear Patrine!"

They were silent awhile.  Then Lynette asked, her soft
breath stirring the heavy tresses:

"Why did you do this, dearest?  Wasn't it sufficiently
beautiful?"

Patrine choked out, blazing crimson to the tips of her
little ears:

"No!  At least!—It is hideous now and he hated it!  I—I
had to tell him," a sob and a laugh tangled together,
"it was the effect of Paris air!"

Lynette smiled, though the golden eyes were running over:
"Bawne thinks so much of you, always!"

"I don't deserve that any one should!"

"Nobody shall speak ill before me of any one I care for!
Why did you start?"

For a vision had flashed into the brain of Patrine, of all
the world mocking and jeering and vilifying, and Saxham
and Lynette upholding and defending David's daughter,
who had brought disgrace upon them.  She lifted her head
and released herself almost roughly from Lynette's embrace.
She stooped down and took the hem of Mrs. Saxham's
gown and kissed it, and rose up looking wonderfully big and
stately, and extraordinarily tall.

"I love you!" she said in her large warm voice.  "You
are the best woman I ever met or shall meet, and I am a
rotten bad hat!  Not worth a penn'orth of monkey-nuts,
take my word for it!  But—if somebody like you had been
my mother—perhaps there'd have been something to show
for it to-day."

Lynette might have replied, but just then through the
quiet house, unnaturally still without the boyish voice and
the boyish laughter, and the clumping of little thick-soled
brogues upon the stairs and in the passages, there sounded
the sharp whirring ting-a-ting of the hall telephone-bell.
She turned and was gone with no more noise than a thrush
makes in departure.  Left alone, Patrine threw on her
bathrobe over the thin nightgown of revealing transparency,
lined with the opulent beauty that captures the desires of
men, and looked at her fair reflection in the long
cheval-glass, smiling with something of the subtlety of the
androgynous genius of the Upas Club fountain—the figure
that faced the guests as they entered, tying a vizard over its
mocking eyes.

"You're worse even than I thought you!" Patrine said
calmly to Patrine, "but now you know what he meant by
what he said, you're not going to trust to Chance and Luck.
You're going—for Uncle Owen's sake, and Aunt Lynette's,
and Bawne's—and Mother's and Irma's and your own—don't
pretend you're a victim!—to marry Sherbrand, the
Flying Man!"

Not a notion of any possible or eventual wrong or injury
to Sherbrand troubled her conscience.  She had yet to
develop on the side of moral sensitiveness.  Responsibility
towards God, and duty towards her neighbour—the sense
of these two obligations that are the foundation and
cornerstone of Christianity—had not as yet awakened in Patrine.

She liked Sherbrand.  It troubled her more that he had
not the *cachet* of one of the great public Schools, than to
know him poor, with his four hundred *per annum*—as the
proverbial church-mouse.  But she herself was not
altogether penniless.  There would be a hundred and fifty
pounds a year for Patrine when she married; derived from
moneys bequeathed to his daughter's children by Grandpapa
Lee Hailey, strictly tied up and protected by various
legal provisos, from depredations on the part of the
unknown possessive male.

Five hundred and fifty between them.  Anyhow, she
told herself, that was better than a jab in the eye with a
burnt stick.  How soon might the marriage be brought off?
One must bend one's energies to the solving of that
question.  How many sleepless nights—they were horribly
unbecoming!—lay between Patrine and Security?  The
Fear that lurked in her dried her palate at the question.
She felt like the runner of a Marathon fainting in sight of
the goal.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`FLOTSAM FROM THE NORTH SEA`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER XLV


.. class:: center medium bold

   FLOTSAM FROM THE NORTH SEA

.. vspace:: 2

On Monday morning, July 20th, under a flying double-column
of Naval Goody Two Shoes and aëroplanes, the King
led forth his Fleets for tactical exercises in the Channel.
There were pictures on the screens at the music-halls that
night and for many nights after, that evoked from huge
audiences tremendous outbursts of patriotic clapping.
Hence first blood in the Great War scores to Lil, belonging
to the most ancient of all professions—who had accepted
the invitation proffered by a Teutonic stranger to join the
familiar crowd on the Empire Promenade.

The German paid for drinks.  A friend joined him.
There were more drinks, and the two men began to talk,
discussing the *ultimatum* expected from Austria-Hungary,
and the inevitable refusal of Belgrade to eat Vienna
humble-pie.  War with Russia must ensue.  They were cheering in
Berlin that night for *Krieg mit Russland*.

"It must come sometime," said Lil's patron in an undertone
to his crony.  "Why then should it not happen now?"

"War with Russia means war with France!" the other
returned in the same key.

"And war with France a reckoning with these pig-dogs!"
snarled Lil's temporary owner.  "If the Serbians and
Russes are to be smacked—good!  If the French—good
also!  If the English, a thousand times the better!"

"Let us hope," said the more placable Teuton, emptying
his second liqueur-glass of Kümmel—"that it will not be
this time as at the affair of Agadir!"

"We are ready!" said Lil's patron with an oath.  "We
have seven millions of men ready, and two thousand millions
of cartridges, and for shell—one would not have dreamed the
world held so much steel packed with super-explosive.  No,
no!  *Diesmal wird es nicht sein wie in der Agadir!*"

He inquired as they left the bar and moved to where Lil,
steeped in the Pictures, was standing at the front of the
Promenade:

"What are these *Gottverflucht* jackasses braying about?"

The jackasses were lustily cheering the portrait of
Admiral Sir John Rushworth Jellicoe, Commander-in-Chief
of the Grand Fleet—now flung upon the screen.  And
the jackasses got upon their feet with a sound as though
the packed house were tumbling to pieces, and the Orchestra
changed on the final bar of "Rule Britannia!" and the
more belligerent of the two Teutons leaned over the
barricade and hissed malignantly, as wind and strings crashed
tumultuously into "God save the King!"

The row broke out in the Promenade as the Royal
portrait flashed out and faded.  A German voice swore
shrilly, another expostulated, and a woman screamed and
screamed....

"'Ere!  What's up, what's up now along o' you, young
woman?" demanded a burly gold-braided Commissionaire,
thrusting through the staring crowd that had gathered.
He dragged Lil, still screeching and clawing, from the
windpipe of her dishevelled patron, adding, "Do you call this
pretty be'aviour?  I'm ashamed o' you—I am!"

"He hissed....  The —— hissed the King!" Lil gasped,
scarlet and vituperative and still clawing.  "Let me git at
'im!  Let me——"

"No, hold her tight!  It is a lie!  She is drunk!" snarled
the German who had hissed.  His necktie, a choice thing in
Berlin haberdashery, much sported on the Unter den Linden,
was plucked up by the roots, and a broad bleeding scratch
adorned his flushed and angry features.  But at the
suggestion that he should give the offender in charge of the
Police, he melted with his companion into the thinnest of
thin air, and Lil did not spend the night in the cells
at Wine Street Police-Station.  There ought to have been
a paragraph in the *Daily Teller* or the *Morning Wire*,
but it was crowded out by the report—in leaded type—of
von Herrnung's death and that of the boy, his volunteer
passenger, the only son of Dr. Owen Saxham, M.D.,
F.R.C.S., M.V.O., whose distinguished share in the
Defence of Gueldersdorp would always be remembered, etc.,
etc., even now that the frank, manly, and courageous policy
of General Botha had established permanent and solid ties
of friendship between the Briton and the Boer.

A sudden freak, perhaps a private bet, had induced the
deceased officer, Captain Count von Herrnung of the Prussian
Field Flying Service, son of a distinguished official of
the German Imperial Foreign Office, and hero of the two
days' flight from Hanover to Paris in the previous April,—to
essay the crossing to Germany at a late hour, and in
the face of a threatening gale.  Another paragraph recorded
how the wreck of the monoplane, "Bird of War" (wrongly
described as "the property of Fanshaw's Flying School"),
"had been found by a passenger-steamer of the Hamburg
Line, bound for Newcastle, floating derelict in the North
Sea."

A telephone-call followed the ring that had heralded the
stroke of Fate's scimitar on that thick bull-neck of
Saxham's.  He answered it through the roaring in his ears
of the North Sea waters that had drowned the boy.

"Are you there?" came in the voice of the friend so
toughly tried, so faithfully trusted.  "You have heard
the report?  Your voice tells me you have!  Hope,
man!—hope!—against everything go on hoping!"

The thick slow answer came stumbling over the wire:

"Have I—grounds for hope?"

Came the prompt reply:

"I say yes!  Dare to despair, when you hear that from me!"

"God bless you, General!"

"Have you—you have not told her?"

Saxham answered, steadying his twitching lips:

"No!—I thought I should like to keep my wife for another
hour or two!"

There was a crisp, sharp order:

"Go to her now, and steel her with this from me—that
the aëroplane, when found, had been thoroughly gutted.
The First Officer, who is English and one of our men, swears
positively to this.  The 'Gnome' engine had been taken out
of the stirrups, and the gyroscopic hovering-gear removed
wholesale.  Do you comprehend that this means—a pre-arranged
thing?  Listen!—I'll pound it into you, confound
you!  Once—they have been picked up!  Twice—they
have been picked up!  Three times—they have been picked
up!  Go to your wife and tell her so from me!"

The speaker rang off.

But he knew discouragement.  The rapid march of events
across the page of History since the Saturday of von Herrnung's
flight from Hendon had elicited a check from Official
Headquarters.

Without signing the book that all visitors must sign, and
cooling your heels in the anteroom, you are to be admitted
to the private sanctum at the War Office, Whitehall, and the
presence of Britain's Secretary of State for War.  See him,
seated square and upright in a high-backed leather-covered
arm-chair behind a big green cloth covered mahogany desk,
a thinnish, wide-shouldered man, with a nose of the beaky
type, brown crisp hair sprinkled with grey receding from
tall sunburned temples, and deep-set smallish blue eyes, a
little weakened by much recent poring over State documents
by electric-light.

The British Government found it incompatible with its
present line of Foreign Policy to take steps towards the
recovery of the Foulis Papers.  For forty-five years their
duplicates had lain in safe-keeping at the War Office.
They were there now.  That was the Minister's chief point.

The Foulis War Engine had never been patented—never
acquired by the British War Office.  Such distinction or
favour as the tenth Earl had received from Government had
been conferred in recognition of the dead man's gallant
services to his country, not as the reward of his inventive
gift.  *Ergo*, the British Government could not concern itself
with the theft of the original Plans from Gwyll Castle.  To
pursue and arrest the thief was the affair of the Head of the
Clanronald family.  If his lordship chose to drop the
matter!—the Colonel's celebrated Parliamentary shrug and
smile conveyed the rest.

.. vspace:: 2

There was another point still.  If the Plans of the War
Engine of Clanronald had once been seen by—alien eyes,
the possession of the formulas did not matter two pence.
The cat that had grown grey in the bag was out of it for
good.  In the Colonel's opinion—a priceless asset in the
highly delicate condition of International Politics—a more
formidable document than the Foulis Plan was the Note
which was even then being placed by Austria's Representative
at Belgrade before the Serbian Council of Ministers.
This, in conjunction with Germany's deferred answer
to our proposal of a Conference of Representatives
of the Great Powers, and the sudden, secret return of the
Emperor of Germany to Berlin—"justifies Admiralty
orders that have been issued," said the Minister, "directing
our First—ahem!—-Battle Fleet, concentrated—as it
happens!—at Portland, not to disperse for Manoeuvre Leave."

The speaker, who had pushed back his chair and crossed
his legs, looked very steadily at Sir Roland as this last
sentence very quietly left his thin lips.  Not a muscle
twitched in the other's lean, keen face.  The Minister went
on:

"Thus I may hope I have made clear to you my view of
the situation.  As for the Flying-officer, Count von
Herrnung—we may presume him to have been—for no doubt he
is drowned—a military spy.  The German General Staff
have a preference for employing men belonging to the higher
social circles for work of this kind.  Wonderfully organised,
their system of strategical and political investigation!"

Sir Roland agreed:

"Wonderfully organised, when one goes closely into its
ramifications—tracing and following them to their Headquarters
in a certain underground office at the Wilhelmstrasse!
But they fail in one thing.  The kind of operations
they contemplate can usually be deduced from the line of
their reconnaissance!"

"And yet in the instance under consideration," hinted
the Minister, "Count von Herrnung's intention of
commandeering a machine from the Hendon Flying Ground
seems to have been fairly well disguised!"

"Pardon me!" opposed Sir Roland, with quiet assurance.
"He had no such intention when he arrived at Hendon.
His orders were conveyed to him on the ground!  And the
haste with which he was got out of England with the brown
satchel proves that his superiors did not dare to delay even
for the precautionary measures, and that no copies nor
photographs have been made of the Foulis MSS. and plans!
Take it from me that the cat, if she has not already got to
Germany, remains in the brown bag!"

"And the bag is somewhere in the North Sea.  But it
may be recovered," said the Minister, "with the body of
von Herrnung."

The General returned, with a deepening of the lines upon
his forehead, and at the angles of his mobile nostrils:

"It may be recovered, as you say.  But *if* so, it will be
found upon the body of the boy."  He added, meeting the
question in the tired eyes of the other man: "Some
objection was made by Mr. Sherbrand—the owner of the now
wrecked aëroplane—to von Herrnung's taking the satchel
with him in the pilot's pit.  So—Mr. Sherbrand informs
me—von Herrnung strapped it to the safety-belt that
secured Saxham in his seat."

A gleam of interest warmed the frostiness of the
Ministerial countenance:

"The boy ... Ah! yes, as I think I mentioned before,
I sympathise deeply with the boy's parents.  He is a son of
a personal friend of your own, I understand?"

"Dr. Saxham, sir, late attached to the Medical Staff at
Gueldersdorp."

"Saxham—that is the name—and the child is the only
one?  Most sad and regrettable.  And I think the
paragraph in the *Wire* mentioned—one of your Boy Scouts?"

"One of my Scouts!"  The Chief's bright eyes snapped
as he added, "Very much to the honour of his troop.  Very
greatly to the credit of the Organisation—as I mean to
prove to him should he happily survive to return!"

"Indeed?  You interest me!  Pray tell the story."

It was told, succinctly and crisply.  He said quite warmly:

"I could hardly have credited!  What pluck and energy!
And to dare the thing—on the strength of a second flight!
A boy like that should have lived!  Good-bye, my dear
General!"

He added, accompanying the visitor to his door:

"These are pleasant summer evenings to be wasted in
London!  A shower or so—and one could do a great deal of
execution with the White Coachman on our Hampshire
trout-rivers, sir!"

He spoke like an angler mildly peeved by deprivation of
the sport he loved best, and even paused to tap the glass
of a barometer hanging by the wainscot, on his way back to
the writing-table littered with State papers, in defiance of
the thin, shrill summons of the telephone-bell....

.. vspace:: 2

So the General went away, owning to himself that the
thing looked desperate.  It was better for England that the
Plans of the Foulis War Engine should lie at the bottom of
the North Sea, but what of his friend, what of his friend's
wife?

The keen eyes were unwontedly dim as he reached the
wide Turkey-carpeted landing, and the messenger caught a
snatch of *The Flowers o' the Forest* whistled in slow time
as his hurrying footsteps overtook the General.  Would Sir
Roland please to go back, was the gist of the message.  The
Minister had something further to communicate.

The War Minister was not alone.  Two persons were
with him—a tall man in civilian clothes who stood looking
out of the window as one who had temporarily removed
himself out of earshot, the other a slim and dapper Naval
Secretary.

The "something further" proved to be the pith of an
Admiralty communication just imparted.  Early that
morning a British Submarine on North Sea Patrol duty (we
will call her E-131), upon returning to the surface to
ascertain the cause of defective submergence, had discovered a
brown leather lock-strap to be entangled with her aft
diving-plane on the starboard side.  A leather satchel firmly
attached to the other end of the strap was jammed under the
plane, and subsequently extricated by one of the men, from
the collapsible.

Perhaps you can imagine the Lieutenant Commander
stooping over the retrieved bit of flotsam, lying under the
shaded electric light hanging over the narrow sliding table
that pulled out from under his bunk in the officer's cabin—a
place of privacy again, the steel bulkhead-doors being shut.
For when you submerge they are all thrown wide so that
the Commander's eye may traverse the whole length of an
elongated engine-room, and see what every man is doing at
his particular post, in a single flash.

The Commander's eye was screwed up in the vain endeavour
to see under the flap of the locked satchel.  He took up
the thing and turned it in his hands, while the strap, soaked
and twisted by sea-water and engine-power, flapped upon
his knees like a long frond of wet seaweed.

"Wonder who cut the strap?"  Clumsily, as though by a
blunt knife wielded by a numb hand—it had been hacked
through, and the satchel scratched badly in the process.
He went on: "Looks like some rich American globe-trotter's
travelling-satchel.  No picking these locks!  One might
negotiate 'em with the oxygen flame-puff—if it wasn't for
the risk of damaging the wads of dollar bills that might
possibly be inside.  Nothing to be done but rip or cut the
leather—and that seems to be made strengthy with metal,
somehow!"  He slipped the lean blade of a penknife between
the strongly stitched edges.  The satchel proved to be lined
with thin plates of aluminium.  "As easy to get inside as
the Bank of England!" he grumbled, and so it proved, if the
Bank of England has ever been negotiated with a bull-head
tin-opener.

Inside the leather case lined with aluminium, a little
sea-water had penetrated, patching with damp a small antique
portfolio of pearly, bossy shark-skin exquisitely painted with
birds and foliage by some old-world Japanese master of Art.
The quaintly feeble lock, and corner-guards were of bronze,
gold-inlaid with scowling fox-masks, and the inevitable
chrysanthemum.

The Japanese lock gave at a twist of the penknife-blade
and then the portfolio disgorged its loose sheaf of yellowed
papers strung together by a clew of faded silken twist.
Drawings to scale and plans: sheets of manuscript and
pages covered with the symbols used in chemical formulas,
scribed in a clear small rounded hand.

"Great Scott!—what's this?"

The ash from the Commander's neglected cigarette fell
upon the topside of the precious manuscript.  He blew it
reverently off, and dug himself into the pile:

"H'm, hum!"

"*By Me, Robert Foulis, Seaman, Tenth Earl of Clanronald,
G.C.B., Admiral of the Red, Rear-Admiral of the British Fleet,
and Marquis of Araman, etc., etc.  Invented & Conceived
Not in Hatred of Mankind, but in Defence of my Country and
the Rights Beloved by Every True Briton——*"

"Marvellous old cock!  And in 1854, when he was eighty
if a day, he offers it for the fifth time to the British
Government!"

"Busy, Owner?  See you've got inside the prize-packet!
My Christmas! what is it?  Miss Araminta's Diary; 'FOUND
AFTER FORTY YEARS!' or 'HOW I BROKE MY ENGAGEMENT
WITH THE CURATE!'"

This from a young, exceedingly wet, and dirty Engineer
Lieutenant, fresh from an interview with the damaged
diving-plane, and smelling potently of castor-oil.

The Commander looked up, and strange things were in his
eyes.

"You're pretty wide!"  He added, speaking partly to the
other man inside the Commander: "Jolly good thing we're
on the Home trip.  That main motor gives a lot o' trouble,
and—suppose some purblind sailing ship crashed into us—and
sent us to the bottom with THIS aboard.  Great Sea
Boots!  It makes me crawl all down my back to think of it!"

The Second clattered down the steel ladder and filled the
doorway with his burly personality.

"What makes you crawl?  Don't say the leg o' mutton
we bought Saturday from the skipper of that Grimsby
trawler has gone back on us!  Is that what the liar means by
fresh meat?"

"If I told you, you'd crawl too.  Or you'd think it a case
of sunstroke—or D.T. of the deferred kind."  The
Commander stowed the papers back in the sharkskin case with
gingerly carefulness that provoked the query whether he
thought he had got hold of a new kind of floating mine, and
elicited the retort:

"I don't think!—I know it!"

No one got anything more out of the speaker, who,
presently, declining stewed mutton, whose wholesome savour
amply certified to the moral character of the trawler's
skipper, went to the Wireless and dispatched a pithy
message to the Commander of E-131's particular Coast Defence
station, and the news was flashed to Whitehall, to go forth
ere long from thence over the world.

.. vspace:: 2

Sir Roland said, with that unwonted cloud dulling his
bright eyes, and a certain huskiness of utterance:

"There's no other solution of the puzzle.  Remembering
that I had said to him, '*In an emergency, you might do good
service to your country by destroying this!*' my Scout took the
only course open to him—and dumped the satchel into the sea!"

The Minister admitted with characteristic reticence:

"Whether I concur with your theory or not, I must admit
to you that the report received specifies that the strap had
been cut.  'Hacked through' is the actual expression—and
the back of the leather outer case scratched as though by a
knife."

"It is vital that I should examine the strap and see those
scratches!"

The Minister answered:

"To-morrow morning by twelve o'clock—I can obtain
you an opportunity.  The recovered valise, or wallet, or
satchel, will be brought up to the Admiralty by the officer
commanding E-131.  She has not yet arrived in harbour.
But the Commander will doubtless receive instructions as
soon as he reports himself."  He continued, gracefully
ignoring his previous statement that the Government had
decided not to interfere: "In the absence of the Earl of
Clanronald, now yachting in Northern waters, it is obligatory
that the War Office should take the matter in hand."

The very tall stranger had wheeled, and advanced to Sir
Roland with a smile and an outstretched hand of greeting.
We know how great a heart beat in its pulses.  Its short,
hard grip spoke sympathy and understanding, though the
voice was harsh and the light grey eyes stared out of the
brick-burned, heavily-moustached face with the old sagacious,
indomitable regard.  He said after a word or two had
passed, the Admiralty Secretary temporarily occupying the
attention of the War Minister:

"By the way, you will be interested to hear something I
have at first-hand from Clanronald.  He has been, as
perhaps you know, cruising with two ancient cronies, Lord
Gaynor and Colonel Kaye, in his steam-yacht *Helga*, along
the Danish West Coast of Jutland.  He returns the richer
by—what I may term a unique experience!"

Sir Roland said, meeting the Sirdar's eyes with great
certainty:

"If I may guess at the nature of the experience, I should
hazard that it was—an attempt in the kidnapping line?"

The other gave his short, gruff laugh:

"You have hit it.  They carry a Wireless installation on
the *Helga*, and sparked the story *via* Cullercoats to
Bredingley, who was stopping a week-end at Doome.  The
yacht was at anchorage in the outer harbour of Esbjorg,
some twenty-eight kilometres from the frontier of
Danish-Germany.  It was midnight.  Everybody on board,
including the watch, seems to have been asleep except Clanronald,
who was roused by something scraping the side of the
yacht.  Presently he heard stealthy footsteps on deck, and
whispering.  He was squatting on his bunk with a brace
of loaded revolvers and a Winchester repeating-rifle, when
the intruders opened his cabin door!"

"Did any of them survive the intrusion?  If so, Clanronald
has—very much changed!"

The Sirdar returned, with the quirk of a smile lurking
under the heavy moustache whose brown was getting flecked
with grey:

"Well—the *Helga* has recently been re-enamelled, and
Clanronald is faddy on the point of his new paint.  Besides"—the
quirk deepened into a laugh—"he thought it would
be more useful to take them as live specimens of the kind of
material that goes to make up the crew of a German submarine."

They looked at each other, laughing.  Sir Roland inquired:

"I venture to hope that while Clanronald was about
it—he collected the submarine?"

"Unfortunately, no!  And, very regrettably, the
collapsible boat in which the raiders had made their midnight
visit was swamped when the two others—there had been
four of them!—jumped into her to make off.  Presumably
they could swim and were picked up by the submarine—Undersea
Boat No. 14—according to the testimony of one of
the prisoners.  The other of whom—an officer and leader of
the foray—took poison, and was found dead in the cabin
that served for his prison-cell.  The other, a mere seaman,
is too dazed with terror to be intelligible—according to
Clanronald.  But the whole thing is interesting!"

"Hugely and instructively.  As shedding," said the
General, "a certain light upon a mystery that baffled the
wiseacres in 1913.  I refer to the mysterious disappearance
of the engineer-inventor Riesl from his cabin aboard a
Hamburg Line, Leith-bound steamer.  With a contract in his
pocket for the supply of crude-oil-consuming marine
motor-engines to the Navy of a Power—other than the German
Government!"

"Possibly!—possibly!  One never knows what forces are
working beneath the surface."  The set, brick-dust face
and grave sagacious eyes of the great soldier seemed to
testify to his complete innocence of anything like a
*double-entendre*.

He ended as the War Minister dismissed the secretary
from the Admiralty, and turned again to Sir Roland, saying
in his most pompous tones:

"Twelve o'clock to-morrow, then, General.  Meanwhile,
pray convey to his parents my admiration—in which I feel
the First Lord will concur—of the remarkable qualities
manifested by young Saxham!  Astonishing devotion to
duty, and courageous self-reliance!  He should have
lived!—he would have made a noble man!"

Came the curt reply:

"He is alive now!  I am convinced of it!"

The Minister gave the speaker a glance of incredulity.
It was so very clear to the War Secretary's logical mind
that the child and the man were drowned.  But the harsh
voice of the great Field Marshal, England's most faithful
friend, who was to succeed him in his place of power,
answered for him:

"One would expect you to stick to your guns, General.
Should you prove right before I sail for Egypt, bring him to
see me!"

"I promise that, faithfully, my lord."

They shook hands and parted.  It seemed a long week
until the morrow when the secret of Robert Foulis came
home to roost at Whitehall.  But it ended, and twelve
o'clock brought that keenly-desired opportunity of
examining the cut lock-strap and the empty, knife-scored
satchel in the official sanctum of the First Lord
Commissioner for the Admiralty, and in the presence of that
functionary.

"There seems—ah!" the First Lord mounted a pair of
gold-rimmed pince-nez, "to be something in the nature of
an address scratched upon the leather!"

Sir Roland corroborated, after a brief inspection:

"There is, most undoubtedly.  And the address is that
of the London Headquarters of our Organisation, No. 1000,
Victoria Street."

"Dear me—dear me!  Most remarkable!  Now here,"
said the Right Hon. gentleman, breathing asthmatically
and twinkling through the gold-framed pebbles, "is something
not so easily deciphered.  A rude symbol, something
like a *fleur-de-lis* with letters at either side, and a few other
meaningless scrawls!"

"It is not a *fleur-de-lis*," Sir Roland answered, "but a
fox-mask, with the number and signature of my Scout.  He
belonged to the Fox Patrol, 331st London.  Here is his
troop-number, 22, and here are his initials, B.M.S.—Bawne
Mildare Saxham.  It is perfectly in order!  In this
way he would be expected to sign a communication to his
fellow-Scout.  And the marks below, I can assure you, are
not meaningless.  They convey that there is trouble of a
very definite kind.  In addition the arrow, here, taking the
top of the satchel for the North as in a map—signifies,
'Road to be followed East.'"  He added with a stiffening
of the facial muscles that made the keen face as hard as a
mask carved in boxwood:

"And followed it shall be!"

.. vspace:: 2

It had been decided amongst those who controlled such
matters that the British Public were to be fed with the tale.
The tapes began to run out at the newspaper-offices as the
General took leave of the First Lord and the War Minister
and got into his waiting car, and sped away to Harley Street
to tell the Dop Doctor how the Saxham pup had proved
worthy of his breed.

The evening papers made great marvel out of the story,
and at all the street corners of London and the suburbs
broadsheets lined the gutters, proclaiming in huge inky
capitals:

.. vspace:: 1

"MYSTERIES OF THE SEA.  EXTRAORDINARY ATTEMPTED
CAPTURE OF BRITISH YACHTSMAN BY PIRATES IN DANISH
WATERS!  MIRACULOUS RECOVERY OF CLANRONALD WAR-PLAN!
SUBMARINE IN NORTH SEA FOULS BAG CONTAINING
PRICELESS HEIRLOOM STOLEN FROM GWYLL CASTLE!  LAST
MESSAGE OF HERO BOY SCOUT!"





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`AT NORDEICH WIRELESS`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER XLVI


.. class:: center medium bold

   AT NORDEICH WIRELESS

.. vspace:: 2

In the face of the outrunning tide, Undersea Boat No. 18
had nosed her way from Norderney Gat to Nordeich, by the
deep-dredged low-water channel of which Luttha had told.
The boy had been roused by the kick of a foot shod with a
heelless rubber boot, out of a dog-sleep on the vibrating
deckplates of the men's cabin, under the white glare of the
electric globes.  The man who kicked him hauled away the
blue blanket, and pitched him his clothes, yet moist and
heavy with sea-water, ordering him in broken English to get
into them quickly to go ashore.

The boy obeyed, stiffly, for he yet ached in every limb
from the resuscitative rubbing administered by Petty
Officer Stoll and his assistant—and his temples throbbed,
and there was a singing in his ears.  Perhaps that was from
the smell of the petrol!  One breathed petrol—devoured
tinned meat stew petrol-flavoured, and drank soup and
coffee made with petrol—judging by the tang upon the
palate—on board the German submarine.

The hatch at the top of the dripping steel ladder was
open, letting in the smell of the sea tanged with the odours
of fish and rotten seaweed and sewage.  One emerged
through the manhole into a strange, windless woolly world.
Through a weeping woolly-grey mist, grey, greasy-looking
water lapped and licked against a weedy jetty of grey stone
alongside which U-18 lay with the fog smoking off her whitey
grey painted steel skin.  A bluff-bowed galliot, a yacht or
two, and some lighters laden with bricks and cement sat on
the blue-grey mud of a small harbour; grey and white
seagulls were feeding on the mud, gaily-painted row-boats
were lying on the shelving beach of weedy sand.

To the right-hand a lighthouse or beacon made a yellow
blur in the prevailing woolliness.  Behind one, the foggy
land seemed mixed up with the foggy sea, even as the
yellow-white curd mixes with the whey in a dish of rennet.
North, the intermittent beam thrown from a lighthouse
came and went in sudden winks.  Facing to the mainland
again, one made out east of the quay an aggregation of tiled
roofs and chimneys, and a wooden church-spire with a
quaint gilded weathercock.  Running south were black
and white signal-posts, buffers, and a big, barn-like railway
station.  Beyond, the fog came down so like a curtain,
that the shining metals of the permanent way ran into it
and ended as sharply as though they had been cut off.

There was a trampling of feet on the steel ladder.  Heads
showed through the manhole, and a rough hand caught the
boy by the collar of his pneumatic jacket and jerked him out
of his betters' way.  Luttha appeared in his panoply of
yellow oilskins, passed aft and went up on the platform,
where his second officer and another stood together at the
rail.  Von Herrnung followed, dough-pale, and wearing an
old Navy cap in place of his goggled helmet, and a junior
officer came after.  They brought the tang of schnapps with
the smell of their oilskin coats.  The boy had seen them
drinking and nodding to each other at the narrow table in
the officer's cabin, as he had hurried into his clothes.

"*Gute Reise!  Viel Glück!*" Luttha had shouted to von
Herrnung, and waved his hand with a heartiness that did not
seem quite real.

"*Auf wiedersehen, besten Dank!*" von Herrnung had called
back to the Commander, and set his foot upon the one-rail
gang-plank by which a seaman had connected the submarine
with the quay.  And then he had drawn it back, as
though the salty plank had burned him.  For a party of tall
grey soldiers with brown boots and belts, and spiked helmets
covered with grey stuff like their clothing, came tramping
along the quay with bayonets fixed, and halted at a
harsh order from their officer—and von Herrnung, with a
shiny grey face, and grey lips under his red moustache, had
croaked out meaningly to Luttha:

"My thanks for this, Herr Commander!  We will settle
the score one day!"

He went on then, and the officer arrested him.  And
while Bawne stood staring, taking in the scene, another
brutal hand had grabbed him by the scruff—lifted him as a
boy lifts a puppy—and slung him on to the stones of the
quay.

"You come with us!"  Somebody spoke to him in
English.  It was von Herrnung, and his eyes were poisonous
with hate.  "You bear your share in this, Her Dearest."  This
was a curious nickname by which the Enemy was often
to address Bawne.  "Where I go you will go also!—do you
understand?"

The officer said something harshly, making an imperious
gesture with his drawn sword, and von Herrnung saluted
and fell silently into place between the grey files.  Then
the party marched along the quay between rows of storehouses
with doors painted in broad horizontal stripes of
black and white, and passed through a yard and a big open
gate at the end of it, with a black and white sentry-box,
and a grey-uniformed spike-helmeted sentry on duty
outside the gate.  The sentry presented arms, and the party
swung through, and struck into a wide main-road that
crossed the railhead, a sandy road with a dyke at either
side of it, that followed the curve of the shore-line east.

Beyond the shore-line the North Sea fog came down,
blank and drab as an asbestos curtain, waiting a westerly
breeze to roll inland and blot out everything.  Between
shore and road were the clumped houses of the fishing-village,
and a church with a wooden spire, shaped like an
old-fashioned needle-case.  Sand-dunes, covered with
sea-holly and bent grass, came up to the road.  But on the
other side of the road, beyond the dyke, the eye traversed
a wide expanse of dead, flat fenland, drained by a many
branched creek.

Set in the midst of the fenland were buildings of some
kind.  One thought of barracks in the same enclosure with
a martello tower or a powder-magazine, like that in Hyde
Park.  But two strange landmarks sticking up into the
foggy sky altered the character of the flat-roofed structure
of grey stone standing in a wide expanse of gravel enclosed
by a strong wooden fence, stained with some drab weather-resisting
composition, and entered by an imposing pair of
spike-topped gates.  A wide dyke full of sluggish water
girdled the fence.  You crossed by a wooden swing-bridge
leading to the big gates.  When you approached
them by the road that branched from the main-road at
right-angles, you realised the immense height of two hollow
triangular towers of grey-painted steel latts and girders
that straddled over the flat roof of the squat stone
building—the shorter tower nosing up three hundred feet into the
air, and its big brother more than double that height,
sheathing its sharp point amongst the leaden-hued clouds,
bellying full of moisture sucked up from the North Sea.

They looked alive to Bawne in a queer ugly way, throwing
out their mile-long antennæ to the supporting poles, linking
their metal guy-ropes to solid structures of stone and
concrete, like colossal web-spinning insects, half-spider,
half-mantis, wholly horrible.  And they reminded him of
the three tall Wireless masts rearing over the Admiralty at
Whitehall, and Marconi House, in the Strand, and the little
one that straddled over the telegraph-cabin on Fanshaw's
Flying Ground.  And at the remembrance the salt tears
overbrimmed his raw and burning eyelids, blotting out the
muscular, vigorous backs of the men who walked in front of
him, and his throat felt as choky as though he had swallowed
a whole bull's-eye.

There was a sharp order to halt, and boots marked time
on sandy gravel.  A grey-uniformed soldier of the two on
guard outside the big spike-topped gates, flanked with a
black-and-white sentry-box on either side, brought his
bayonet to the slope and challenged sharply.  A sergeant-major
of the party stepped out and answered; the sentry
bellowed:

"*Raus!*"

And with the ruffle of a side-drum, the gates swung open,
the guard turned out of a stone guardhouse within, and the
armed party with the prisoner and the boy marched into
the gravelled courtyard.  The gates shut, and von Herrnung
was taken off to a block of buildings distant from the
central erection with the Wireless towers.  There was a
clock over the doorway of the guardhouse.  The hands
indicated a quarter to four.

Bawne, standing shivering in the morning rawness,
heard the infantry officer commanding the party say in a
loud, harsh voice that the boy was to be kept close and
sharply looked after.  Then a heavy hand gripped him
roughly by the collar, and the voice belonging to the grip
shouted:

"At the Herr Lieutenant's orders!"

Whereupon the boy was summarily thrust before the
gruff-voiced speaker to a shed behind the guardhouse—a
shed whose planks were a-tremble at all their lower edges
with glittering drops of North Sea fog.  He was helped in
with a kick, scientifically administered—the big key crashed
in the lock—and one was free to sob one's bursting heart
out, lying face downwards among the hard, clean, shining
straw-trusses that covered the floor of beaten earth.  Somehow
the tears relieved, and merciful sleep came to the child,
and presently he awakened under the oilskin coat that
served for bed-covering, to the rustling of the straw under
his head, and through one unglazed aperture that admitted
light and air, shone a large, lucent moon—in her last quarter,
with Saturn, blazing like a great blue diamond, at her pale
and silvery side.

In the shed, which had been destined but luckily not used
as a kennel for the Adjutant's Pomeranian boar-hound, the
boy remained in durance vile for a period of several days.
The drills and parades, the buglings and drummings that
marked the ordinary course of garrison life, alone enlivened
the cramped monotony.  He was given coarse food and
drink three times a day, and permitted to exercise for
half-an-hour in charge of a corporal within the limits of the
gravelled courtyard.  Soldiers were drilling there on most
of these occasions, big men in the brand-new green-grey
uniform that seemed a kind of Service kit, and who regarded
Bawne with looks of quite incomprehensible malignancy,
and when their mouths were not closed by Prussian military
discipline, made coarse or beastly jokes at his expense.

You are to suppose a pitifully unequal struggle on the part
of the boy to maintain decency, cleanliness, and self-respect
under these conditions, which would have ended in hopeless
lethargy had the Saxham pup sprung from a feebler race.
Two things helped him at this juncture.  The Rosary he
said in his straw lair at night, and certain stimulating
reading contained in a sea-stained and grimy-paged Scout's
Notebook, that nobody had seen him with, or having seen
had thought it worth their while to take away.  You can
see him on the sixth morning of captivity squatting on his
straw, poring over the Alphabet of the Morse Signalling
Code, the Rules for First Aid, and so on, following the ten
precepts of Scout Law.

"*Rule No. 7*.  A Scout obeys orders of his patrol-leader
or scout-master without question."

He nodded his head as he read the words and his heavy
eyes brightened.  He pushed back the dulled and rumpled
hair from his forehead and straightened his hunched back.

"*Rule No. 8*.  A Scout smiles and whistles under all
difficulties...."

The smile was bravely forced.  He held up his head,
filled his lungs with air, inflated his chest, pouted his lips,
and began to whistle *Rule Britannia*.  And at the second
bar, somebody booted the door heavily and a thick voice
bellowed:

"*Halt den Mund!*"

It was the voice of the soldier who was Bawne's jailor,
and the whistle quavered and broke down.  And as the
boyish heart swelled to bursting and the irrepressible tears
brimmed over, a musical motor-horn, some distance off,
sounded clearly and sweetly:

"Ta-rara-ta ra!"  And a Prussian officer's voice drowned
out the sweetness of the answering echo, shouting:

"*Achtung!  Wache heraus!*"

Bugles sounded, side-drums beat, there was a crunching
of heavy boots upon stone and gravel, followed by the click
of presented arms, and the groaning of the heavy gates
swung back.  Amidst all these significant noises, you
caught the purr and crackle of pneumatic tyres rolling over
the wooden bridge into the courtyard.  As they stopped
short, a bugle sounded imperatively, and hoarse voices
gave the order:

"*Helm ab!*"

And a multitudinous shout answered—a thick, short,
crashing utterance that suggested the fall of a tree.  Three
trees fell crashing, and then in a little still of awe a sharp,
hollow voice answered:

"*Danke, meine Kinden!*"

And the boy squatting, listening in the straw, was conscious
of a queer tingling sensation that made his hair stiffen
on his scalp and sent odd little waves of shuddering down
the whole length of his spine.  The voice was not melodious
or powerful.  But it set the nerves on edge, and made you
wonder what he could be like—the man to whom it belonged.
And the question made a picture in the mind, of a mouth
with thin lips that were parched and discoloured, a cruel
mouth, matching the harsh and hollow utterance.

The time crawled on and the sun climbed high.  It must
have been noon or nearly when measured steps approached
the shed, and the door was unlocked.  This time a
non-commissioned officer who had kicked Bawne yesterday
caught hold of the boy, hauled him out of the shed, and
made at the double towards the squat stone building
bestridden by the pair of Wireless towers.  Their intolerable
shadows, the sun being nearly overhead, barred the big
courtyard with wide lateral and diagonal bands and stripes
of blackness.  It was as though two Brobdingnagian
spiders had spun there a pair of webs of incredible size.

There were soldiers on guard with fixed bayonets at the
open doors, that led into the square low-ceiled stone
vestibule.  Before the two wide steps stood a bright yellow
motor-car.  It was big, roomy, and luxurious, with the
Prussian eagle in black and red on both doors.  A young
officer in field-grey and flat cap sat immovable at the
steering-wheel.  At a little distance waited two other cars.
Their chauffeurs wore a dark blue livery with silver braid
and buttons, and these cars were black-enamelled and
studiously plain.

Inside the vestibule were more sentries and a small body
of soldiers, all with fixed bayonets.  Also three dubious
individuals in black uniform who might have been detectives
or not.  They were grouped outside a heavy door on the
right hand as you entered.  Despite the presence of so
many persons a singular quiet reigned.  Footfalls made no
noise on the floor, presumably of stone, covered with thick,
resilient red rubber.  There were no windows, light being
admitted from overhead by a skylight of thick opaline glass.

.. vspace:: 2

I have said that quiet reigned, but as the corollary of a
sharp harsh voice that talked without cessation.  It
upbraided, denounced, interrogated; interrupted conjectural
answers with contradiction; burst out anew into shrill
denunciation, and switched off the current of abuse to pelt
its object with questions again.  It rasped the nerves.
Of the men who heard it some grew pale, others were red
and sweated freely.  When it broke off in a scream like a
vicious stallion's neigh, a susurration of horror passed from
one to another of the erect, silent, and rigid men waiting
in the vestibule.  The neighing scream was followed by a
small commotion.  The door opened, and a tall, grey-moustached,
grey-cloaked cavalry officer, in a silver helmet
crested with a perching eagle, demanded—Bawne's little
German serving him once more at this juncture:

"Water!  Immediately—a glass of water!" and vanished again.

An orderly got the water, passing out by another tall door
in the centre of the vestibule and coming back with a filled
tumbler on a china plate.  One of the men in black snatched
it from him and knocked officiously.  But the harsh shrill
voice had begun to rate again, and when the door was
opened, a thick-set officer in a spiked infantry helmet, with
a glittering gold moustache and sharp blue eyes twinkling
through glittering gold pince-nez, waved the water away
as though it had never been asked for.

"The boy!" he said, in a shrill falsetto whisper.  "*Seine
Majestät* wants the boy!"

Then it seemed as though twenty zealous hands propelled
the boy towards the mysterious room's threshold.  The
officer in pince-nez grabbed his arm and pulled him briskly in.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`THE MAN OF "THE DAY"`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER XLVII


.. class:: center medium bold

   THE MAN OF "THE DAY"

.. vspace:: 2

You were in a square, singularly light, though windowless
room immediately underneath the lower, pointed end of the
biggest Wireless.  The room was lighted along the top of
the walls on two sides by oblong slabs of thick opaque glass
with many ventilators controlled by levers.  The huge
metal ribs and supports of the colossal steel tower overhead
were built deep into the solid stone masonry.  Through a
massive block of crystal glass—the insulator on which the
pointed end of the mast rested, your vision was snatched
up—up dizzily—through the vertical labyrinth of metal ribs
and girders, until it ended at the inner extremity of the
apex, seven hundred and fifty feet above.  The shrill song
of the wind amongst the steel ribs, and spars, and guy-ropes,
whose ends were linked to reinforced steel beams or
ground-anchors, sunk in heavy outside foundations of masonry,
hardly reached one here.  But from the dynamo-room that
absorbed the space between this and the second Wireless
chamber, you heard the deep moan of the Goldberg Alternator,
its rotor speed maintained by a 500 horse-power
Krafit engine, sunk, to lessen the tremendous vibration, in a
solid steel and cement lined power-house, deep below the
level of the soggy ground.

The boy's wide blue eyes took in the wonder and the
strangeness of his surroundings.  Lightness and whiteness,
a ship-shape neatness, a scrupulous freedom from dust, a
dazzling polish and burnish on surfaces or knobs or handles
of wood, brass, or copper, characterised the place.  About
the walls were metal cylinders with pipes and induction-coils,
frames supporting reels of wire in rows, and brass
things like pincers in rows above them; and above these,
rows of shining crystal bull's-eyes like port-lights, and yet
others with stars and circles of electric bulbs.

At the distant end of the long, light, shining room, the
deck-like run of the polished boards was broken by a step
leading to a platform where the rigidly-erect figures of three
men in dark blue uniform sat at the middle, and at either
end of a long narrow table burdened with instruments
whose use Bawne partly knew.  The midmost operator,
sitting with his back to you, wore a head-band with receiver
ear-pieces, beyond which his ears, large, thick, and red as
quarter-pounds of beefsteak, projected in a singularly
grotesque way.  The man seated on the right of the table
had a paper-pad and pencil, and the man on the left sat in
front of a typewriter, with lowered intent eyes and fingers
crooked above the keys, as one waiting to type off a Wireless
message, and the tingling desire to approach and see the
apparatus more closely evoked a wiggle on the part of
the boy that was grimly checked by a big hard hand
that gripped his arm.  This reminded him that he was a
prisoner.  Like von Herrnung, Bawne thought and—then
upon his right he became aware of von Herrnung, green as a
drowned man—and with all the stiffening gone out of
him—wilting over the supporting arms of two officers of the
garrison.  And then a voice said something shrilly and
harshly—and Saxham's son found himself looking into a pair of
steel-blue, shining, flickering eyes, with whites curiously
veined with red.

.. vspace:: 2

The man to whom the eyes belonged sat immediately
facing you, on the opposite side of a big kneehole writing-table
with rows of drawers in its pedestals, and official-looking
ledgers upon it, also files of papers, dispatch-cases,
three big inkstands, and the shining metal pillar of a
telephone transmitter, the base of which the officer gripped with
his right hand as he leaned forwards, sharply scrutinising
you.  The hand was large and muscular, with short, thick,
crooked fingers, covered with jewelled rings that sparkled
in the sun.

Half a dozen other officers stood at some little distance
behind the seated personage....  Five out of the six wore
the Service dress of grey-green serge, with spiked helmets
covered with the same material.  Badges, buckles, chain-straps,
and the hilts of swords curved or straight were dulled
to rigorous uniformity, and belts, gloves, and boots were
of earth, not tan-coloured, brown.  Thus much Bawne
grasped, but of these individualities, save one, he got no
clear impression.  You were obliged to look at, and think
of, the man sitting in the chair.

Those strange eyes stung as they fastened on you and
sucked at you, somehow making you think of a tiger lurking
in a cave of ice.  They were shadowed by the peak of a
grey-green field-cap, with an edge of vivid crimson showing above
its deep band of silver lace, oakleaf and acorn-patterned.
He wore a loose grey overcoat with silver buttons, thrown
open to reveal a grey-green single-breasted Service jacket
with a turn-down collar edged with silver lace and faced
with crimson, and a glittering decoration dangling below
the hook.  But as he was of the short-necked, fleshy type of
man, and kept his head well down and thrust forward,
staring you out of countenance over a grizzled moustache
with upright, bushy ends—and all the light in the room
came from overhead, the decoration was obscured by the
shadow of his chin.  A sharp chin, meagrely modelled,
with a cleft in the middle, suggesting petulance and vanity.
The chin of a mediocre actor of romantic parts.

"So you are the boy?"

The tobacco-stained teeth in the mouth under the dyed
moustache were filled and patched with gold that glittered
when he spoke to you.  There was a flash of yellow metal
now as he added:

"You do not answer, no?  Come nearer, boy!"

His legs, short, thick legs in grey riding-breeches and
brown boots with beautiful spurs of gold and steel, stuck
out towards you under the table.  As you stepped out
briskly to lessen the distance between you, he pulled the
legs back sharply, and a handsome, dark young officer,
standing on his right, put out a brown-gloved hand warningly,
as though the border of the big Turkey rug on which
stood the kneehole writing-table were a frontier-line that
must not be crossed.

As he did this, the seated man glanced round at him,
nodding approval, and the pale, jagged seam of a scar on
his left cheek showed plainly against the dark, harsh,
fever-dry skin.  With the slewing of his head the decoration
hanging by a swivel at the collar of his single-breasted
Service jacket flashed into the light.  Bawne saw a large
Maltese Cross eight-pointed and blue-enamelled, having a
black eagle, with outspread wings, between each arm.
Crossed swords in diamonds were above, surmounted by a
diamond Crown Imperial.  And a black and white ribbon
supported another Cross of plain black edged with silver,
at a buttonhole of the Norfolk-cut jacket of grey-green.
Possibly the boy had guessed in whose presence he stood,
even before the young officer, at an impatient signal from
his master, said in excellent English:

"I am commanded to tell you that you are in the presence
of the Emperor of Germany."





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`PATRINE IS ENGAGED`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER XLVIII


.. class:: center medium bold

   PATRINE IS ENGAGED

.. vspace:: 2

"Don't tell me—not that you ever have—that there ain't
such a thing as Providence!"  Thus Franky, after lunch
upon the fateful Third of August, from the hearthrug of the
drawing room at 00, Cadogan Place.  "When," he went
on, "just as I'm on the point of sendin' in my papers to
please you—good old England kerwumps into War!"

He continued, as Margot shrugged her small shoulders:

"All right, best child!  Bet you twenty to one in gloves
it comes off!—as sure as the Austrian monitors were shellin'
Belgrade, and the British Cabinet were sittin' on Sunday,
and the weekly rags selling like hot cakes, when you and me
and the rest of the congregation were slowly oozin' out of
Church.  Why, the Kaiser and the Tsar have been at
loggerheads since Saturday.  German troops are swampin'
Luxembourg, and the next move will be the Invasion of
France.  There We come in—and the rest of the big
European Powers!  Like a row of beehives kicked over!—all
the swarms mixed and stingin', and Kittums' little
Franky in the middle of the scrum!"

"Why are you so—frightfully keen about it?"

Margot's great dark deer-eyes were vaguely troubled.
She got up from her writing-table, a lovely thing in Russian
tulip-tree, the shelf of which was graced by a row of mascots:
Ti-Ti and the jade tree-frog, Jollikins, Gojo, and half a dozen
more.

"Best child, I'm not keen!" asserted Franky.  "But I'm
pattin' myself on the back—gloatin' over the knowledge
that I'm not a bally Has Been—but a real live soldier—just
when I'm likely to be wanted to be one!  Switch on?"

He added, as Margot shook her head: "My grammar's a
bit off, but I know what I mean if I can't express it.  Here's
a telegraph-kid on a red spider.  Two to one in
cough-drops that yellow screed's for me!  Callin' me to
Headquarters just as I'd got into my civvy rags to spend the
afternoon with my wife!"

The prophecy proved correct.  Franky vanished upstairs
to peel, plunge into his Guards' uniform, and whirl away,
borne by a taxi, into the dim conjectural regions known as
Headquarters.

Margot went back to her desk to re-read a type-written
letter from the Secretary of the Krauss and Wolfenbuchel
Fraüenklinik at Berlin, counselling the honoured English
lady whose introduction, supplied by a former lady-client,
was specially satisfactory!—to secure a room at the
Institute, by the payment of a moiety of the fee in advance.
The crowd of applicants desirous to subject themselves to
the wonderful "Purple Dreams" treatment, was so large,
the accommodation, by comparison, so restricted, that to
follow this course would be the only wise plan.  Similar
treatment could be obtained in Paris and Brussels, but to
ensure success beyond doubt it was wisest to seek it at the
German fountainhead.  One hundred guineas would secure
admission to the Berlin Fraüenklinik.  By cheque made
payable to the British Agent of Professors Krauss and
Wolfenbuchel, Mr. Otto Busch, 000, Cornhill, London,
E.C.  It would be advisable were the English client to
follow her remittance, taking up residence in Berlin within
the next few days.  Travelling might not be so easy in
October, mildly hinted the Secretary of the Institute.

Why, bosh! what utter piffle!  Good old England wasn't
going to toddle into any European War in a hurry, decided
Margot.  She had had enough bother over the South
African biz.  Perhaps if Germany was having a rag with
Russia, and a tiny bit of a scrap with France, one would
have to get a passport, and travel by a different route to
Berlin.  Perhaps the best thing would be to go now—and
stick the boredom of a three months' residence in the
Kaiser's capital!  Why not?  Under the existing
circumstances, one would be bored anywhere.

She drew the cheque, and enclosed it to Mr. Busch's
address, and wrote a little letter in a huge hand to the
Secretary, saying that she had done this and was obliged
by his advice.  Then she 'phoned to the Club to ask Patrine
to come round to tea at 00, Cadogan Place.  Miss Saxham
was not there, according to the hall-porter, but might be
found at AA, Harley Street.  There Margot ran her to
earth.  Yes, Pat would come with pleasure! but upon
condition that Lady Norwater was alone.

"Of course!" Margot remembered.  "She's in mourning
for the pretty kiddy-cousin!  I must be getting stupid, or
I'd have thought of that!"

But when the tall figure passed under the Persian portière
of the Cadogan Place drawing-room, it was arrayed in a
revealing gown of pale rose lisse with the well-known stole
of black feathers and a tall-crowned hat of golden braiding
topped the Nile sunrise hair.

"Why, I thought—" Margot began:

"I know!  Do you think it horribly unfeeling?"  The
speaker stooped to kiss the soft cheek of the little creature
curled up in the corner of a favourite sofa in a favourite
attitude which conveyed an impression of Margot's having
no feet.  Patrine did not look at all horrid or unfeeling as
she said, winking back the tears that had overbrimmed
her underlids, "My heart is in crape if my body isn't!"

.. vspace:: 2

"I know!" Margot's lovely eyes looked sympathy.
"I remember how fond you've always been of the little
cousin."

"Uncle Owen and Lynette won't believe that the darling's
drowned," Patrine went on.  "But I can't hope!  I'm
not of the hoping kind!  When I shut my eyes I seem to see
Bawne fighting to keep afloat—then sinking.  It's as
though he called me, and—it's horrible!"  She shuddered.
"It's horrible!"

"And—Count von Herrnung?  The German Flying
Man?"  Margot touched the large white hand next her.
"You know what a bad hand I am at saying things that are
consolatory and cosy.  Couldn't rake up a single text for
my life—or if I did I'd quote 'em wrong end topside.  Like
the callow curate who assured the weeping widow that
'Heaven tempers the wind to the lorn sham!'"

"I'll let you off the texts, not being a weeping widow!"

But Patrine's pale cheeks burned.  Margot pursued, not
looking at them:

"Rhona Helvellyn told me there was nothing serious
between you.  Indeed, she said you rather hated him
than otherwise.  But of course you're sorry he's drowned,
naturally!"

There was a silence.  Then:

"Yes," Patrine agreed, "I rather hated him than otherwise!"

"Ah!"  Margot's little face was sage.  "It's a pity you
don't care for some nice man or other!"

"Isn't it?"

"But you will one day.  It's much nicer to live with your
husband than with your sister.  Though I never had a
sister," added Margot.  Then her mind, light and brilliant
as a humming-bird, flitted to another subject.  "Rhona and
her two Militants lunched with me on Sunday.  Awfully
down on their luck, all three.  The Grand Slam they'd
planned—the surprise-packet for the Mansion House
Banquet had had the lid put on it by the Police.  Fancy
Scotland Yard finding out anything!  But it had, for Rhona got
a mysterious note warning her that she'd be dropped on
before she could open her head.  So—the Bishops toddled
through their speeches without being interrupted!  Sit
down and light up.  These Balkan Sobranies are tophole!"

"I can't stay!"  But Patrine sat down on the sofa, dipped
in the ever-brimful silver box, and kindled a cigarette.

"Where's His Nibs?" she asked.  For not even the
chastening of bereavement could cure Patrine of slanginess.

"Called to B.P.G. Headquarters suddenly."  Margot
blew rings.  "Or doing duty for some pal or other at the
Tower.  Don't bother about him!  Tell me—why can't you
stay with me?"

"Aunt Lynette wants me, for one thing.  And——"

"And who for the other?"

"A man!"  Patrine sent a thin blue spiral of cigarette
smoke twirling upwards from her pursed lips.  Intently she
watched it climbing and spreading.  When it faded between
her absorbed eyes and the Futurist mouldings of the lapis
lazuli-grounded ceiling whereon a silver comet swung in a
great elliptical orbit about a golden central Sun, she
resumed:

"A man——"

"That makes two men!" said Margot shrewdly,

"No, only one.  A man I'm going to marry.  Rather
soon, too," said Patrine calmly, and put her cigarette into
her mouth again.

"PAT!"

Margot was staring at her blankly.

"Well, my dinkie?"

"Isn't this frightfully previous?"

Patrine removed the cigarette to say:

"It depends on how you look at things."

"But—when did you meet?"

"In Paris."

"Do I know him?"

"No, luckily for me!"

Margot's small, amazed face dimpled a little at the compliment.

"Is he nice?"

"I think so!"

"In Our Set?"

"I don't think so!  He's a Flying Man by profession.
Now you know nearly as much as I do," said Patrine.
"And I've to be getting back to Harley Street."  She rose
from the sofa, towering over her small, indignant friend.

"You're not going out of this room until you tell me the
rest of it!  What is his name, and when did—it—come off?"

"His name is Alan—and he only asked me on Wednesday,
when he came to Harley Street.  He has called every day
since that horrible 18th of July, but this time he came to
bring"—Patrine choked a little—"Bawne's Scout staff and
smasher.  They had been forgotten in the dressing-shed at
the Flying School.  Lynette was too ill to go down to
receive them.  I had to instead—and the sight of them
broke me up."

"I—see!"

"And," Patrine went on, "he—Alan—was being
sympathetic, when Uncle Owen came in."

"My hat!"  Margot sat up, her small face alight and
sparkling.  "The Doctor-man with the chin and eyebrows!
Did he give you unlimited wigging or relent and
bless you like the heavy uncle in a proper French Comedy?"

"He saw how things were between us.  He wasn't
astonished.  He was very kind.  He is always kind!" said
Patrine, swallowing.  "If I really believed God were as
good as Uncle Owen, I shouldn't be afraid to die."

"He makes me feel like an earwig under a steam-roller,"
affirmed Margot.  "And the charming aunt.  Does she
cotton to the engagement?"

"Lynette is not, for the present, to be told.  I asked that.
It seems so cruel to be happy when she is so broken-hearted."

"Umps!  Then—Irma and your gay and giddy mater?
How do they take it?"

"They haven't been asked to take it any way."

"Oh well!  Love is good while it lasts," Kittums said
from the summit of a pedestal of experience, "but if I could
change back to Margot St. John again——"

"You wouldn't!"

"Wouldn't I, that's all!  This horror that November
brings—that's coming every day closer! ... Pat—I
haven't told Franky yet, that's to be got over!  But I've
definitely settled to go to that Institute in Berlin where
women can have babies without knowing anything about
it—under—Bother!  I never can remember the name of
that drug!"

Patrine sat up.  Her face was curiously expressionless.
She said, crushing out the last spark of her cigarette-end
against the face of a Chinaman on the lacquer ash-tray that
occupied a little stand beside the sofa with the silver
Sobranie box:

"You told me something—you showed me the pink book
with the pretty title, 'WEEP NO MORE MOTHERS'—wasn't
that the name?  You've made up your mind?  Does
it cost the earth?"

"Two hundred for patients of the superior class—*wohlgeboren*
clients.  Half paid in advance!  Stiff!—but to make
sure of not suffering I'd plank a thou'!  It's a nightmare,
and a Day-mare, that haunts me all the clock round.
That's why I'd change—and be Margot St. John again!
That's why I can't whoop with joy when my friends tell me
they're going to be spliced!"

Patrine got up.

"Oh!—well!  Perhaps I shall escape.  After all—it's a
lottery!"

"Not for big, splendid women like you.  You were made
to be a mother, Pat!"

"*Don't!*"

She kissed Margot hastily and went to the door.

"Stop!"  Margot scrambled off the sofa.  "You've forgotten
the most important thing of all.  Hasn't 'Alan' got
a surname by any chance?"

Patrine looked back over her shoulder with something of
the old smile.

"Rather!  What do you think of Sherbrand?"

"What do I think of Sherbrand?  How odd!  It's
Franky's family name!"

"Queer coincidence.  But *my* Sherbrand hasn't any
relatives in the Peerage!—or if he has, he hasn't told me!
I'll butt you wise when I know him well enough to ask him
about them.  You see, the whole thing has been beautifully
sudden!"

"Bring him to lunch at the Club to-morrow.  You're not
in mourning, and if you were it wouldn't matter.  It's
simply a family affair, if he's really Franky's cousin.  So,
say yes."

"Very well, if he'll come!"





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`THE WAR CLOUD BREAKS`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER XLIX


.. class:: center medium bold

   THE WAR CLOUD BREAKS

.. vspace:: 2

Patrine kissed her friend again, and went, leaving Kittums
in a whirl of astonishment.  To Franky, presently returning
from the conjectural region known as Headquarters she
announced:

"Here's something like news!  Pat Saxham—the girl
with the Nile sunrise hair that you don't like!—is going to
marry a Flying Man.  And his name is—the same as yours!"

"By the Great Snipe! you don't say so!"

Franky, slim and dapper in the scarlet Guards' tunic and
crimson sash, divested himself of his sword, dropped his
immaculate buckskin gloves into his forage-cap, and sighed
with undisguised relief as the attentive Jobling, who had
been hovering in the background, disappeared with these
articles.  Then he proceeded carefully to choose a cigarette
from the silver box of Sobranies, lighted it up, bundled
Fits out of her master's corner of the sofa, and dropped
into it with a sigh of relief.

"Sherbrand....  Must be the aviator-fellow we met in
Paris.  The chap whose hoverer was bein' tested by the
swells of the French S. Aë!  Saved your life and snubbed
me for askin' him to dine with us!  Well, that's what I call
a cannon off the cush for the Saxham girl!"  His dislike of
her betrayed itself in his tone.  "Must be the same
man! supposin' him short of a father!  Hilton of Ours showed me
an advertisement in the B.M.D. column of *The Banner* this
afternoon briefly announcin' my Uncle Sherbrand's death.
Never read *The Banner*—that's how I missed it.  Can't say
I feel much like puttin' crape on my sleeve in any quantity,"
went on Franky.  "My Uncle Noel has been the Family
Skeleton, poor old chap! since that affair in 1900.  No
doubt his son's cut up—wouldn't be decent of him not to!
But at any rate it brings him nearer these—"  Franky
stuck out a beautifully-cut pair of red-striped auxiliaries
ending in dazzling patent-leather Number Eights, and
craning over Fits, who had jumped upon his knees, regarded
them critically, ending after a pause—"By one life out of the
three that stand between.  Don't be so gushin', old girl!"  The
rebuke was for Fits, who had taken advantage of her
master's attitude to lick him on the chin.

Margot crinkled her slender eyebrows and moved restlessly
among her big bright, muslin-covered cushions as she
asked:

"Is this Volapuk or Esperanto?  For mercy's sake don't
be obscure!  Why is this Flying Sherbrand nearer your
shoes by one life out of three?  What has he got to do with
your shoes at all?"

"Don't you switch on?"  He lifted his sleek brown head
and turned his neck in the setting of the gold-encrusted
collar badged with the Scottish Thistle, and stared at
Margot with the brown eyes that had seemed so beautiful
under the awnings of the Nile *dahabeyah*, and were only
stupid now.

"Have you forgotten?  Don't you twig, best child?
Suppose—for the joke of it—there's War, and I get wiped
out tryin' to keep up the fightin' traditions of my family
and get a bit of gun-metal to hang on a ribbon here."  He
glanced down at the left breast of the red coat, guiltless of
anything in the decoration line.  "Then—unless the child"—his
tone grew gentle—"our kiddy that's coming, happens
to be a boy—my Cousin Sherbrand steps into my billet.
He's the next heir to the Norwater Viscounty.  Look in
Burke or Whittaker if you don't believe me!  Get down, old
lady, you're coverin' me with white hairs!"  He bundled
Fits off his knees, got up and rang.  "A man ought to be
here from Armer's," he told the servant who responded.
"Armer and Co., Pall Mall, Military Tailors.  Send him up
to my room and tell Jobling to help him with all those cases
and things.  No! don't send Jobling!—send Dowd!"

The said Dowd being Franky's soldier servant, between
whom and the civilian Jobling reigned a profound mutual
contempt.

"What is Dowd going to do?"

"Oh! only goin' to help overhaul my Service kit and so
on," Franky responded lightly.  "What with gettin' leave
and bein' married I've hardly sported kharks since last
Autumn Slogs.  Wouldn't do to find myself too potty to get
into the regulation tea-leaves in case my country called."

"What rot! ..."

But Franky had swung out of the room and clattered
upstairs with Fits close upon his heels.  Fits, who, ordinarily
unwilling to be out of sight and sound of her master,
now adhered to him like a leech, or his shadow; whining and
fidgeting in his absence, as though her feminine mind were
beset by haunting apprehensions of some sudden parting, or
impending loss....  Long afterwards Margot wondered:
"If I had loved him as Fits loves him—should I not also
have felt that foreshadowing dread?"

But she was conscious only of her own physical discomfort
and the increasing weariness that movement brought her.
Sharp discontent peaked and pinched the tiny features.
She caught a reflection of them in a screen-mirror and
shuddered.  With every day that dawned now, their
wild-rose prettiness faded.  By-and-by—

"If I were as good to look at as I used to be in June—or
even a month ago!" she wondered—"would *he* leave me as
he is leaving me to-night—to go down to the House?  Don't
I know that the House means the Club, or the music-hall, or
a card-party!  Why do men get the best of everything and
never have to pay the bill?"

She dined in a tea-gown, and when Franky, still in that
strange mood of suppressed excitement, attired to four pins
in the magpie evening garb of civilized life, had kissed her
and said: "So-long, Kittums, little woman!  I'm going
down to the Big Talk Shop for a bit.  Expect me back on
the doormat when the Mouthpieces of the Nation have done
swoppin' hot air!" she tucked up her feet on the big sofa
in her charming drawing-room and read "WEEP NO
MORE, MOTHERS," until the pink pamphlet with the
gilt sunrise stamped upon it grew heavy in the tiny hand.
Then she rang for Pauline and betook herself to bed.

The bedroom was blue-green as a starling's egg, its
painted walls adorned with delicate lines of black and
silver.  Perhaps you can see Kittums, under her Brittany
lace coverlet amongst the big frilled pillows in one of the
narrow black oak bedsteads standing side by side on a
carpet of deep rose.  A silver night-lamp burned under a
dome of sapphire glass on her night-table, and an electric
clock noiselessly marked the hours.  Lying thus, wrapped
about with all the swaddlings of Civilisation, this dainty
daughter of the Twentieth Century strove in blind revolt
against Nature, the huge relentless Force that was slowly
grinding her down.  The ant that gets fed into the mill-hopper
with the grain might resent the millstone after the
same fashion.  Ridiculous, but infinitely pathetic, the
tragedy of an infinitesimal thing.

What did Franky comprehend of her terrors, her
forebodings?  Even Saxham's counsels were a man's counsels,
his advice a man's advice.  "*Face your ordeal! do not flee it,
lest you encounter something even more terrible!*"  Not more
terrible for oneself, mind you! but for that unknown,
conjectural being, referred to by Franky with such foolish
tenderness.

The child always!  Never Margot!  She set her little
teeth, staring out into the blue-green dusk from among her
pillows.  What if it were to be always so?  "My boy,"
"My son," for ever, instead of "My wife."

It was a breathless night.  A hush of suspense brooded
over the huge, hot city, such as prevails before the breaking
of a storm.  Sentences from the Secretary's letter came
back to her as she tossed under the cool light coverings:

"*Wiser not to delay, lest travelling should become difficult.
It will be advisable indeed for the gracious lady to start as soon
as may be.  English bank-notes are negotiable here to some
extent.  A sum in gold is most convenient to bring.*"

Why hang back?  Why hesitate because one expected
opposition from Franky?  Why not slip off on the quiet
without a hint to him?  What a perfectly tophole idea!
One could pack secretly, get funds from one's Bank, and
skip with Pauline via Ostend to-morrow!  Berlin was a dull
place, but anyhow one had got to be dull for some months
yet.  The thing could be arranged while Franky was absent
on duty at the Tower, or on one of his mysterious errands to
Headquarters.  One could cable to him afterwards from the
*Fraüenklinik* at Berlin.

An electrical thrill of energy and purpose volted through
the humming-bird brain under the silken brown waves.
Margot tossed back her coverings and sat up suddenly in
bed.  Her great eyes gleamed like a lemur's in the light of
the night-globe.  She would steal that march on Franky,
she told herself, to-morrow, or at the latest, the day after.
Wouldn't it be A1?

The small face dimpled into mischievous smiles.  She
caught a glimpse of it in a mirror on the opposite wall and
kissed her little hand to Margot with saucy gaiety.  If
Franky, down at Westminster, could only know what
Kittums was planning!  She had a vision of the Houses of
Parliament under the white-hot August moonlight, outlined
in bluish-green and dazzling silver against a background
of glittering black.  Like a Limoges enamel, she
told herself.  The long lines of electric arc-lights stretching
over the bridge, up Whitehall and down Victoria Street—all
along the Thames Embankment—strings of
diamonds—crowds and crowds of people ... talking bosh about War
when there wouldn't——She was asleep.

Asleep, while packed thousands waited under the blue
glare of the arc-lights for the rising of the Curtain on the
World Tragedy, of which four yearlong Acts have been
played out.  For the tag of which Humanity is waiting
with held breath, too weary even to cry out: "*How long, O
Lord?—how long?*"

.. vspace:: 2

Prone to assume strange, angular attitudes when speaking,
the Foreign Secretary hung over and clutched at the
dispatch-box before him, as though it literally contained
that most malignant of all the swarm of Evils that issued
from the Box of Pandora, as he told his hearers of the
rejection of the German bribe and warned them of the
imminence of a Declaration of War.  Then, amidst increasing,
deepening excitement, the Prime Minister read the
appeal of the King of the Belgians, and told of Great
Britain's ultimatum to Germany....

No wonder those close-packed crowds of sturdy Britons
waited under the blue glare of the arc-lamps to hear Big
Ben bell the midnight hour.  As the great voice boomed
Twelve from the illuminated square of the dial amidst the
striking of the countless clocks of London, a tremendous
roar of cheers acclaimed the pipping of the egg of Fate and
Destiny, echoed by other crowds in distant thoroughfares,
spreading in waves to the unseen horizon, whose East was
pregnant with the Kaiser's Day.

That Fourth of August; Eve of the Feast of British
Oswald, King, soldier and Saint, whose Address to his
Northumbrian warriors before the battle of Denisburn,
fought against Pagan Cadwalla in 633, the Catholic Church
enshrines in Her Chronicles:

.. vspace:: 2

"*Let us all kneel and jointly beseech the true and living
GOD ALMIGHTY in His Mercy to defend us from the
doughty and fierce enemy.  For He knoweth that we have
undertaken a just War....*"

"Whereupon," says the Venerable Bede, "all did as the
King commanded.  And advancing towards the enemy with
the first dawn of day, they won the victory their Faith
deserved."

.. vspace:: 2

And before midnight of this pregnant Fourth of August,
from the great Wireless Station of Eilvise in Hanover,
Germany flung round the world this vital message to all her
mercantile Marine:

"War declared on England!  Make as quickly as you
can for a neutral port!"

On the outbreak of War the British Navy cut the All
German cables.  One by one the German Colonial Wireless
Stations were dismantled.  When the great station at
Kamina in Togoland fell, the only remaining link in the
system was between the Fatherland and the United States.

.. vspace:: 2

Dawn outlining the silken blinds, vied with the blue
glimmer of the night-lamp as Margot wakened, to hear, in
the hush that precedes the Brocken-hunt of Sloane Street
motor-traffic, Franky's low, urgent appeal:

"*Kittums*!  Kittums, best child!"

"What on earth did you wake me for?" said a sleepy and
distinctly cross voice.

"Couldn't help it!  I simply had to tell you!" Franky
began.

The little hand touched the electric clock-button and on
the ceiling wavered a gigantic dial of yellow brightness.

"*Had* to!  At three o'clock in the morning!  When I was
having such a tophole dream!  Thought I was back at the
Club in my three dear rooms with the Adams doors and
chimney-pieces—and Pauline came in with a huge basket of
white flowers—and I asked: '*Who are they for?*'  And she
said: 'For Mademoiselle!'  And I was Margot
St. John—and had never been married!"  There was infinite
wistfulness in the little voice.

"White flowers mean death, don't they, when you dream
of 'em?  And I'm sorry your dip in the Bran Tub of
Matrimony has turned out such a bad investment.  What I came
to tell you should revive your hopes of making a better one,
my child!"

That jarring note of mingled resentment and irony, how
new and strange it sounded to Margot!  Until this moment
Franky's voice had never been anything but gentle.  It was
gentle now as he said, at his dressing-room door:

"Finish your sleep.  I was rather a brute to wake
you!"  He was going without a backward glance.

"Come back!  Come off it!  Don't be dignified!" Margot
called after the retreating figure.  "I'm quite awake
now, so you'd better tell.  What's on?"

He came back to the bedside, looking tall and shadowy in
the blue dimness.  Margot put up a little hand and patted
his cheek.  There were wet drops upon the smooth, warm
skin....  Perhaps he had walked home, and it had been
raining.  Or—

"*Franky*!  You're not——"

He captured the little hand and took it in both his own,
and squeezed it.  He said in a cheerful but rather choky
voice:

"Of course not!  And—the news could have waited.
Only—since midnight England and Germany have been at
War.  The Big Scrap is three hours old.  First battalion of
Ours is under orders for the Front—I've exchanged out of
the Second with Ackroyd—too sick a man for fightin' just
now, luckily for me.  You know Ackroyd.  Used to flirt
with him frightfully—to give me beans when I'd vexed you
when we were first engaged.  When do we go, did you ask?
Liable to be off at any old minute.  By-bye, little woman.
Too late to go to bed—heaps of things to attend to.  God
bless you!  See you at brekker—or lunch, if I've luck."





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`THE EVE OF ARMAGEDDON`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER L


.. class:: center medium bold

   THE EVE OF ARMAGEDDON

.. vspace:: 2

Kittums, upon that fateful morning, coming down to
breakfast and finding no Franky, was annoyed.  One might just
as well have had breakfast in bed.  She didn't want any,
but Cook would be hurt if the chowder and eggs, and
croquettes of chicken weren't eaten.  Therefore Margot
ate—to avoid wounding the cook.  The daily papers she
left untouched, knowing that War would leap out from the
huge capitals heading the columns and strike her in the eyes.

She had herself dressed and 'phoned for the car.  The
house did not seem a place to stay in, somehow.  Dowd was
busy in his master's room, ordering Jobling about in loud
authoritative tones and being waited upon by the maids.
Even Pauline, ordinarily scornful, referred to him as
"Monsieur Dowd" instead of "*zat man Dow!*"

Once in Sloane Street, the War rushed at you.  Groups of
men, young, old or middle-aged, stood talking at every
street-corner, newspapers rustled in every hand.  You
couldn't escape the papers.  Huge flaring headlines shrieked
from the broad-sheets in the gutters and on the railings:
"WAR DECLARED!  ULTIMATUM EXPIRED.  BRITISH FLEET
READY FOR BATTLE.  INVASION OF BELGIUM BY GERMAN
ARMY CORPS!"  The drapery salesman who was to win the
Victoria Cross, called from the top of a Knightsbridge
motor-bus to the grocer's assistant who was to receive the
Médaille Militaire at the doughty hands of Joffre....
The budding airman who was to bring down a Zeppelin
single-handed chuffed past on a motor-cycle—the girls who
were to make shells for British guns, or pack made ones with
T.N.T. and kindred explosives, tripped along in their
transparent hobble-skirts, to meet Alf and Ted at the Tube.
And neither Alf, who subsequently took five Huns prisoner
by the single hand, shepherding them back to the British
lines with dunts of the gun-butt and sarcasms more pointed,
nor Ted, who threw himself down over the exploding bomb,
dying that his comrades in the trench might live, dreamed
what kind of chick would pip Fate's egg for him or her
presently.  Yet the dullest face wore a new expression, in
the tamest eyes burned the light of battle!  Unquenched it
burns in them still, after four dreadful years of War.

The Club, already deserted by August holiday-makers,
would be utterly abandoned to chimney-sweeps, charwomen
and window-cleaners, and yet Margot told the chauffeur to
drive to the Club.

Turning out of Piccadilly she discovered Short Street to
be blocked by taxi-cabs.  An endless procession of
telegraph-boys plunged in and out between the thudding
swing-doors of the vestibule.  The vestibule was congested with
battered, dusty ladies, ladies' maids even dustier and more
battered, and travelling bags battered and dusty to the
*nth* degree.

Some of the bags were bursting, not a few of the maids
were hysterical.  All the returned travellers were telling
their adventures at once.  The air was thick with
exclamations, explanations, cries and ejaculations.  Unfed,
unslept, baggageless and penniless in many instances, the
members of the Ladies' Social—seeking health, or novelty,
in half the pleasure-resorts upon the map of Europe—had
come hurtling back to Short Street like leaves driven before
the furious blast of War.

"Has anything happened?"

Lady Norwater addressed this query to the Club
hall-porter, a bald person of habitually slow movements and
singularly bland address.  The man gnashed his teeth at her,
uttering a sound between a groan and a snarl—made as
though to tear non-existent hair,—leaped with astonishing
nimbleness over a pile of luggage, and vanished.  Margot
would have made a note of his conduct in the Complaints
register, but that the hall-table was obliterated by heaps of
rugs, dust-cloaks and waterproofs.  Wondering, she made
her way into the big General Room on the ground-floor.

Here travel-creased, dust-smeared members sat in voluble
rows on the comfortable sofas, or reclined speechless in the
capacious armchairs.  Medical men, hastily summoned by
'phone, moved noiselessly from patient to patient.
Husbands and male friends listened not unmoved, to piteous
recitals of adverse experiences undergone on enemy ground.

Kittums, snatched into the whirl, moved from friend to
friend, gathering experiences.  Mrs. Charterhouse, with her
Pekinese pug and her maid, had just arrived at Homburg to
undergo treatment for a twenty-two-inch waist when the
War Cloud gathered monstrous on the horizon.  Had not
her Swiss doctor written a warning instead of a prescription
the white and golden Cynthia, Mademoiselle Mariette and
Chin-Chin, would at this moment have been languishing on
rye bread and bean coffee in a Teutonic jail.

"As it is, we've spent a whole week, and every sou we
had on us making the journey!" said Cynthia, in her plaintive
tones.  "They held us up at Frankfurt, Basel, and Geneva!
What inquisitions, what scowling suspicious looks!
To be hunted and suspect makes you wicked, I've found out!
When we got to Paris at four yesterday morning and took
a rickety *fiacre* to the Palais—all the taxis have vanished!—I
could have *prayed* for a cup of tea and a roll!  But at the
Palais all was confusion.  The hotel was shutting up—every
male servant called to the Reserve.  We got to the 'Spitz'—the
same experience there!  Exhausted, I sat on something
in the vestibule—it moved, groaned, and I found it to be
the wreck of Sir Thomas Brayham.  He and Lady Wathe,
his man and her maid, who have been all through July at
Franzenbad in the Egerland,—reaching Paris after awful
adventures, had all four been hurled out in the same way.
One of those jiggety motor-omnibuses took all of us to the
Couronne.  They were full to the roofs and cellars, but
they wedged us in, somehow!  Then, for two days Sir
Thomas tore round Paris trying to get *laissez-passers*."  She
turned her lovely eyes upon a large, stertorously-breathing
but otherwise inert object reclining with closed eyes
and folded hands in the biggest of the Club armchairs.
"Didn't you, Sir Thomas?"

"Beparr?"

Brayham, waking with a bewildered stare, regarded the
charming Cynthia uncomprehendingly until the Goblin,
sitting opposite, centre of a knot of bosom friends, repeated
the query:

"Didn't you run about Paris for passes for two days?"

"No!" bounced out Brayham, now aroused, and purpling
under the coal-dust that begrimed his large, judicial visage.
He added, with a vestige of his King's Bench manner, as the
Goblin stared at him in concern for his mental state: "I
retain the use of my reason, dear friend!  But I WILL NOT
consent that the varied tortures of the abominable ordeal I
have undergone could possibly be packed within the
nutshell limits of forty-eight hours!  Mph!"

So dust-covered was the ex-Justice that the very act of
shaking his head rebukingly at the Goblin, raised a cloud
that made him sneeze.  He uttered the curious composite
sound that heralds sternutation, drew out a voluminous,
coal-dusty handkerchief, stared at it indignantly, and in the
very act of returning it to his pocket—fell asleep again.

"A perfect wreck, as I said just now!" whispered
Mrs. Charterhouse to Kittums.

"*How* I congratulate you, dear Lady Wastwood," said
the Goblin, "on not having gone abroad!"

"Was it so horrid?" asked Trixie, sympathetically,
arching the eyebrows that resembled musical slurs.

"Was it so—"  Lady Wathe shrugged her thin shoulders
and gave the ghost of one of her rattling laughs.  "If to
fight your way back, stage by stage, amidst inconceivable
difficulties, obstacles and insults, is horrid!—if to travel for
two long days and nights in trains crowded to suffocating
excess merits the term—" She loosened the quadruple
string of superb Oriental pearls that tightly clipped her
stalk-like throat and went on: "If it comes under the
heading to find yourself and your friends—in tatters after a
suffocating struggle!—packed with sixty other squalid
wretches in a luggage-van *en route* for Dieppe!  If to sit for
three hours on your jewel-case, waiting, in a crush of
congested humanity, for the arrival of the Newhaven boat—if
to fight as with beasts at Ephesus to gain its gangway—if to
fall in a heap on the sodden deck—to lie there lost to
everything but the fact that the waves that drench you are British
waves, and the British coast is slowly crawling nearer!—if
all this and how much more, can be lumped under the
term of horrid, it has been, dear Lady Wastwood, horrid in
the extreme!"

Lady Wastwood's small, triangular, white face with the
V-shaped scarlet mouth, looked enigmatical.  She arched
the thick black slurs that were her eyebrows again, and said
not without intent, to her crony Cynthia Charterhouse:

"*Who* would have *dreamed* only three weeks ago, when
that excessively long-legged and extremely good-looking
Count von Herrnung sat here and talked to us about
German women and German Supermen—that we should be
at War to-day with Germany?"

"Poor Count Tido!"  Something rattled in the Goblin's
meagre throat as though she had accidentally swallowed
some of her pearls.  "That dreadful report in *The Wire*
made the Franzenbad treatment disagree with me horribly!
To be drowned in that commonplace North Sea crossing,
upon the very eve of realising the one ambition of his
life!  For he hated us so thoroughly!  His Anglophobia
was a perfect obsession.  Poor dear Tido!  One might
call it a wasted career!"  The speaker dried a tear and
continued: "His family will be frantic.  You know he was
to have been married in October!  Baroness Kriemhilde
von Wolfensbragen-Hirschenbuttel.  Immensely rich!  Her
father has large interests in the pearl-fisheries of German
New Guinea.  Her betrothal gift, a superb black and white
pearl, the Count always wore as a mascot.  Poor Baroness!
She will be inconsolable.  Marriage means the first draught
of real freedom to young German girls!"

Mrs. Charterhouse said in her sweetly venomous way:

"Miss Saxham bears up—under the circumstances!"

"Under what circumstances, might one presume to ask?"  Then,
reading aright the ambiguous smile of Mrs. Charterhouse,
the Goblin rattled out her characteristic laugh:

"What absurdity!  You refer to a mere dinner-table
flirtation in Paris.  The mere *rapprochement* of *atomes
crochus*!  Miss Saxham and Lady Beauvayse dined with us
on the night of the Grand Prix.  Poor Tido was certainly
struck with her.  I remember he talked about her eyes and
figure afterwards.  But her hair being so black and growing
so heavily—did not please him.  He found the effect—I
think his term was—'too crepuscular.'"

"Ah!  You throw a ray," said Mrs. Charterhouse in that
sugared way of hers, "on a mystery that has intrigued me.
Now I know why Miss Saxham went to the Atelier Wiber in
the Rue de la Paix and got her crepuscular tresses changed
to terra-cotta!"

"*Not* saffron?  Now," said Lady Wastwood, pensively
tilting her own green-gold head and elevating her arched
black eyebrows, "I should have called that shade saffron
or tumeric.  Who do you suppose footed the bill for the
process?  The wretch Wiber simply won't look at you under
four hundred and fifty francs!"

"Perhaps Vivie Beauvayse—" suggested Mrs. Charterhouse.

"I think not.  Vivie preferred the crepuscular effect.  It
contrasted capitally with her own style of colouring.  You
must have noticed, they are seldom seen going about
together as they used.  Dear Lady Wathe, do you feel faint?
Can I get you anything?"

For something had clicked behind the Goblin's pearls, and
she had suddenly stiffened in her seat.  The superb figure of
Patrine Saxham had entered by the swing-doors leading
from the vestibule followed by a tall, broad-shouldered
young man in loose grey tweeds, whose left sleeve
displayed a band of black significantly new.

"Can that be Miss Saxham?  It must be!—her type is
so unusual!  Not having seen her since the night of the
dinner I referred to I did not quite grasp the meaning of
your references to ingredients common in Indian curries.
Of course, I understand now!"  The Goblin surveyed the
tall, pliant figure with the dead beech-leaf hair through her
lorgnette before she leaned forwards and roused the sleeping
Brayham by a brisk application of the instrument.  "Look,
Sir Thomas!  Would you have known Miss Saxham?"

"Beparr! ... Wharr? ... God bless my soul, no!"

Brayham, turning in the armchair as the Zoo walrus
turns in his concrete pond, surveyed Patrine with a
bloodshot stare.

"Silly girl!  Spoilt her looks!" he snorted.  "Handsome
as the dooce with her gipsy-black tresses.  Won her bet.
Won't get her ring now though, unless von Herrnung paid
before he flew!"

"Was there a bet between them?  How is it you never
told me?  Have I deserved this from you?" demanded Lady
Wathe indignantly, as Mrs. Charterhouse and Lady
Wastwood exchanged glances and smiles.

"Sorry! ... Forgot! ..."  Brayham gobbled apologetically.
"Man I know happened to be close to 'em leaving
Spitz's Restaurant that Sunday night in Paris.  Told
me he heard von Herrnung lay Miss Saxham his magpie
pearl solitaire against a bit o' Palais Royal paste she was
wearing—that she wouldn't change the colour of her hair!
Made the appointment for her, with Wiber—'*Pastiches
Artistiques*,' and so on, *Rue de la Paix*.  He bragged of it
afterwards at the *Cercle Moderne*!  Dam Germans! no idea
of decency!  Why do Englishwomen intrigue with 'em?
Bounders that kiss and tell!"

There was a significant pause, broken by the Goblin's
shrillest peal of laughter.  The ex-Justice, whose vitality
was low, folded his hands and dozed again.  Then——

"Now we *know* who footed the bill," said Cynthia
Charterhouse in dove-like accents.  While Trixie
murmured in the vexed ear of Margot:

"Kitts, my dinkie, you are a pal of the Saxhams.  *How*
far had the affair *really* gone?"

"There was no affair!" said Margot's sweet little voice,
very clearly.  "Pat rather hated Count von Herrnung than
otherwise!"

"Judging by the mute evidence of her hair—" began
Mrs. Charterhouse, languidly.  How Margot loathed these
women, erstwhile her chosen friends and associates, tearing
with greedy beaks and vicious claws at the reputation of an
unmarried girl....

"Her hair belongs to her!  She can bleach it if she
wishes!"  The little figure rose to its altitude of four feet
seven inches and surveyed the scandalmongers with
wrathful eyes.  "I have said that there was nothing between
Miss Saxham and Count von Herrnung"—the little voice
was crystal-cold: "I should be extremely obliged to all of
you if you will understand this clearly!  Miss Saxham is
engaged to my husband's cousin, Alan Sherbrand."—Had
Franky heard that stately reference to my husband, he
would have been "bowled," to quote himself.  "Franky
likes him, and so do I, tremendously!  We're both keen
on their bringing off the match!"

There was another resounding silence.  Brayham snored
melodiously.  Then Trixie Wastwood said with her Pierrot
smile:

"Really, Kitts, it was—hardly cricket not to have warned us!"

While Mrs. Charterhouse added in tones of iced velvet:

"Regard me also as prone beneath Miss Saxham's Number
Eight shoes.  Did you say her *fiancé* was a cousin of
Lord Norwater's?  Not possibly the son of the uncle who
died quite recently?  Captain the Hon. Noel Sherbrand,
late of the Royal Gunners....  My husband used to
know him before—people left off!"

"It is the same.  He muddled his career somehow, and—most
people cut him!  But he is *dead*," said Margot very
deliberately, "and his son, if we have no—" the delicate
cheeks flushed with sudden vivid crimson—"his son is
perfectly tophole and Franky's next heir.  We met him in
June in Paris, and so did Pat Saxham!  How do any of you
know she didn't tint her hair to please *him*."

"Possibly she did!  But, according to Sir Thomas—it
was the other man who paid!"

"Odd, isn't it?  In this world," said the Goblin with her
crackling laugh, "the other man invariably pays the bill!
And so the young gentleman over there—who is quite
remarkably good-looking in the blond Norman style—and
who is going to marry Miss Saxham—succeeds to Lord
Norwater in—a certain eventuality!  May one be
permitted to hope, dear Lady Norwater, that Fate and yourself
will combine fortuitously, to keep the cousin out of the
House of Peers!"

"Rude, ill-bred, horrid woman!" thought Margot,
clenching her little teeth to keep back these epithets.
"How dare she twit me with—*that*!  How dare—"  Then
her hot flush sank away and a mist came before her eyes,
and she would have fallen, but that Trixie Wastwood
jumped up from the sofa and threw about the little figure a
kind, supporting arm.

"I've got you!  You're not going to faint, Kittums, are
you?  Forgive us, my dinkie!  What *pigs* we have been!"

"Heckling the tomtit for defending the saffron-crested
blackbird!  I rather agree with you," admitted Mrs. Charterhouse
as Margot freed herself, saying it was nothing,
and proudly moved away.  "We women are horribly
spiteful," continued Cynthia.  "Yes, we are spiteful,
Lady Wathe!  I am perfectly in earnest.  What is the
reason?  Will anything cure us?  Do somebody tell me!
Colonel Charterhouse would say it is because we eat too
much rich food, walk too little, automobile too much, and
want some useful work or other to occupy our minds!  He
is coming here to lunch with me—he was quite touchingly
anxious to be invited!"  Her beautiful eyes widened as
the swing-doors thudded behind three entering masculine
figures, "Why, here he is with Lord Norwater, and your
boy, Trixie!  All three in khaki!  What a day we are
having!"

She added, as her handsome middle-aged Colonel made
his spurred way through the ever-thickening crush to her:

"I am enlightened!  So *this* was your surprise!"

"Not half as big as mine when I found they were willing
to take me.  'Fit as a fiddle,' according to the M. O.
Gad!"—he went on, as his wife made room for him on the
settle by her side—"as willingly as though he had been
somebody else's husband," Lady Wathe said subsequently—"It's
to my golf I owe it—these A.M.S. sawbones finding me
in the pink!  And instead of a back-seat, what do you
think they've given me?  Command of the Third Reserve
Battalion of the blessed old Regiment, the Loyal North
Linkshires, *vice* Crowe-Pinckney, kicked out by a gouty
toe! ... How's that for an oldster of fifty-five, ... Eh,
what?"  His chuckle was that of a Fourth Form
athlete picked to supply a gap in the School Eleven.  And
Cynthia's beautiful eyes, as she slipped her hand into the
Colonel's, looked at him as the boy's mother's might have
looked upon her son.

Lady Wastwood's Pierrot smile might have played upon
the reunited couple mockingly, but that the unexpected
apparition of her boy Wastwood in single-starred khaki,
adorned with the badge of a crack Hussar Regiment, girt
with the Sam Browne and narrow officer's shoulder-strap,
and clad as to the legs in spurred brown butcher-boots—dimmed
her bright green eyes and brought a choke into her
throat.  Wastwood the son was so like Wastwood the
father—killed at Magersfontein in 1900,—whom Trixie, for no
reason apparently, had romantically adored.  A burly
young man, pink as a baby, with thick fair hair growing
down within two inches of his eyebrows, small, fierce blue
eyes, and a huge roaring voice, softened down now to a
tender bellow as he answered a pale girl's eager question
with:

"Well, I can't say exactly when we're going to the Front,
but I hope to Christmas it'll be soon!"

Wastwood's engagement to the girl had been announced
only the week previously in the Society Columns of the
leading dailies.  Now, while Wastwood's younger brother
Jerry anguished in the throes of a final Exam, at Sandhurst,
the said Jerry being set upon getting a Commission in time
to go to the Front with one of the First Divisions—his elder
sat on a Club sofa and made love to the girl Jerry was
subsequently to marry.  For not only Wastwood's title,
but his vacant Commission as a Lieutenant in the Dapple
Greys and his sweetheart went to his junior after Mons.

There was a lot of family and regimental re-shuffling and
re-dealing, you will remember, after Mons.

The leaven of the Great Awakening was working in the
souls of these worldly-minded, ultra-modern men and
women, even as the crowd in the rooms grew denser, as the
buzz of talk became almost solid, and khaki mingled with
the brilliant toilettes.  Hardly a man but wore dead-leaf
brown.  Wives were entertaining their husbands, mothers
were lunching their sons, that day, at the multitudinous
little tables in the great and lesser dining-rooms,—there was
a revival of old code-words, an interchange of almost
forgotten pet-names, a resurrection of ancient jokes, when the
atmosphere seemed dangerously charged with emotion.
How many Last Sacraments of renewed love were eaten
and drunk by husbands and wives who, estranged for years,
were to be reunited by the War, and parted by the War until
the Day when Wars shall be no more.

.. vspace:: 2

That a tall young man in grey tweed with a crape armlet
should sit opposite Patrine that day at Margot's special
table was one of the thousand miracles already wrought.

Sherbrand had shelved all recollection of that June
adventure in the Bois de Boulogne, when a flushed young
husband in immaculate top-hat and frock-coat had thanked
an angry young man in waterproof overalls and gabardine
for not chopping his wife into kedgeree.

Could one be angry any more when this little human
dragon-fly was what Patrine called "a frightful pal" of
hers.  Thank Heaven!  Patrine had known nothing of the
cousinship when she had answered Sherbrand's plain
question, "Will you marry me?" with an assent:

"*Sooner than not!*"

"Then—it is settled?"

"Yes, you poor dear!  If you think me worth having!"

*Worth having*!  Sherbrand's glorious Patrine.  Whom to
be near was heaven on earth.  Whom to obey was a lover's
luxury, even when she had issued the mandate:

"Now, you must come to the Club and lunch with me,
and meet my friends.  Do be decent to them!"

Perhaps you can see Sherbrand bowing rather stiffly to
Margot and accepting with the briefest hesitation the
smallest of offered hands.

"I thought it must be the same!—I was certain there
couldn't be two Flying Sherbrands.  Pat!—Mr. Sherbrand
can't deny the relationship, though he disapproves of
Franky and me most fearfully.  You'll have to teach him,"
went on the coaxing little voice, "that we're lots and lots
nicer than he thinks us!  For we've got to be friends," said
Kittums, "if you and my dear Pat are going to be married!
No time like the present!  Can't we begin now?"

What a vivid little face it was, though there were tired
marks like faint bruises under the great dark eyes, and the
rose-flush in the cheeks was less bright than it had seemed in
June.  He released the tiny jewelled fingers, and found
himself presented to the husband.

"Frightfully glad to meet you—more reasons than one!"

Franky, slim, sleek-headed, and dapper in unblemished
Regulation tea-leaf, held out his hand, saying as he looked
the other squarely in the eyes:

"If I had known your Home address, I should like to
have dropped a line to you, when I—when I saw the
newspaper yesterday."

"My mother lives at Bournemouth.  My father had
been an invalid for years.  I go down to-day by the
afternoon train."

"Ah!  Please remember me to my—Aunt Jeannette."

From what dusty shelf of memories had Franky reached
down the name of his uncle's unknown wife?  But it
sounded pleasantly to Mrs. Sherbrand's son.  The cloud
upon his forehead cleared away, and his cold sea-blue eyes
began to thaw into kindness:

"I'd like a word with you in private.  Do you mind
comin' out of this clackshop into the vest*i*bulee?" Franky
went on, quoting his favourite Jimmy Greggson, and with a
word to Margot and a glance on Sherbrand's part at
Patrine, the two men passed through the swing-doors.  Here
Franky wheeled, and said with effort:

"This is a bit subsequent! but—if there's time available
and the date of my uncle's funeral doesn't happen to be
fixed, I should like to say—"  He grew furiously red and
began to stammer: "My father ... myself ... Dash! how
brutally I bungle!  But my uncle has a right to—to lie in the
family vault with his ancestors.  It's at Whins—the Church
is in the Castle grounds.  I can guarantee that my father—every
facility—sympathy—proper respect—"  He broke
down.  Sherbrand answered, now the cooler of the two:

"You are very kind, Lord Norwater.  My mother has
already received a telegram from Lord Mitchelborough
conveying a message to the same effect."

"I engineered that!" thought Franky complacently.  But
he was fish-dumb.  Sherbrand went on:

"She would thank you, as I do, gratefully.  But my
father—would have preferred to be buried where he died!"

"Good egg!  And now there's another thing to get off
my chest," said Franky.  "You know you stand in for the
Viscounty when I succeed my father, or if I get knocked
out in this scrap—supposing I should kick without heirs!
That being so, suppose you bury the hatchet and lunch with
us?  Wouldn't in Paris—perhaps you will now?  The War
seems to rub up old saws like new somehow.  That copy-book
tag about Blood bein' thicker than water! that's one
of the ones I mean.  In case my wife got left—do you
tumble?"—the ambiguous term was quite expressive—"I'd
like to think that you were—would be kind to her!"

"I should certainly—in that case—try to do what I
could."  A certain physical and mental resemblance showed
between these two long-legged, lightly-built, clean-made
Sherbrands, standing together talking of grave matters,
with candour and simplicity and British avoidance of
sentiment and excess of words.

"But,"—Sherbrand found himself yielding to an impulse
of confidence in the owner of the brown eyes that were some
inches below his own, "this War is my chance!  I'm a
certified pilot-aviator and constructor and engineer.
Perhaps there'll be a chink in the Royal Flying Corps for
me—and many another fellow like me—before long—I hope, not
very long!  For my father's sake as much as for my own,
I'm bound to make good—you understand?"

The brown eyes understood.  His kindred blood warmed
to the look in them.

"He knew—my father knew that he had failed in life
through his own fault.  He did not resent his brother's
attitude.  He bore the consequences more or less patiently, and
when he died he left the cleansing of his name to me.  Not
that he was as badly to blame as people thought.  He was
born without sufficient of the quality called—objectivity.
It's the power that keeps a man slogging, slogging in one
groove without getting mechanical or stupid, as long as he
attain his ends or can serve his country by keeping on.  It's
*indispensable*!"—he emphasised the word, his strong blue-grey
eyes full on Franky's—"as indispensable as lymph in
your inner ear-tubes.  Without it you can't keep a level
balance—whether you stand, or walk, or fly!"

"Miss Saxham—knows, I suppose?"

A flush crept up through Sherbrand's tanning:

"I have told her.  It wasn't pleasant.  But she—likes
me enough to overlook it.  She—seems to think I should
never fail in that way!  I hope to God I never shall!"  The
old boyish terror of inherited weakness cropped up in the
tone of the man grown.  "It would be horrible to suspect
the bacillus of slackness lurking in my blood!  If there
is—the sooner I get scrapped, the better for her and for me!"

"Well, you've chosen the—kind of career that is going to
use up a good many men pretty quickly."  Franky was
warming more and more to this big blond, candid cousin.
"Not that I think there's much of the slacker about you.
Few chaps more fit and nervy—that is, going by looks, you
know!  But if the Kaiser's Flying Men can shoot on the
wing as well as they brag they can"—his brown eyes were
watchful for a change in the other's face—"then——"

"Then I tumble out of my sky, a dead bird!" said Sherbrand,
squaring his broad shoulders, "and someone luckier
fills my place!"

"Thumbs up!  Ten to one you'd come down with a
broken wing or so."  There was something that touched
Franky's latent quality of imagination in the fellow's queer
way of saying "my sky."  "This cousin of mine is a handsome
fellow," he said to himself, "and a plucky one.  And—by
the Great Brass Hat!—now I come to think of it—the
livin' image of old Sir Roger Sherbrand—his and my
great-grandfather—goin' by the portrait in the gallery at Whins."

"So you're firm on joinin' the Flying Corps..." he
went on, feeling for the moustache which had been
reduced to Regulation toothbrush size.  "Good egg You!
Wish you all the sporting chances——"

"And better luck," said Sherbrand drily, "with Bird of
War No. II. than I had with No. I.!"

"You're building a new 'plane?"  The brown eyes were
alight with interest.

"Rather!  Come and have a look at her one day."

"Like a shot, if only I'd time!  Did she tot to a hatful
of money?"

"Something under £700.  £500 of that goes for the new
'Gnome' engine.  You see that German—"  Sherbrand
broke off.

"I remember!  Pretty rough on you, that North Sea
crossin' business.  Must have been an awful loss.  Look
here!"  Franky reddened again and began to flounder.
"Could I—couldn't I—help with the boodle?  Got £700
lying by idle.  Frightfully glad if you'd let me chip
in!—just in a cousinly sort o' way!"

"I am much obliged to you, Lord Norwater."

Confound the fellow! how he froze at the least hint of
patronage.  He went on, holding his head high:

"You are very kind, but I am not poor, unless as poverty
is understood by people of your world.  Apart from what
my profession brings me I have something in the way of
income.  My mother's brother left me a sum of money
that brings in yearly over £200."  He went on as Franky
regarded with unaffected interest the man who wasn't poor
on two hundred *per annum*: "The principal—I suppose it
tots up to £6,000—I shall naturally settle on my wife."

He warmed and brightened with the utterance of the
word.  His cold eyes grew soft and his brows smoothed
pleasantly.  He said with a glowing pride, and a kind of
brave shyness that a woman who loved him would have
adored:

"I have said nothing yet to Miss Saxham about my hopes
of a Commission—I suppose for fear of not pulling the thing
off.  But the moment it comes along I shall persuade her to
marry me.  We'll be man and wife before I fly for the
Front."

As cocky as though he had landed the biggest catch in the
matrimonial waters, thought Franky, instead of that great,
slangy, galumphing young woman without a halfpenny at
her back.  But he did the amiable, in a way characteristic
of Franky, ushering the guest back to the luncheon-room,
introducing "my cousin" to people worth knowing, doing
the honours with a pleasant cordiality that won upon
Sherbrand more and more.

Sherbrand took leave directly after lunch, saying that he
had to catch the afternoon express for Bournemouth.  He
had left his bag and suit-case in the hall-porter's care.
Would Patrine?—Patrine read the entreaty in the hiatus
and yielded to it, saying Yes, she would drive with him,
and see him off from Waterloo.

"It's lovely of you!" Sherbrand said to her gratefully as
they rose.  She gave him her cordial smile and a soft glance
from the long eyes.  They took leave of their hosts and
passed out together, heads slewing as the tall young figures
went by.

Once in a taxi, spinning down Short Street, Sherbrand
possessed himself of the hand he coveted.  Its warm
strong, answering clasp thrilled him to speechlessness.  He
looked at the long white fingers intertwined with his own,
and asked himself whether he were deserving of a happiness
too great to be credited.  When her shoulder touched his,
its warm creamy whiteness gleaming through the dead-white
of her thin sleeve, his heart drummed until it seemed as
though she could not but hear it.  But his was not the
only heart that beat....

"Thank you."  It was her rich warm voice speaking
close by his ear.  "Thank you for being so nice to my
Kittums!  She is the truest little soul going.  We have
been chums ever since I joined the Club.  Never quarrelled
once—until she made up her mind to marry Franky——"

"And now you're going to marry Franky's first
cousin."  Sherbrand laughed rather breathlessly.  "'Marry'
... 'Marriage.'  Two splendid words with meanings and
meanings beyond meanings packed into them.  Isn't it
wonderful? ..."  He gripped the warm white hand in his strong
brown one.  "Pat, your pulses are playing a tune!"

"So are yours," she answered in a low tone.

"What is it?"  He bent his head and set his lips in a
swift caress to the back of the white hand.  Then he turned
it gently over and looked earnestly at the blue wrist-veins.
They were full and throbbing tumultuously.  Her blood
was answering to the call of his.  He set a second swift kiss
upon them and his voice was unsteady as he said:

"I know the name of the tune, my wonder.  Patrine!
Love!—it's the *Wedding March*!"

"Whose?  Grieg's, or Wagner's in *Lohengrin*, or Haydn's?"

"Neither Wagner's nor Haydn's nor Grieg's.  Yours and
mine!  I told Lord Norwater to-day that I meant to make
sure of you before I fly for the Front."

"You're going to the Front?  Oh!—why?"  Her long eyes
looked at him with sharp terror in them.  He answered:

"When the Powers that be offer me a Commission in the
Royal Flying Corps."

"I see."  She breathed freely.  "And so—we are not to
be married until then?"

"Would you—to-morrow, if I——"

"You know I would!"  Her voice broke over him in a
wave of tenderness.  "You've made me love you—so
dreadfully, Alan.  Now if the little tin gods hear us—the
spiteful little gods who spoil people's lives—something will
happen to part us, soon."

His arm went round her and gathered her against him.
He said with a great thrill of triumph:

"If the Great God is for us we can defy the little tin
devils!  It was He who made us for each other, brought us
together—will bring us closer still!"

He added, as a handsome boy of nineteen or twenty,
dressed at the zenith of the fashion, and already showing the
worn lines of habitual dissipation, flashed by driven in a
silver-grey Lanchester, with a notorious Cyprian enthroned
at his side:

"How can I thank Him enough for what He has done for
me?  How many temptations He has helped me resist, that
I might come to you clean to-day!"

"Were any of the temptations like Mrs. Mallison?"  She
had freed her hand from his, and now leaned forwards,
hiding her clouded face from Sherbrand under the pretext of
following the grey car with her eyes.  "That was little
Wyvenhoe with her....  How young he is!  And how
old she must be!  Why, I've seen her portrait in a Book of
Beauty dated forty years back—with a chignon and waterfall.
They called her the Marble Marvel in those days,
didn't they?  Before she pitched her cap over the windmill,
and made hay of the Prunes and Prisms.  Now she acts in
Music Hall sketches—has a voice like a raven's, paints a
quarter-of-an-inch thick, and exploits Eton boys.  Is
anything the matter?"

Sherbrand had suddenly started and pulled his watch out.
Now he rapped on the glass at the back of the chauffeur,
leaned out of the window and spoke to the man, and
resumed his seat, answering:

"The matter is that I had forgotten an important
appointment.  I can manage to keep it by the skin of my
eyelids by taking the three o'clock train to Bournemouth
instead of the two-thirty Express.  You won't mind?  You'll
come with me and wait for me?"

"Not a little bit! ..." she answered to the one question
and to the other: "Of course I will!"





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`THE INWARD VOICE`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER LI


.. class:: center medium bold

   THE INWARD VOICE

.. vspace:: 2

The taxi, arrested and reversed on its way to Piccadilly
Circus, was soon speeding Westwards.  It whirred up Berkeley
Street, traversed Berkeley Square, and turned into a
short street ending in railings, enclosing grass wonderfully
green for August, clipped bushes of evergreens, and some
autumn-foliaged planes.

"We'll keep the man.  I'll take his number.  He'll look
after my kit for me.  Let me help you out, dear!"

He opened a gate in the railings and let her through.  A
large double house, with many windows, severely screened
with brown curtains and wire blinds, loomed behind them,
commanding the oblong patch of London green.  The
Modern Gothic porch of a lofty building of smoke-darkened
freestone rose up before them.  Patrine said under her
breath, realising the ecclesiastical character of the
edifice:

"Great Scott!  It's a church!"

But Sherbrand, who had stayed to shut the gate in the
railings did not hear the tabooed expletive.  He caught her
up and turned the massive iron handle of the porch-door
which was braced by bands of iron with trefoil heads, and
studded with heavy nails.  They went down two shallow
steps into an oblong, vaulted chamber, very cool and dark
and fragrant, tesselated with squares of black and white
stone.  Slabs of black marble lined the walls to the height
of a tall man.  An inscription in Early English lettering,
cut into the black background and gilded, caught Patrine's
eye in passing.  She read beneath the symbol of the
Cross:

.. vspace:: 1

.. _`Cross. "Sodality of the Blessed Sacrament"`:

.. figure:: images/img-404.jpg
   :figclass: white-space-pre-line
   :align: center
   :alt: Cross. "Sodality of the Blessed Sacrament"

   Cross. "Sodality of the Blessed Sacrament"

.. vspace:: 2

Under were lists of names, all male, ranged alphabetically.
Her quick eye dropped to the initial S. and found Sherbrand
there.  But when she looked for her companion, he was
waiting hat in hand, at a door some distance beyond them.

"You will come in and wait for me?" he whispered as she
came towards him.

"Why not?  As well here as anywhere!"  He opened the
door and she passed in.

To Patrine's left hand, close to the door by which they
had entered, was a small unpretending altar supporting the
tinted image of an emaciated, bearded monk in a black robe
girdled with a white cord.  A clustered pillar of red and
white marble supported a shallow basin containing a little
water.  Patrine shrugged as Sherbrand dipped his fingers
and made upon brow and breast the sacred Sign.  Then he
seemed to hesitate—dipped again and held the wetted finger
tips towards her, evidently courting her touch.  She shook
her head hastily.  Her eyes swept purposely past his,
scanning the vast interior.  They were standing in the
shorter southern transept of what was *some* church.

The vast nave was dark and cool, full of silence and
shadow and the perfume of flowers and incense, mingled
with a fragrance far subtler than these.  Pillars of richest
Modern Gothic design supported the roof, whose forest of
rich dark timbers showed little adornment, except at the
Sanctuary end.  Here coffering, diapering, and gilding made
for splendour; rich marble cased the pillars and floored the
stately choir with its rows of stalls, wrought in dark wood,
elaborately carved.  The north transept housed the organ, a
towering instrument of many pipes.  The scarlet cushion
on the vacant organ-bench, the book of chants left upon the
rack, the black and yellow-white of the well-used keys, the
numbered heads of the stops, showed through the lattice-work
of a high wrought-iron screen, wonderfully painted and
gilt.  Between Patrine and the nave was a pulpit of red and
white marble like the pillars, with a carved sounding-board
of obviously ancient work.  Rows of pews flanked the wide
central aisle and the two smaller, and on the right of a lofty
oaken screen that masked the west door, with the mellow
light of a great rose-window falling on it, towered a huge
Crucifix in black marble, upholding a white tortured Figure
whose drooping thorn-crowned Head, like His hands and
feet and side, dripped with crimson....  Patrine winced
at the sight, and turned hastily away.

Now she was looking over the head of Sherbrand, who
knelt before her upright and motionless,—at the High Altar,
backed with a noble triptych, its three panels displaying
the Annunciation, the Visitation, and the Nativity.  A silver
lamp depending by chains from the centre of the Sanctuary
roof burned with a small steady flame before the Tabernacle—standing
between tall tapers burning in gleaming candlesticks,
and vases of huge white golden-anthered August
lilies—hiding behind its broidered curtains and golden doors,
the Ineffable Mystery.

"Come!" Sherbrand's whisper said, close at her ear as he
rose up.  She turned and followed him down a side-aisle.
"Sit here!" he signed to her, pointing to a narrow bench.
He waited until she was seated, laid his hat and stick beside
her, gave her a grave smile, bent his knees once more,
looking towards the High Altar and moved noiselessly away.

Turning her head to follow him with her eyes, Patrine saw
that the large dark church was not as empty as she had
supposed.  Kneeling or seated figures of men and women
were scattered here and there amongst the wilderness of
empty pews.  The serried rows of rush-bottomed kneeling-chairs
in either side-aisle showed aggregations of people, ten
or a dozen together, chiefly in the neighbourhood of certain
narrow wooden doors appertaining to small structures that
might be little chapels or vestries, set between groups of
pillars in regular sequence down the length of the side-walls.
Still following Sherbrand's figure with her eyes she saw
him knock at one of the doors, wait as though for an answer,
and enter.  As the door swung towards her, she saw that it
bore a name in gilt letters within an oval on the upper
panel.  Each of the doors, a questing glance satisfied her,
bore a name.

Of course the little wooden chapels were confessionals.
Was Confession the important business that necessitated
Sherbrand's losing a train and foregoing the company of
Patrine to the station, a favour so eagerly sought and so
ardently received?  Her red lips curled a little at the corners
as she turned her face back towards the High Altar, rising
within the low barrier of the red and white marble
Communion-rail.  So remote and pure and set apart with its
tall, shining lights and gleaming vases of pure white lilies, its
snow-white silk frontal embroidered with a golden
ray-surrounded Chalice, its fair white linen Altar-cloth, with a
running border of Old English lettering in dark rusty red:

.. vspace:: 1

.. class:: center white-space-pre-line

   "He had borne our Infirmities and Carried out
   Sorrows.  He was Wounded for our Iniquities.
   He was Bruised for our sins."

.. vspace:: 2

The words seemed to have a physical as well as mental
force and impressiveness.  It was as though they swept from
the high white Table through the fragrant, wax-lit stillness
of the Sanctuary, winnowing the still, spicy air of the dark
nave and the lighter side-aisles as with wide, powerful,
unseen wings.  And despite the presence of nearly a hundred
people scattered about the great building, the stillness was
extraordinary.  It got on the nerves.

Almost awfully upon the nerves.  For a long way
behind her, where the shadowy dusk brooded thickest, and
the white tortured Figure of the Crucified hung drooping
from the great Cross of black marble against the background
of the towering oak screen, it was as though the first great
drops of a thunder-shower were falling, *pat, pat, pat!* upon
the pavement below.

Merely a trick of imagination—and yet it tortured.  One
knew by sensations like these that one had been frightfully
overstrained of late.  One had done lots of things one
regretted—several things one disliked to think of; one thing
that made one hate oneself sometimes with a very fury of
intensity, when one wasn't too busy hating *him*.  But since
he was drowned, one had felt it scarcely cricket to go on
expending fierce resentment and savage disgust and acute
loathing in that direction.  One heaped it on the living of
the two gross, sensual offenders.  Oh God! when Sherbrand
had said in that tone of triumph:

"*I come to you clean!*"

How inexpressibly one had abominated oneself.  How
one had shrunk against the side of the taxicab, pretending
to look after wretched little decadent Wyvenhoe and the
unquenchable Mrs. Mallison—feigning sudden absorption
in the Piccadilly shop-windows, to escape those clear
undoubting eyes that pierced one to the very soul.  To be
thought good when one was wicked, pure when one was the
other thing; believed candid when one was a living lie.
Ah!—that not only pierced but scorched.

.. vspace:: 2

If anybody, a month or so back, had asked Patrine:
"Are you a Christian?" she would have retorted: "What
are you playing at?  Of course I am—I suppose!"  Of late
that conjectural Being she had called God had receded,
faded, grown dimmer, and vanished.  But here in the
stillness, looking towards the Altar, she was conscious as
those candle-flames went up like prayers from faithful souls,
that Good and Evil were living warring Forces.  You chose
White or Black deliberately, and when Death came—it
was anything but the end.

Her hair stiffened slightly on her scalp and a light shudder
thrilled through her.  She felt with a growing awe, and
sense of dreadful certainty, that Someone was looking at her.
And to relieve the insupportable tension she stretched out
her hand, and took a squat, thick little book from the shelf
below the seat in front of her.  It was a copy of the Douai
translation from the Latin Vulgate of the Bible, and there
was a purple marker where she opened it, in the middle of
the Book of Job.

"*Power and terror are with Him....*"

That was the first line that caught her eye.  A little lower
on the page came:

"*Was it not Him that made life?  Hell is naked before Him
and there is no covering for destruction....  He stretched out
the North over the empty place, and hangeth the earth upon
nothing.*

"*He hath set bounds about the waters, till light and
darkness come to an end....*

"*The pillars of heaven tremble and dread at His beck.  By
His power the seas are suddenly gathered together, and His
Wisdom hath struck the proud one.*

"*His Spirit hath adorned the heavens ... and seeing we
have heard scarce a little drop of His Word, who shall be able to
withstand the thunder of His greatness?*"

It was like a Voice speaking—a Voice of inconceivable
magnitude.  It made one go cold, asking oneself the
question: What if sin were an insult to Him?  A scrap of filth
flung in the Face of One who created the atom, the protoplasm,
the cell, and the bacillus, and built from these in
His own Image, Man.

.. vspace:: 2

Sitting in the stilly duskiness the woman He had made
shut her eyes and tried to envisage Him.  He was not the
God of the Curate's Confirmation-class, nor the God the
Anglican Vicar of the West End Church preached about, but
a Being the hem of whose garment extends beyond the
confines of Space, and in whose lap lies Eternity.  Infinite
Goodness, infinite Love, infinite Purity, infinite Beauty,
He could stoop to care for the little beings of His Workmanship
so much, that for them He did not hesitate to sacrifice
Himself in the Person of His Only Son.  Did not love such
as this make wilful sin an insult to Him in that Son's Person?
Wasn't it—pretty rough on Our Saviour—to have poured
out His Blood upon the Cross of Calvary as an atonement
for the sins of men like dead von Herrnung, and women like
Patrine Saxham, and know them still so beastly, so prurient,
so base, so vile? ... It began to dawn upon Patrine, still
possessed by that strange hallucination of the Blood that
dripped heavily from the tortured Body on the great black
Cross behind her, how it might be that evil wilfully
committed, opened its Wounds afresh.  Drove the thorns
anew into the drooping Head of the Crucified, pierced
once more the Heart, that inexhaustible fountain of
love....

"*O! all you that pass by ... attend and see if there be
any sorrow like unto My Sorrow.*"

The words came cropping up through layers of sentences
heard and forgotten, clearly as though a voice had spoken
them at her side.

.. vspace:: 2

This afternoon the headlines of papers had shrieked of
horrors.  You remember that at seven o'clock in the
morning two German Army Corps had poured into Belgium
by the eleven strategic railways that provided for The Day.
The vast grey-green flood of marching men, the huge
python-like columns of machine-guns, the splendidly-horsed
batteries of field artillery, the Brobdingnagian siege
howitzers thundering behind their traction-engines, the miles of
motor- and horse-drawn transport-waggons, carts, and lorries,
blotted out the familiar features of the landscape, as,
preceded by massed brigades of cavalry, with squadrons of
Field Flying Service aëroplanes reconnoitring three
thousand feet overhead, the hosts of Germany rolled down
towards the banks of the Meuse.

Directly in line of them rose the fortified City of Liége,
termed "the Birmingham of Belgium," holding in the
suburb of Seraign, five miles distant from the city, the huge
Cockerill machine-plant and foundry, one of the largest
ironworks in the world.  They had stayed three hours at
the frontier station of Visé, a Belgium Custom House town
of less than 4,000 inhabitants, where a few squadrons of
Belgian Cavalry and the Belgian 12th Line Regiment, aided
by some heroic peasants, farmers, and townspeople had risen
up with desperate gallantry to oppose their inevitable
advance.

They had written the sign-manual of the Hun upon the
ashes of Visé in the blood of its massacred inhabitants.
Frightfulness, the many-headed hydra, was uncaged and let
loose ere they rolled on to Liége peeved by their three hours'
intolerable delay.  While I who write and you who read
far from the sound of fusillades, or the crash of shells or
the yells of peasants dying amongst the flames of burning
houses, learned of these deeds from the shrilly clamorous
headlines, and asked one another with raised eyebrows,
in incredulous voices: "*Can these hideous things possibly
have been done?*"

Patrine had no doubt that they had been done!—were
being done even while she sat waiting in Sherbrand's church
for Sherbrand.  Did she not know von Herrnung?  Were
not his fellow-officers and the soldiers he and they
commanded, lustful, brutal, cruel, rapacious, arrogant, and
pitiless even as he?  He was a Type—not the isolated example
of a new species.  It would not be easily stamped out; its
dominating characteristics would write themselves upon a
conquered race.  Those outraged wives, those violated
daughters of Belgium would live to see it reproduced in the
living fruit of their humiliation.  What honest man could
bear to stoop over his wife's bedside and meet the eyes of
the Enemy looking at him—from the face of a new-born child!

A rigor of horror seized upon her body and shook it.  Her
jaw dropped, her eyes closed as though they shrank and
withered under their contracting lids.  She slid from her
seat and fell upon her knees helplessly.  Her head sank
forwards upon the hands that rose instinctively to hide her
face.  In the same instant Sherbrand's low voice speaking
behind her turned the heart in her bosom to ice.

"Dearest—I am ready, that is if you are?  My keeping
you was unavoidable.  I am going to Communion with my
mother, before the Funeral Mass to-morrow, and I wanted
to make my Confession first.  Has the time seemed long?"

"Not long.  Shall we go now?"

He bent the knee to the High Altar and moved with Patrine
down the nave towards an altar dedicated to the Virgin
Mother, that was on the south side of the church near the
great west door.  Wax tapers of several sizes burned in a
brass stand beside the tiny altar-rail.  Sherbrand lighted
three tapers and placed them, felt in his waistcoat-pocket
for a bit of silver and balanced it on the slotted top of the
money-box too gorged with pennies to admit of the slender
sixpenny bit.  Then with a beautiful, devotional simplicity
he knelt upon the narrow blue golden-starred cushion for a
moment, looking up at the gracious veiled head that bent
above.

But for the modernity of the tweed clothes, the pose of
the athletic, lightly-built body would, with the mellowed
light from the great rose window falling on the keen
bronzed face and thick fair hair, have suggested a knight at
prayer.  In a moment he rose.  They returned as they had
come, passed through the chapter-house of the Sodality,
and issued through the door into the garden.  She said,
as he triumphantly possessed himself of the dear white
hand:

"Tell me, when you lighted and placed those three
candles and knelt down—what did you intend—what was it
for?  A practical insurance against a railway-accident?"

The dull, ill-timed gibe was no sooner uttered than she
sickened with self-contempt.  For Sherbrand answered
with direct simplicity:

"Well, no!  Call my three candles a reminder that I have
asked Our Lady's help and protection and guidance for
three dear people.  My father, my mother, and my wife
that is to be.  For myself I asked that I might never
disappoint you.  You don't know how I shall try to live up to
your belief in me!"

"You dear boy!"  Touched to the quick response of
tears she could barely falter: "You're a million times too
good for me, if only you knew!"

"I know this—that the wide world doesn't hold another
woman like my woman!  Why, Pat, the very sound of your
voice lashes all the blood in me into big red roaring waves of
love."

"'Big red roaring waves.'  Oh, Alan!"

She laughed, driving back the hot salt tears that stung
her eyelids.  The taxi was waiting at the corner of Blount
Street, patiently ticking out twopence.  Sherbrand whistled
and it approached them.  But this time Patrine did
not enter.  She could not now drive to Waterloo.
It was much, much too late.  She refused even to
be dropped anywhere.  She infinitely preferred walking.
It was quite a pleasant stroll from there to Harley
Street.

So they wrung hands and looked in each other's eyes and
parted.  When the taxi vanished round the corner of Blount
Street, the tall, gallantly-borne figure in the golden-braided
hat and pale rose gown began to walk swiftly towards
Grosvenor Square.  Suddenly it paused, wheeled, and
returned upon its paces, passed through the gate in the
railings and disappeared into the church.

In bed that night in the chintz-hung room at Harley
Street, Patrine, recalling the experience that had followed
the yielding to that irresistible prompting, wondered if it
had actually taken place, or were woven of the tissue of
dreams.

Kneeling upon a bast matting-covered hassock behind the
door of the narrow little wooden cell into which she had
slipped as a tall, grey-haired officer in Service khaki passed
out,—she had rested her elbows upon a narrow ledge before
her and peered through a close grating of bronze wire at a
figure dimly descried beyond.

The priest was white-haired and of small stature.  A
meagre ray of light falling from above upon the hands
clasped over the ends of the narrow stole of violet-purple
that hung loosely about his neck, showed them wasted and
yellow-white and deeply wrinkled.  By the testimony of the
hands he was an old man.  Something in the manner of her
address must have struck him as unusual.  She had not
spoken six words in her quick, hot, stammering whisper
before he lifted a hand and said authoritatively:

"Stop!"

And as she had arrested the rush of her words, he had
continued, in a grave, dry voice, quite devoid of unction or
sympathy, cautiously lowered and yet wonderfully distinct:

"You say that you wish to 'confide something' to me
'under the seal of Confession,' and you are not a Catholic!"

"No, I am not!  I suppose I would be called—a sort of
Christian, though."  She said it haltingly.  "Does my not
being a Catholic prevent you listening to anything I
... want to say?"

The dry voice came back:

"I do not refuse to hear what you have to say.  But
Confession, Absolution, and Penance are Catholic Sacraments.
I cannot extend the benefits of the Church to one
who stands without her pale."

"I'm sorry! ... I suppose, I really haven't got the
right to ask advice from you, or to expect you to keep
anything—secret?"

There was a little old man's cough.  The dry voice followed:

"I did not say that.  As a priest, I am bound to give
good counsel to those who ask it.  And I promise you, also
as a priest, to respect your confidence....  Now if you
desire to go on—for I have several penitents waiting—I
will ask you to do so.  Be clear and truthful and brief.
Mention no person by name.  Let there be no exaggeration.
Now begin! ..."

"It's like this..."  And she had blurted out the ugly,
sordid story, that in the plain, unvarnished narration grew
uglier and more sordid still.

He had listened without the movement of an eyebrow or
the twitch of a muscle.  At certain points where she had
deviated from the sheer fact by a mere hairsbreadth the
dry little cough had interjected: "Think again!"  When
she touched upon the circumstances that had resulted in
"another man's" offer of marriage:

"You have accepted this other?" he had asked, and
followed her affirmative by saying, quietly, just as he had
told her she was not a Catholic: "You have not told him
of—what has taken place.  Is he an honourable, upright
man?"

"Very!"

"H'mm!" said the dry cough.  "What is his religion?"

"He is a Catholic."

"H'mm! ... A devout Catholic?"

"He seems—awfully keen on his Church!"

A silence had followed, during which the beating of Patrine's
heart and the singing of the blood in her ears had
seemed to fill the clean little wooden place.  Then:

"Do you intend to tell this keen Catholic," asked the
merciless voice, "that you do not come to him—pure?"

"No! ... At least..."  The heave of her bosom
against the little shelf before the lattice made the dry wood
quiver and creak.  A deep sigh broke from her.  The
priest's voice continued:

"You have made it quite clear why you have applied to
me.  To be encouraged not to tell!  But even for your
own sake I advise you to make confession.  Do you expect
God's blessing upon a marriage that is—upon your side—a
fraud?"

"Men aren't angels!" Patrine burst out rebelliously.
"How do I know that he—Yes, I do know!"

His face had risen up before her, and his voice was in her
ears saying with that note of gladness in it: "I come to you
clean!" and shame and compunction choked her, as she
added:

"He's straighter than I should have believed it possible
for any man to be."

"H'mm!"  The dry hacking old man's cough came
again.  He sniffed twice, sharply.  Now he was speaking
again.

"You have not known many—or any Catholic men
before this one.  Your doubt as to the existence of masculine
purity proves with what type of persons you have hitherto
mixed.  For your own sake you will be wise to tell the truth
to this gentleman.  If you loved him you would tell him
for his.  Now you must leave.  I have given you too much
time as it is.  Repeat after me as I dictate."  He clasped
the withered hands and began briskly: "*Oh, my God——*"

After a brief ineffectual hesitation, Patrine echoed him.
He went on trailing after him a voice that stumbled and
dragged:

"*Oh, my God!  I am very sorry that I have offended Thee by
the sin of fornication, and have yielded up my body to
uncleanness, instead of keeping myself pure as Thou commandest.
I beseech Thee for the love of Thy Son my Saviour Jesus Christ
to bestow upon me the grace of a genuine sorrow for my sin;
and while I implore that Thou wouldst mercifully spare me the
ruin and disgrace I have merited by my own act, I faithfully
promise Thee to profit by the bitter lesson I have learned.  But
if I find myself as the natural consequence of my
wickedness——*"

"*—of my wickedness——*"

The dragging echo failed.  A mist came before her eyes.

"Go on," said the stern voice from the other side of the
grating.  It went on dictating:

"*But if I find myself as the natural consequence of my
sinfulness about to be the mother of a child, I vow not to be
guilty of any violence to the innocent.  But to bear my bitter
punishment meekly, as coming from Thy Hand.  Amen.*"

She said the words.  He blessed her with some such words
as these:

"Now may God bless and forgive you, and bring your
soul from darkness into His Light.  Leave me now.  Please
shut the door."

She heard the dry little hacking cough again as she closed
it after her.  But she did not go away thinking him harsh
and merciless.  She had seen great shining tears dropping,
dropping upon those withered hands.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`KHAKI`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER LII


.. class:: center medium bold

   KHAKI

.. vspace:: 2

Remember how upon the great grey canvas of London,
broadly splashed in with khaki, from the becoming dead-leaf
of the Regular troops to the deadly ginger of the newly
mobilised Reserve or the hideous mustard-yellow of the
latest recruit to the newest Territorial unit—Recruiting
posters of every shape, size, and method of appeal to patriotism,
suddenly flared out, ranging from the immemorial red-and-blue
printing on white to the huge pictorial hoarding-plaster
in monochrome.  Dash in as values the glow of
re-awakened patriotism, the resounding silences in which
Royal Messages to British Citizens and lieges were delivered
by grave officials in scarlet gowns and curly white wigs, and
the singing of the National Anthem by huge crowds
gathered in front of Buckingham Palace, to cheer, over and
over again the King, the Queen, and the Heir to the
British Throne.

Recall how keenly-curious Britons densely thronged the
neighbourhood of the Houses of Parliament, eager to
ascertain the British attitude towards France and other
Continental Powers; while immense aggregations of people
blocked the entrance to Downing Street, surging outside the
wrought-iron screens protecting Ministerial windows;
congesting Whitehall until omnibuses proceeded at a snail's pace.

Revive the strange newness of things, the snap and tingle
of seeing not only Royal Palaces and Government Offices,
but vital places such as Arsenals, Docks, Railway, and
Electric Power stations, Powder-magazines and Munition
Stores closely guarded by men in tea-leaf or ginger-brown.
Sickly the hot flush of things so new with the pale
dread of ruin, the ugly rumours of Invasion.  Shadow in
broad and black, a panic on the Stock Exchange, the dizzying
fall of prices on Continental Bourses, the record slump
on Wall Street, the frenzied stampede of the run upon the
Banks, the Proclamation from the steps of the Royal
Exchange of the strange thing called by nearly everybody—anything
but a Moratorium; as, for example, a Monatorial,
a Monoroarium or Honorarium, and so on.

Who could ever forget the excitement attendant on the
sailing of famous passenger and cargo-liners with
quick-firers and Maxims nosing through steel shields abaft the
lower bridge?  How the Red Cross notified its surgeons,
nurses, and ambulance-helpers to hold themselves ready for
business, and a neat khaki rig-out that had puzzled us in
several unfamiliar details, turned out to be the Service
uniform of the Royal Flying Corps.

German and Austro-Hungarian Reservists of all classes,
summoned home by the strident bellow of Fatherland, surged
round their respective Consulates.  Prince Cheraowski,
Representative of Germany, having had his passports
handed him, shrugged the shrug of a disgruntled man,
lighted a cigarette, and took a farewell constitutional
through St. James's Park.  And, on the Declaration of
War with Austria-Hungary a few days later, Count Lensdorff
received his walking-ticket, and gracefully vanished
from the scene.  And from the hall-doors of one Embassy
in Carlton House Terrace and another in Belgrave Square,
British workmen, cheerfully whistling, unscrewed the
massive brazen plates.  Crowds watched the operation in
phlegmatic silence; the single individual who loosed a
"boo" being promptly bonneted by a disapproving
majority, and moved on by the police, while the windows
of the British Embassy at Berlin were being shattered by
brickbats, as were those of divers British consulates and
Legations throughout the Fatherland.  On the mud, stones,
and verbal filth lavished on their inmates, of the Yahoo-like
usage undergone by Englishmen and Englishwomen, we
may not dwell, but I do not think we are likely to forget.

Recall again, how vast public spaces carefully kept and
tended by Committees and boards and Councils, became, as
at the stroke of a wand, huge training camps of young, keen,
healthy if pale-cheeked Britons in ill-fitting gingerbread
or mustard-coloured clothes.  How groups of unoccupied
London houses, or large vacant stores, or the head-centres
of the Y.M.C.A. in various districts, would suddenly
overflow with bronzed and sturdy warriors of the Regular
Forces, and as suddenly empty again.  The platforms of
railway termini, closely guarded and barred from the
public, would be dotted with neat stacks of Lee Enfield
rifles, while regularly-breathing sleepers in khaki pillowed
on their packs, shielded by the peaks of their tilted caps
from the blue-white electric glare, or the yellow dazzle of
the morning sun.  A whistle—a snort and clank of two big
locomotives—and the platforms under the reverberating
glass roofs would be empty again, under the dusty yellow
sunshine, or the blue-white electric glare.

Remember all this to the daily accompaniment of those
huge shrieking headlines, the trotting of innumerable
iron-shod hoofs, the ceaseless rolling of iron-shod wheels, the
clatter and vibration of huge motor-lorries, vans, and
waggons commandeered for the use of the Auxiliary
Transport (brilliantly painted in thousands of instances, and
proclaiming in foot-long capitals the virtues of Crump's
Curative Saline, or Bango's Extract of Beef), mingled with
the steady tramp of marching men, all through the days
and nights.  By night you lay and listened to these sounds,
mingled with the bleating of flocks of sheep, and the
bellowing of herds of cattle, until the hoofs and wheels and
marching boots mingled into the roar of one great ink-black,
awful River, whose ice-cold woe-waters—sprung from some
mysterious source—swept through our villages and towns
and cities, carrying with them millions of lives, brute and
human, towards the blood-red dawn of Death.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`FRANKY GOES TO THE FRONT`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER LIII


.. class:: center medium bold

   FRANKY GOES TO THE FRONT!

.. vspace:: 2

With the First Infantry Brigade of the First British
Expeditionary Force went the First Battalion of the
Bearskins Plain.

Exchanging with Ackroyd, "too sick a man for fighting"
(who parted with several superfluous inches of appendix and
convalesced in time to go out with the Second Battalion
and meet a glorious end at Ypres), Franky was swallowed up
in the vortex of Aldershot.  000, Cadogan Place saw him
but once more before the roaring flood whirled him away,
like a slim brown autumn leaf, to the Unknown.

His gift to Margot on the night of their parting was a
silver elephant of truculent aspect, having ruby eyes and
mother-o'-pearl tusks and a howdah on its back,
accommodating a "Gladsome Days" pull-off kalendar.

"You're such nuts on mascots and gadgets, best childie,
I thought I'd get you this beggar for a keepsake.  Saw it in
a shop in Bond Street.  It goes like so!"—Franky demonstrated
by sticking a penknife-blade under the liberal whack
of leaves that had become obsolete since the First of
January.  "Rather a neat notion.  Something appropriate for
every day o' the week," he continued, indicating a rhymed
distich appearing beneath the current date.  This, the first
of many utterances on the part of the Silver Elephant,
ranging from the idiotically inappropriate to the appositely
malign, ran as follows:

.. vspace:: 1

..

   |  "*Be very kind to Pussy-cat*
   |    *And handle her with care:*
   |  *You would not pull her by the tail*
   |    *If her claws grew out of there!*"

.. vspace:: 2

"Well, if that's the best this beast can do—" began
Margot, sternly surveying the proboscidean.  Then she
softened, meeting Franky's disappointed eyes, and said it
was a lovely present and she would always keep it on the
table by her bedside.  She and Franky were almost lovers
again for the brief time that yet remained to them.  She
even endured without open resentment his continual
references to the child.

"Take care of you both for my sake, won't you, Kittums?
Of course, long before Christmas I hope to be back with you!
But"—he tenderly crushed the little figure to him as he sat
on the bedside holding it embraced—"but if by any old
chance I get sent in—remember what kind of man I'd like
my boy to be.  Sanguine, ain't I?—on the point of his being
a boy—putting a pink geranium in the front window before
the house is built, but still——"

He laughed awkwardly, and brushed off a shining drop of
moisture that splashed on the slender brown leather strap
that marks the officer's caste.  A third star showed on his
khaki sleeve, but he had made no reference to it, and
Kittums omitted to ask what it meant.  He kissed her
gravely on the eyes and lips and forehead, unwound the
slender arms that clasped his neck, and gently laid her back
upon the pillows.  Then with: "Good-night and God bless
you!" he went quietly out of the room.  The hall-door shut
and a servant put the chain up, and the waiting car slid
away to the Tower.  For "I'm to kip down at the old shop
for to-night," Franky had explained, "and shepherd five
hundred strengthy foot-sloggers—fat as prize bullocks
every one of 'em!—to Nowhere in Particular in the
morning."

Margot cried a little when the hall-door shut, and then
fell soundly asleep among her big pillows.  Waking as a ray
of five o'clock sunshine penetrated between the blue-green
silk blinds and the lacy curtains, to realise that Something
had gone out of her life.

Something wilful, petulant Kittums had not valued until
the hall-door had shut behind it.  Something that—crawling,
shuddering thought!—might never return.  She sat
up in bed, hugging her knees and staring into a Future
without any Franky in it, a tragic little picture against the
background of the big frilled pillows, her great dark eyes
wide and wild under her tumbled gold brown hair-waves,
her paleness enhanced by the rose-silk night-sheath, a
maelstrom of thought, emotions, apprehensions, terrors,
whirling in the humming-bird brain.

The ray of sunshine presently touched the face of the
electric clock and elicited a malicious twinkle from the ruby
eyes of the Silver Elephant.  Remembering her promise,
Kittums put out a hand, pulled off the paper-slip bearing
the date of the previous day and read:

.. vspace:: 1

.. class:: center white-space-pre-line

   "*May All Your Hours*
   *Be Bright As This!*"





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`OFFICIAL RETICENCE`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER LIV


.. class:: center medium bold

   OFFICIAL RETICENCE

.. vspace:: 2

The First British Expeditionary Force was in France.
Thus much after considerable delay was vouchsafed us.
Some studiously unenlightening Field post-cards, some
industriously Censored private letters, some Press
narratives and photographs were permitted us, of Highlanders,
Guards, Scots Greys, Middlesex, Worcestershires, Gordons,
and others, brought in upon the midnight tide and
debarking from huge transports at Boulogne and Havre and
Rouen, under burning blue skies and a sizzling sun.  The
illustrated weeklies and the cinematograph showed them,
with battery after battery of R.F.A. and R.H.A. and
R.G.A., Ammunition parks and columns, and Engineers
with pontoons on motor-waggons, and Field Ambulance
units, endlessly streaming into or out of the canvas cities
erected on the sites of the old Napoleonic camps.  Showed
also Comic Relief, in the familiar form of British Tommy,
grinningly appreciative of the welcome accorded him by
command of the French Republic; meekly submitting to be
plucked bare of buttons and badges, by sirens who sought
these with offerings of chocolate, wine, and fruit.  This
meagre pabulum we champed, possessing our souls perforce,
in patience; sitting before the great iron curtain of official
reticence that had glided down into its grooves as though it
never meant to go up again.

Then, with the whiffling swoop of the Jabberwock—the
Food Scare was upon us.  Letters showered from venerable
maiden aunts in remote country districts, describing
economies practised by our great-grandmothers in 1801 and
1814.  Hot-eyed friends buttonholed one and whispered of
Famine that was coming, and pressed crumpled pamphlets,
dealing with Food Values, into one's unwilling hand.  The
Specie Scare came next, rousing the most phlegmatic to
frenzied indignation.  What!  In lieu of the smooth plump
British sovereign and half-sovereign welcomed in every
corner of the civilised world, must we perforce accept the
"magpie," or One Pound note, and the "pinky" or
ten-shilling bill!

People frothed and vituperated.  We were all frothing,
what time the stocky Kalmuck-faced von Kluck with
130,000 Germans of the Kaiser's First Army came rolling
down in overwhelming force upon the First and Second
British Army Corps.  Eighty thousand men of our blood
holding the line of the canal from Condé to "a place called
Mons" with, as the flanking angle, another place called
Binche.

The 5th French Army was in full retreat from Namur and
Charleroi; borne back by the resistless pressure of von
Buelow, Chief of the Second Army of Attila, 250,000 strong.
The 4th French Army was retiring before von Hahsen and a
third tidal wave of armed Germanity—humping its huge
snaky columns after the fashion of the looper
caterpillar—along the menaced line of the Meuse.

The Krupp and Skoda motor-howitzers that had crushed
Belgian fortresses like eggshells were coming into position;
the circling enemy aëroplanes were directing with
smoke-rockets the uncannily excellent shooting of the German
Artillery.  We who thought we had no more than a couple
of Army Corps in front of us, and possibly a Division of
Cavalry, were beginning to realise the ugly truth.  As the
frightful blizzard of iron and flame broke upon the British
batteries, and the shallow trenches made in desperate haste
and crowded with the flower of the British Army, began to
lose the shape of trenches, to melt—to become mere
scratches in the earth, littered with human scrap....

We did not suspect, we never dreamed of grave disaster
to our Forces, though some of us were strangely haunted by
well-loved looks and dear familiar touches before the Iron
Curtain of official silence lifted that quarter-inch and the
thick red stuff oozed slowly underneath.

.. vspace:: 2

An hour or two before the Great Awakening, Margot had
'phoned asking Patrine to come round.  Arriving, her friend
found Kittums sorely exercised in spirit.  The housekeeper,
in tears, had sought an interview on the Food Question
and entreated her lady to lose no time in provisioning
the domestic citadel with Flour, Sugar, Bacon, Tea,
Coffee, Potatoes, Cereals, and tinned meats against the
approaching days of famine.  She begged to submit a List.
It would be well to lose no time for all the Banks were
breaking.  She felt it her duty to mention the fact.

"And so I told Wallop to dry her poor old eyes,"
explained Kittums, "and I'd go and buy up the Army and
Navy Stores as soon as I'd had a look in at what Franky
calls the Dross House, just to ask the Manager, as man to
man, if there's any chance of the Bank going biff?  Your
adorable Lynette and your Uncle Owen may say that hoarding
things to eat isn't playing the game and all that.  Well!
When you're too sharp-set to think Imperially, come round
here and I'll grub the lot.  How is your Flying Man?"

"Doing some Army Coaching.  Out Farnborough way,"
said Patrine.  "I've not set eyes on him twice since that
Club lunch."

"When Franky cottoned to him so," said Margot.
"You've not had a scrimmage?"

"God forbid!"

"Engaged people always squabble."

"Alan and I don't," asserted Patrine.

The car came round and they drove to the Bank.  Most
Banks had enjoyed a Run and a few had experienced the
combination of a Run with a Panic.  There had been a
severe Run on Margot's bank.  Now it was over and a
huge majority among the people who formed queues at the
doors and crowded the counters were paying in the deposits
they had nervously withdrawn.  Relieved in mind, Kittums
cashed a cheque of magnitude, and the respectable Williams
turned the car in the direction of the Stores.

On this Day of the Great Awakening, Woman stormed
the departments.  Kittums and Patrine plunged into the
scrum, to emerge after having achieved a modified success.
Lady Norwater's explanation, that she required provisions
in wholesale bulk because of a yachting-trip she meditated,
had been hit upon by several thousands of other terminological
inexactitudinarians.  The mounds of bacon, the castled
tins of tea and coffee, the sacks of sugar, rice, and cereals,
the raisins, currants, and tinned comestibles—had been
nearly all picked up by these knowing early risers.  Still
enough had been secured to relieve the mind of Mrs. Wallop,
and scare the wolf from the threshold of 00, Cadogan Place.

"Beg pardon, m' lady."  The sedate face of the respectable
Williams looked over the last Brobdingnagian parcel
transferred to his embrace.  "I think if your ladyship 'as
no objection it would be better to close the car."

"If it will close," began Margot, looking with interested
speculation at the mountainous accumulation of bulky,
whitey-brown string-tied bags and packages upon the front
seat.

"FOOD 'OGS!" bellowed a man in a rusty bowler hat
and soiled shirt sleeves, so suddenly and powerfully that
Kittums jumped.

"Garn 'ome!" vindictively shrieked a fiery-faced female.
"Greedy-guts!  Yah!  Git along 'ome!"

"FOOD 'OGS!" reiterated the Stentor in shirt sleeves,
backed by an approving murmur from a crowd of dingily-clad
men and women gathered upon the pavement right and
left of the imposing entrance to the Stores.

"Now then, move on 'ere!" came from a policeman, and
the crowd began to dissolve, with lowering glances.
Motorcars were moving away, carrying their owners embedded in
groceries.  Others were driving up to the door.

"Move on, please!" repeated the Man in Blue.

"Not till I've got rid of these things.  Call the
Commissionaire.  Tell him my name and number!—say the orders
were given by mistake! ..."  Margot went on, when the
Alpine range of parcels had melted away under the
combined efforts of chauffeur and Commissionaire: "Poor old
Wallop will wail, but I've purged myself of the contempt of
being a Food Hog.  Great Snipe! to think of deserving to be
called such an awful name.  It made me feel all of seventeen
stone, with a row of chins like saddle-bags!"  She pinched
her own dainty chin between a tiny finger and thumb.
"Still, I've enjoyed the scrum," she went on, as the car
slid towards Piccadilly.  "It's bucked me splendidly!  I
shall know what to do now, when I want to lay my ghosts.
You know one of them"—the little fingers twitched in
Patrine's—"what's coming in November.  The other
started haunting me only a few days back."  All the new-won
colour had died out of the small oval face and the great
dark eyes were tragic in their terror.  "You're too good a
pal to laugh.  Well, then—I'll own up.  Franky's my latest
ghost of all!"

"But you have heard?  You have had letters?"

The answer was strangled between a laugh and a sob.

"Letters.  Three post-cards from Somewhere in France
and a queer epistle all squares of blacking.  Not much
between—except that he is tophole and coming Home at
Christmas and sends love to us both!  That's Franky's
way.  He always talks as—"  A shudder went through the
little figure, and shadows were about the great wild eyes,
and the pale lips quivered:

"Poor little Kittums!" said Patrine's big warm baritone.
She slipped an arm tenderly about the little thing.  Who
could have dreamed that Kittums could care so about
Franky—or any other man.  "Are you worrying so badly,
my dinkie?" she went on, soothingly: "Try not.  It isn't
wise!"

"I'm not worrying," came the weary answer.  "I'm being
haunted—that's all.  Day and night since it started, his
hands are on me and his eyes are looking at me.  When I
sleep, I'm wandering through desolate places looking,
always looking for him!  And thousands of other selfish,
silly women are being haunted in the same way.  Oh, Pat,
be always kind when you're married to your Flying Man!"

"*When!*"—Patrine echoed.  But what of sorrow or
doubt her tone conveyed was lost upon Margot.  She had
told her own grief, and the telling had relieved her.  Like
the child with the kissed bruise, she could prattle of other
things.  She was twittering and chirping in the gay little
voice Franky knew so well, as Williams, the respectable,
turned smoothly into Short Street.  There was a dense
block at the corner by the Aldebaran Hotel, and amidst
the swishing of the motor-engines and the fidgeting of plump
carriage-horses, loathful of the sudden release of the
pungent exhaust from escape-valves under their noses—a little
piece of dialogue between two Cyprians on the near
sidewalk drove home to both the occupants of the car.

One Cyprian was well-to-do, past thirty-five and expensively
caparisoned for conquest, from the tall feather topping
her stove-pipe hat and her burnished wig of Angora goat-hair,
to her silk stockings of liberally-open pattern and the
tips of her high-heeled, buckled shoes.  Her hard eyes
under their painted brows took critical stock of the other,
younger woman, whose make-up could not hide ill-health,
and whose flaunting fineries were the worse for wear.

Said Hard Eyes, indicating with a jerk of her powdered
double chin, a procession moving down Piccadilly
Circus-wards—a publisher's catchpenny advertisement of "WEEP
NO MORE, MOTHERS!" ingenious in its employment of
robust-looking matrons as bearers of the sandwich-boards
plastered with posters of rose-colour and gold:

"You could give some of the swell West End ladies a
tip or two, I reckon, Lallie, about that Purple Dreams
dope?"

"Honest to God, I could!  But I wouldn't!"  The
haggard eyes leapt viciously out of their languor.  "Let
'em run up against it—same as me!  Me that went all the
way to Brussels to get the new treatment.  Great Scott!
When I came to I was black and blue and green all over.
And my face!  It was a fair scream!"  She threw an appraising
side-glance in a shop window.  "No!  My skin'll never
be what it used, I reckon."

"But the"—the hard eyes between the elder woman's
blued lids were hideously significant—"the Trouble, eh?"

"The Trouble"—Lallie's still girlish shoulders shrugged.—"Oh,
that's all right!  I heard no more of it!  There's
the one comfort.  Good-bye, ducky.  I got to meet
somebody at the Cri."

"Well, better luck!"  And as the block broke and the
car moved on, the women nodded and parted.  Margot
and her friend Patrine did not look at each other as the car
stopped before the Club.

A glance showed the vestibule crowded, the second pair of
swing-doors thudded momentarily as members and their
guests passed on into the Club rooms, without relieving the
congestion that fresh arrivals renewed.  Some doors above,
a piano-organ in charge of two men was jolting out the last
bars of the Russian National Anthem.  One of the men,
olive-skinned, grey-haired, and dressed in threadbare black,
sang the words with perfunctory fervour in a cracked tenor
voice.  As the last chord banged out and the organist jerked
the changing-lever over, and the Marseillaise summoned
jangling echoes of its lyrical frenzy from the pavement and
the surrounding walls, Patrine, meeting Sherbrand's eyes
over the crowded heads of people, knew a sudden shock of
apprehension in the strangeness of their regard.

For day and night since that strange, impulsive visit she
had made to the Confessional—"You must tell him.  It is
your duty to tell him!" had sounded in her ears.  She set her
teeth and determined that she would never tell him, none
the less knowing that the revelation would be made.  A
Power infinitely stronger than her woman's will was bearing
upon it.  Her treasure was in peril, her fairy-gold at any
moment might turn to withered leaves at a breath from her
own mouth.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`NEWS OF BAWNE`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER LV


.. class:: center medium bold

   NEWS OF BAWNE

.. vspace:: 2

"Pat!—what luck!"

Sherbrand was standing before her, tall and lean and
masterful, saluting her with the touch of three fingers to a
soldierly forage-cap with three buttons, set jauntily atilt on
the broad tanned brow.

Ah! the delight of seeing the cold grey glance warm into
sea-blue, the lean, eagle-face flash into smiles.  For a little
while yet he was hers, she told herself, as the hard hand
gripped on hers that answered the swift fierce pressure, and
her blood that the sickly chill of fear had stagnated, whirled
on its crimson circle singing for joy.  And then—a second
glance, sweeping from the top to the toes of the tall manly
figure, stopped the song.

"Alan!  You—in khaki!"

"I suppose so," he said a little clumsily, echoing
thousands of other men.  "It's the universal wear just now,
isn't it?  We fellows must make good while we can—and
we're all of us joining.  Even Macrombie—you can't have
forgotten Macrombie—has got his rating, and is acting a
P.O.T. on a Destroyer in the North Sea."

.. vspace:: 2

Do you see the dour drunkard standing up, under the eye
of the smart young inspecting Fleet Surgeon, naked save
for the leather bootlace that held a battered silver locket
round his harsh and swarthy scrag.

"Your age? ..."

"Ye micht ca' me forty," said the subject, with caution.

"I might, but I'd be a liar!" said the Fleet Surgeon, "so
try again, my man!"

"Ye micht pit twa to the forr-ty," came rumbling from
the hairy chest.

"And tack eight on to that," thus the Fleet Surgeon,
tucking the hooked ends of the stethoscope into his ears,
and deftly applying the microphone.  "And then I'd be
wide of the actual!  Breathe deeply, will you!"  The effort
provoked a volley of coughs sounding like half-bricks
pitched against the sides of an empty cistern and the Fleet
Surgeon shook his head.

"*Hough—hough—hough!*—why didna' ye—hough! lat
weel alane?" gasped Macrombie, with eyes blazing hell-fire
through the moisture engendered by the cough.  "Dinna ye
ken I'll never no' be wanting to breathe deeply whaur ye're
needing to send me?  There is nae room whatever for lung-play
oot o' the ordinar'," he added scornfully, "aboard ane
o' thae kittle, cranky, tinpot Destroyers!"

"Hold out your hand!" commanded the arbiter of Destinies.
He contemplated the extended member, wavering
and fluttering like the indicator-needle on the dial of an
atmospheric pressure-gauge.  "Pretty wobbly, what?" he
commented to the owner with the sarcastic inflection that
advertised a keen advocate of Temperance.

"Man, O! man!" broke from Macrombie in a harsh rattling
whisper, desperate appeal flashing in his burnt-out
eyes, "you that are young enough to be my son, tak' me or
leave me, ane or the tither—but shame me nae mair!"

Telegraphists were sorely needed, so Macrombie of the
racking hoast and the shaky hand was passed as fit for
Service, and duty rated as Petty Officer Telegraphist aboard
one of the contemned tin-pots.

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.

.. vspace:: 2

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 Aëronautics 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 Café 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. Aë.  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 *képi*."

"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 amitiés à 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 *fiancée*?"

And the dapper middle-aged Wing Commander in the
gold-banded *képi*, whose dark plain uniform displayed the
gold badge of the Service Aëronautique 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 célèbre* 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. Aë. 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 métier 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 aërial 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 *mètres* 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 très intéressante*,
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 à 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
*kilomètres*.  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 *côtellettes* 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
*fléchette*....  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 *fléchettes* and little Morocco
bombs.  Aha, the *côtelettes*!"

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 Aëronautique*.  You demanded, according
to M. Jourdain's statement, £8,000 and a royalty for the
world-patent.  We will buy it of you outright for £12,000.
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. Aë.?
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 £60.  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 aërodrome."

"Waiting the moment when the authorities at Whitehall
awaken to the fact that you are a genius, *mon ami*!  *À 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 Crédit 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 aërodrome, 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 aërodrome!"

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!"





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`LA BRABANÇONNE`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER LVI


.. class:: center medium bold

   LA BRABANÇONNE

.. vspace:: 2

"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 Préfecture.  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 Liége
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 à 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 *à
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 Barbançonne*."  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:

.. vspace:: 1

..

   |  "Après des siècles, des siècles d'esclavage
   |    Le Beige sortant du tombeau
   |  A reconquis par son courage
   |    Son nom, son droit et son drapeau.
   |  Et ta main souveraine et fière
   |    Peuple désormais indompte
   |  Grava sur ta vielle bannière
   |    Le roi, la Loi, la Liberté!"

.. vspace:: 2

"*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:

.. vspace:: 1

..

   |  "O Belgique, O mère chérie,
   |    A toi nos coeurs, à tot nos bras,
   |  A toi noire sang, O Patrie——"

.. vspace:: 2

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.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`THE BELGIAN WIFE`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER LVII


.. class:: center medium bold

   THE BELGIAN WIFE

.. vspace:: 2

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 brûle!*"
and "*En Angleterre où 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.

.. vspace:: 2

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

.. vspace:: 2

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:

.. vspace:: 1

..

   |  "*Nous le jurons tu vivras!*
   |    *Tu vivras toujours grande el belle*
   |  *Et ton invincible unité*
   |    *Aura pour devise immortelle——*"

.. vspace:: 2

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

"*Tout brûlé!*"

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]

.. vspace:: 2

.. class:: noindent small

   [1] "There is no milk."

.. vspace:: 2

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]

.. vspace:: 2

.. class:: noindent small

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

.. vspace:: 2

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]

.. vspace:: 2

.. class:: noindent small

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

.. vspace:: 2

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.

.. vspace:: 2

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!"





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`SHERBRAND BUYS THE LICENCE`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER LVIII


.. class:: center medium bold

   SHERBRAND BUYS THE LICENCE

.. vspace:: 2

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.

"The little Catholic Church I've mentioned was built for
the very purpose.  Perched on the cliffs as though it might
spread its rafters any minute and flap away to sea."  He
kissed her hair again.  "Don't think I'm spinning fairy-tales.
I've got a Special Licence, so there's no need to
bother about time, or previous residence in the district, or
anything stuffy.  Nothing's wanted but Opportunity, the
church, and the priest.  And that the local Registrar should
put in an appearance.  That's necessary, as we're not of
the same faith—yet!"

She freed herself from his embrace, rose to her superb
height, and stood over him.

"You've arranged all this—without consulting me for a
minute.  You and your landlady—and your Licence and
your Registrar!  Boy, I am sensible of a great desire to box
your ears soundly for this!"

"I'd rather take a clout from you than a kiss from any
other woman."

She tapped him lightly on both ears, and said, putting
a butterfly touch of lips in the middle of the broad,
tanned brow:

"There are both clout and kiss.  Now show me the
Special Licence."

He thrust his hand into a pocket behind the plastron of
the khaki tunic and pulled out a note-case she had bought
and given him.  The shiny square of parchment-paper
bearing the signature of his Grace the Archbishop of
Canterbury drew both their heads together over it.  In a
compartment meant for stamps was a hard, thin, metallic circle,
shining yellow through tissue paper folds.

"The—Ring?" she whispered.

"The Ring!"  He nodded, smiling, as she bent her face
over it, kissed the tissue paper reverently, stuck the Licence
back in its compartment, and gave him back the case.

"And you had these in your pocket this afternoon when
I was such a horrid beast to you?"

"They were burning a hole right into my chest.  Why,
Pat, you're—crying!"

She half turned away, mopping her wet eyes with her
flimsy little handkerchief.

"Because—because—it's so blessedly sweet and dear of
you to have planned this.  Do you—do you really want it
so much?"

"More than anything under the sky," said Sherbrand.
"And, don't you see, it settles the question of providing for
you, splendidly!  If we're married, and I get—pipped—Somewhere
at the Front—"  He stopped short, for one of
her large hands firmly covered his mouth.

"I won't have it.  You're not to speak like that, ever!"
said a muffled voice above his head.  "If you were killed—don't
you understand—everything'd be over for me!  It's
a kind of nasty little Death—only to have you hint at it."

"All right!" he mumbled penitently, and kissed the hand.
It was withdrawn, and he went on:

"I have my little fortune, though Flying has made a hole
in it.  And I'd naturally like—as my mother is provided
for—the stuff to go to my wife."

"Oh! if I only were—good enough, I would be your wife
to-morrow!" she groaned.

He got up and took her masterfully in his arms.

"No more of that.  I can't stick being made out a—bally
pattern.  You are a hundred times too good for me!"

"*But not at all patriotic*," came drifting back upon him in
the voice of Raymond.  His embrace never slackened, but
he asked of her a question, looking for the answer to lighten
in her eyes: "Pat—you've not said yet that you're glad
they've given me my Flying Commission!—that you're
British enough to give your man, if it came to giving—for
the Old Shop!  I know you are!—of course you are!—but
say it—I'd like to hear you."

"I—I——"  She caught her breath and her eyes wavered
miserably under his steady gaze.  "I'm not a little bit
o' good at telling decent proper lies.  I love England—but
I love you heaps, heaps, *heaps* best!"  He felt her pant
between his arms....  She writhed her long white neck
like a creature in desperate agony.  "I want to eat my cake
and have it!" she wailed, evading his eyes.  "Now you
know me, you'll despise me.  But it's the truth—anyway!
I'd like a man to send to the War—and a man to keep for
myself!"

His arms wrapped her closely and his heart plunged
madly against her bosom.  He kissed her on her yielded
mouth, and the kiss was a living flame.

"That will be when we are married and you have a son!"
he whispered, and a drowning horror enveloped her.  She
cried out and thrust him back, and might have sunk down
at his feet and told her dreadful story then....

Whitaker's Peerage intervened, sliding from the lap of
the obese, reposeful Member, and falling to the carpet with
a resounding thump.  The indignant eyes of the awakened
lady glared at Sherbrand over her gold-rimmed spectacles.
She demanded, snorting:

"Since when has this room—*hr'runk!*—been thrown
open to visitors?"

"I'll inquire," Sherbrand stammered, and the guilty
couple fled.  That night Patrine wrote on a card "Seasheere,"
and thenceafter wore it in her bosom.  But many
weeks were over her head before the Call came.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`THE WOE-WAVE BREAKS`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER LIX


.. class:: center medium bold

   THE WOE-WAVE BREAKS

.. vspace:: 2

Meanwhile everybody who could get near the Belgian
refugees excitedly pressed hospitality upon them....  The
desolate mother was termed "Poor Dear" in a dozen different
keys of sympathy.  But she only looked with dull vague
eyes in the faces of would-be philanthropists.  When
kindly hands tried to draw the little ones away, she grabbed
them and held on.

"She doesn't understand us, the Poor Dear Creature!"  Thus
the Goblin, gulping within her rows of pearls, red-eyed
under her towering osprey *panache*.  "What she has
suffered!  It shatters one to realise.  Can one credit that
dear Count Tido could have belonged to such a race?  Miss
Helvellyn claims her by right of discovery, I believe, so
farewell to my plans for her benefit!  But Belgians, I
understand, are to be had in any quantity, and Belgians I
must and will have!  Think of those rows and *rows* of new
cottages standing empty at Wathe Regis, and that huge
caravanserai that nobody can live in at the corner of Russell
Square!  Do you hear me, Sir Thomas?  Oh, how clever
of you, Lady Eliason!  Sir Thomas, listen!  Lady Eliason
*positively promises* that Sir Solomon shall interest himself in
this.  *Of course* there must be a Fund, and a Committee,
and a Headquarters!  The Fund must be Huge, the
Committee Representative....  Dear Lady Beauvayse is to
be our Hon. Secretary....  With your legal knowledge
and influence, and your passion for philanthropy, Sir
Thomas, don't tell me You are going to keep out of this!
You are damned if you do! did you say?  Bless you!  Who
are these queer people coming in?"

Two nuns in the familiar habit worn by Roman Catholic
Sisters of Charity, little black-robed figures with starched
white coifs, broad white guimpes and flowing black veils,
had passed the Club windows a moment previously.  A tall,
slight woman in Quaker grey had seen and hurried in pursuit
of the Sisters, recognised as members of a Belgian
Community, to whom Mrs. Saxham explained the situation,
speaking in her exquisite French.  The Sisters replied in a less
polished accent, their discreet eyes ignoring curious glances
as their guide ushered them into the crowded drawing-room.

The crowd parted before them, revealing Rachel and her
children.  The nuns moved forwards and stood within the
radius of those heavy, vacant eyes.  Life leaped into them.
She cried out in her thick Flemish tongue and was answered,
and rose up, the children clinging to her.  In a moment the
Sisters had advanced upon her, taken the baby from the
cramped arms that now resigned it, taken the mother also
into a pair of black-sleeved arms.  And she was weeping on
the bosom of Charity, and telling them the dreadful story
that is told anew every day.  Presently she and Vic,
Josephine, Georgette, and Albert the big-headed, were eating
cake and drinking coffee under the sheltering wing of the
Sisters, but though some elderly Members still hovered in
their neighbourhood, the question of a Fund and a
Committee had usurped the attention of the Club.

Lady Eliason and Lady Wathe were selecting a Quorum....
Rhona Helvellyn had proposed to Lynette an adjournment
to the Chintz Room.  They had reached the swing-doors
of the drawing-room, when with violence they banged
open to admit Brenda Helvellyn in the maddest spirits,
escorted by Doda Foltlebarre and Sissi Eliason and half a
dozen of the wilder, younger members of the Club.

Said Rhona, barring her junior's way with a long thin
arm as Brenda rollicked past her:

"Mrs. Saxham, let me introduce my sister Brenda.
Brenda admires you frightfully!"

Brenda, staring with wide bright eyes at the object of her
alleged admiration, offered a pink, moist, recently washed
hand to Lynette.  At Rhona's indignant exclamation she
started and pulled away the hand, stammering:

"They wouldn't let me! ..."

"Wouldn't let you change into decent clothes when I'd
'phoned Home to have some sent here?  Tell me another!"

"Well, then, the things hadn't come!"

"And if they haven't, why not have stayed upstairs until
they do come?"

"All alone....  Oh!  I couldn't!  Anything awful
might happen up there...."  The peach-face of sixteen
winced and the eyebrows puckered.  "And Doda and Sissi
simply *love* me in these things.  They said I must come
down and be seen!"

Doda and Sissi and the guilty six exchanged rapturous
winks and grimaces.  Certainly a damsel of sixteen, whose
superb crimson tresses are crowned with the squashed ruin
of a muslin "Trouville" hat, and whose slender form is
draped in the wilted wraith of a light green aquascutum, is
more than likely to create a *succès fou*, on her appearance in
a London drawing-room.

"'Seen!'" Rhona snorted.  "Well, you are a sight,
there's no denying.  From your head to your feet—My
merry Christmas! what *have* you got on your feet?"

Brenda tittered nervously, poking out a slim foot in a
huge golosh lined with wearied red flannel.

"They're the Mère Économe's.  There wasn't time to
dress properly.  We were turned out of the Convent,
haven't I told you!—just as we stood.  It was early in the
morning.  Seven o'clock Mass was just over.  We were
trooping in to the *Réfectoire* for coffee.  We went to Mass
and did our lessons, in spite of the awful guns.  Then
... all at once—"  She began to laugh, and a mask of fine
glittering dew broke out over her peachy face from the
temples to the upper lip.  "The earth began to shake.
The French were retreating from Charleroi.  They streamed
past and past, horsemen and guns and marching men, just
as they'd gone by two days before when we waved and
cheered them from the garden.  Only this time there were
wounded men....  The ambulance waggons were heaped
with them—all bloody and dreadful....  Oh!  And then
the shells began to fall ... among the waggons and on the
Convent!  "The Germans are coming," the soldiers called
to us.  'Fly while you have time!'"

"Shut up!" Rhona ordered the girl.  "Haven't I told
you not to talk, you stoopid!  There weren't any shells—it's
all your silly nerves.  There might have been—but
there weren't!"

"But the shells were hitting the Convent walls ... and
bursting.  The house was on fire.  And the French Commandant
said to the *Maitresse Générale*: 'It will be *rasé* over
your heads if you remain, Madame.  *On n'y fait quartier
à personne—les Allemands*!  They are advancing in
incredible numbers.  The road to Calais lies open before them
because of the Great Catastrophe of yesterday.  Our hearts
are sad, not only for our own losses, but for the misfortunes
of our friends across the——'"

"WILL you be silent!  He never said so!"

With her scarlet head surmounting the shiny waterproof,
Brenda rather reminded one of a Green Hackle, the likeness
to the splendid gauze-winged fly being increased by the
brightness of her eyes.  Very round, very wide open, and
with strange lines radiating from the pin-point speck of
pupil to the outer band ringing the hazel irids, they stared
from that crystal-beaded mask of hers.  "But, Rhona,"
she reiterated, bewildered by her senior's vehemence of
contradiction, "he *did* say so!  And the Convent was
burning when we left!"

"If it was, you're to forget it—d'you hear me?  And
look here, if you dare to talk like this at home——"

"I won't.  I know the Mater mustn't be upset!  Look
here, I'll swear I won't, if that'll do!  Only don't say I've
got to stop upstairs, will you?  They're so gay here,"
Brenda pleaded humbly—"it'll help me to forget!"

"All right!" and with a warning scowl from Rhona the
sisters parted.  Lynette Saxham asked, looking after the
little bizarre figure of Brenda with wistful tenderness in her
eyes:

"Will she recover from the shock of the horrors she has
seen the more quickly because you forbid her to speak of
them?"

"I don't know....  I haven't thought....  It's my
mother I bother most about....  You see, Roddy's
Battery—Roddy's my brother—has gone with the
Expedition.  If Brenda talks rawhead and bloody-bones—but
I'll take care she don't, the little fool!"

The eyes of both women followed the funny little figure.
Lynette said as it was absorbed in a crowd of laughing
friends:

"Would you prefer that we finished our talk here?"  She
glanced at the settee in a glass-screened angle near the
fireplace, and Rhona assented with evident relief.  Her Chiefs
of the W.S.S.S., she explained, were anxious that Mrs. Saxham
should consent to speak at the Royal Hall Mass Meeting
of Protest Against the Delay of Parliament in passing
the Woman Suffrage Bill.  The Meeting was fixed for the
middle of October.  Mrs. Saxham's sympathy with the
Movement was to be gathered from her writings.  A
personal expression would be valued by the W.S.S.S.

"I am in sympathy to the extent of joining in any form
of protest or any description of organised Demonstration
that is not characterised by violence," said Lynette.  "To
brawl at public meetings"—Rhona wondered whether she
had heard of her own baulked attempt to heckle the Bishops
at the Guildhall Banquet?—"to assault public personages
and damage private or public property is not the method
by which the Franchise will be gained.  To make war upon
men is not the way, I think, to win their suffrages for women.
But I will gladly speak at the Meeting, please be kind
enough to tell the Chiefs."

"It's awfully sporting of you—when you've been in such
trouble.  It must have been quite too awful," bungled
Rhona, "about your boy!"

"About my boy! ..."  Lynette caught her breath and
nipped her lower lip between her teeth to keep back the
cry that else must have escaped her.  "You are kind....
You will be infinitely kinder if you say no more!"

"I beg your pardon.  I'm frightfully clumsy!" apologised
Rhona.  "Roddy—my brother who's at the Front—once
told me that I had the tact of a steam-cultivator and
the discretion of a runaway motor-bus."  She added: "I'm
afraid you think I was rough on Brenda.  But the Mater's
heart-trouble keeps us all on tenterhooks, and for her
sake—no matter what horrors are hinted or whispered—nothing
shall make me believe—anything but the Best, until the
Worst is brought to my door!  You understand, don't
you? ... What's that?  Young Brenda——"

A gust of laughter drew the eyes of both women to the
Green Hackle, who, surrounded by an appreciative circle,
including Margot and Trixie Wastwood, Cynthia Charterhouse,
Doda and Sissi, was performing the maddest *pas seul*
that ever held the floor.  One huge golosh flew off, shaving
a gilt-and-crystal electrolier as she finished with a daring
high kick, and dropped down breathless and panting
between Margot and Cynthia Charterhouse.

"You crazy child!" cooed Mrs. Charterhouse, patting one
of the pink hands.

"I feel crazy!" gurgled Brenda, while Doda picked up her
battered Trouville hat and Sissi retrieved hairpins scattered
over the Club carpet.  "Oh, my stars!  You don't know,
you'll none of you ever guess what it is to me to find you all
so gay!"  She bounced on the springy seat until her red
locks tossed like the mane of a Shetland pony.  "Now I
really can believe—really!—that the whole thing's been a
bad dream!  Like you get when Sisters have been too busy
to boil the potatoes soft, or take the cores out of the stewed
apples."  She turned her head and the sparkling mask of
tiny beads broke out again over her flushed face.  "Who are
those *Soeurs de Charité*?" she asked, for the circle of elderly
Members had melted away and the two Religious were now
going, taking with them the Belgian mother and her children,
to whom—of course at the Club's expense—they were to
afford a temporary home.  "What are they here for?  Why,
that's the woman who came with us on the boat from Ostend!
Ah, my God!—it's all true!  I can't tell lies any more!  Do
you hear, Rhona?" and the bizarre little figure leaped up
and stood before them, defiant and panting.  "Not even
for you and Mother!"  The voice broke in a wail.  "Oh! how
can you bear to see everyone so gay when the Guards
and Gunners have been killed at Mons?  Seven thousand
lying dead, the French Commandant told us.  Thousands
taken prisoners—and we sit laughing here——"

Lynette Saxham caught the little body as it doubled on
itself and dropped like a shot rabbit.  She carried it to one
of the settees, and knelt by it, loosening the clothes, working
with swift and motherly hands.

The piano-organ had come back, or another like it,—and
was jolting out the popular pseudo-pathetic strains of
"Good-bye, Little Girl, Good-bye!"  The swing-doors had
thudded behind the nuns and their charges.  Lady Wathe
was just saying to Lady Eliason:

"Then you, dear, will personally apply to the Foreign
Office and the Home Office and the Belgian Ambassador
and the County Council.  Pray count on me for *all* the rest!
Sir Solomon is a Tower of Strength!  You agree with me,
don't you, Sir Thomas?  Mercy on us!  *What* a commotion!
Who has had a telegram from the Front?  Who says the
Guards and Gunners have been annihilated?  Who says the
British Expedition has been overwhelmed by numbers and
forced to Retreat?  Will nobody stop that horrible organ?
Will nobody answer me?"

.. vspace:: 2

It was the tragic crowning of that day of trivial happenings
that the Iron Curtain that had baffled us so persistently
should rise to the tune of a music-hall ballad at the touch of
a schoolgirl's hand.  Long before the huge funeral broadsheets
broke out in the gutters of Fleet Street, the Strand,
Pall Mall, and Piccadilly, screaming of the RETIREMENT OF
THE FRENCH FORCES FROM NAMUR AND CHARLEROI,
DISASTER TO THE BRITISH EXPEDITIONARY ARMY, DECIMATION
OF FAMOUS REGIMENTS, AND THE RETREAT FROM MONS,
the Tidal Wave of Mourning that was to sweep the United
Kingdom from end to end had crashed down upon the
Club.

.. vspace:: 2

Ah! how one had underrated them, those dead men who,
living, had seemed to hold themselves so lightly.  Who,
submitting to be outclassed in Sport even while holding it
the thing best worth living for, had smilingly accepted those
hateful records of 1912-1913.

Theirs is a glorious record now.  Above the huge Roll that
is wreathed with bloodstained laurels, droop the Flags of the
Allied Nations, their heavy folds all gemmed with bitter
tears.  Each nightfall finds the endless Roll grown longer.
Each day-dawn sees the Hope of noble houses, the pride and
stay of homes gentle and simple swallowed up in the abyss
that is never glutted!  How long, O Lord? we cry, yet
comes no nearer the End for which the smallest children pray.

And the women....  In the Book of the Prophet Ezekiel
we read of a valley of dry bones over which the Spirit of
the Creator breathed.  When that Wind from Heaven
stirred them, the dead white bones put on Life and rose up.
A change as miraculous has been wrought in Woman since
the Black Deluge left a deposit of new-made widows and
mourning mothers, red-eyed sisters and silent wan-faced
sweethearts, sitting about the little tables where the empty
places showed as awful gaps.

The bereaved did not shed many tears.  Their grief was
too deep to be emotional, their newly-awakened spirit too
lofty for complaint.  Their pride in their dead men was their
upholding.  Their bleeding hearts they only showed to
GOD.  Before then, He was for many of us non-existent:
for many more a remote, passively observant Personality
but tepidly interested in the affairs of the human race.
Would these have learned to know Him, think you, if there
had been no War?

And those whom every newspaper unfolded, every knock
at the door might smite with dire intelligence, right bravely
they bore themselves through that fortnight-long, hideous
pipe-dream of the Long Retreat South.  For many of these
the torture of suspense was to give place to cruel certainty,
after that unforgettable Sunday of the Sixth September,
when at a distance of twelve kilometres from Paris the
retirement of the Allied Armies suddenly changed to an Advance,
and the columns of German Guard Uhlans in hot pursuit of
the British Force, were routed by Generals Gough and
Chetwode with our 3rd and 5th Cavalry Brigades.  For
many, many others, the strain has never since slackened.
They lie o' nights as they lay through those nights of
September, 1914, and feel the bed shaking, and the floors and
walls vibrating, as the outer rings of vast concussions spread
to them through the troubled ocean of atmosphere.  And in
the mornings they will tell you calmly:

"Oh, yes.  *He* is alive, but where he is there is terrible
fighting.  I heard the guns." ...

No arguments of people whose sons or husbands are not
with the Army in Belgium, or France, Italy, or Palestine,
will convince them that they do not hear the guns.  Or
that, borne upon the waves of a subtler medium than air are
not conveyed to them finer, more mysterious vibrations.

Thoughts that meet thoughts.  Mental appeals—demands—entreaties....
The hands of their souls, reaching out
through the dark hours, clasp those of other souls in
greetings and farewells.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`KULTUR!`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER LX


.. class:: center medium bold

   KULTUR!

.. vspace:: 2

The Belgian village-town had been so sorely knocked about
that the names of its faubourgs, boulevards, and thoroughfares
were obliterated.  Hence, one is fain to substitute
others, such as the Street Where The Naked Body Of The
Little Girl Hung Up On Hooks In the Butcher's Window,
the Passage Of The Three Dead British Soldiers With Slit
Noses And Pounded Feet,—The Square Of The Forty Blindfolded
Civilian Corpses, and the Place Of The Church Of
The Curé They Crucified For Warning The British By
Ringing The Bells.  Of this sacred edifice—Romanesque
and dating from the tenth century—little remained beyond
the crypt and the stump of the tower.  Some calcined and
twisted bones, a scorched rag of a cassock, represented
M. le Curé, that faithful shepherd of souls.  Of M. le Curé's
flock, not one remained to tell the story of the tragic episode
that had reared the grim pile of blackening corpses in the
Market Square, and added seven hundred homeless refugees
to the rivers of human wretchedness ceaselessly rolling
South.

In the bright sunshine of the fine October morning that
had followed a night of rain and thunder, the grimly-altered
shadows of shell-torn buildings lay black on the ripped-up
pavements and shrapnel-pocked walls.  A sandy-white cat
lapped gratefully at a puddle, a dishevelled fowl pecked
between the cobblestones, a pigeon or two preened on the
broken ridge-tiles.  To the eye of a skilled observer hovering
hawk-like in the hot blue heavens, raking the streets through
high-powered Zeiss binoculars, nothing human remained
alive in this Aceldama.  Yet when the two-seated
bomb-carrying Taube with the big man and the small boy in it
had banked and climbed, and hummed away Southwards on
its aërial mission of ruin and destruction, one British officer,
sorely wounded, lay in what had been the ground-floor
living-room of a well-to-do baker's shop.

.. vspace:: 2

A Captain of a Guards infantry battalion belonging to a
Brigade of the First Division of the First Army Corps.
Marching, counter-marching, digging, and fighting rearguard
actions had kept the Brigade's hands full during those
blazing days and drenching nights of August and September,
whilst the battered Divisions that had borne the brunt
of the huge German offensive, reduced to one-twentieth of
their effective, had hurried Southwards, leaving a trail of
blood.

"Those other beggars have had all the luck!" the Brigade
had growled when it had any time for growling.  But it had
won shining honours at the Marne, and had been heavily
engaged at the Aisne, losing many of its men and officers.
In the Aisne battle, particularly, the man we are concerned
with had won special mention in Dispatches for a deed of
great gallantry.  Three days previously, an order from
General Headquarters had moved his battalion on the little
village town.

.. vspace:: 2

Their R.F.A. Battery had been posted a quarter-mile
distant, commanding the north-east and east where the
Germans were known to be.  Machine-guns were placed at
the principal road-ends debouching on the west where the
Germans might be: the main streets had been barricaded
with transport-waggons and motor-lorries, all the Maxims
left had been hidden behind the sand-bagged windows of a
factory—a gaunt, brick sky-scraper, long a thorn to the
beauty-loving eye of M. le Curé—the walls of houses ending
streets leading to the country had been loopholed for
musketry, and a howitzer from the battery and a machine-gun
had been spared to protect the bridge south of the town,
a little place resting in the elbow of a small babbling river.
Watches and patrols had been set and pickets placed, and
then these war-worn Britons had dispersed into billets, or
gone into barracks, too weary to eat, craving only for sleep....
That big mound of blackened ruins near the railway
station, left intact for strategic purposes by the enemy, now
stood for the barracks—just as that calcined heap of
masonry, and twisted iron girders at the town's north angle
now represented the hospital.  Both had blazed, two huge,
unquenchable, incendiary-shell-kindled pyres, to light the
retreat of the battalion south.

.. vspace:: 2

Secure on those points of menace, north-east, east, and
west, the exhausted battalion had slept like dead men.  The
townspeople, relieved in mind by the presence of so many
English soldiers, slept like Flemings—very nearly the same
thing.  The Burgomaster slept; M. le Maire followed his
example.  M. le Docteur and M. l'Avocat slumbered
profoundly too.  Only M. le Curé, being restless for some
reason or other, resolved to spend the night on the church-tower
in the company of his breviary, an electric reading-lamp,
a bottle of strong coffee, and a battered but excellent
night-glass, the property of his late maternal uncle, an
Admiral of the French Navy.

Four hours they had slept, when a furious clangour from
the church bells awakened the sleepers.  Shrill whistles
screamed, bugles were sounded, Staff officers and
company commanders clattered out of their quarters—the
battalion jumped like one man to its feet.  Voices talked
over the wires of the field-telephones.  An artillery
patrol-leader had ridden into the advance of a column of heavy
motor-lorries approaching the bridge that crossed the river,
carrying the highway that had brought the battalion from
the south.  Lorries heavy-laden with—French infantry!—for
an outpost's flashlight on the advance had revealed the
Allies' uniform.  Well, what of it!  French troops were in
the east upon the Yser.  But still the crazy church-bells
jangled and clanged and pealed, shrieking:

.. vspace:: 1

"REVEILLEZ-VOUS, MESSIEURS LES ANGLAIS!  VOUS
ÊTES SURPRIT, LES ALLEMANDS SONT ICI!  RÉVEILLEZ-VOUS!
AUX ARMES!  AUX ARMES!"

.. vspace:: 2

And another broad arrow of dazzling blue-white light
showed motor-lorries packed with spiked helmets and green-grey
tunics, behind the *képis* topping men in blue coats and
red breeches.  The gunners of the howitzer, spared for the
point commanding the road south of the bridge, were picked
off by German sharpshooters before they could fire.  The
officer with the machine-gun was bayoneted and the gun
itself seized.  Revolvers cracked and spat incessantly,
bayonets plunged through the darkness into grunting
bodies.  Britons and Boches strove in a mêlée of whirling
rifle-butts and pounding fists.  And by the light of
star-shell, shrapnel, and machine-gun-fire from the other side
of the river began to play indiscriminately on the assailants
and the assailed.  Under cover of this fire, the Germans
would have rushed the bridge, but for the Factory stuffed
with machine-guns, pumping lead from its windows, and the
howitzer—Oh! bully for the howitzer! thought the wounded
man.

His company had been entrenched as a reserve near the
bridge in the mouth of a faubourg running westwards.
They had doubled out to support the bridge-party in the
moment of alarm.  He had been shot then in the right arm
and had gone on using his revolver with the left hand.  It
was not until some well-timed shrapnel from the R.F.A. battery
north-east of the town began to burst among the
green-grey uniforms, and the Kaisermen took to their
motor-lorries and went off, carrying their wounded and
leaving many dead—that Franky had been sensible of any pain.

"You've been pipped, old man," had said the commander
of the bridge-company, mopping a smudged and
perspiring visage with a handkerchief that shrieked for the
wash.

"By the Great Brass Hat! so I have, but I'd forgotten
all about it," said Franky, surveying the carnage in the
golden sunlight of the newly-minted day.  "Look at these
fellows in French uniforms.  It's an insult to the Allies to
bury 'em like that.  Couldn't we take off the blue coats
and red baggies before we stow 'em underground?  And the
prisoners.  What beauties!  Whining 'Kamerad!' to our
chaps, and putting their hands up for mercy.  Do they
suppose——"

The speaker ceased, for the brother-officer who had
commanded the bridge-company was absorbed in looking
through his binoculars at a silvery speck in the western
heavens.  It grew into a British R.F.C. scouting biplane,
that came droning overhead at 4,000, circled, fired a white
rocket for attention, dived nearer, circled again, and
dropped a scrawled message in a leaded clip-bag.

.. vspace:: 1

"*Enemy-column—infantry with motor-lorries and two guns
crossing river—bridge a mile to the West of you—hurrying
hell-for-leather North.  Dropped them two bombs.  Bigger
column advancing from North with more motor-lorries and
howitzers.  Look out for squalls that direction.  Roads to
South all clear.*"

.. vspace:: 2

"Those crossing the bridge to west of us will be the
gentlemen who came round that way to leave their cards!" said
the Lieutenant-Colonel Commanding as the biplane sang
itself away.  "Probably a column detached for the surprise
from the bigger force to the north.  Well, we seem to have
finished top-dog.  Let's hope they won't tackle us again
until the men have had their coffee.  'Phone the Brigadier
at Zille!  And 'wireless' the news of the scrimmage to the
Divisional Commander at Baix and Marwics thirty miles
south of us, and get a message through to Sir Kenneth"—he
named the General Officer Commanding the A.C. to
which the Brigade belonged.  "And give details to the
G.H.Q. at St. O., don't forget!  Not that we'll get much
credit over this."  The Colonel scowled, surveying from the
sandbagged window of Headquarters, situate in the Factory,
the long lines of stretchers being trotted off by the
R.A.M.C. bearers to the town Hospital.  He rubbed his finger
under the bristles of his close-clipped moustache with a
rasping sound that conveyed his irritation as he went on:
"That's the worst of these rotten little Advance-guard
actions!  They're expensive, infernally expensive.  The
casualties are heavy and the credit *nil*."

"Possibly, sir, but at any rate we've wiped out a lot
of these Boche beggars," said the Battery Commander,
optimistically.  "Halloa!  Bird over!  And it's a Boche
plane!"

A two-seated Taube, shining silver in the morning sunshine,
had come out of the golden mists to northward, rolling
up the landscape under its steel belly with wonderful
steady swiftness.  At some 3,000 above the town, it hovered,
making a queer buzzing noise.

"I've heard that song before," said the Adjutant, his
eyes glued to his binoculars.  "You remember, sir, at
Fegny?"

"The spotter our fellows christened the Buzzard.  At his
old smoke-signalling tactics."  The Colonel snatched the
Field-telephone, spoke, and from a gaping skylight at the
top of the tall, square, many-windowed Factory an
extravagantly-tilted Maxim began to pump lead skywards in a
glittering fan-shaped stream.  "Queer effect, uncommonly!
Looks as if it were raining upside down....  Gad!—I
believe that hit him!" he added, as a small dark object fell
from the Hunnish monoplane.  But it was only the inevitable
miniature parachute with the smoke-rocket attached
to it belching gouts of black vapour.  The Buzzard ceased
buzzing, banked, and climbed gracefully out of view.

And then, with a leaping of green-white tongues of flame
away in the north, beyond a long sunlit stretch of level
country fringed with poplars and streaked with canals, and
patched with brown cornfields and golden-tinted woods
and apple-laden orchards, and dotted with little towns and
villages, the heavy German field-guns and 11.2-inch Krupp
howitzers began to shower shrapnel and big steel shells of
High Explosive upon the devoted little town.

The Kaisermen had got the range from their spotter.
Half of the single Field battery of 18-pounder quick-firers
were put out of action in the twinkling of an eye.  The little
town became a storm-centre, canopied by soot-black smoke,
stabbed by the fierce blue glares of the shell-bursts.  The
houses were toppling.  The ruins were blazing.  The
gasometer near the station was hit and blew up with a fearful
explosion.  The streets were full of shrieking, stampeding,
dying townspeople and children.  "Save us!  Take us with
you!" they screamed to the Englishmen.  For the Divisional
Commander at Baix and Marwics had telegraphed "Retire,"
and the battalion was preparing to evacuate the town.

A great shell wrecked the Factory, killed the Adjutant
and many of the machine-gunners, and slightly wounded
the C.O.  The Romanesque church-tower, whose bells had
shrieked alarm in the little hours of the morning, rocked,
staggered, and collapsed over its famous chime.

Again, men had melted as you laid your hands on them,
blown into crimson rags as their mouths opened shouting to
you.  It had been Hell, Franky remembered, sheer,
absolute, unvarnished Hell.  The Battalion Surgeon-Major had
been dressing his wounded arm in the open street when the
Death-blizzard had broken upon them.  A lump of shrapnel
hit Franky in the ribs on the right side and some R.A.M.C. bearers
carried him, vomiting blood, into the baker's shop.
Possibly they were killed—for a shell hit and burst, and
wrecked the house in the instant of their leaving it—and
they never came back again.  Their charge, in his helplessness,
had escaped death by a narrow shave.  The plank
flooring of the upper room, dropping from the broken joist
at the fireplace end, had formed a penthouse over him—lying
on the blood-soaked stretcher on the tiled flooring—shielding
him from the avalanche of household furniture,
glass and crockery, descending from overhead.

Thus he had lain, partially unconscious, when what was
left of the battalion marched out of the town.  Most of the
population followed on the blistered heels of the British
soldiers, helping to carry the stretchers of the wounded and
crippled men who under that blizzard of fiery Death had
been got out of the burning Hospital.  Not all had been
got out.  Franky, lying bloody and smothered with plaster,
and helpless under the penthouse of planking that had saved
him, had heard the screams of these—such pitiful,
heart-rending screams.

Then the bombardment had stopped, and the mere relief
from that intolerable torture of outrageous sound was
Heaven.  The screams from the burning Hospital had
ceased, but when the earth had shaken with the approach
of a great host, and German cavalry in green-grey uniforms
with covered helmets had ridden through the ravaged
streets, and the tottering walls had trembled at the passage
of colossal motor-tractors dragging 11.2-inch Krupps and
carrying huge loads of German gunners, engineers, and
infantry—and German voices had shouted harshly up and down
the streets—and German heads were thrust from open
windows—and the work of Pillage, so dear to the German
heart, was being carried out with German thoroughness—the
screaming had begun again.—Cries of women and
children, shouts of men; pleas, expostulations, prayers for
mercy in French or Flemish, brutal laughter, German oaths,
threats, and orders; subsequently, to the accompaniment of
"*Deutschland, Deutschland, über Alles*"—the popping of corks
and the breaking of glasses—Hochs for Kaiser and Kronprinz,
fierce disputes over the divison of booty, more shrieks
of women and girls....  To the funeral adagio of
picks and mattocks upon the cobblestones of the Market
Square.  A volley then, and shots and more shots....
Subsequently Private of Infantry, Max Schlutter, made
these scrawled entries in his note-book; testifying to
the Sadism prevailing among the troops of the Attila of
To-day:

.. vspace:: 1

"*October —th, 1914.  Great day of loot and plunder!
We shelled the cowardly English—a whole Army Corps with
a brigade of heavy Artillery—out of the village of H——.  The
Hospital, Barracks, Church, and many houses destroyed by our
guns.  The Mayor, the Burgomaster, and the Registrar shot
for harbouring our enemies.  The priest tied up to his church-door,
tortured, and then burnt, for ringing the bells to warn the
English of our approach.  Lieutenant Rossberg had a little girl
butchered like a pigling, and pounded the feet of some lame
English soldiers we found hiding, to teach the swine how to
dance.  They too were shot.  Decidedly the Lieutenant is a
funny fellow.  All the people who had not run away brought
out of their houses and shot.  They filled the air with their
lamentations.  After a grand gorge and a big swill, we now all
drunk and slept on the pavements by the light of a magnificent
silvery moon.  Burned more houses, and continued the march
next day with a hellishly bad head.*"

.. vspace:: 2

"How long before they find me out?" Franky had
wondered.  But the plaster-whitened brown boots sticking
stiffly out under the penthouse of broken flooring must have
looked as though they clothed the rigid feet of a dead man.
"Presently they will come!" he had promised himself.  But
though they had sacked the baker's shop and visited the
other rooms in the dwelling, no one had entered the ravaged
little parlour, split open from floor to ceiling by the upburst
of the High Explosive, and offering its ravaged, worthless
interior to the scrutiny of every passing eye.

Worn and spent with fierce exertion, hard fighting,
and loss of blood, delirious with the rising fever of his
wounds, he was conscious in whiffs and snatches.  The
conscious intervals made fiery streaks across broad belts
of murky shadow, a No Man's Land wherein Franky
wandered, meeting things both beautiful and hideous,
knowing nothing real except thirst, racking cramps, and
stabbing pain.

The second day passed.  At sun-high a distant fury of
guns broke out.  Through the terrible drum-fire of Prussian
Artillery he fancied he could hear the British field-guns,
hammering out Death in return for Death.  Suffering
agonies for lack of water, he sustained life with scraps of
chocolate broken from a half-cake carried in a breast-pocket.
To move one hand and carry it to his mouth was possible
at cost of ugly pain.  Night fell, a night that was rainy, and
windy, full of cool drippings that wet Franky's clothes
without visiting his baked lips, and still the cannonade went
on ceaselessly—so that the crazy walls that sheltered him
shuddered and the earth vibrated, and the eeriness was
made more eerie with the sliding of tiles from broken rafters,
and the creaking and banging of broken doors, slammed by
ghostly, invisible hands.  Pale splashes of light,—reflected
stabs of fire from the muzzles of those unsleeping guns in
the south and west, made the darkness yet more dreary.
Rats scrambled and squeaked, close to him in the obscurity,
evoking horrible suggestions of being gnawed and bitten as
one lay helpless there....  He gritted his teeth to keep
back the cry that nearly broke from him as one rodent
crossed him, its hooked claws rattling against his straps and
buttons, its cold hairless tail sliding snakily over his hand.
He fancied that he saw its eyes shining in the darkness—he
was certain that it had moved and lopped round behind
him—he felt its whiskered snout cautiously approaching
the throbbing artery beneath his ear....  Then his nerve
left him, and he croaked out feebly, though it seemed to him
that he shouted:

"S'cat, you brute!  Get, you beggar!  Halloa; Halloa!
*Belges au secours*!  *Ici un Anglais, grievement blessé*!  Is
anybody there?"

But there came no answer save the muffled thunder of
guns in the distance, the crackle of fire in houses that were
burning, the gurgling of a broken water-main, and the
distressed miaowing of a cat.  It came nearer.  There was a
rustling sound, and the light descent of a furry body on
padded feet; Pussy had jumped in where the window had
been, alighting not far from Franky.  He could see a pair of
green eyes lamping in the darkness, and called, seductively:

"Pussy, pussy!  Come here, old girl!"

The purr came near.  Franky, with infinite torment
reached out a hand, felt and stroked a warm, furry
body.  He said, cautiously feeling for the appreciative,
sensitive places at the nape of a cat's neck, and under the
jaws:

"Good old girl.  Don't know what they call cats in
Flemish, but Pussy seems to be good enough for you.  Stop
and scare the rats away, give 'em fits, eh, Pussy?  You're
agreeable?  Good egg!  Oh—I say!"

For Pussy had walked, loudly purring, on to the chest that
heaved so painfully, and proceeded to knead the surface
scientifically, preparatory to curling down.  Franky set his
teeth, and bore the ordeal.  Thus they kept company until
morning, when Pussy, who proved to be a lean white Tom
with patches of sandy tortoiseshell on flanks and shoulders,
withdrew by the fanged opening where the window had
been.  A moment later Franky heard his late companion
lapping noisily from a street-puddle and knew envy, in the
anguish of his own unrelieved thirst.

He wandered then for a space of hours or instants, in the
days of his own lost childhood.  He was in the night-nursery
at Whins, suffering from some feverish ill.  He felt the
prickling as of innumerable ants running up his limbs and
the sweat upon his forehead, and called meaningly to Nurse
for drink.  But it was his mother in her dinner-dress, with
shining jewels crowning her dark hair, and wreathing her
neck and starring her bosom, who came to the bedside and
leaned over him, put the rumpled hair from his hot forehead,
and held to his lips the cup of milk.  Then a droning sound
made the room vibrate, and he was back with his company
in the hastily-dug trench across the mouth of the
west-running thoroughfare, and church-bells were clanging and
the telephone-buzzer was calling for the reserve to double
out and reinforce the men in the trench enfilading the
bridge....

.. vspace:: 2

Then he was awake and the sun was high.  Those guns
in the west were silent now, though from the south and
south-east came heavy thuds and long vibrations.  Through
the rents in the flooring above him by which the rain had
dripped upon him in the night, he was looking at the blue
sky.  A big white bird hovered there.  Not a bird—a
Taube.  *The* Taube, and he had not dreamed the buzzing
after all.

Oh, but it was queer to lie there under the keen scrutiny
of that eye in the heavens!  It made the prickly ants swarm
up Franky's thighs and sides until the sensation grew
unbearable.  Hate, fierce hate of the murderous, beautiful thing
droning up there in the azure sky above its curious misty
circle made him see everything red, made him want to yell
and shriek.  For Margot was in danger, somehow—somewhere—while
one lay helpless as a log....

"Steady, old child!" whispered Franky to himself, warningly.
"You're going off your chump.  Hold still!"

And he held still.  The Buzzard ceased to buzz, and
floated on, droning.  He fancied that he felt its shadow
darken and pass over him, moving from his head to his feet.
The noise of the tractor stopped.  Reflected in the area of
a skewed wall-mirror he saw the machine volplane down,
and alight without a falter in the Market Place—before
the smoking ruins of the Town Hall.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`LYNETTE DREAMS`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER LXI


.. class:: center medium bold

   LYNETTE DREAMS

.. vspace:: 2

Upon that same night in October nearly five weeks following
the breaking of the Woe Wave, Lynette Saxham had a
strange dream.

It seemed to her that she saw piled up in one colossal heap
the riches of all the world, the world we know and the world
we have forgotten; the treasures of all ages piled up higher
than Kilimanjaro, or Aconcagua, or the cloud-mantled peak
of Mount Everest.  To her feet as she stood spell-bound
amongst the foothills, rolled jewelled crowns, and huge
barbaric torques and diadems of rough gold, precious cups,
vases, and chargers; outpoured treasures of precious stones
and wrought gems of inconceivable beauty and vileness,
wondrous fabrics, marvels of sculpture, weapons, armour
and coins of age beyond the ages—rude discs of tarnished
gold, stamped with the effigies of forgotten kings.  Orders,
decorations, the paraphernalia of Pomp, the stage-properties
of Power, the symbols of every religion, save One, were
mingled in the stupendous pile, and a terrible Voice cried:

"Gone is the age of pride in possession!  Chattels and
fardels are no more!  The days have spilt like pearls from a
broken necklace!  Time has eaten the years as the moth a
garment of wool!  Foredone, foregone, finished!  Who now
will gather riches from the Dustheap of the World?"  And
as new avalanches of treasure rolled downwards to the
reverberation of that thunderous shout, a Hand of Titanic
proportions hurled down upon the heap a war-chariot of beaten
gold, with great scythed wheels, and jewelled harness; and
that vision changed, and the dreamer was drowning, deep
down in clear green seas, under the rushing keel of a huge
barbaric War-galley that was all of gold, arabesqued and
bossed with jewels, and coral, and pearl.

And the sense of suffocation passed, and a wonderful cool
peace flowed in upon Lynette.  She seemed to be led by a
beloved hand that had been dust for years, into a bare
walled place through which a thin breeze piped shrilly.
Someone was there, doing some manual labour.  He turned,
and with a shock of unutterable rapture Lynette was looking
in the face of her lost boy.

Bawne had grown thin and seemed taller.  His temples
had hollowed, his plume of tawny-gold hair hung unkempt
over his wide white forehead.  But his blue eyes were as
sweet as ever.  She had never realised how like they were
to Saxham's in shape and colour, and in expression, until
now.  He thrust his lower jaw out and knit his brows
slightly, as though her face were fading from his vision, and
he wished to fix in mind the memory of its well-loved
features:

"Stay, Mother!  Oh!  Mother, don't leave me!" he cried,
and stretched out his hands to her, and she awakened,
weeping for sorrow and joy.

It was broad day.  Her husband was not there.  She
rose and bathed in the cold water she loved, and dressed in
the simple Quaker-like grey that set off her fairness, and
went out to Mass....  The day's Preparation was taken
from the noble prayer of St. Ambrose, Bishop and Confessor:

"*And now before Thee, O Lord, I lay the troubles of the
poor; the sorrows of nations, and the groanings of those in
bondage; the desolation of the fatherless; the weariness of
wayfarers; the helplessness of the sick; the struggles of the dying;
the failing strength of the aged; the ambitious hopes of young
men; the high desires of maidens; and the widow's tears.  For
Thou, O Lord, art full of pity for all men: nor hatest aught of
that which Thou hast made.*"

He even loved von Herrnung, who had taken her boy, and
kept him in slavery, and robbed the joyous light from his
sweet eyes, and set amongst his red-brown hair one sinister
streak of white.  She saw the bleached forelock dangling
before her eyes when she shut them and tried to pray for
the Enemy:

"Oh God! forgive that evil man, and turn his heart
towards mercy and pitifulness, and give me back Thy precious
gift, for the love of Her who is Thy Mother!"

It was yet early when she returned to Harley Street and
passed at once into the Doctor's consulting-room.  There,
where her lips had first kissed him, sleeping in his chair, she
found Saxham sitting at his table, with his sorrow of heart
revealed in the stoop of his great shoulders, and his greying
head resting upon his hands.  Not a sound did he utter, but
the attitude was more than eloquent:

"Oh my son!" it said.  "Oh me!—my little son!"

"Owen!" she said, coming to his side and touching him.
Then, as he started and looked up: "Bawne is alive!" she
cried.  "I have seen him in a dream, and he has spoken to
me.  He was in a bare high place with corrugated iron walls,
whitened.  It made me think of the Hospital at Gueldersdorp
in the old days, and of a hangar....  His clothes were
soiled and torn, and his hands were blackened.  One other
thing I saw—but I will not wring your heart by telling
you....  It is enough that I have seen our boy....
alive.  Oh! thank God!"  She stopped, and the rose of joy
faded from her cheeks, and only the tears were left there.
Her eyes widened with a terrible doubt.  "You *knew*! ...
It is in your face!  You had heard ... something, and
you did not tell me!"

"I had not the courage.  Despise me, for I deserve it!  I
had news of Bawne at the end of August.  He is with that
man who stole him—"  He clenched the hand that rested
on the table until the knuckles showed white upon it and his
hair was wet upon his forehead and his mouth was twisted
awry.  "Taken with him on errands of aërial reconnaissance—carried
helplessly into battle as a Teddy bear or a
golliwog might be fastened on the front of a racing-plane.
And, when I remember that I bade him risk that journey—"  Saxham
broke off, and turned his face away.  She came
nearer to him and said:

"But he is alive!—alive, even though he be in danger.
My dream was sent to tell me so.  Did not the Mother come
to me in my sleep and lead me to him?  Just as when
she came and sent me here to you.  Now I will atone
for these days of selfish grieving.  Only give me work to
do!"

"Have you not enough upon your hands already?  Too
much, I have sometimes feared."

"Only the Hospice and the Schools," she answered
eagerly, "and the Training Houses for the elder women.
And, thanks to you, these are excellently staffed.  If I
were to die it would make little difference.  Things would
go on just the same."

"Would they?"

She stooped, lifted his hand to her lips and kissed it.  He
looked at her keenly as she did so, and the over-bright flush
upon the thin cheeks and the hollows about the beautiful
eyes, like the burning touch of her hand and of her lips, told
him their tale of woe.

"Not for you.  Nothing would ever be the same for you
or for Bawne.  Therefore—give me more work."

"There is plenty of work, unhappily," he said, "because
of this calamity that has fallen upon the nation.  We have
notice that a hundred wounded men from the Front—many
of them cot-cases—will arrive at SS. Stanislaus and Theresa's
at three this afternoon."

"I shall be there!"

"I am not going to try to dissuade you.  I will not keep
back what God has given to me from those who have given
so much for England.  There is another quarter where you
will be of use."  His eyes were on the triptych frame before
him.  "I speak of that little Lady Norwater—Patrine's
friend—I think you have not met?"

"Oh, but I have.  We were made acquainted with each
other some weeks ago at the Club."  Her delicate face
contracted.  "That day when the news came about the British
losses.  Just before that poor child Brenda Helvellyn
blurted out the dreadful truth.  Owen, it was tragic.  She
had known it from the beginning——"

"And the sister forbade her to breathe a hint of it.  That
is the attitude of the fashionable Sadducean," said Saxham
bitterly, "who not only denies the Atonement and the
Resurrection, but will not admit of Death."

"But," she asked him, "what of Lady Norwater?
Patrine tells me she is ill."

"She is ill.  Lord Norwater—at first reported missing
after an action north of Ypres on the —th is now said to
have been killed."

Lynette was silent.  Her husband knew why her head
was bent and her white fingers sought a little Crucifix she
wore.  She was praying for the dead man.  Presently she
said:

"He was very brave, I believe?'

"He had been recommended for the Victoria Cross for a
special service of great gallantry—rendered during the
Battle of the Aisne.  He was a brave and simple young
man, and very lovable.  His wife received the official
intelligence of his death yesterday.  They 'phoned Patrine,
as you know, and sent for me later.  Lady Norwater is
expecting her confinement at the end of November—and
they were alarmed for her."

"Poor little soul!  Her baby will be a comfort to her!"

Saxham remembered under what circumstances he had
made the acquaintance of Lady Norwater, and his look was
rather grim.  In his mind's ear he heard again the sweet
little voice saying in its fashionable slang jargon:

"Oh no!  I rather cotton to kiddies.  It's the bother of
having 'em doesn't appeal.  It puts everything in the cart
for the Autumn Season."

Still, the recent remembrance of her piteousness softened
the Doctor's never very adamantine heart towards her, the
humming-bird broken on the wheel of implacable Fate.  Not
unnatural, after all.  More of a woman than one would
have thought her.  How she had clasped her tiny hands
together and entreated him, when the worst was feared for
her, to save, to save her child.

"Franky's child.  Perhaps—the boy he hoped for.  Oh! to
have to say *hoped*, hurts so dreadfully.  Yes, yes!  I will
be brave and good and quiet....  I will do everything
that you say.  Ah, now I know why all these days I have
felt Franky near me, and seen his eyes looking at me out of
every stranger's face."

Margot did not cry out in her pain and loneliness for her
friend Patrine to come to her, though she sent loving,
grateful messages whenever Pat called or 'phoned.  But
she had said to Saxham, only that morning: "Doctor, I
met your wife at the Club not long ago.  She is more
beautiful, but so much sadder than the portrait you showed
me.  Ah, yes!  I remember why.  When I am better, would
she come and see me?  Perhaps it is inconsiderate that I
should ask.  But the world is so huge and coarse and noisy
and empty"—the little lip had quivered—"and there is
something in her face that is so sweet, I have been fancying
that it would"—-she hesitated—"be good for me and for
my baby if she would sometimes visit me.  Do you think
she would mind?"

Saxham had answered:

"I will ask her."  Now he gave the piteous message, and
Lynette warmly agreed:

"Of course I will go.  Whenever you say I may!"

"Not for some days.  She is to see no one yet, and your
hands are full with Madame van der Heuvel and Marienne
and Simonne."  The Doctor referred to an exiled Belgian
lady and her young daughters, who had been received at
Harley Street as guests.  "And—there is the Hospital—and
to-night you have to address this Meeting of Suffragists
at the Royal Hall.  It is the only decision of yours, let me
tell you," said Saxham, "that I ever felt tempted to
dispute.  My wife upon the same platform with Mrs. Carrie
Clash and Fanny Leaven!  A triple force of Metropolitan
Police on duty, and detectives at all the exits and amongst
the audience.  It's—"  Words failed Saxham.

"It is unspeakably hateful in your eyes.  Dear Owen, I
know it.  But I should be hateful in my own sight if I were
to break my word.  On the day I first met you we spoke of
these views of mine.  I hold them still.  Marriage has not
altered them.  It is not in me," said Lynette, "to change!"

"You are the soul of faithfulness in all things!"

"Then do not be grieved that I keep to my given promise.
Those who have honoured me by asking me to address them
are aware that my convictions are opposed to theirs at
points.  But while I oppose I admire their ruthless
devotion and their magnificent, unswerving policy of
self-sacrifice——"

"But these felonies," he protested, "these incendiary
attacks upon property——"

"In nine cases out of ten, and I believe the authorities
know it as well as the W.S.S.S., such outrages have not been
committed by Suffragists at all."

"By whom, then?"

"Have we no enemies without our gates even now when
we are at War?"

"Germans...."  A light broke in upon Saxham.
"It's not impossible.  As for scattered literature being
evidence—that can be bought anywhere.  But granted the
blackest sheep of the W.S.S.S. to be proved—piebald, that
will not make me less anxious for you to-night."

He touched a heavy plait of the red-brown hair with a
tender hand and said to her:

"I grudge that the pearls of my wife's eloquence should be
thrown before Suffragists."

"We disagree, dear love," she said to him, "but we do
not love the less for it.  When the Franchise is accorded to
Women, should I vote for one Party and you for another,
will that matter a whit to you?"

"Not a whit," he said, as he kissed her.  "You may give
your vote to whom you choose, so long as the voter remains
mine.  Who was that?"  Saxham's quick ear had heard a
footstep in the hall.  "Madame van der Heuvel coming back
from Mass?"

"It is Patrine!"

"Patrine off and away at this hour?"

"I told her I would explain to you."

"She has explained to you," said Saxham, "and that
should be enough."

"Dear Owen! ... I am sure she wished you to know of
it....  She has gone down to Seasheere, a little Naval
Flying-station on the South-East coast, to meet Alan
Sherbrand on the home-flight from Somewhere in
France."

"I see in to-day's *Wire* that he has been gazetted
Lieutenant," said Saxham.  "One rather wonders, all things
considered, that it has not happened before."

For not once nor twice in the past weeks the big smudgy
contents-bills hung upon railings and worn as a chest-protector
by newspaper-vendors, since paper became too scarce
an article to line street-gutters with, had trumpeted the
name of Sherbrand; and the big black-capitalled headings
had set forth his deeds of daring.  Only to-day they had
announced:

.. vspace:: 1

"SHERBRAND OF THE R.F.C. STRAFES ANOTHER HUN-BIRD.
BAG BROUGHT UP TO NINE, AND TWO ENEMY KITE-BALLOONS.
POPULAR YOUNG AVIATOR NOW VISCOUNT NORWATER,
HEIR-PRESUMPTIVE TO BRITISH EARL."

.. vspace:: 2

"He may be sent back to the Front at any moment—it
is natural that they should wish to be together, don't you
think?"  The speaker added, as Saxham made no immediate
rejoinder: "As they are engaged to be married, and
what is more, engaged with your consent."

"She has told you so?"

"No!"  A shadow of the old smile hovered upon the
sensitive mouth.  "I told her, and she could not deny it....
Oh, Owen!  Do you really believe I have been blind
all this time?"

"I should have known that women have clairvoyance in
these matters.  But Patrine feared that you would think
her unfeeling or inconsiderate——"

"And why?  Because when God sent me a great
grief He gave my poor girl a great happiness?  The
best earthly happiness, save one, that He holds in His
gift."

"I thank Him that you still think so, after thirteen years
of marriage!"

"I shall always think so, Owen.  And it is a great thing
that Patrine has chosen so well.  He is true and brave, and
loves my dear sincerely.  And her love is beautiful and
disinterested.  There is no taint of baseness in her——"

"She has nothing of Mildred or of David, then," flashed
through the Doctor's mind.  Lynette went on:

"No one will ever be able to charge her with venality or
mercenariness.  The succession that they *will* talk of in the
newspapers was not dreamed of when she and Alan fell in
love."

"The succession!  Ah, of course!" the Doctor said;
"There is a possible succession to a Viscounty now that
Lord Norwater's death is proved fact, but only in case Lady
Norwater bears no male child.  But a title would not spoil
Sherbrand, and I agree with you that it has never influenced
Patrine."

"How tired you look!" Lynette said, noting the look of
heavy care and the deep lines of weariness traced on the
stern visage.

"I have several critical private cases, and a long list of
operations for this morning at SS. Stanislaus and Theresa's.
Now go and dress, my sweet, for I have work to do."

And Lynette went with a happier look than she had worn
since the crushing blow fell.  And Saxham shot the bolt of
his consulting-room door and went back to his chair at the
big writing-table, and leaned his head upon his hands.

An Atlas burden of care cracked the sinews of the Doctor's
huge shoulders.  It had not occurred to Saxham when
Patrine had gulped out her pitiful story, and he had
heartened her by bidding her forget, that forgetfulness would
speedily be accomplished at the cost of an honest man.

Now, what to do?  Must Sherbrand take the stranger's
leavings or David's girl be twice the loser by the stranger's
lustful theft?  It was a problem to thrash the brain to jelly
of grey matter, thought the Dop Doctor, drilling his fingertips
into his aching temples—were there no cause for anxiety
elsewhere.

Ah! how much more stuffed the pack that burdened the
big shoulders.  The boy had been taken and the mother
would die of grief.  You could see her withering like a white
rose held near the blast of a smelting-furnace.  Yet there
was nothing to do but look on and play the game.  A bitter
spasm gripped the man by the throat, and slow tears, wrung
from the depths of him by mortal anguish, splashed on the
paper between his elbows and raised great blisters there.
Truly, when the spark of Hope burns dimmest, when the
grain of Faith is a thousand times smaller than the
mustard-seed—when God seems most far away, He is nearest.  We
have learned this with other truths, in the War.  Blood and
tears mingle in the collyrium with which our eyes have been
bathed, that we might see.

Saxham battled down his weakness, and rose up and went
to duty.  None might guess, looking at the Dop Doctor,
that those hard, bright eyes had wept an hour ago.  Later
on, a moment serving, he went to the telephone.

"Halloa!  Is this New Scotland Yard?  M.P.O.?  Halloa!
... I am Dr. Saxham, speaking from SS. Stanislaus and
Theresa's Hospital, N.W.  Can I get word with
Superintendent-on-the-Executive, Donald Kirwall?  Halloa! ...
Thanks, I'll hold the line."

He waited a minute, and the Superintendent answered:

"Halloa!  Dr. Saxham?  Anything we can do for you, sir?"

"Yes.  Put me on six good plain-clothes men at this
Mass Meeting of Suffragists at the Royal Hall to-night.
Can you? ... Halloa! ... I could do with eight or ten!"

"Halloa! ... Well, sir, we'll do what we can.  We'll
be pretty strong in force there, as it happens, Marylebone
and Holborn and St. James's Divisions...."  Something
like an official chuckle came over the line.  "Mrs. Petrell
in the chair, and the Clash and Fanny Higgins.  We've
learned to look for trouble when they get up to speak.
Halloa!  Beg pardon!  I didn't quite hear! ..."

Saxham had cursed the popular leaders.

"Yes, I was aware they'd prevailed on Mrs. Saxham to
address 'em....  Indeed, they're advertising her all over
the shop....  Halloa? ... Certainly we'll put you on
the plain-clothes men you ask for.  But even without
Police to protect her, Mrs. Saxham don't run much risk.
Halloa! ... Why! ... Oh! because an uncommon big
percentage of the audience on these packed nights are
out-and-out loose women.  Soho and Leicester Square, and all
that lot....  Others come up from Poplar and Stepney
and Bethnal Green and Deptford to hear Fanny Higgins.
Halloa?  Do they want the Vote?  Well, naturally these
gay women like the idea of being Represented in Parliament.
If respectable females are going to get good of it, naturally
the prostitutes want the Franchise.  They hold that Woman
Suffrage 'ud improve their conditions.  Halloa! ... You
don't know but what the gay women have as good a right to
vote as the gay men who employ 'em?  No more don't I!
But whatever they are, they appreciate those who spend
their lives in trying to help the unfortunate.  And, West or
East-Enders—the most chronic cases among 'em wouldn't
suffer a finger to be laid on your wife.  All the same, I'll
attend to your instructions.  Doors at 7.  The men shall
be there.  Don't worry yourself!  Four ready back of the
Platform and four more posted right and left of the
proscenium.  Don't mention it!  Very proud to....
Good-afternoon!"

"Good-afternoon and thanks, Superintendent!"

And Saxham rang off, more relieved in mind than he
would have cared to own.  Then the horn of a motor
sounded below in the Hospital courtyard, and another and
another followed.  Tyres crackled on gravel.  The running
feet of men pattered on pavement.  The hall-porter whistled
up the speaking-tube into the Medical Officer's Room, and
Saxham went down, meeting the black-robed Mother
Prioress and the Sister Superintendent on their way to the
great vestibule.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`WOUNDED FROM THE FRONT`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER LXII


.. class:: center medium bold

   WOUNDED FROM THE FRONT

.. vspace:: 2

The wide-leaved front doors stood open.  Doctors and
surgeons, theatre-assistants, students, white-habited Sisters,
blue-and-white-uniformed nurses and probationers, were
swarming in the great vestibule.  Already a double stream
of canvas stretchers, laden with still figures swathed in
iodined gauze and cotton-wool padding, were being carried
up the wide steps, from the big grey-painted Red Cross
motor-ambulances, by R.A.M.C., and blue-uniformed
bearers of St. Theresa's Association, while omnibuses,
private cars, taxis from Charing Cross and Victoria were hauled
up behind, waiting to disgorge their loads.  And cheer upon
cheer went up from the packed sidewalks and roadway;
handkerchiefs waved from the windows of the nearest houses,
and the passengers on the roofs of the omnibuses passing
up and down Wellington Road, Edgware Road, and Praed
Street, stood up and craned their necks in the fruitless
endeavour to glimpse the reason of those frantic cheers.

For the first convoy of wounded from the Front had
reached the Hospital.  These unwashed, begrimed, hairy
brigands, these limping tramps in tattered khaki, these
bandaged cripples leading blind comrades, were our Guards,
our Gunners, our Highlanders, Kents, Middlesex men and
Munsters, our Rifles and Northamptons, our Welsh and
Gloucesters, our Scots Greys and Lancers, our immortals
of those red-hot days of August, and their compeers, the
terrible fighters of the Marne and the Aisne....

They were back, full of cross-nicked, nickel-coated Mauser
bullets, bits of shell and lumps of shrapnel, cheap jokes,
music-hall choruses, vermin, and spunk.  The reek of lysol
and carbolic, the sickly whiff of dysentery and the ghastly
stench of gangrene, brought back to Saxham the Hospital
at Gueldersdorp, as he passed back and forth between the
stretchers, issuing swift orders, briefly wording directions,
marshalling his trained forces with the generalship that had
distinguished him of old.

"Doctor!"

"What is it, Ironside?"  Saxham turned to speak to the
Resident Medical Officer.  "You look off-colour, man!"

"I feel off, sir.  They're so damned full of grit, and cheerful!
Not only the cases from the Base Hospitals, but those
casualties they've sent us direct from the trenches....
Two days in the train getting to Calais—and Lord! the
straw and filthiness in their wounds!  And we've been told
our next War'd be carried out on an absolutely Aseptic Basis,
and here we are back in 1900!"

"Not quite," said Saxham.  "Wounds like these were
never made by Boer shrapnel.  Human bodies shattered
beyond imagination by High Explosive, rank among the
triumphs of Modern Science.  After the Stone Age and the
Iron Age, the Golden Age and the Age of Shoddy has come
the Age of Militant Chemistry.  Martianism, in a word."

"It's an ugly word....  Doctor, that man over there,"
the speaker indicated a pair of hollow eyes staring hungrily
over a huge iodine-smeared gauze muffler, "wants to know
if we can save his lower jaw?  Not that there's much left
of it.  His pal, who interprets for him, says a wounded
German officer shot him in the face with his revolver, 'cos
he went to give the blankety blank a drink out of his
water-bottle.  One of the Gunners—and not long married,
according to the pal."

"All right, tell him!  Name him for one of my beds,"
Saxham said brusquely, and nodded to the owner of the
desperate eyes, saying, as they flared back their gratitude:
"Even if it had been 1821 in the cattle-truck, we're in the
Twentieth Century here.  Warn Burland," he named the
anæsthetist, "for duty at once.  Gaynor Gaynes and Frost
to be ready with the X Ray on Flat I.  Mr. Whitchett and
Mr. Pridd to act as Assistant Surgeons.  We'll take the
worst cases straight away——"

"But, my God, sir! most of these men are beyond Surgery,"
groaned Ironside, cracking his finger-joints.  "Broken
and mashed and rent as they are, what they need is to be
re-created! ... If Christ were to look in here just now,"
the Medical Resident cried in his bitterness, "there'd be
plenty of work in His line.  New tissues to make, bony
structures to re-build.  Organs to replace where organs
have been destroyed.  He'd have done it by mixing earth
with His saliva and anointing.  We might as well spit on
twenty per cent. of these fellows—for all the good we can do!"

"Give them liquid nourishment—brandy where necessary,
and send those I've tagged up to the theatre.  No
waiting to wash—in their cases.  And remember my
Gunner gets the first look-in!"

.. vspace:: 2

Saxham turned and ran at speed, making for the nearest
elevator, found it just going up full of stretcher-cases lying
close packed as sardines, turned and shot up the stone staircase
three steps at a time to the first floor, glittering with
white enamel, polished oak, brass fittings and cleanliness,
under the discreet radiance of shaded electric lights.  The
centre space was occupied by the tribune engirdling the
domed Sanctuary of the Chapel.  Short corridors tastefully
adorned with red-enamelled buckets, blue glass bombs of
chemical fire-extinguisher, and snaky coils of brass-fitted
hose, led to long wards running east, west, north, and
south.

"Eh, Doctor!"

A fair-faced, gentle-eyed Sister of Mercy, in the
wide-winged starched linen cap and guimpe, and white twill
nursing-habit with the black Cross, stood near the lift,
talking to a tall, raw-boned, white-haired Surgeon-General
of the R.A.M.C.  She greeted Saxham's appearance with a
little womanly cry:

"Eh, Doctor!  Never it rains buddit pours."  There
was a hint of Lancashire in her dialect.  "The R.A.M.C. have
sent us ten more cases.  Dear, dear!—but we'll have
our hands full."

"Then you'll be happy, Sister-Superintendent.  I've
never known you so beamingly contented as when you were
regularly run off your feet, and hadn't a minute to say your
Rosary.  Anything specially interesting, Sir Duncan?"

"Aweel!"  The broad Scots tongue of Taggart droned
the bagpipe-note as of old.  "Aweel!  There's an abdawminal
or twa I'd like ye to throw your 'ee over—an' a G.P. that
ye will find in your line.  Fracture o' the lumbar
vairtebra from shrapnel—received ten o'clock yesterday
morr'ning!—an' some cases o' shellitis, wi' intermittent
accesses o' raging mania an' intervals o' mild delusions—an'
ane will gar you draw on the Medical Officer's Emergency
List o' Abbreviated Observations I supplied ye wi' a
guid few years agone."

"I've not forgotten."

"I'm no' dootin' but ye have found it unco' useful."  Taggart's
frosty eyelashes twinkled.  "It has saved my
ain face from shame mair times than I daur tell."  He
quoted, relishingly: "M.B.A.—Might Be Anything!
G.O.K.—Guid Only Knows!  L.F.A.—Luik for Alcohol.
A.D.T.—Any Damned Thing!  'Toch, Sister, I beg your
parr-don!  The word slipped oot—I have nae other excuse!
But my case o' shell-shock, Saxham.  What say ye to an
involuntary simuleetion o' *rigor mortis*?  A man sane an'
sound an' hale—clampit by his relentless imagination into
the shape o' a Polwheal Air-Course Finder, or a pair o'
dividers.  Half open, ye ken.  Ye may stand him on the
ground upo' his feet, an' his neb is pointing at the daisies—or
ye may lie him o' his back in bed—an' his taes are tickling
the stars.  Am thinking it long till I'm bringing ye thegither!
But ye are busied.  I'll no' keep ye the noo."

Racing for the second lift, just emptied of its sorrowful
burden, the big shirt-sleeved Doctor checked in his stride
and touched the handle of a sliding door.  The door shot
back noiselessly in its grooving.  Saxham was in a cushioned
tribune high above the level of the chapel Altar.  The
scent of flowers and the perfume of incense hung like a
benison on the still air of the sacred place.

In one of the carved stalls of the nave the figure of a
priest in cassock and biretta sat reading from a breviary.
It was the Chaplain, waiting in readiness to be called to
administer Holy Unction and Viaticum to some Catholic
soul about to depart.  In the choir behind the high Altar a
slight girl, in the frilled cap and prim black gown of the
Novitiate, knelt on a rush-bottomed prie-dieu absorbed in
meditation, her black Rosary twisted round her clasped
hands.  Prayers that are most earnest are frequently
incoherent.  Saxham formulated no petition as he knelt there
in the tribune, but the cry of his heart to the Divine Hearer
might have been construed into words like these:

.. vspace:: 1

"*If Thou wert here in the visible Body as when of old Thou
didst walk on earth with Thy Disciples, Thou wouldst heal these
broken sons of Thine with Thy look.  Thy Touch, Thy Word!
Yet art Thou here—for Thou hast said it, ever present for Thy
Faithful in Spirit, Flesh, and Blood.  Help O Helper!  Heal
O Healer!  Lord Jesus, present in the Blessed Sacrament of
the Altar, give power and wisdom to Thy servant.  Aid me,
working in the dark by my little flame of hard-won knowledge,
to preserve life, Thou Giver of Life!  Amen.*"

.. vspace:: 2

So having prayed, the Dop Doctor went up to the theatre
and wrought mightily, doing wonderful things in the way of
patching and botching the broken bodies of men.  Later, as
he sat in the Harley Street dining-room playing the courteous,
attentive host to sad-eyed, wistful Madame van der
Heuvel and her two pretty daughters—for Lynette had
dined earlier on account of the Suffrage Meeting—he heard
a latch-key in the front-door and Patrine's well-known step
in the hall.

He excused himself, rose and went out, and spoke to his
niece.  She made a croaking sound in answer, as unlike the
voice of Patrine as the pinched and sunken face revealed by
the hall electroliers, resembled the face of dead David's
handsome girl.  The mouth hung lax.  The cheeks had
fallen.  The eyes stared blank and tearless, from hollow
caves under the broad black eyebrows.  He said with a
pricking of foreboding:

"You have had a long day! ..."

"Not long enough to tire me.  I am made of india-rubber,
I think, and steel."

He considered her a moment with grave, keen eyes that
had no gleam of curiosity.

"Sherbrand is well?  He returned from France in safety?"

"He was quite in the pink when he arrived—and ditto
when he left.  Not that he had much time.  A wireless
came, ordering him to replace an aviator of the Royal
Flying Corps, killed on observation-duty—or whatever it is
they call it—with our fellows on the new Front.  Rough on
him, but he took it smiling.  No, thanks!  I'm not keen
on dinner....  You won't mind if I go to my room?"

"One moment.  Have you had food to-day?" he asked her.

"I forget....  Yes, of course!  There was luncheon at
one o'clock.  The people at the Air Station did us
tremendously well."  Her mouth twisted.  "I think it better to
tell you and Lynette that Alan Sherbrand and I have said
ta-ta!"  She tried to smile.  "I'm back on your hands like
a bad penny!"  Her eyes seemed all black between their
narrowed lids.

They were quite alone, no servant within hearing, and the
dining-room door was shut.  Came the Doctor's low-toned
question:

"Has any—third person made mischief between you two?"

"No, nobody has blabbed to him about anything.  But—he's
wise enough now, as regards this child.  Particularly
wide-O!"  The black, glittering eyes looked dry and hard
as enamel.  Her teeth again showed in that mirthless grin.
"I don't suppose he has the ghost of an illusion left....
Women—most women would say I was a howling fool to
make a clean breast of it.  I never meant to—I can
swear!—when first we got engaged.  I used to call his goodness
stodgy.  I think I despised him for it in certain moods of
mine.  You've never realised the kind of beast I can be.
But more and more, I got to respect him!  And suddenly—I
knew that if I married him under false colours—letting
him believe me to be what I amn't—even though he never
found me out—I'd—never have been able to shake hands
with myself again!"

She moved to the stairs, the sleeve of her coat brushing
the Doctor's great shoulder.

"Don't you suppose God had it all his own way," she
said in that odd, strangled voice that wasn't like Patrine's.
"There were minutes when the World, and the Flesh, and
the Devil were jolly well to the fore.  Alan would marry me
to-morrow if I used the power I *could* use.  But I won't!
I won't!  It'd not be playing the decent, straight game.
So I let him call me heartless, and piffle like that, and then
the game seemed hardly worth playing.  I'd have thrown
up my cards—only the Recall came.  And we said good-bye,
and I saw him fly away like a great white bird, over the
water.  And I'm so strong—so horribly strong—that I
stood it and didn't die....  Even if Alan's killed at the
Front I shan't die....  *Ah-h!* ... You mustn't touch
me!"  Her hands plucked themselves violently from
Saxham's that would have enfolded them.  "I could stand
anything better than pity.  Being pitied would kill
me—though I'm so awfully strong!"

"Then trust us not to pity you—only to love you.  That
I look upon you as a daughter is no secret to you, I
think?"

"No, dear!"  She stroked his sleeve, not lifting her
pitifully reddened eyelids, and then he felt her start.
"Uncle Owen!"  Her hand clenched upon his arm, and her
tear-blurred eyes sought his.  "I must tell you....  He
had news to give me to-day—of Bawne!"

"Nothing worse, thank God!—than what I know
already," Saxham commented when she had told.  He
stood in silence a moment, mastering himself, and the
electric hall-light showed in his harsh square visage the
ravages that grief had wrought.

"How you have suffered!  If only I could do something
to comfort you!" she muttered.  "And Lynette.  Do you
know—there are days"—a sob caught her breath—"when I
daren't even look at Lynette."

"It is so with me!"  His voice was deep and quiet and
sorrowful.  "Old Webster probed deep with his Elizabethan
goose-quill, when he wrote of the

.. vspace:: 1

..

   |  "Greyfe that wastyth a faire woman
   |  Even as wax doth waste yn flame."

.. vspace:: 1

Pray for us both, my dear, and believe that you are a
comfort to us."

She said with a laugh that was half a sob: "I might have
made a hole in the water at Seasheere, or jumped out of the
train on the way back, I daresay, but for the thought of you
both.  Or, if it wasn't that stopped me, my joss was on the
job."

"I had rather say your Guardian Angel."

"Do you think any self-respecting Guardian Angel could
possibly bother about a regular bad egg like me?"

"Mine did—when my wife married me and I was a
peculiarly bad egg."

"You, you dear!"  She suddenly caught him round the
neck and hugged him strenuously.  "Do you think I don't
know—haven't always known how my father and mother
treated you!"

"Time heals wounds of that kind," said Saxham, as they
turned together from the foot of the staircase, and, still
keeping a protecting arm about David's daughter, he
reached his hat and stick from the hall-stand, "though you
may doubt the statement now."

"I can't.  I'd only have to look at mother to——"

"To remember that she is your mother!"

His tone was final in its closure of the subject.  But in
his heart he thanked frail Mildred once again for her ancient
treachery, as he went out to the waiting car, and sped
through London's murky streets to the North-West suburb
where stands the Hospital.

Patrine went upstairs, holding by the balusters and feeling
chilly and old.  In the prettily furnished sitting-room,
communicating with her chintzy bedroom, were her letters,
and a deep cardboard box stood upon a table.  It had been
sent on to Harley Street from the Club, and bore the address
of a Regent Street florist, whose showy establishment
boasted a German name.

The fragrance of roses with a musky after-tang in their
sweetness permeated the atmosphere.  There were no roses
amongst the flowers on the chimney-shelf and cabinets.  It
occurred to Patrine that there must be roses in the box.

Her head was throbbing and her eyes smarted.  She threw
off her hat and coat, pitched them down upon the chintzy
sofa, switched off the electric lights, let up the blinds, pulled
a chair close to the open window, and sat down, resting her
folded arms on the clean, dustless sill.

Sitting there, staring out into the semi-obscurity of
Harley Street, with the late cabs and motors sliding past and
the distant roar of Oxford Street in her ears, she asked
herself:

"Have I behaved like an honourable woman or—a
blithering idiot?  That's what I want to know?"

She waited.  Not one pat on the back was vouchsafed
by an approving Conscience.  The indicator of the dial
slowly travelled in the direction of the blitherer.  Patrine
shut her hot, dry eyes, and began to conjure up the day that
had gone over.  Its sweetness was rendered infinitely
sweeter, its bitterness a hundredfold more poignant by
the knowledge that it was the last, the very last.

If she lived to be old, old, old, she knew she would never
live to forget Seasheere.  The smell of the hot thyme and
sun-baked grasses of the cliffs, the rhythmic *frrsh!* of the
salt waves upon its shingle, the shrill piping of its gulls, and
pale blue of its skies would never fade, never cease, never be
silent, never alter....  For on Seasheere cliffs her Wind
of Joy had blown for the last time.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`BAWNE FINDS A FRIEND`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER LXIII


.. class:: center medium bold

   BAWNE FINDS A FRIEND

.. vspace:: 2

The machine that could hover like Sherbrand's "Bird of
War" had come down in the Market Place.  A big grey
two-seater monoplane, with the rounded cleft bird-tail and
wings of the German Taube type.  You could see a number
on its side and three big black Maltese crosses, and the
profile heads of pilot and passenger showing up in strong relief
against the blackened ruins of the Town Hall.

A bomb hung in its wire cage-holder on the visible side of
the fuselage.  It struck Franky that the airman must be
profoundly sure of himself, or culpably reckless to have
come down before getting rid of the thing.  A swivel-mounting
like a barless capital A supported a machine-gun
above the radius of the tractor, and well within reach of the
pilot's hand.

The pilot got down.  He was tall and big, with a red
moustache; a man whose natural height and bulk were so
augmented by the padded helmet topped with the now-raised
goggles, the pneumatic jacket girt in by a broad band
of webbing, supporting a brace of large revolvers, and the
heavy bandolier he carried, that the figure of his companion,
scrambling after him, seemed that of a mere dwarf.

The man who saw, *per* medium of the rakishly-angled
looking-glass yet hanging on the wall of the wrecked parlour,
conceived a horror of the Troll-like creature in its big
helmet, and the full-sized oilskins that hung in folds about
its diminutive body, the skirts reaching nearly to the
ground.  When the two passed beyond the mirror's area
of reflection, the doubt whether they might not have
discovered his whereabouts and be stealthily creeping up from
the rear to attack him, made him shudder, and brought the
perspiration starting in the hollows of his sunken temples
and cheeks.

Minutes passed.  He waited with his eyes upon the
mirror.  Someone was approaching from the direction of
the Market Place, keeping well under the broken walls of
the houses fringing the narrow *trottoir*.  Where an avalanche
of tiles and brickwork had fallen, he must perforce skirt the
obstacle, and thus for an instant be reflected in the glass.
Meanwhile the sound of nearing footsteps—sometimes
muffled in thick dust, or clicking over cobblestones, or
tripping and stumbling among bricks and rubble—grew
more distinct.  The red-moustached giant could not walk so
lightly.  It must be the Troll—could be no one but the
Troll!  The suspense of waiting had tensed into unbearable
agony when the sound of a voice crying broke out in the
deathly silence of the place.

"Oh, oh!"  Like a woman or a child's uncontrolled
wailing.  "Oh—the poor men!  Oh, the poor women and
the li-ittle ch-ildren!  Oh!" and *da capo*, working up to a
crescendo of agony, and dying away in heartbreaking sobs.
It was so strange—not that there should be weeping in
these razed and ravaged streets, but that the voice that wept
should be a voice of England—that it begot in the helpless
man who heard doubts of his own sanity, and a reckless
desire to dissipate such doubts.  He heard himself call out:
"Who is crying there?"

And a treble voice piped back, and stumbling over the
moraine of *débris* tongueing from the avalanche of broken
tiles and masonry, came—not the Troll-dwarf in his huge
disguising helmet and outsized pneumatic jacket—but an
urchin of twelve or thirteen—in the familiar dress of a Boy
Scout—minus the smasher hat and staff.

"Me for the gay old life!" meditated Franky.  "Thought
I was getting groggy in the upper works—and now I know
it!  A British Boy Scout in his little khaki shirt, with a row
of gadgets on his left sleeve, and ribbon tags to his little
garters, all on his little lone in the middle of
this—Gehenna!"  He spoke to the fever that galloped through his
veins in the tone of a patron presiding at the test-display of
a Cinema Film Company: "Pretty good, but you can do
better.  Roll along with a troop of blue-eyed Girl Guides,
old Touch-and-Go!"

.. vspace:: 2

The Scout's figure vanished out of the glass.  There was a
sound of scratching and scrambling.  The broken floor jarred
to the impact of a light body, and a boyish treble called:

"Is—is anybody here?  Anybody—English?"

The voice quavered on the last word.  Franky knew that
this was delirium.  He grinned under his four-days' beard,
and the grime and soot and plaster that masked him, and
answered in a series of Bantu clicks, so leather-dry was his
tongue:

"Me as per descrip: to fol: Young British sossifer of
good fam: irrepro: ref: and tophole edu: badly dam: by
Hun shell!  Greatly in need of the com: of a ref: Chris: ho:
Mus: in the eve: and intell: conver: greatly appre:"  He
shut his stiff eyelids and opened them again, but the
imaginary Scout had not gone.

"You're dreadfully—hurt.  Couldn't I do—something?"
the treble voice piped.  Its owner was now squatting on his
heels in the shade of Franky's penthouse of planks.  The
knuckles he rested on the floor were cracked and grimy, and
his deeply-freckled, fair-complexioncd face was lined, and
anxious and thin.  His blue eyes were swollen with crying,
though his sensitive lips wore a wistful, crooked smile.
"You *are* real?" he asked wistfully, and Franky answered,
huskily:

"Rather!  In fact, I'm a lot more real than you.  Who
are you, since we're gettin' personal?"  He repeated slowly
after the boy:

"'Bawne Mildare Saxham, Scout No. 22.  Fox Patrol,
331st London W.'  Seems good enough."  He shut his hot
eyes wearily.  "But if you're solid—you'd get me a drink!"

There was a little stir.  The Scout had gone.  Franky
knew it without opening his eyes, yielding to the deadly
sinking faintness engendered by the effort of speech.  A
mountainous weight crushed his chest, and his legs were cold
and heavy as ingots of pig-iron.  It occurred to him that at
this rate the—wind-up—could not be far off.  And a great
horror fell upon him like a pall, and cold sweat broke forth
and streamed upon his haggard face and broken body.
Death for one who so loved Life and the pleasant things of a
commonplace existence....  A cricket-match, a day with
the hounds, a funny *revue*, a game of polo, a break at
billiards, a clinking run with the car, a fine cigar.  Mess in
camp after the hard day's march, long, cool drinks with bits
of ice tinkling in the tumbler.  That new, fierce pleasure
tasted in his first experience of real fighting....  And
oh! how much sweeter than these the scent of Margot's hair, the
light of Margot's eyes, the clasp of her arms about his neck,
the hope of fatherhood, never now to be realised....

"My little chap!" he muttered, and his heart wept, but
no tears came to his arid eyes.  Then something cold
touched his mouth.  The rim of a cup with water in it.
"Thank you!" he said, after a gulping draught, opening his
eyes with the sense of reviving coolness stealing through his
parched vitals.  "That's—absolutely IT!"

The boyish treble said with a quaver in it:

"If I set this can beside you—I got the water from the
pipe that is running—and the broken cup near it, could you
manage to dip it in?  Are you able to move this hand?"

"First class!" whispered Franky, lifting the member a
very little way and dropping it again.  "The—the other
arm came in for it when the shrapper hit me in the ribs....
Halloa!  Chocolate," for a bit touched his lips and
was gently pushed between them.  "That reminds me.
I've an iron ration somewhere about me.  No—they took
my pack off when I got crumped up."  It had seemed only—decent
to Franky in those days of endless foot-slogging, to
carry a pack and a Lee-Enfield and fare no better than his
men.  "Frightfully obliged.  But I won't take this."  This
being another scrap of chocolate.  "Is thy servant a Boche
that he should stodge kid's grub?"

"You're English!"  The blue eyes were full of hungry
worship.  "Man alive!" quavered the boyish treble, "you
don't know how I've wanted to hear an English voice again.
Tell me"—he panted and was pale under his multitudinous
freckles, and the beating of the childish heart shook the thin
young frame—"the Germans haven't beaten England—and
sunk our Navy, and wiped out our Army—and killed
the King, and Lord Roberts, and the Chief Scout, and Lord
Kitchener, and—and my father and mother and everyone?"

"No!" said the wounded man, and his faint whisper was
as convincing as though the negative had been shouted with
the full strength of vigorous lungs.  "Is that the kind of lie
they've been pitching you?  Perhaps it does 'em good to
believe it!  Let 'em, if they like.  It'll never be true!"

"I knew it couldn't!"  The clear treble had lost its
quaver.  "And yet there were times when I was funky.  *He*
seemed so awfully sure at—the beginning!  And—the
Enemy never stops—rubbing it in!"

"Who is the Enemy?"

"His name is von Herrnung.  And—and I must go now,
for—for your sake."  The eyes flickered, and their pupils
dilated to wide circles of frightened blackness.  "He might
wake up—and come—and find you.  And if he found
you——"

When the arteries have been almost depleted by hæmorrhage,
and the strength of the body has ebbed to vanishing
point, the brain is sometimes dazzlingly clear.  Thus, though
the faint whisper barely reached the ear of the other, the
haggard eyes looking out of the begrimed and unshaven face
of the man lying in the blood-soaked stretcher were alert
and observant.  He said reassuringly:

"He won't come just yet.  Tell me more about him, and
all about yourself."

How strangely lined and pinched and puckered was the
young face with its clear red-and-white sprinkled over with
brown freckles.  Fine dust of dew-beads started upon
forehead and temples and cheeks, the half-opened mouth
twitched nervously, though he thrust out his under-jaw
and knitted his reddish brows in a gallant effort of
self-control.

"His name is von Herrnung.  He is the German Field
Flight officer who took me away from England.  I wrote
down the date in my Scout's pocket-book so that I mightn't
forget.  It was July 18th.  He was trying Mr. Sherbrand's
hawk-hoverer at Hendon.  He asked me to go up with
him——"

"Great Snipe!" panted Franky weakly.  "Are YOU the
boy who dropped the wallet with the Clanronald Papers and
the scratched message in the North Sea?"

The blue eyes understood.  "There was a wallet," said
their owner.  "I don't know what was inside, of course.
But he——"

A spasm of trembling went through the slender body.  He
bent his head, and blinked his eyes, and the muscles of his
throat and jaw worked as though he fought down an hysterical
access of tears.  And a broad shaft of golden light,
falling on the young bare head, showed how the shining
red-brown hair had been roughly clipped in ridges, leaving
a forehead-tuft oddly streaked with white.  Amongst the
crowds of homeless exiles endlessly streaming along the
roads of this scourged and tortured country, or crouching
amongst the wreckage of its ruined villages and battered
towns, heads even younger than this boy's had displayed
the tragic sign.

"Poor kid!" Franky muttered, recognising it as the result
of overwhelming physical shock and unnatural mental
strain.  "He knew what was inside? ..."

"I don't think so!  If he had known when the submarine
picked us up in the North Sea—I think he would have killed
me!  He would like to kill me now, he says"—the apple in
the boy's throat jerked—"because through me he has been
*degradiren*—reduced from Captain to Supernumerary Officer
Pilot—and has had his Third Class of the Red Eagle taken
away!  That was done at the big Wireless Station—Nordeich,
they called it——"

"Nordeich....  Of course ... in German West Friesland.
Thrash along—I'm following you.  Did they Court
Martial the Flying Man?" Franky whispered; and Bawne
whispered back:

"The Emperor punished him! ..."

"The Emperor, did you say? ..."

"Yes.  He came to Nordeich—in—I've forgotten
what they call it when great people want to move about
without red carpets and lots of fuss."

"Incognito."

"Incognito.  He'd broken off his yachting-trip in
Norwegian waters—and landed at Kiel only that day.  I heard
men whisper it....  He was dressed in the field-grey, like
his War Minister von Falkenhayn—-and his generals of the
Imperial Staff—and all the other officers and men.  But he
'stripped off the War-harness,'—that's what they called
it!—before he got into the Potsdam train."

"Go on! ... What did he look like? ... They say
he has changed a lot o' late."

"I couldn't tell.  I'd only seen photos that made him
look younger and hid his short arm.  But even if he hadn't
sat while the others stood—and worn the Iron Cross, Grand
Class—and the Black Eagle with diamond swords and a
Crown Imperial—I'd have known it was the Emperor, by
his eyes."

"By his eyes, you say! ..."

The boy's heart throbbed visibly, the breath came in
short puffs through his nostrils, and his lips were twisted
awry as he smiled.  The smile stiffened out as he nodded.
"By his awful eyes! ... When they looked at you they
made you feel tired, and empty, and—queer.  But when they
got angry—you were reminded of—of a tiger lurking to
spring out of a cave of ice!"

"Ah!  So he got angry, did he?"

Bawne nodded.

"When I wouldn't answer the questions he asked me—he
talked English—about how the brown satchel had come
unstrapped and tumbled into the sea.  And he said to an
officer: 'Show him your whip!'—and he did—and it was
short-stocked and covered with leather, like a dog-whip—with
three thongs strung with little balls of lead.  Man
alive!  you ought to see my back.  Though they only hit
me once!"  He winced, and flushed, and paled.  "I
was a coward to squeal—though when they asked:
'Will you tell now?' I *did* say: 'Not to stop you from
killing me!'"

"Good egg you!  Great Snipe!—if I'd been there.  With
a Service Revolver—!  Never mind....  Go on!"

"I forget....  Oh!—they pulled on my shirt and gave
me some strong stuff to drink.  Corn brandy, I think it
was—and then He got up and came round the table and began
to talk to me.  He said I must not be an obstinate boy, for
in another few days there would be War.  Our pitiful little
Army'd be wiped out and our Fleet sent to the bottom of
the sea.  The British Isles would be *Deutsch Brittanien*—and
English people who would not swear to be good Brito-German
subjects of their new Emperor and Overlord would
be instantly put to death.  But if I told up about the brown
satchel I would be permitted to live, and possibly my parents
also.  If I said No!—nothing would be left but to call
back the officer with the whip."

"Coaxin', wasn't he?  And what did you tell him?"

"I said: 'You've only said you're going to conquer
England, Sir.  You haven't done it yet!"

It was not merely the treble voice of a courageous child
answering.  It was the utterance of a race untamable and
indomitable.  Franky could hear the metal balls on the
whip clink one against another as the loaded thongs were
shaken out....  He whispered with dry lips:

"Then——?"

"Then I don't quite know.  I was sick and sleepy, and
the blood was running down my back under my shirt.  If
they had killed me I wouldn't have cared much.  Perhaps
he saw that, for he called up von Herrnung.  He was not to
be dismissed from the Field Flying Service—because of the
War that was coming!—but he was to forfeit his Order of
the Red Eagle and rank as a Supernumerary Officer Pilot.
Man alive!—you should have seen how that big man
squirmed and crawled and blubbered."  The young lips
curled, and the jaw thrust out contemptuously.  "'Thanks!
Gratitude! ... My blood to prove devotion! ... All I
ask—the service of danger—the reconnaissance under
enemy fire!'  And the Emperor——"

"Kicked him, I hope!"

"No, he said: 'Supernumerary Officer Pilot von Herrnung
you will now to your Flying Headquarters return.  Let it
be your task to win back at the cost of a thousand lives—if
you had them—the lost esteem of your Emperor.  Take
this boy with you.  Make of him a decent German.  It is
"up to you," as the English say.'  And then the Wireless
went '*S'ss!  Crackle!  Pzz!*' and the telephone-bell said
'*Pr'rr!*' and the room was cleared—they said because of a
Call from the Winter Palace at Petersburg."

"And where did they take you after you left the Wireless
Station?  Go on—I'd like to hear you tell!"

The boy glanced round uneasily and then mastered his
apprehensions.  The grimed hands went to his stocking-top
and pulled out a squat little book.  The coloured presentment
of a Boy Scout adorned its soiled leather cover, and
the thumbed leaves of the diary within were pencilled from
end to end.  The Odyssey of a Saxham Pup, one might
have called the story whispered into the ear of the wounded
man by the boy squatting at his side.

.. vspace:: 2

One had been taken by train to Bremen and thence to
a place called Taubefeld, in West Hessen.  Flight Station
XXX was here on a vast stretch of heath.  There were
rows of great hangars, and a vast army of motor floats
and lorries, upon which machines, hangars, telegraph-installations,
workshops, mess-houses, and quarters for officers
and mechanics, could be placed when the mobilisation-order
came and transported by road or rail.

One had fallen sick at Taubefeld—the effects of that
North Sea ducking.  One had waked up with a skin-cropped
head wondering where one was.  A woman who
helped in the cookhouse had given one broth and gruel and
the medicine prescribed by the doctor.  One had crawled
off one's straw palliasse weakly and shakily, and so won
forth into a new, unfriendly world.

One's parole had been taken—and one was thenceforth
free to move about and see things—when one was not
wanted to help oil or clean wires or sweep up the hangars.
There was grub enough: bacon-soup, potato-salad, and
sausage, queer but not uneatable.  Nobody was really
brutal as long as one didn't speak English, or even German
with a British accent, too much at one time.  *Keine
Unterhaltung da!* ("No conversation there!") some officer
or N.C. would yell at one, and the rebuke was generally
accompanied by the swishing cut of a cane.

Consequently the Saxham Pup had bent himself to
acquire German, as spoken by Germans, and schooled
himself to employ his eyes and ears while maintaining
economy in the use of his tongue.  He had found out his
whereabouts from an envelope he had picked up, and other
things from listening to the officers' conversation, and the
talk of the mechanics in the big hangars.

War was the thing everybody talked about.  There was
going to be bloody War in a twinkling.  The German Navy
was going to smash the British Navy into matchwood,
everybody was quite sure.  The German Army was going to walk
over the miserable little British Army—and then would be
expiated the sins of the British Government and the diabolical
plottings of Sir Edward Grey.  Throat-cuttings, shootings,
and hangings were mentioned in connection with the
above, and other personages whom British Boy Scouts hold
in reverence.  But one had had to bear it and hold one's
tongue, and keep smiling.  That was the method of the
Chief who had said to one: "Quit yourself like a man."

Brave advice, possible to follow by day when alien eyes
were watching.  One could choke down weak tears and the
ache of the lonely heart that cried for Home and the dear
familiar faces, when the Birds of War were roaring and whirring
up the night-field or down out of the sky.  But at night,
in the grim, unfriendly dark of the sleeping-cupboard, without
other witness than the thin, sore-eyed white kitten that
shared one's meals and slept beside one on the hard straw
mattress under the foul-smelling grey blanket,—things were
harder.  One had got through, after a fashion, by "rotting"
and making believe.  One did not set down in the Scout's
Note-Book or tell the wounded friend on the stretcher how
one had kissed the back of one's own hand, and whispered,
"Good-night, Mother!" and touched one's cheek with the
tips of two fingers and whispered, "Good-night, and God
keep and bless you, my darling boy!"

Amongst other things of interest picked up by day, one
found out that Supernumerary Officer Pilot von Herrnung
was cold-shouldered by the officers of the Flight Squadron,
which he had captained before his fall.  No longer top-dog,
he was made to pay for his domineering and swaggering.
He resented this, by swaggering more.  The men talked of
this in the hangars, as they tuned-up wires or cleaned the
engines.  Von Herrnung was *Unglücklich*.  Nobody liked
him.  The Squadron would not stand him long.  Hadn't he
insulted the Herr Squadron-Captain Pilot who had succeeded
and challenged him, and got his cartel back again?

"Colossal insolence!" he had fumed.  "A challenge from
a person of my rank confers an honour on him who receives
it.  Not a man among you stands upon my level.  Deny it
if you can!"

"True, very true!" the Lieutenant-Observer who had
brought back the challenge was reputed to have retorted.
"Not a man among us has ever been degraded, therefore,
Herr Supernumerary Officer, you stand alone.  And we of
the Field Flight do not regard your presence among us as a
distinction.  You may possibly conceive that?"

He had said it just as though he had had a stink under
his nose, according to the narrator.  And he had dropped
von Herrnung's letter on von Herrnung's table, wiped his
fingers ostentatiously upon his handkerchief, given the ghost
of a salute—wheeled and gone out.  After that the whilom
favourite of Fortune had turned sullen and solitary, and
developed such desperate recklessness that men funked to
fly with him.  Subsequently the Bird of War hovering-gear
having, after due examination by Government experts, been
relinquished to its captor, he had had the mechanism
adapted to a Taube monoplane, and thenceforward made
Her Dearest the sharer of his flights.

You are to suppose Bawne snatching fearful joys in the
realisation of cherished ambitions.  Loathing and fearing,
he yet admired the big red-haired man, so superbly brave in
the air that seemed his natural element.  Equally the man,
detesting the child, grudgingly acknowledged his courage
and obedience.  No queerer companionship may have been
than this between the Enemy, and the son of Saxham and
Lynette.

When the Flight Squadron shifted to Aix-la-Chapelle,
a huge seething caldron of military preparation,—"Does
England declare War against us?" people asked the Flight
officers.  "It is probable," they answered, "*Gott sei
danke!*"  Upon the Third of August, starting at night, Bawne had
made a long flight with the Enemy.  At midnight the
Taube had hovered over a great, beautiful city twinkling
with millions of electric lights.

"That is Brussels you see down there," shouted von
Herrnung through the voice-tube.  "The city is *en fête*
because of the agreement arrived at between the Emperor
and the Belgian King.  That means England has lost a
friend, and made another enemy.  Do you understand,
little English swine?"

And von Herrnung, who had brought a Wireless outfit,
had busied himself in picking up messages from a
low-powered installation at the German Embassy and
transmitting them to Somebody, high in authority, who waited at
Berlin.  He had grown more and more peeved as he went
about his business, Bawne could not tell why but Franky
understood quite well.

Belgium had not been content that the Red Cock should
perch upon her British neighbour's roof, while her own house
remained unscathed by fire.  Franky smiled, knowing this
to have been the burden of the song sung by the tuned
sparks.  Broad day had found the big city humming with
mobilisation, enormous placards printed in the National
Colours, with: "BELGIUM REFUSES!" and "ROI, LOI,
LIBERTÉ," posted in all the public places—and a park of
heavy Artillery concentrated round the Etterbeek Barracks,
as von Herrnung had flown back to Aix-la-Chapelle on the
morning of August 4th.

Bawne went on:

The Flight Squadron had been attached to a Field Artillery
Division of the Second Corps, under a General named
von Kluck.  A huge man he, with a square head and a big
mouth full of broken teeth.  Bawne had previously seen
him at the Wireless Station where he had been taken on
landing from the submarine.

They had seen little of the aviation-base, from the
beginning of hostilities.  The Powers that Were had promptly
taken von Herrnung at his word.  For him were the long-distance
flights, the delicate and risky missions, the dangerous
reconnaissances over the Allied batteries.  Driven by
that gadfly of desire to regain the lost distinctions, he
seemed to have lost all sense of fear and to bear a charmed
life.

Thus, while von Kluck's Advance was opposed at Mons
by the stubborn thrust of the British Forces, the Buzzard
earned his nickname by his tireless quest for Death.  It
eased his grudge against mankind to hunt men—and he
hunted; hovering and observing, wirelessing and spotting,
utilising one machine for many purposes,—in those days
when War Flying was as yet in its infancy—sniped at by
the sharpshooters of four out of seven British Divisions—often
waging, with automatic pistol and Krupp machine-gun,
fierce battles with other Paladins of the Wing, on the
boundless lists of air.

How many times the boy's heart had cried for pity when
some brave bird crippled by a spout of lead, or fired by an
explosive bullet, had gone spinning earthwards, showing the
Three Crosses of the Union Jack, or the blue-white-red
circles of France's tricolour—or the red-black-yellow of the
Belgian Flag upon its upper and under-wings as it fell.

They had bombed Paris two days before, and bombed
Ypres that morning, starting from a Flying Base near the
city of Bruges.  Bawne knew the place was Ypres because
it was marked in red on the roller-map.  The British General
Headquarters were supposed to be there.  All the bombs
had been used except two, and the Enemy must have forgotten
to get rid of these before he landed.  He was generally
careful, but not so when he drank much.  And lately
he had drunk a good deal, there was so much wine in
the country.  He had come down and gone into the
restaurant to quest for food and champagne.  If he found, he
would eat hugely and drink heavily, and then sleep himself
sober.  He always slept after a bout before taking to the
air again.  But sometimes when he had mixed drinks he
got savage instead of sleepy, and then——

"Do you mean that he thrashes you?" Franky interjected here.

"Rather!  Just look!"

There were bright red, newly-made weals and brown and
purplish old ones on the little muscular, boyish arm from
which the speaker stripped the sleeve.

"My back and legs are lots worse," he volunteered with
the air of a showman.  "I sometimes think he'd like to kill
me.  But he won't"—the blue eyes were shrewd under the
white-streaked forelock—"because of what the Emperor said."

"'Take the boy with you and make of him a decent
German.'  For fear of your being sent for, he—  Yes, I
understand! ... My Christmas!" Franky whispered,
opening his haggard eyes, and the fire that burned in them
scorched up the water, "If I only had the use of this bashed-up
body I'd jolly soon put the fear of God into the howling
brute!"  His uncertain hand fumbled about the butt of his
Webley and Scott revolver.  "Shoot him—and make tracks
for Headquarters with you in his Taube.  Can't fly for
monkey-nuts though.  Can you?"

"A little."  There was a lightening of pleasure in the
sombre depths of the blue eyes.  "He lets me do plain,
straight flying when he's sending Wireless, or photographing
or observing.  I've never started from the ground yet, or
done a landing, though I'm sure I could if I tried.  *He* has
shown me lots and lots.  And I do what he tells me."  The
forehead knitted under the ragged piebald forelock.  "He
bluffs about shooting me if I don't obey.  But before I
drink brandy or do other things that are blackguardly—or
throw bombs on the British and the Allies, he *shall* kill me!
I've told him—and he knows I'll keep my word."

"I pipe.  And can't you manage to do a flip on your
own," came back in the nearly extinguished voice from the
sunken chest of the helpless figure on the blood-soaked
stretcher.  "One o' these fine days when von Thingamy
isn't wide?  What's to hinder your getting away now and
pushing South to meet the British Advance-guard?  We
blew up the bridge when we left the town, but it's up to you
to swim the river.  Or cross with a barrel or a plank."

"Yes.  And I've often planned to bunk it!  But—Man
alive!—he's frightfully clever.  He knows a Scout sticks to
his Word of Honour—and he always asks for my Parole."

"F'f!  That's a poser, old son."  Franky considered.
"If I were in your shoes I'd take to givin' the strictly limited
parole.  Two hours—or three—or four....  There's a
chance if the time expires without renewal—of being able
to—perpetuate a strictly honourable bunk.  So, best Kid,
live in hopes and watch out for chances, and one day——"

The speaker's voice trailed off into indistinctness.  A
deadly vertigo came upon him.  He sank amidst swirling
waves of grey nothingness, to emerge after æons, to
consciousness of the morning sunshine, and the warm rain
dropping on his clammy cheek and hand.

"Oh, oh!  I thought you were dead!"  It was the wailing
voice he had heard long ages back.  "Like all the other
people....  The poor men and women and the little
children——"

"Dead!  Not a bit of it!  Only shamming for a drink,"
Frankly whispered, as the cup with its blessing of cool water
revisited his baked lips: "Look here.  Where did you tell
me your Flying Devil was?"

The boy said, with a scared glance through the breached
front wall of the baker's parlour, out into the street where
the golden sunshine played upon War's havoc and desolation:

"I said he went into the restaurant in the square where
the—the dead people are piled up—to hunt about for wine."

"I remember.  What's that?"

The gaunt eyes rolled towards the yawning gap where
once had been the window.  The white lips whispered,
"Did you hear?  I'll swear somebody laughed."

Both held their breath.  Not a sound reached them
except the sliding of some *débris* from a pile of shattered
masonry, and the gurgling of the water in the broken
street-main.  Franky mustered breath and went on:

"And now shake hands and scoot, my son, for this spot
isn't healthy.  Say 'Good-bye and God bless you!'  And—if
you didn't mind—you might kiss me"—the uninjured
hand lifted clumsily and pointed—"here on my forehead....
Steady on!  Hold hard!  Thumbs up, old man!"

For sobs were racking the thin young frame, and the
bright tears were running.  He gasped out:

"I—I—can't go away and leave you—to—to die all alone!"

*Die....*

The dreadful word, at last, dropping with a dull shock
through the wounded man's consciousness as a heavy stone
sinks through deeps of black water.  Swirling rings of mist
in Franky's brain, threatened to close down and blot out all
things.  He thrust back the grey menace of unconsciousness
with a brave effort, whispering:

"Die....  Rats!  What are you—talking about?  It's
me for the gay life every time!  All I've—got to do is to lie
here—and—wait until they fetch me....  They're
coming—before to-morrow morning—give you my solemn word!"

"You're sure?"

"Dead sure.  Look here—can you remember my name
was Norwater?  Captain, First Battalion Bearskins
Plain?"  The stumbling voice went on as the boy nodded: "Well
then, I'd like you to put in a word for me when you say
your prayers, sometimes.  I might have a little chap of
my own, by-and-by, to do that for his Pater.  What's this,
best child?"

A black wooden Crucifix with the Figure of Our Lord in
white plaster was being held close to the dimming eyes.

"It's a Crucifix.  I think it must have fallen down from
the room that was above here.  Won't you keep it—to help
you through the night-time—just as the one on my Rosary
helps me? ..."

"Good egg!  Do you pray to it—and kiss it?"

"We pray—not to it, but to Our Lord who died for us
and lives in Heaven.  We kiss it—because even if it isn't
pretty it is His Image—and has been blessed by a priest."

"Wipe my mouth first, please.  You'll find—hanky in
my pocket.  Thanks!"  He asked, after his discoloured lips
had touched the Feet of the Crucified: "Isn't there
something one ought to say?  A prayer—or something!  Not
much time now—before they fetch me.  Tell quick—what
words say!"

"You couldn't have anything better than Our Father.
Our Lord made that prayer Himself.  But there are lots of
others.  The little ones are easiest.  Say: '*Jesu, have mercy
upon me!*'"

The weak voice came stumbling after.

"Jesu, have mercy on me!"

"*Jesu, help me!*"

"Jesu, help me!"

"*O Thou who didst die for sinful men upon the Cross, have
mercy upon me a sinner!*"

The glassy eyes stared upwards and past the boy, and a
thin scarlet thread began to trickle from the corner of his
mouth....

"O Thou who didst die—upon the Cross—mercy—me a sinner!"

The stumbling voice trailed away into silence.  The
glazing eyes, meeting Bawne's, said plainly: "Now go!"
And as the boy, blind with tears, turned in obedience to
their order, a dull flame leaped into them.  They had seen
the tall half-length of a big man, panoplied in the goggled
helmet and pneumatic jacket of the aviator, bulking in
the window-gap, even before Bawne knew that the Enemy
was there.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`AT SEASHEERE`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER LXIV


.. class:: center medium bold

   AT SEASHEERE

.. vspace:: 2

The narrow white footpath had suddenly led nowhere.
Patrine had found herself standing at the edge of a four-foot
bluff, looking down upon a grassy plateau that gently sloped
to the brink of the cliffs.  A wire fence enclosed an
aggregation of stone-grey wooden buildings dominated by a
flagstaff and the latticed steel tower of a Wireless installation.
The White Ensign flapped lazily from the halyards of the
flagstaff, there were three hangars at a little distance away.
A row of seaplanes sat on the grass before them, and some
figures of men in overalls or the familiar Naval uniform
moved in and out and about the machines busily as ants.
Where the grassland stopped at the cliff-edge the roofs
of other hangars showed, that were built upon the shingle.
A little way out beyond the line of foam where the long
green lips of the sea mumbled at the wet pebbles, another
row of seaplanes lashed to buoys, rocked like gulls drowsing
after a gorge of fish.  And far out to sea, where the heavy
trails of smoke bannering from the funnels of rushing grey
hulls betokened the War activities of the Fleet in the
Channel, and the conning-towers of big submarines sometimes
pretended to be little stocky steamers sitting on the
swell, two strange bat-like things rose and circled and
swooped, and were hidden in grey-blue mists to rise again,
and swoop and circle....  And a little dinghy with
two blue figures in it was pulling out from the beach in
the direction of the anchored planes.

"Beg pardon!  But—aren't you Miss Saxham?"

She craned her long neck, looking for the speaker, and
found him in a youthful Flight Sub-Lieutenant, who, standing
below the grassy bluff, was looking up with very brown
eyes at the tall figure in the narrow skirt of tan, white and
rose-pink chequers, the low-cut blouse of guipure lace, and
the knitted silk coat of rose-pink.  Buckled pumps adorned
the well-arched feet, clad with navy blue silk stockings of
liberal open-work.  She sported a buff sunshade lined
with rose, and a hat of rough tan straw, trimmed
with quills of navy blue and rose-pink, sat coquettishly on
the beech-leaf hair.  She gave the boy one of her wide
smiles, evading the "Yes" by nodding, and with a cat-like
leap and scramble, he was up the grassy bluff and standing
before her, blushing and saluting and holding out a scribbled
paper-pad.

"For me?"

"For you—if you're Miss Saxham.  It's a Wireless came
this morning—from your—from a great friend of yours.
Somewhere in France."

"Oh—thank you!"

She pulled off a loose buff glove and stretched a large
white hand for the paper-pad.  The message ran:

.. vspace:: 1

"6 a.m.  Now leaving Compiegne for Calais.  Seasheere
in five hours, barring accident.  All my love to you.  Alan."

.. vspace:: 2

And the Lieutenant had thought her pale....  She
kissed the paper and smiled at him bewilderingly.  "Lucky
beggar, Sherbrand," thought the Lieutenant.  "What a
glorious woman!"  He extorted from Patrine, who would
not be twenty until next August, the penalty for being
built on a grander scale than other daughters of Eve.  But
she was asking:

"Whom have I to thank for bringing Mr. Sherbrand's
message?"

"Flight Sub-Lieutenant Dareless—and the thanks are
quite on my side."  He phrased the trite civility
punctiliously, while the bold brown eyes beamed and twinkled:
"For you're IT," they said; "just—clippingly—IT!"

"How did you know me?" began Patrine.

"Picked you up through the binnics from the bridge, ten
minutes ago."  The slim brown hand flourished, indicating
a T-square-shaped space of well-watered turf marked off in
whitewash lines upon the green aërodrome below.  "We
call things by their proper names so as not to lose touch, you
understand?  The short stretch is the Bridge, and the long
strip aft at right angles—that's the Quarter-deck.  The big
hut No. 1 is our Wardroom—the Wing-Commander's cabin
is divided off from it.  The officers' cabins are in the
small hut, No. 2, and the Warrant Officers and men divide
No. 3.  Of course we keep watches and post sentries—just
as if we were at sea.  That Territorial on guard near is
relieving a man of ours, do you see?"  He jerked his chin
towards the moving brown figure.  "What have we to
guard?  Oh, well, the hangars, and our Wireless"—another
jerk indicating the latticed steel mast surmounting a
telegraph hut wedded to a vibrating dynamo-shed.  "We get
reports from our patrols—most of 'em are fitted with
radio-apparatus—and we receive and transmit messages.  Long
distance?  Well, rather!  We're frightfully swanky about
our Wireless plant.  It's Number One, H.P.  Not big, but
jolly powerful.  A——"

Six clear, silvery double-notes had sounded from a brass
bell, hung beneath a little white-painted penthouse sitting
on the blue strip of shadow on the westward side of the
Wardroom hut.  The Petty Officer who had rung the bell
exchanged a brief word with the Territorial, and went back
to the hangars from whence he had emerged.  Patrine, with
her heart in her mouth, asked the Sub-Lieutenant:

"Was that a signal?"

"Only ship-time," said the brown-eyed one.  "Six bells.
Eleven A.M.  And our man ought to be looming up in sight.
He might hit Seasheere now at any minute.  In fact, he's
nearly an hour late."

"You don't—you don't suppose——?"

Fear had pinched and drawn and bleached her so that she
looked forty behind her white veil with blue chenille
dragonflies.  Her pale mouth twitched and her black brows knotted
over the haunted eyes that strained out to sea.  The paper-pad,
crunched to a mere wad, dropped from the hand that
unconsciously released it.  The boy picked it up, thrilled by
this peep behind the scenes of another's romance.

"No, no!  There's no fear of an accident, Miss Saxham.
Perhaps a bit o' engine-trouble—you've got to travel
slowish if she vibes too much.  Or he might have spotted an
Aviatik and delayed to have a biff at him—on the principle
that ten Hun-birds make an evener bag than nine.  We
know what a terror he's getting to be with the Maxim.
But what puts the fear of God into the flighty Taube
quicker than anything is our R.N.A.S. Vickers' gun."

Ah, did he know how horribly he tortured her!  But a
grey speck showed upon the delicately-misty distance
eastwards, growing bigger, coming nearer, putting miles of green
white, heaving water under its throbbing engine with
effortless speed.  Her glance leaped to Dareless, studying the
oncomer between narrowed lids, and the hope that had
kindled in her died out as he shook his head.

"One of ours, on the Home-flight from Belgium, Miss
Saxham.  Your man will pick up much higher, and to the
south-east."

And presently the latest type of Fleet hydroplane, a
two-seater Batboat carrying two bareheaded young gentlemen,
moaned into view, chasing its own wave-skipping, flying
shadow at full stretch for the shore, came down in a long
mallard-like glide, skidding over the water as the wild-duck
does, and in a ruffle of glittering spray, continued the
home-journey in the character of a motor-boat.

Then there was a sharp squib-like crack, and from one of
the anchored hydroplanes, a rocket went up and burst in a
smoke-puff that hung in a little cloud of violet-grey upon the
sunny air, and from the hangars on the shingle under the
bluff streamed figures in blue overalls or grimy shirt-sleeves,
and cheered and waved, standing ankle-deep in refluent
water, topped with creamy sheets of foam.  As the
Batboat with her joyous navigators rushed spluttering to the
shallow anchorage and tied up beside the Station planes,
megaphones bellowed, motor-horns tooted, somebody
banged on the ship's bell, a cornet struck up "Rule
Britannia!" very much out of tune....

"Well done, you two beggars!  Oh! well done!" trumpeted
Dareless, through his hollowed hands, and turned a
beaming face on Patrine to explain that the hatless navigators
of the Batboat were Lieutenants of a Flight stationed
at Antwerp, and had shared in the Air Raid on the
Zeppelin-sheds at Düsseldorf—early on the previous day.

And then a droning song had come drifting down out of
the sky to the south-eastward with a buzzing undernote in it
that Patrine remembered well.  Dareless had lifted his
head for a rapid upward reconnaissance, and said with a
flash of white teeth in his brown face:

"Thumbs up, Miss Saxham!—this is your particular bird!"

And Patrine had seen, small and high, and shining palely
golden in the sunlight, the shape of the biplane that carried
her lover, and her heart knocked twice in her bosom,
heavily, as they knock behind the curtain before they ring
up at the Comedie Française.  A Clery's signalling-pistol
had cracked and been answered from the Air-Station.
Mechanics in overalls had appeared upon the green.  Then
the buzzing had stopped, and the second Bird of War, rising
higher to escape the backwash of light airs from the cliffs,
had launched into a splendid sweeping spiral, ending in a
long glide, and alighted on the well-rolled Station
aërodrome—and Sherbrand had come home.

.. vspace:: 2

Surely never until the thought of Flight,—formed in the
brain-cells of Man and fertilised by the lust of
Adventure,—hatched out in the Bird that bears the Knight of To-day
upon the air-path, did lover return to his lady after a fashion
so wonderful as this.

The Flying Men have always been coming.  In the Book
of Books you will read of them.  Ecclesiasticus, the Preacher,
foretold of the day when a Bird of the Air should carry the
Voice, and That Which Hath Wings should tell the matter;
and how these Winged ones rush and roar through the
prophetic pages of Ezekiel and Daniel, you have but to open
them to learn.  Their shapes like locusts, their armoured
bodies with great-eyed headpieces "like those of horses
prepared unto battle," the noise made by their wings in
flight "like the noise of chariots and horses running to
battle," the wheels beneath their wings, the human faces
appertaining to them, the inward fire that issues from them
in scorching vapours,—are described with fiery eloquence in
the Apocalypse of the Apostle of St. John, when the Fifth
Angel sounds the Trumpet, and the King whose name is
Exterminans, the Destroyer, reaches the culminating point
of his terrific reign upon earth.

Flight makes the world no more joyful, being mainly used
for purposes of destruction, but nothing can rob the Flying
Man of his shining gloriole of Romance.  The boy who was
building toy aëroplanes of card and elastic a few years back
has rediscovered the Flying Dragon of the Cretaceous
period, broken and tamed the winged monster into a War
steed, and thundered down the forgotten roads of the
Pterodactyl and the Rukh, to reap shining honours upon the
battlefields of the mutable Air.  And if the girl who chaffed
the boy of old worships him to-day as St. George, Sir
Lancelot, Sir Galahad, and Le Bon Sieur de Bayard rolled into
one, who shall blame her?  Not I, for one!

.. vspace:: 2

In the instant of reunion, when the tall brown figure came
swinging to meet her, and the strong hard hands gripped
her own, Patrine loved him more than ever.  Sherbrand's
was not a romantic greeting, but it thrilled her nevertheless.

"They've asked us to lunch here, but it's ready at the
Cottage.  Shall we accept?  It's for you to decide."

His tone had indicated his keen desire for the *tête-à-tête* in
preference.  Disappointment had shadowed his clear eyes
when Patrine had voted for luncheon at the Air Station,
inwardly longing to be alone with him—to be alone.

And yet, despite the longing, the haunting sense of a
sword of Fate hanging over her, Patrine found the Wardroom
lunch a jolly banquet.  They were so young, those
sunburnt faces, laughing about the plainly-furnished board.
The Wing-Commander in charge of the Station proved to be
something under thirty.  To Patrine, occupying the place
of honour on his right hand, he did the honours like a
veteran.  One of the navigators of the Batboat sat upon her
other side, and Sherbrand was her *vis-à-vis*.

Sherbrand was altered.  She knew him older, harder,
sterner....  Thinner to the verge of haggardness, with a
deep vertical furrow graved between the thick eyebrows
that made a bar of blonde fairness against the red of his
deeply-burned skin.  He had gone away a splendid youth.
Now he returned with two silvery-yellow stars on the cuffs
and shoulder-straps of his khaki tunic, a man seasoned and
tempered as a bar of steel in the furnace-blast of War.

The pleasant meal ended, and the jolly party broke up.
Their hosts accompanied them to the gate of the Station
enclosure, and the warmth and heartiness of Naval tradition
had been in the farewells that had sped the departing
guests upon their way:

"*Au revoir*!  All happiness!"

"So-long!  We'll look after the 'plane all right!"

"*Adios!  Buenas noches!*"

"*Sayonara!*"

"*Siéda!*"

"Good-bye and good luck!  Now all together....
Hip—hip—" and a rousing British cheer.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`GOOD-BYE, DEAR LOVE, GOOD-BYE!`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER LXV


.. class:: center medium bold

   GOOD-BYE, DEAR LOVE, GOOD-BYE!

.. vspace:: 2

They had looked back to smile and wave their thanks, and
an aged tennis-shoe, scientifically hurled by Dareless, had
knocked the cap out of Sherbrand's upraised hand, and
raised a cloud of chalky dust from the surface of the sunken
road.  Under cover of this they had crossed the road and
climbed a slope together and found themselves standing in
heavenly loneliness, with the sea beside them and their feet
upon the thymy grasses blotted by the short shadows of their
tall figures, under the almost vertical sun.

"Look!" Sherbrand had said, pointing to a whitewashed,
red-tiled cottage cuddled in a hollow some quarter of a mile
distant, girt with a gay frivolous little garden full of
bachelor's buttons and sunflowers, lavender bushes and
nasturtiums yellow and red.  He slipped his hand within her arm
and pressed it, whispering: "There's our Eden—and my
dream has come true!"

Her heart choked her.  They moved on together shoulder
to shoulder, her elbow resting in the bend of his strong arm,
and her hand lying in his.  The air they breathed was sweet
with heady, nameless fragrance, the burning golden light
that haloed them seemed the effluence of their love.
Anguish and rapture mingled in the chalice of the perfect hour
for Patrine.  Nothing but rapture was in the draught for
Sherbrand, though a faint fold showed between his eyebrows
as he said suddenly:

"Hang it!  I've forgotten to ask the Station fellows to
give me a night's shakedown.  However, there's a decent
hotel in Seasheere.  My bag is still in the machine, by the
way....  Did you send someone on to the cottage with
your traps?"

"I——"

She began to falter.  It was coming....  But his
eagerness delayed the moment of revelation.  The track
they followed dipped down and they found themselves in a
grassy basin.  The turf cupped up on every side and they
were alone, lidded by the blazing turquoise sky.

At the bottom of the green nest he stopped, and next
moment his embrace enveloped her.  She forgot, as an
answering flame burned in her blood, all the things that she
had meant to say.  "I'll have my hour," shot through her
whirling brain, "I must have something of him to keep in
remembrance.  He has never loved me—nor I him—so
passionately as now.  Oh, my God!"

He released her with a happy sigh, and they sat down on
the shadowed side of their green nest, a deep dimple in the
cheek of the sunny, smiling Earth, and looked in each other's
eyes.  He said, as she took off her hat and threw it aside
and turned her unveiled, unshadowed face back to his:

"Your dear cheeks are thinner, I fancy, Pat.  Have you
been worrying much about me?"

She nodded, thinking of her sleepless nights passed after
reading his few letters, or when his letters had failed to
come.

"Pretty badly—in the days of the Retreat from Mons.
You piloted that French officer over the Channel
and—whiff!—you vanished.  What has become of him?"

"Wing Commandant Raymond?  He's riding the storm
and directing the whirlwind somewhere on the French Front.
I got my orders to join the R.F.C.-unit acting with a
rearguard battery of the Second Army Corps as soon as I'd
dumped him.  As for the work with the battery, it was
always the same thing.  We flew out against von Kluck's
advance, spotting their gun-emplacements and getting the
range for our gunners.  And under us a dark-brown river
with five branches rolled South.  And that was the
Retreat."

His arm was round her, her cheek was pressed to his, her
bosom heaved against him.  She turned her lips to his in a
quick kiss, and whispered:

"And when you came down out of your sky 'like pigeons
homing at nightfall'—that's a sentence in one of your
letters—d'you recognise it?—the river went on rolling
still?"

"Just the same, without a break.  And what a—welter.
Remnants of crack infantry brigades tangled with the rags
of cavalry squadrons—grimy, hairy, ragged chimney-sweeps
with bandaged feet and empty bellies, and blackened
tongues hanging out, and blind, blank, staring eyes....
Imagine all the toy soldier outfits in the kiddy-shops of
Regent Street emptied into the gutters and you'll get an
idea of what the thing was like....  And Transport and
Supply-columns jumbled with bits of R.G.A. batteries and
R.F.A.—three dying horses to a howitzer, and one gunner
left out of six!  Bands of refugees and troops of stragglers.
Lunatics led along howling and gibbering.  Lorries, carts,
and motor-vans crammed with swollen-footed cripples—cheek
by jowl with bloody spectres evacuated from Field
Hospitals that were reddening the sky with their burning
in the rear.  A day-and-nightmare to haunt one for ever if
the end had been different—"  He caught his breath.
"But when I remember that we straightened the muddle—brought
Order out of Chaos—turned on the Germans and
bit to the bone—I pray that the memory may stay with me
always, so that I may teach your sons and mine what it
means to be Englishmen!"

"Oh, Alan!  My poor boy! ..."  She caught him in her
arms with sudden passion, strained him to her and then
freed herself from him, and moved away, signing to him that
he must not approach.  "What you hope for can never be!
I'd have told you this before if I'd been decent, but I wanted
your kisses—I was hungry for the touch of you—and the
sound of your voice in my ears after all these weeks and
weeks——"

"Then why do you say it can never be—and tell me in the
same breath that you long for me and love me?"  His light
brows were drawn into a heavy line over his stern grey eyes.
"Aren't you and I going to be married?  Is it possible that
you'd draw back—*now*?"

"Because your wife should be a pure woman, and I am
not, it is possible.  Don't move!  Don't come nearer!  If
you do I'll never have the courage to tell—what must be
told!"

And he had sat still, as a figure in carved khaki-coloured
stone with his knees apart and his knotted hands hanging
between them, and his eyes, curiously hard and pale against
the strong red sunburn of his face, fixed immovably upon her
mouth.  When she ended there had been a great silence; and
she had looked up at the azure dome lidding their green nest,
wondering why the burning, perfumed breeze had suddenly
turned cold.  His voice recalled her:

"Why have you told me this?"

"To be honest."  She hugged her knees.  "To give you
a chance for freedom before you were handicapped with me
for life, poor boy!"

"And how do you suppose it makes me feel?"  He
breathed roughly, and gritted his teeth, wringing his hands
in one another so strongly that the knuckles started
death-white against the reddened skin.  She heard herself saying
lamely:

"I knew you'd be horribly sick about it and hate me!"

"I don't hate you.  But I want to kill *him*!  He took
you to that damnable place and—"  He bit his lip and
swallowed.  "How long was that before I met you at
Hendon?  Three days—and our day of meeting—the
meeting I thanked God for!—was July 18th.  This is
October—the 14th—to be particular.  You must know what I'm
driving at.  Is there—any danger——"

She said in a level voice, looking at him steadily:

"I have deserved it—but I think God is going to be kinder
to me than to—punish me in that way."  Her eyes flickered
and fell from his.  "It was because—I was so awfully afraid
at first that I made up my mind to marry you.  And now—and
now you know the very worst of me."

"Hardly the worst."  He drew breath roughly, and the
cloud upon his forehead lightened a little.  "We'd have
been man and wife before I flew for France—if you'd let me
have my way.  Why didn't you?"

"I—Oh!—It seemed so mean....  A kind of child-stealing.
You were so unsuspecting, and so generous, and
so *clean*!"  She bit her lips, and the tears welled over her
underlids....  "You shamed me into being straight with
you.  I'd loved you from the beginning.  But it was as
though my love had left off crawling and grown a pair of
wings."

"Answer me straight."  He turned so as to face her.
"Did you ever love that German?"

"To my shame be it spoken—never for an instant!  After
that night at the Upas I hated him unspeakably.  Only
when I thought he was dead, I began to let up a little on the
hate."

He looked at his hands and unknotted them and knotted
them, and said suddenly:

"You may be interested to know that he is not dead, but
very much the other thing.  He is scouting and spotting for
von Kluck's gunners on their south and west Fronts, and
sometimes bombing positions he has skried out—and doing
it all superbly, damn him!  He has been degraded to the
rank of a Supernumerary Flying officer for some breach of
duty that got to the Kaiser.  And he has evidently made his
mind up to make good in this War.  They pick him for all
the dangerous missions.  He seems unkillable—and we've
tried our hardest.  And wherever he goes—until now I've
kept this from you—he takes—the Saxhams' son!"

"Bawne! ..."

She shaped the name dumbly, with lips that were pale
as poplar leaves.  "God forgive me!" her conscience
whispered.  "How little I have thought of Bawne!"

"Yes.  I mean Bawne!"

So odd was the contrast between the speaker's grim, set
face and the bald simplicity of his language, that her white
lips twitched with a crazy desire to laugh, as he added:

"I've been keen for a long time on coming across the man
who pinched my hawk-hoverer and kidnapped my friend's
son—and putting the fear of God into him with an
automatic revolver, or a Maxim....  But now that I
know—this!"—the deadly contempt in the voice is inconveyable—"a
clean death hardly meets his case.  Good cartridges
seem wasted in killing that fellow.  One wants to set one's
heel down—hard on him—and scrunch!"

He had sat silent, staring before him yet a moment longer.
Then he gathered himself together and got up from the grass,
glanced at his wrist-watch and said, holding out his hand
to assist her in rising:

"Well, let's be going.  It's half-past three.  They'll
expect us to tea at the cottage.  By the way, you haven't
told me.  Did you send on your bag from the station when
you came?"

She shuddered violently, and leaped up without touching
the offered hand.  The west was all dappled with tiny
pearly cloudlets, their shadows were lengthening momentarily,
the salt smell of the sea was on the breeze that came
in languid puffs.  But the wine of joy that had brimmed
their green bowl had been emptied out by her own hand,
and the draught now held to her flinching mouth was
bitterer than hemlock and blacker than Styx.  That change
in his face and voice—

"What do you suppose?  I brought no bag.  I am going
home by the next train."  She glanced at a little jewelled
wrist-watch he had given her and back at the mask-like face,
that said:

"You mean we part here, for good!  Is that it?"

"For good—or bad.  My poor boy——"

He put her "poor boy" from him with a gesture of the
hand.  He asked in a flat, toneless voice:

"Am I a blackguard like von Herrnung?  You came
down here to marry me.  What will be said afterwards—if——"

"I'm past caring what people think or say!" she flashed
at him angrily.  "I've told you that I will not marry you!—that
I'm not fit to be your wife.  Oh! if you suppose it
didn't hurt——"

A rush of tears drowned out his altered visage.  She
turned away, fighting for composure, summoning all her
woman's pride to help her at her need.  That swaying grace,
that alluring physical perfection—had never appealed to
Sherbrand's senses so irresistibly....

"Patrine!"

She heard his eager footsteps following her.  She was
snatched into his masterful embrace, assailed by his stormy
kisses, wooed by his passionate words of love beyond her
power to resist.  The flood in the veins of both was rising,
the force of the warm rushing torrent was bearing them
away, she cared not whither, so that she might keep those
arms about her still.

"Patrine!  My woman of women—do you think I'd let
you go from me?  Not I!  I'll have you for my wife whether
you will or no!  We'll forget—all that!  We'll be happy
in spite of it.  Won't we?"

"No!" she gasped out.

"We will, I tell you!"  He laughed out with ringing
triumph and bent his head, seeking her evasive mouth with
his own.  Hard pressed she had panted:

"Don't ask me to marry you!  I'd never, never do it!
Unless you were poor and sick and a nobody—and wanted
a woman to nurse and work for you....  Then—the wag
of a finger or the wind of a word would bring me to you.
But—I swear it before God!—I won't marry you as you are!"

"You will!"

"I've sworn I won't.  But—"  She had whispered it in
a kiss of fire—"I will give you—what that other man took!"

And Sherbrand had uttered a hoarse sound like a sob, and
unwound her arms from about his neck, and said, holding
her hands close in his and looking sternly in her swimming
eyes:

"I'm no saint, God knows!—but I'm a better man than
to take what you offer.  Halloa!  That's Davis.  What's
up now?"

A distant whistle had made him prick his ears.  He
whistled back and ran lightly up to the brink of the grassy
punch-bowl in time to meet the little black-avised Welshman—hero
of the Paris episode in connection with the girl
with the goo-goo eyes.  Davis had handed him a paper-pad.
Sherbrand had read it, scrawled a reply on the blank side
to be dispatched by the Station's Wireless, and hurried back
to Patrine.

"We—couldn't have been married to-morrow anyway.
The man who undertook to replace me while I went on leave
has been killed doing reconnaissance on our new Front in
North-West France.  I'm recalled."

"Recalled?"

He nodded.  The British Force had been deftly transferred
from its position on the Aisne to a base at St. Omer,
you will remember, thus blocking the Calais Gate.  The
New Offensive was taking shape.  Sherbrand had continued:

"So—if you're to catch the three-fifty from Fearnchurch
to Charing Cross—we'll have to run!"

And as the screech of a distant engine had sounded from
the direction of Fearnchurch Station, he had caught up
the veiled hat and thrust it upon Patrine, grabbed her
thin rain-coat and vanity bag and sunshade, and hurried her
back to the flinty railway-station by the way she had come.
And with the banging of the carriage-door, her woman's
heart had broken.  She had felt it bleeding drip, drip, drip! as
Sherbrand's tall bare head and grave sad eyes had receded
out of sight.

And the train had been delayed at the next station,
waiting for the passage of a troop-train crammed with eager
faced young men of Kitchener's Army, concrete answers to
the famous Call to Arms and the First Five Questions—nearly
half an hour.  So that rounding the curve beyond
the last signal-cabin for the clanking journey through the
short tunnel, Patrine had seen, some miles to seaward of the
glittering white prow of the North Foreland, a biplane with
its wings reddened by the sunset, flying south-east.

"Oh! good-bye, Alan!" she had whispered, knowing that
she would never see her Bird of War again.  He had been
caught and dragged back into the fiery whirl of the cyclone
without the hope that nerves and supports and brings
adventurers back.  Sorrowful and stern, baulked of his
heart's desire, grimly bent on meeting von Herrnung, and
wreaking retribution for a horrible wrong, upon the red head
of the Kaiser's Flying Man.





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.. _`MORE KULTUR`:

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   CHAPTER LXVI


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   MORE KULTUR

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The boy's slight figure seemed to shrink upon itself as the
stony eyes looked at him, and the teeth showed under the
red moustache, not tightly curled now, but stiffened and
pointing to the eyes.  Von Herrnung set a foot upon the
broken wall and leaped into the baker's parlour, staggering
slightly as he alighted amongst the rubbish on the broken
floor.  He had been drinking, but not to excess, for the
restaurant-cellars having been thoroughly gutted by his
countrymen, the wreckage of the bar behind which Madame
had sat, busy with her embroidery, had yielded barely a
half-tumbler of Cognac and a single bottle of Champagne.

Having drunk enough to spur memory and not to lull his
snarling grievances to slumber, he had come forth to blunt
the tooth of his bitter hatred on the boy.  For, since that
queer tickling, pleasurable sensation experienced in his first
tantalization of Bawne's hunger, every new weal marked
upon the wincing body, every fresh bruise inflicted on the
shuddering soul of Her Dearest, imparted to von Herrnung
a ferocious pleasure in comparison with which mere vicious
indulgence palled.

"So, there you are, little English pig-dog," he said in
German, as the blue eyes met his own and fell away before
them and the colour sank out of the young face.  "Get you
back to the *Market-platz* there and wait for me.  I have
some business with your friend."

He stretched out a long arm, picked up the boy by the
slack of his garments, and with a turn of the wrist dropped
him into the street.  His ears were pricked for the cry that
should follow the slight scrambling fall of the light body on
the rubbish.  It failed to come, and he frowned.
Presently—  Meanwhile here was game of a larger kind.  He looked
down from his superb height upon the bloodstained figure
in the stretcher.  Its eyes were closed, and the haggard face
beneath the grime and bristles had the yellowish-white of old
wax.  He spoke to it harshly, in his English, and the brownish
lids split apart and the gaunt sick eyes glimmered up at
him.  But no reply came from the livid lips.  He rapped his
foot sharply on the floor, repeating:

"I suppose you know you are my prisoner, sir?" and a
strange spasm of mingled amusement and irony twitched
the muscles of the haggard mask.  The faded negatives of
eyes regarded him with the ghost of a smile in them.  The
dissolving voice said in tones no louder than a sigh:

"Possibly.  But not—for long!"

The voice stopped short.  As von Herrnung took a step
nearer to the stretcher, his toe stubbed against and caught in
the strap of a leather case lying on the littered floor.  He
picked up the case and smiled as he drew out a costly pair
of Zeiss binoculars.  His own, though hailing from the Jena
workshop, only magnified to 12x.  These registered 25x.
On the metal rim of the larger lense was engraved the style
and title of the owner: "Capt. Rt. Hon. Viscount Norwater,
Royal Bearskins Plain."

A find in the dual sense.  He restored the binoculars to
their case, unbuckled the strap and slipped it under his
heavy bandolier of cartridges, hanging the case beside his
own, loosened the upper stud-clips that fastened his goggled
helmet, and pushed it back so as to reveal his whole face.
The gaunt eyes were open, looking at him attentively.  He
asked them:

"May it not be that we have met before?  In Paris, yes?
On the night of the Grand Prix.  At the Hotel Spitz, *ja, ja,
gewiss*!  A dinner given by Sir Thomas Brayham for Lady
Wathe and a few friends.  You were one of the friends.  I
another.  How is the old woman, do you know?"

*Kreutzdonnerwetter!* what inconceivable insolence!  The
eyes looked through him as though he had not been there.
His hard blue eyes, already injected with blood, grew savage,
and a purplish tinge suffused his florid skin.  He reflected
an instant, pulled a capacious silver spirit-flask from the
deep side-pocket of his pneumatic, half-filled the drinking
cup that capped it, and knelt down beside the stretcher,
saying quite pleasantly, in his gutturals:

"See, here is some capital Cognac.  Let me give you a
sip, eh?  Then you will feel better."  He poured a dram
between the teeth, and waited through a spasm of coughing,
wiped the blood and mucus from the gasping lips with a rag
of the torn clothing, then pulled a stool from amongst the
rubbish, sat down near the feet of the wounded man,
facing him, and took a long pull of the belauded brandy
from the neck of the big flask.

"That does more good than canteen coffee," he said, and
sucked his red moustache appreciatively.  He set down the
flask on the floor between his feet, found his case, and
carefully chose a cigar.

"A zigarre?  No!  You will, then, perhaps not object
to my smoking?  We of the Field Flight have to comfort
ourselves with snuff when in the air.  To burn tobacco and
blaze up like a star-shell and come down like a charred
rocket-stick, that is not at all agreeable or *praktisch*.
*Sapperlot!* you are not a very amusing companion.  Nevertheless,
my fellow, I drink to your jolly good health!"

He knocked off the ash of his cigar, cleared his throat, and
spat, just clearing Franky's shoulder.  The flicker of anger
in the sunken eyes brought a glitter of malice into his own.
He sent out a long swaggering stream of smoke, and knocked
the ash from his cigar with the little finger of his ringed left
hand, continuing:

"You see, I have cut the long thumb-nail that amused
you when we met in Paris.  The Day has come—though
you would not join me in drinking to its dawning!—and the
German eagle has dipped his claws in English blood.  We
Prussians have beaten out the iron sceptre of World Power
with giant blows upon the War Anvil, and the sun that
never set upon the swanky British Empire, has already risen
to find the Roast Beef of Old England in danger, and the
Triple Entente a bankrupt syndicate."  He shrugged and
twisted his red moustache, tilted his big body sidewise,
and spat at a carefully-calculated angle, missing the other
shoulder of the victim as he pursued:

"But you do not know ... *Donnerwetter!* how should
you?—lying here like a stuck pig!  Yesterday—in the
neighbourhood of Ypres—took place the ultimate,
conclusive battle, in which the German mammoth pounded the
British Lion into pulp.  Your little British Expeditionary
Force may be said to exist no longer.  Your Brigade of
Guards, who boast that, like the Samurai, they do not
surrender while yet unwounded, is practically extinct.
Maddened by despair the officers shot the few men who
remained and then blew one another's brains out.  Your
Commander-in-Chief is our prisoner, Sir Rothesay Craig has
been killed, also General Callonby and General Jones-Torrian.
The French Generalissimo has surrendered, with
the 5th French Army.  The 6th French Army has been
chopped into sausage-meat.  So, all is over!  Total Kaput!"

"If what you say is Gospel," said the weak voice, and the
faded eyes had the ghost of a smile in them, "why do I keep
on hearing our guns?"

For the hurly-burly of battle in the South had broken
out afresh as though in contradiction.  The crazy floor
vibrated, the tottering walls shook with the distant fury of
sound:

*Thud—thud—thud—thud!* and the muffled *Boom!—Crash!*
of immense explosions.  And through all the steady slogging
of Royal Garrison Artillery howitzers, and the tireless,
dogged hammering of Field Artillery eighteen-pounders.

"*Macht nicht!*"

Von Herrnung shrugged contemptuously, though his keen
ear did not miss the fact that the guns were coming nearer:
"That must go on—for a little!—until the last show of
resistance is broken down.  If it be a military virtue not
to be aware when you are beaten—your big-jawed, dull-brained,
short-headed British bull-dogs of soldiers have that
virtue, of course.  But comes the awakening!  The Russian
Navy has been blown off the Baltic, the Czar has accepted
our Kaiser's ultimatum—the Belgian Government has made
its submission—the Belgian Army has laid down its arms.
Our 17-inch siege-howitzers are bombarding the shores of
England from their emplacements at Calais.  The Army of
Invasion is embarking—your British Navy—the floating
bulwark of your Empire—lies at the bottom of the North
Sea.  Ministers run from one end of England to the other,
begging, coaxing, persuading—your proletariat.  There is
panic in the English War Office, and despair at Buckingham
Palace; rebellion in the streets of London, *débâcle* in the
City, and stampede in the West End.  To-morrow the
Emperor of Greater Germany and the Crown Prince, Viceroy
of the Brito-German Possessions, will, with the Empress
enter Paris.  Ten miles of films will record for all Posterity
this colossal and magnificent scene.  The London pageant
of triumph follows.  Well may you weep, my unlucky fellow,
over the collapse and ruin of your proud country"—for
tears were really trickling from the puckered eyelids of the
now flushed and quivering face.  "*Himmelkreuzbombenelement*!
You are not weeping.  You are laughing, you dirty
English swine!"

"What else do you—expect—when you're so—dashed
amusin'?" gasped Franky painfully.  "Roll along with
some more of it—why don't you, Anatole?"


"You do not believe me, no?  You think that I am
rotting," von Herrnung shrugged his huge shoulders and
laughed with forced heartiness.  "Always to rot, that is
the English custom."  He added, with a cruel relish: "*Desto
besser*, you will die more pleasantly.  For of course you will
die.  This is the third day you have lain here, *Alter junge*,
and you have the smell and colour of gangrene.  You
are a lump of carrion, Norwater, not worth the taking away!"

"Possibly not!"

The eyes met his calmly, though their laughter had died
out.  It angered von Herrnung to be baulked of the ferocious
enjoyment he had promised himself.  He finished the
Cognac slowly, seeking in the fiery drink a spur to
inventiveness, and sucked his moustache slowly as he capped and
pocketed the flask.

"I am hellishly sorry, I assure you, Norwater," he said,
adopting a bluff and hearty manner as he sucked the stump
of the nearly finished cigar.  "One is hardened to death
and wounds in War, but one is human.  And I have been
on friendly terms with many Englishmen and *Angenehme
Englânderinn* such as Lady Wathe, whom I have known for
years, and that superb brunette, Mees Saxham.  We flirted
desperately that night in Paris.  Later on, in London, she
became my mistress——"

"You lie, you aëroplane-stealing cad!" said Franky,
feebly but with great distinctness.  Von Herrnung swore
and spat, full in his face.  Its nostrils winced disgust, but
the brown eyes were indomitable.  And from the blue lips
came a mere thread of human utterance, pregnant with
scathing irony:

"I—say to you what the—Belgian woman said to your
Kaiser—when his—horse splashed her.  '*This kind of
filth—wipes off!*'"

"You think so, eh?  You——"

Von Herrnung clenched his fist, and might have dashed it
in the eyes that defied him, but for a sudden, significant
change in the sound of those distant guns.  The barrage of
the German Field Artillery was becoming intermittent.
The slogging of the British had increased in energy.

A flare of red spurted into the Kaiserman's pasty cheeks,
and his hard eyes lighted eagerly.  He forgot his rule of
sleeping off liquor before again taking to the air.  With a
confidence in his own powers largely justified by his
successes, his mind leaped to the scene of conflict.  Now, when
the German batteries were weakening, was the moment for
the arrival of a pilot-aviator of the Imperial Field Flight,
skilled as aërial observer and signaller, and known to be
indifferent to risk.

Here was the chance one had hoped for.  Restitution of
the forfeited decoration.  Restoration to the Emperor's
favour.  Reinstatement in the lost place upon the regimental
roster.  Promotion—the bestowal of new honours—danced
before him like little, gaudy demons, drowning with
their buzz the voice of prudence, luring him to the essay.

"I am compelled to leave you now, Norwater," he said
smilingly to the man on the stretcher; "thanks so much for
our interesting chat!  I shall carry away a pleasant
recollection, and leave you also a memento in the shape of a
bomb, which I shall drop on you when I have climbed to a
suitable height.  So *Gut Abend, Alter junge*.  Though before
I go there is a trifling formality——"

He knelt down by the stretcher, and without unnecessary
gentleness rifled the pockets of the wounded man.  The
victim had swooned when von Herrnung rose, transferring
to his own person a small purse, heavy with English
sovereigns, and a pigskin case full of crisp French banknotes,
with a thin gold wrist-watch that had a luminous dial,
and a coroneted monogram upon the back.

Sheer waste, according to the German War Book, issued
by the Great Staff for the use of German officers, to leave
upon the person of the fallen opponent articles likely to be
of use to the conqueror.  He rinsed his hands in the water-can,
and dried them on his clothing, pulled up his helmet,
fastened it, and buttoned his pockets, straightened his
bandolier, nodded pleasantly at the reflection of his giant
person in the skewed wall-mirror, jumped lightly through
the window-gap, and went upon his way.

.. vspace:: 2

The slight figure lying so still upon the stretcher had
never been remarkable for beauty of proportion.  The
sharpened face with its hue of old wax, the discoloured stains
and the hair and grime upon it, had never been handsome
even in health.  But thrown back and tilted upwards, with
the rosy glow of the setting sun touching the high brow, and
violet shadows framing the sealed eyelids and close-shut
mouth, it did not lack the quality of nobility.  There was
something knightly about the still form.

He revived to pain and loneliness and burning thirst, the
squalor and abomination of desolation, the louder, nearer
thudding of the German drum-fire, and the dogged reply of
the unweakening British guns.  He might have deemed the
events that had taken place illusions born of weakness and
fever, but for the testimony of the looking-glass that hung
away upon the wall.  There was the familiar vista of the
Market Square, with the charred ruins of Town Hall and
Clock Tower, yet sending up thin columns of bluish smoke
into the radiant air.  You could even make out a corner of
the great stack of stiffened, blackening bodies.  Nothing
was wanting but that the Taube should still be resting on the
cobblestones like a drowsy white vampire-bat glutted with
human blood.

But the Taube was not there.  From high overhead the
buzzing note of the hoverer came down to Franky.  He
could see through the rents in the penthouse of broken
flooring the white, winged shape hanging poised overhead.
He even fancied he could descry the helmeted, goggled head
of von Herrnung peering over the bulwarks of the bird-body,
the jut of his elbow and the pear-shaped wire cages in which
the bombs hung ready to his hand.

The thought of Margot and the child was an exquisite
agony.  The thirst for life, delectable life, revived in Franky
ragingly.  In dreadful expectation of the deafening crash,
and the rending pang, and the burning bite of the greenish
flame, the haggard eyes were straining upwards, when the
terror went out of them, and their lids flickered down....
Let the fellow do his worst.  Where was the good of
hating?  Christ had prayed for His murderers when they
nailed Him on the Tree.  The numb hand feebly made the
Sacred Sign, and the tension passed with the terror....
There was a dull boom high overhead, and some heavy
objects fell in a neighbouring backyard.  Little bits of
metal rattled on Franky's plank penthouse, and some warm
drops pattered on Franky's face and wetted the hand that
lay upon his breast.  Not rain, but something sticky and
thick, with a sickly, well-known odour.  He lifted the hand.
Oh, horrible!  The heavens were raining blood.

.. vspace:: 2

Too weak to even guess at what had happened, he fell
again into a stupor.  The hollowed chest heaved at longer
intervals beneath the First Aid bandaging over which had
been thrown the khaki coat.  Long cold breaths expired
through the panting nostrils, the eyes showed a glassy line of
white between the parted lids.  He was dreaming....

Dreaming of being borne along in a shadowy boat under
starless skies, through clear lucent darkness, over another
darkness unfathomable, and yet diamond-clear.  Perhaps
no more water than the atmosphere above it was air, both
possibly, elements unknown....  The boat crowded
with seated shapes, three of them feminine....  A tall,
black-hooded, black-mantled figure in the sternway seemed
to impel the vessel with a single oar.

"Is this stuff water?"

The quiet voice of a man seated beside Franky had asked
the question.  Franky slipped his hand over the boat's low
side and withdrew it shining, but not dripping, thinking:

"It is and it isn't.  Fairly odd!  Wonder where we're
bound for?  That fellow sculling....  Reminds me of
old Charon, in the Sixth Æneid, when I swotted Virgil
at School."

"Me too!"  Thought seemed to pass current as speech,
for though Franky had not voiced his reflection, the tall
man who sat next him had answered instantly:

"But if this is the Ninefold—what about the '*cold and
venomous waters, consuming iron and breaking the rarest
vessels*.'"  The speaker dipped his hand over the side and
brought it up all shining but not dripping, and touched his
lips with it, and went on, smiling: "Besides, if you and I
are alive, where are our golden boughs, and if we're dead,
where are our oboli?  We ought to have 'em!  It wouldn't
be good form not!"

"Why, you're Braythwayte of Ours!  How is it I didn't
know you?  Why did I suppose—"  Franky broke off, for
Braythwayte's very recent exit from the stage of life had
been performed after a highly coloured fashion, when the
Germans had showered heavy shells of high explosive upon
the little Belgian town.  "That fellow sculling," he said to
cover the slight embarrassment.  "Somehow I fancy I've
seen him before."

"Ah!  Now I recollect."  Braythwayte was answering
the thought of the previous moment.  "I did get crumped
up pretty badly.  Should have come off lots worse hadn't
it been for Cruse.  He threw himself in front of me when the
shell dropped so near us."  He spoke of the Sergeant-Major
of his Company who had been killed at the same moment.
"Don't you recognise him?  Cruse is the man who's sculling.
I caught a glimpse of his face just now—it can be nobody
but Cruse."

"Beggin' yer pard'n, Sorr."  The soft South Irish brogue
sounded more apologetic than contradictory.  The thick,
sturdy figure of the speaker, uncertainly descried in the
clear obscurity, leaned anxiously over from the opposite seat.
"'Tis Father Walsh—may Those Above reward him for an
ould, bould gentleman!—that kem crawlin' out on his four
bones to the Advanced threnches at a place they did be
callin' La Bossy or suchlike—to give Holy Absolution to
meself and Hanlon an' two other boys av' the Loyal Irish
Rifles that wor' in a bad way.  Wouldn't I swear to his skin
on a gate, or the bend of his beak anywhere"—the voice
hesitated—"barrin' for the mimmory I have that Thim
Wans was afther pluggin' him through the head—and
himself just layin' the Blessed Sacrament on me tongue!"

"Beg pardon."  A woman's voice joined in the conversation.
"Sorry to interrupt, but I know him, really.  It
isn't the Surgeon-Major—or Father Anybody!"  Franky
recognised in the clear obscurity the flowing white
head-dress and grey Red-Cross badged cape of an Army Nursing
Sister, as she went on: "It's just our Civil Surgical
Specialist—who died of double pneumonia (septic) at the Harfleur
Military Hospital.  Had a touch of influenza—and would
get out of bed to operate on one of the Sisters—a sudden
case of appendix trouble with typhoid thrown in.  Oh, yes! the
operation was successful, but the Sister didn't recover.
Still, the C.S.S. gave his life for hers all the same!"

"Good egg, him!  But are you quite sure there's no
mistake with regard to our friend there?"  Franky nodded
towards the tall, black-hooded, black-mantled figure plying
the oar, upright in the stern.  "Because just now I caught
a glimpse of his face, and I could have sworn it was my
grandfather—by a long sight the finest man I've ever come
across!  He dived over the yacht's side and saved my life
when I was drowning.  It was the Cowes Season of 1894.
I was a cheeky nipper of eight—and he was seventy-one.
And the chill and the excitement brought on a stroke or
something.  He was dead in his cabin-berth next morning,
when his man went in with the mail."

"Oh, you funnies!"  This with a clear little trill of
laughter in the voice of a small girl—Franky could see her
bright eyes dancing as she peeped at him from her niche
between the Army Nurse and the small, black-habited
elderly figure of a Sister of Charity in a deep starched
*guimpe* and wide-flanged cornette.  "As if it could be
anybody but my Dada—who pulled the soldiers out of the train
that was all smashed up and burning!  When me and Mummy——"

"*Taisez vous donc, Raymonde!*" whispered the nun
reprovingly.  "It is not *convenable* that *petites demoiselles*
should interrupt their elders thus.  Remember where you
are, and in what Presence!"

"Please don't scold her!" coaxed Franky, the devout
lover of children.  The nun smiled, meeting his entreating
eyes.  He smiled back and went on: "Right or wrong—we
seem all agreed that our friend in the stern is a near
relation—or a close acquaintance of nearly every one of us.  In
every case a supreme benefactor——"

"Surely, monsieur!" she gave back in a hushed tone.
"But surely, monsieur!  The Helper—the Benefactor of us all!"

As the keel grated on unseen bottom, she folded her
hands with a beautiful devoutness, and sank upon her knees,
drawing with her the child.  The man of the Loyal Irish
followed her example.  Franky found himself kneeling with
the others—and as the boat's prow ploughed into sand or
shingle, and the Ferryman, shipping his oar, moved shorewards
with a shepherding gesture, the voyagers rose with a
thrill of expectancy, and followed with one accord.

He stepped ashore—dropping the great black mantle—turned
and faced them, spreading out His Arms.  Beauty
Divine, glory unspeakable——





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`THE QUESTION`:

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   CHAPTER LXVII


.. class:: center medium bold

   THE QUESTION

.. vspace:: 2

"Have I been honest?" Patrine asked herself over and over,
kneeling by the open window, staring into the darkness.
"Have I been just towards the man who never was a friend
even when he played the lover?  Did not my own attitude
of cynical curiosity towards secret, hidden things, bias his
line of conduct towards me?  Might not even von Herrnung
have respected a girl who showed no inclination to flutter
moth-like, about the flaming torch of Sin?  No! he would
not.  But I could have saved myself even from scorching—I,
who approached the flame too closely, and shall carry
the scars of my burning to the grave."

Drip, drip, drip!  Water, oozing from the box that stood
upon the table, was dropping on the carpet with the small,
insistent sound....  At the west end of the Catholic
Church where Patrine had told her story to a priest in the
Confessional there was a great black Crucifix, bearing a
white thorn-crowned Figure gashed with gory-seeming
wounds.  She had fancied that the blood from them dripped
down upon the pavement as she had sat staring at the High
Altar, and wondering whether it were true that wilful sin
committed by men and women for whose salvation Christ
had bled and died might not cause Him suffering even now?

She had been willing to sin for Sherbrand, and said so in
her hour of madness.  Yet the renunciation of her lover as
a husband had been an act of the purest love.  Perhaps
God would overlook the one thing for the sake of the other?
Perhaps He had really spoken by the mouth of that old
priest whose tears had dropped upon his withered hands....

Drip, drip, drip!  Patrine began to suspect the source
whence the sound proceeded.  The people who had packed
the roses—they must be roses—had wetted the cotton-wool
too heavily, the fools!  The inlaid table and the carpet
would suffer if the wet were not mopped up.  One ought
to ring for Mrs. Keyse or Janey, or better still, see to it
oneself.

She half-rose with this intention, then sank down again
nervelessly.  It was half-past ten.  The October night
leaned close over London, Harley Street was muffled in
velvet darkness.  The veiled gleam of electric lights showed at
its junction with Cavendish Square.  The rumble of the
tube train came from Portland Place, the faint shriek of the
Northern Express sounded from Euston.  A Brocken Hunt
of motor-buses screeched and clanked up the Marylebone
Road and faded into distance.  The rumble and roar of
Oxford Street showed signs of diminution.  It was possible
to hear stray sentences spoken by people passing upon the
pavement below.

"I don't care!"  This from the shorter of two female
figures that had halted before the house.  The edge of
light-coloured skirt showing below her cloak, and the gleam of
white cuffs framing the gloved hands with which she
gestured, suggested a Hospital nurse to Patrine.  "Taxation
without Representation is a crying injustice—and the men
will wake up to it one of these days....  And Mrs. Clash
may be a noisy person—and Fanny Leaven may drop her
haiches—I do myself when I get stirred up.  But they're in
earnest—and they've suffered—cruel!—for their convictions.
Look at this Petrell—that one that always takes the Chair.
She's a physical wreck—with the treatment she's had—and
I know what I'm talking about!  Haven't we had Suffragettes
brought to the Hospital for treatment over and over—after
they'd been pitched out of Political Meetings by
Stewards and half-throttled by Police.  What I say
is—Moses! how late! ... We shall get locked out of the Home
if we don't run for it!"

And their light hurrying footsteps and the unmistakable
frou-frou of starched print accompanying, passed away up
Harley Street.  They must have come from the Mass
Meeting of Suffragists that had taken place at the Royal Hall.

.. vspace:: 2

It had been a memorable evening.  The atmosphere of
the Royal Hall, thronged not only with the members of the
W.S.S.S. but with representatives of many other Women's
Unions and Associations and Societies and Leagues, was
highly charged with electricity.  Mrs. Petrell, resolute-lipped,
quiet-eyed, clear of diction and composed of manner,
knew, as she sat in her chair beside the little table in the
middle of the crowded platform, and better even than the
plain-clothes police among the audience—that at any
moment the storm might break.

She had advocated with all her much-tried strength an
armistice for the War-period, involving a temporary
abandonment of militant methods and inflammatory addresses,
in favour of a policy of active help and practical
sympathy, alike honourable to her head and heart.

Other Societies, Unions, Leagues, and Associations might
have followed the lead of their Presidents.  But would the
W.S.S.S. accept her programme?  Militancy had been its
motto and the breath of its nostrils through all these
troubled years.  Since the outbreak of War, Flaming Fanny
had busily sown the whirlwind, advocating fresh Demonstrations
in conjunction with a system of Unlimited Strikes.
Woman must hold her hand, now that her help was needed.
Man, the Oppressor of all time, must be coerced by Woman's
flat refusal to take part in Relief Work, or War Work, or
Work of any kind whatever, into yielding the withheld
right.  And Mrs. Clash sided with Fanny—and others,
nearer home.

Little wonder then that Pressmen, sensing the imminence
of riot, had turned out in their shabbiest tweeds and left
their watches and tie-pins at home.  Little wonder that
Medical Students, who had not already joined the Service,
with betting-men and patrons of the pugilistic Prize Ring,
found themselves baulked of anticipated entertainment, or
that loafers and crooks, pickpockets and rowdies,
disappointed of a pleasurable evening, expressed themselves in
unmeasured terms regarding that Mass Meeting at the
Royal Hall.

A melodious speaking-voice can be a magical wand,
wielded by the mouth of a plain woman.  But when the
woman is beautiful and intellectual, when soul breathes
through her words, and strength and tenderness, then she
becomes a Force to reckon with, a Power to move mountains
and bring water of tears from the living rock of the
hardest human heart.

The officially-checked lights of the Hall shone down upon
a sea of threatening faces.  The electric battens over the
speaker's head showed her to be a tall, fair, slender woman,
dressed in filmy grey, veiling soft clinging silk of the same
shade.  The simplicity of her dress was unrelieved by
ornaments other than a chain of pearls about her long throat.
The red-brown hair seemed heavy for the little Greek
head, the lovely pale face with the sensitive lips, wore a
look of patient sorrow, the eyes she turned upon the
audience—a seething mixture of irreconcilable elements—had
in them courage, sympathy and understanding, and knowledge
too.  Before she spoke she had created an impression.
Strangers were ingratiated by her beauty and evident
refinement.  Those who best knew her were among the
wildest and most reckless there.  They had quieted, when she
had risen up in her unnoticed corner of the platform, and
moved forwards to the speaker's place opposite the Chair, as
though oil had been cast upon the waters of a stormy sea.

.. vspace:: 2

"When God Willed this War that we call Armageddon,"
she had said to them—"for without the permission of
the Most High the earthly Powers that planned and prepared
it could not have plucked the fruit of their desire—it
came in time to prevent the declaration of a War even more
terrible.  War, to the Death, between Woman and Man."

In a few trenchant words she painted the dire results of
such hostility.

"That unnatural horror has been mercifully averted,"
she said to them.  "The old sore is healed, there is no hatred
nor rancour left.  We women have learned what a price has
to be paid for the Franchise of Manhood.  It is the brave
blood that is drenching the soil of Belgium and France and
Poland—that will flow in rivers as wide as the Thames at
Vauxhall Bridge before Peace is proclaimed again.  They
have answered the Call.  They are pouring into the recruiting
offices—in thousands of thousands—those who have
given up their loved ones, their homes, their hopes of
success in Arts or Sciences, professions or businesses or trades.
Will women be as unselfish and as generous when their Call
comes?  For it will come.  It is coming while I stand
here!"

They were strangely quiet, under the spell of the beautiful
voice, and the eyes that were luminous and deep with
tenderness:

"There are faithful Christians among you; brave earnest
souls who have prayed to GOD for guidance among the
difficulties that beset the way for working-women, and
weaker souls have been maddened to frenzy and plunged
into unbelief by the intolerance and the injustice, the
shrieking wrongs and the unpurged evils that Man, who
enters upon his heritage the world, by the Gate of Motherhood,
has ignorantly accumulated upon the shoulders of the
sex he professes to respect."

There was a murmur of approval at this.  She lifted a
hand, and they were silent.

"I say to those who have despaired, 'Despair no longer!'  I
say to those who have prayed—'Your prayer is answered!'
Take up the work that has dropped from the hands that are
busy with the rifle.  Prove your right to the Parliamentary
Franchise.  Take your place amongst the World's Workers,
for good and for all.  The Vote will be granted: it cannot be
denied!  But if you had it now, passionately as you desire
it, and the choice were offered you—Oh! my sisters!—would
you not yield it up with gladness to bring those dead
men back to life again?"

And after a pause of unbroken silence she added:

"For they have fought even better than they knew.
They have re-conquered Woman.  Freely and willingly as
comrade and helper she takes her place and her share of the
burden.  Peace is proclaimed.  The War between the sexes
is at an end!"

We know how truly the speaker prophesied.  Quietly as
the vast Atlantic flows into and fills a labyrinth of empty,
echoing, rock-caverns, the vast body of unemployed women
took the places of the male workers called away to the Front.
They had clicked into the slots before the world was well
aware of it, or they themselves understood that a miracle
had been wrought.

Said the breeched and gaitered lady-conductor of a
North-West tram the other day:

"Now the ones that was brought up active has got their
chance to do a bit, and the ones that was brought up idle
'ave found out that they like work, will they ever be content
to sit and twiddle their thumbs again?  I don't think!"  She
clipped pink tickets with zeal, and when a red-nosed,
watery-eyed elderly man who had offered her a pewter
shilling cursed her venomously as she thrust the coin back
on him: "'Ere you! ... 'Op it!" she said to the offender,
and caught him neatly by the scruff, hauled him down the
cork-screw stairway, and deposited him in the Camden
Road without turning a hair.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`THE DEVIL-EGG`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER LXVIII


.. class:: center medium bold

   THE DEVIL-EGG

.. vspace:: 2

Von Herrnung had quitted the earth sober, to discover at
the height of a thousand metres that his potations had
dulled his brain.  As he ceased to climb and brought down
the nose of the Taube to the level, he realised that he was
dizzy, and that at the pit of his stomach squatted the
aviator's deadly foe, the demon of nausea.  He pictured it as a
yellow, frog-like thing with frothing leathery lips and green
eyes that squinted.  This image vexed him, and would not
be driven away.

He switched on the hawk-hoverer and sensed the drag of
the twin horizontal flanged screws against the thrust of the
propeller, adding to its drone the vibration of the endless
travelling-chains running in their sheath of transparent talc.
To make room for its long groove in the floor of the bird-body,
the thick glass port beneath the pilot's feet had been
removed by the sergeant-mechanic of the Flight Squadron.
Now there were two ports, one on either side.  Through
these the German looked down upon the shell-pounded
ruins of the village-town, its roofless homes and broken
enclosures giving the effect of a wild-bees' nest laid open by
the gardener's shovel after the gardener has smoked out the
bees.  As von Herrnung located the baker's house by aid
of his recently acquired binoculars, another swirl of sickness
took him, and he shuddered and spat bile over the side.

Those distant voices of guns had not ceased their sullen
calling.  In the rose-flushed south towards which the Taube
faced as it hovered above the ruins of the village, black
columns of vapour swelled and towered, and acrid flashes
stabbed through the murkiness.  One should be there, his
manlier self said to him.  Better to be a brave German bird
dodging Death amongst the puffs of shrapnel, dropping
devil-eggs on the British batteries, winning back the forfeited
Cross and the lost Imperial favour, than to be here, hanging
like a carrion-vulture over the maimed body of a dying man.

Perhaps.  But one had promised oneself revenge for the
scorn that had stung like fire.  And one had bragged to the
English boy of what one meant to do.  He looked back,
and called through the speaking-tube that traversed the
canvas over-deck between the pilot's seat and the passenger's:

"Unstrap yourself and come to me and take the control-stick.
*Schnell*—do you hear?  What is that you say?"  He put
the voice-tube to his ear and heard the shrill pipe answer
through it.  "You think it best to tell me that you take
back your parole?"  The big teeth grinned under the
red moustache.  "All right!" said the Enemy.  "While we
are in the air, you are free to jump out if you like, and run
away.  When we get to the ground again, that is another
matter.  Come now, sit in front of me and take over the
controls!"

And as the boy obeyed, creeping beneath the intervening
deck and under the canvas partition, the Enemy moved back
upon the pilot-seat, keeping his feet on the lower controls,
and separating his knees so as to leave a ledge for Bawne
to occupy.  Still laughing, he took spare safety-straps that
hung on each side against the bulwarks, and clipped the
patent pneumatic studs to the belt that girt the boy.

It did not do to run risks.  Some day, it might occur to the
Emperor to order von Herrnung to deliver up his captive.
And—the little devil was useful—hellishly!  He had come
into the world, twelve years ago—possessed of the Flying
Gift.  He had taken to the air as naturally as a young
crow or pigeon.  A tap on the shoulder, a word shouted in
his ear—and he knew what you wanted!  He understood
now why his overlord required the unrestricted use of his
arms at this moment.  The small hands twitched as they
gripped the lever, and shudders convulsed the slender frame.
Noting this von Herrnung grinned.  His qualms had
left him for the present, he was once more master of his
stomach and lord of his cool and steady brain.  Through
the back of his head the boy could see him—leaning his big
body sidewise—craning his neck over the edge of the
fuselage—his hand hovering over the bomb hanging near in its
wire holder, his keen hard eyes calculating distance—his red
brows knitted, his full mouth smiling under its thatch of
red hair.  The devil-egg would burst upon its impact with a
roof or with the ground, a thousand metres under the Taube.
How many times since the red dawning of the Aggressor's
Day had he, von Herrnung, not plucked out the pin and
lifted the latch, and sent Death and Destruction speeding
earthwards!  Why should this particular devil-egg have
exploded five seconds after its release?

The detonating mechanism had been wrongly set, or the
explosive had suffered some chemical deterioration.  With
the volcanic upburst of flaming gases and the fierce blizzard
of rending steel splinters, the Taube was shot upwards like
the cork from a bottle of champagne.  The Enemy had cut
out the hovering-gear when he had dropped the devil-egg,
and the thrust of the tractor had sent the Taube rushing on.
Thus, though she had been bumped about on waves of rising
gases—though daylight shone through holes in her wings
and body,—a wheel had dropped like a stone from her
under-carriage—and a piece of her tail had gone fluttering and
swerving earthwards, no serious damage had been done to
the machine.

Bawne's cheek was bleeding from the scratch of a splinter,
but he stuck manfully to the controls.  "Steer south," he
had been told, "when I switch off the hoverer," and he had
waited, his teeth set, his brows knitted, his eyes on the
compass, and his heart crying out to God to save his new-found
friend.

He knew it was because he had prayed so hard that the
bomb had exploded prematurely.  Would the Enemy try
again with the one that yet remained?  But the Enemy
made no sign.  One dared not look round or speak to him.
Was he in a fit, or sick, or merely shamming?  One could feel
the big body heaving at one's back as it lay huddled against
the canvas partition, with rolling head and arms spread wide,
and knees that straddled and sagged.

Jerk!  The Taube heaved her after-part as a cow gets up,
and nose-dived.  Von Herrnung's feet had slipped from the
controls, and her rudder was flapping free.  As Bawne toed
the bar and gripped the guide-wheel, and brought the keel to
a level, the blood in his veins tingled and he knew a thrill
of joy.

One had borne a lot, but—Man alive!—a moment like
this was worth it.  What Boy Scout could deny the greatness
of this boy's reward?  To be master of this giant Bird,
rushing at the speed of an express-train over woods and fields
and villages, diminished to the patches on a crazy-quilt by
the height at which one sped.  To hear the shrill breeze
harping in the wires and the roar of the flashing tractor,
and change the din at a finger-touch to the silence of a glide.

West, where the sun was setting in red fire were signs by
now familiar.  Linked specks that were big grey German
troop-trains ran over the shining gossamer-lines of the
railways, going south.  Where the shining lines looked like
scattered pins, the railways had been blown up by the Belgians,
or the British.  Things like caterpillars crawling over
the white ribbons of the highways were German motor-lorries
dragging great howitzers, or Army Supply and
Transport, or marching columns of robust, bullet-headed
German infantrymen.

A blot of grey upon a town was where a Division rested.
Strings of grey spiders hurrying south, would be brigades
of cyclist telegraphists or sharpshooters, and processions of
drab beetles scuttling along, Field Ambulances, or Staff
motor-cars.  One would have said that a green-grey blight
had fallen upon Belgium, swiftly advancing, stayed by
nothing, devouring as it moved.

East, where the shadow of the Taube raced beside her like
a carriage-dog, black streaks that were barges still crawled
on the canals, and peasants' carts crept over the roads—and
there were no columns of troops in view, nor uglier tokens of
the War.  Though the red and brown towns showed scant
signs of life, late root-crops were being harvested; plough-teams
were breaking up the stubbles, factory chimneys were
smoking, and acres of linen-web yet spread to bleach along
the river-banks.

Later in the month the grey-green blight was to sweep
over all this region as the Boche retreated before the thrust
of the 1st and 4th British Army Corps, from Houthulst
Forest to Menin-on-Lys.

.. vspace:: 2

Those voices of the guns were nearer now.  They talked
on incessantly.  You felt the air that carried you vibrating
as you flew.  The solid earth heaved up in waves under the
dusty golden smoke-drifts veiling the south horizon.
Black pillars of smoke and *débris* climbed and collapsed
against the dusty gold.  Grey Imperial Staff cars were
parked in the courtyard of a château with pepper-box towers.
Officers sat at tables on the vine-covered terrace, while a
farm close by was doing duty as a casualty-clearing station.
You could pick out the flutter of the Red Cross Flag on a
broken tree beside the gateway—and the come and go of the
bearers carrying laden or empty stretchers—and the white
armlets of the *Sanitätskorps* men who drove the ambulance-cars.
To have seen over and over again what grown folks
learned from newspapers was to be a man seasoned in War,
whilst yet one's bones were young.  Well worth the hardships
one had borne, this sheaf of ripe experience.  Good to
know one had obeyed the Chief who said, "*Quit yourself like
a man!*"

So Bawne flew on.  The fiery chrism of a strange second
baptism was on his forehead.  Gates of wonder seemed
opening on the horizon towards which he hastened, guided
by the big broad arrow of the reinforced compass and the
thudding of those nearing guns.

Some perception of great issues at stake and marvellous
impending changes, ushering in the revival of the forgotten
days of Chivalry, may have come at this hour to the child
so strangely caught and whirled into the dizzy circles of the
maelstrom of International War.  Did a voice whisper to
him that as of old by his Pagan forefathers, babes were
sacrificed to Bel and Odin—so for the cleansing of the sick
world of to-day from the War-madness begotten by greed
and materialism a torrent of rich, warm, generous blood was
to be shed from the veins of the young?  Could he dream
that the lower mankind sank, the higher men were to
rise—mounting on stepping-stones of obedience and courage, to
those heights where the human may walk with the Divine?
That through long years to come, bright boys in myriads
would drain the wine of Death from the chalice of
Self-Sacrifice, and pass to God who kindled in those clean young
souls the fire that made Him burn to die for men.

.. vspace:: 2

The Enemy was rousing from his doze or dwam, or swoon,
or whatever had been the matter with him.  The big body
was heaving into an upright posture, the big foot was
knocking in Morse on the bottom of the fuselage.  The boy
looked down and saw blood running there—or was it the red
of the sunset?

"Shut—off—and—look—at me," rapped the foot, and its
thrall obeyed and shrieked at the sight of the horror he was
strapped to, glaring with wild eyes, and spitting unintelligible
sentences with bloody splinters of shattered teeth and
red rags of palate and tongue.

"I am damaged, is it not so?  Something hit me when the
bomb exploded."  Something like this came in strange
sounds from that inhuman face.  And the boy shrieked
again and again, straining at the belt that bound him to his
terrible companion, conscious of nothing but overmastering
fear—

"*Quit yourself like a man!*"

.. vspace:: 2

He heard the words through the drumming in his ears
and his heart left off leaping.  His brain cleared.  He
realised that the Taube was diving to the ground.  He
switched on power and brought down her tail and pulled up
her nose gamely.  They passed through a suffocating mist
of burned chemicals that deposited red powder on your
hands and face, and the glass of your flying-goggles, and
parched your lungs like burning Cayenne pepper—and were
over the battle-zone.

As far as the eye could take it in the face of earth was
moving.  Death, like a many-handed mole, seemed working
underground.  Huge geysers of dirt and mud and stones
heaved up in thick black smoke and vapour.  The air shook
incessantly with reduplicated concussions.  Buildings
tottered and sank away, and railway bridges melted, and
spurts of blinding fire leaped from invisible mouths of guns.

The revolutions were slowing down.  The Taube travelled
painfully.  Beneath her bobbed a row of sausage-shaped
observation-balloons straining at their spidery cables,
beyond these were the third and second German lines—whitish
furrows stretching East and West, with little zig-zags,
that were communicating-trenches, between.  A thin
blue haze of rifle and machine-gun fire hung over the pitted
ground.  The Advanced lines behind their smear of rust-red
barbed wire might have been sixty yards from the parapet
of the British trenches.  Friend and foe were dying
there—and over the hurly-burly, dodging Death in puffs of
woolly vapour, belched from vertical mobile muzzles, directing
fire, signalling, wirelessing, scouting, fighting others
who assailed signallers or scouters—wheeled and circled the
Birds of War.  Their sharp eyes picked him out flying far
down beneath them.

"There goes a Hun somebody's shrapbozzled!" said the
pilot of a R.A.F.B.E., shutting off to speak to his observer.

"Going to crash in a minute," said the observer of the
Bleriot Experimental.  "Where, do you suppose?"

"If he keeps on at that angle," said the pilot from behind
his glasses, "he'll pass over that nest of Hun machine-guns
in the big shell-pit behind the German Advanced Line, at
about a hundred and fifty—and pile in that ploughfield
behind our Gunners."

The Taube was flying low and crookedly—the high crescendo
whine of shell passed over it—heavy metal sent from
German batteries—and other shells from British guns were
crashing and bursting near.  The wind was getting up in the
west, and the drift of the machine was trending eastwards,
in spite of anything Bawne could do.  Could one keep flying
long enough to pass the first line of British trenches?  And
how would one come to the ground, knowing nothing about
landing—and with a bomb on board!

One must get rid of the devil-egg.  Should one drop it on
the enemy's trenches?  As he flew towards them a rag of
white fluttered, and Bawne caught his breath.  A long line
of grey-green men were jumping like grasshoppers over the
parapet.  They went forwards with their hands up, waving
a White Flag, and from the British trenches came men in
khaki doubling out to take their prisoners....

*Rat-tat-tatt!*

The khaki figures began to fall.  The grey men were
cheering....  The *rat-tatt*—came from the German
machine-guns, pumping out jets of murderous lead.  Then in a
flash Bawne understood, leaned to the right, and seeing the
machine-gun pit beneath him—pulled out the pin, jerked up
the latch, and dropped the devil-egg.  Horrible to think, it
would kill Germans!—but then—to save one's own dear
Englishmen——

"Good Night!  Did you see that?" asked the pilot of the
R.A.F.B.E., shutting off to address his observer, and
immediately switching on again, for a geyser of earth and
stones and fire, and bits of things that had been men and
guns had spurted up from the spot where a moment since
had been the gun-pit, and troubled waves of heated air
reached them at 5000.

"He knows he's got to come down crash, and jettisoned
the lollipop to improve his chances! ... Civil of him to
drop it just when the Deershires were getting it hot and
hot! ... Deserves thanks from the British C. in C.,
though his Kaiser won't be particularly pleased with him,"
reflected the R.F.C. observer, as the Taube, flying like a
bird with a wounded wing, crossed the lines of the British
trenches, dived staggeringly, and crashed down in the
ploughed field behind the slogging guns.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`A MENACE; AND GOOD NEWS`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER LXIX


.. class:: center medium bold

   A MENACE; AND GOOD NEWS

.. vspace:: 2

*Drip, drip!* ...

The slow dropping of water on the carpet and the sweet,
heavy fragrance of roses, brings me back as it brought
Patrine.  She got up and pulled down the dark blue blinds
with the precaution that was becoming habitude with us
at this date, in view of that often bragged-of menace from
the sky.  She switched up the lights and moved to the table,
roughly pulled off the string that tied, and lifted the lid of
the cardboard box.

A rich, sweet fragrance that was almost musky enveloped
her as she lifted the thin paper.  A sheaf of roses of flaming
sanguine crimson, tied with black-and-white striped ribbon
lay beneath.  Black and white are the Prussian colours.
Black, white, and red the standard of the Hohenzollern.
Patrine knew that von Herrnung had sent the roses, even
before she recognised his writing on a thick white envelope
pinned to the ribbon binding the flowers.

.. vspace:: 1

"*If Isis desires news of 'her dearest', she will open and read
the letter.  From one who does not desire to forget.*"

.. vspace:: 2

The letter contained a lock of hair, jaggedly cut—she
knew from whose sweet head.  Half blind with tears, she
lifted the lock to her lips and kissed it passionately, before
she bent herself to read the careful English sentences that
revealed the man in all his vanity and lustfulness, insolence,
and tyranny, as though the burin of Strang or the brush of
Sargent had etched him upon copper or limned him upon
canvas, to show the world what depths of infamy can be
plumbed by the Superman.

.. vspace:: 1

"*Strong Woman of the race of moral weaklings, have you not
yet learned to be proud that a Prussian soldier prized your
beauty, and took it for his own?  When the fierce men in the
proud German Field-grey have swarmed over the soil of
England,—when, amidst the squadron of night-birds whose feathers
gleam mysteriously in the pale moonlight, thy lover flies onward,
singing his war-song, laden with his cargo of explosives—when
the Red Cock crows on the roof-trees of London's wilderness of
houses and London's fire-bells, amidst terrific explosions, ring
out the last battle of the century, will Isis then think of me?
Revolvers, carbines, bombs, and poisoned arrows are among the
gifts I shall bring thee in the hand that wears the mascot pearl
of black and white.  Coloured signalling-balls set in the silver of
the searchlight, shall be thy tiara; for thy arms and thy white
bosom there will be strings of rubies outpoured from the broken
coffers of the House of Life.  Our second nuptials will be
celebrated by a mitred Death, amidst the smoking ruins of
Westminster Abbey, to the roaring strains of the German Anthem,
'Now Praise Ye the Lord.'  Till then au revoir! shall one
perhaps say?*

"*Ah, were Isis of the burning beech-leaf tresses not only
beautiful but wise, she would place her hand in the hand that
stretches yearningly over the North Sea.  I wish love more than
vengeance; is not that unnatural for a Hun?  A golden
consciousness of happiness yet to come wells up within me.  Would
Isis taste that happiness, let her go to her window and open it
on the night of the day that brings this letter.  There are no
Germans in England who are not in prison or under espionage.
No, possibly! yet go to thy window!  A word to him who waits
there, and Isis is once more mine.  But beware of turning my
tenderness by scornful rejection to hatred.  Cold devil!—I
should then strike, and frightfully, at the head whence came this
hair.  Look at it well and answer.  T.v.H.*"

.. vspace:: 2

She could turn no paler, her hue was that of death already.
She dropped the loathsome letter from her hand upon the
roses and thrust the lock of hair into her bosom, and went
to a window and touched the spring of the blind.  It flew
up and revealed her tall shape standing there silhouetted
against the electric radiance in defiance of that boasted
menace from the sky.

The street seemed empty, within the radius of her vision,
save for the dark bulk of a motor-car, standing before a
house on the same side some way down.  Its headlights
flashed, once, twice, and again, as though in answer.  It
slid forwards with a low hissing sound: "*Ss'sh!*" it said, as if
in gluttonous anticipation, and stopped opposite the
hall-door.  Again the headlights flashed, there was a gleam of
yellow enamel.  She recognised the Darracq car in which
von Herrnung had driven her to Fanshaw's Flying Ground
on that unforgettable eighteenth of July.

Holding her breath, narrowing her long-sighted eyes for
better focus, she scrutinised the driver, recognising in the
thick-set figure hunched over the steering-wheel, wearing a
peaked cap pulled low over his forehead, and a wide white
muffler twisted round his throat, the German who had
brought the message from the Three in the blue F.I.A.T. car.
She was sure of him when he touched his cap, looking
furtively up at the window, and switched on a small electric
bulb, illuminating the clock upon the dashboard as though
to afford her a view of his face.  Its bloodshot pale eyes,
thick broad nose, and the unwholesome, purplish colour of
the complexion, barred with a big light yellowish moustache
with waxed ends, had stuck in her memory as ugly personal
traits will stick.  Of the slenderer man beside him she had
no recollection.  He was buttoned up in an overcoat with a
fur collar, and wore a soft felt hat.  She felt the eyes it
shadowed were fastened on her, and recoiled as though from
the touch of something unclean and horrible, roughly
dragging down the blind.

She was brave, but the sense of being almost alone in the
house with those alert, observant eyes outside, spying upon
her movements, made her heart beat suffocatingly, and
brought chill damps of deadly terror to the surface of her
skin.  She moved to a chair with a clogging sense of
ultimate effort—the nightmare feeling of striving against a
powerful hypnotic influence, bidding her creep downstairs
and open the street-door, step into the car waiting at the
kerbstone, and be borne away by rushing wheels and whirling
screws, or even swifter wings, perhaps, to that War-torn
land where von Herrnung was waiting to exact his price for
sparing the beloved head.

She drew the lock of hair from her bosom and whispered
inarticulate tendernesses to it, stroking its red-gold beauty
with fingers and lips.  Not until now those bread white
strands amongst the reddish-gold conveyed their sinister
meaning.  When it came it was like a blow delivered full
between the eyes.  She swayed forwards and fell upon her
knees beside the table, her forehead resting on the clenched
hand that held the boy's hair.  All that was maternal in her
fierce, undisciplined nature urged her now to make the
sacrifice.  Remorse for having forgotten the child in her
absorbing love for Sherbrand, was a scourge of fiery
scorpions that urged her to the leap.

Its uselessness, the certainty that von Herrnung would
keep no hinted promise to restore the hostage, would have
been no argument to deter her.  Sherbrand's influence
might have counterpoised, but she had sent away Sherbrand
for his own sake.  Now she would go to Bawne, buy him
back with body and soul, if need be, from the hands of the
torturer, or at least share his agony and die by his side.

Madness was near enough that night to sweep her tattered
robe before the eyes of Patrine, and beckon enticingly with
her sceptre of plaited straw.  She was alone and she had
borne so much, and nothing else could save Lynette's
boy—unless it were a miracle!  Where was God—where was God
now?  Upon that July night of the child's spiriting away
Sherbrand had bidden her pray that Bawne might be
restored to them.  She had petitioned in a perfunctory way
when she had thanked God for taking away von Herrnung—that
the child might be traced and brought back.  Now she
clenched her hands until the nails dug into their palms, and
groaned out, as the dry sobs racked her body, words that
sensed after this fashion:

"Save him, save him!  For Christ's love save him—and
give him back!  For the dear sakes of those to whom I have
been so ungrateful! hear me—only hear me! and I will—be
different.  I will serve Thee, O God, who have ignored
Thee!  I will confess Thee, I who have denied! ..."

Mean, base, said her pride, to kneel and entreat Him
whom you have neglected and insulted.  Even though
He heard, do you think that He would answer now?  But
with desperate effort she thrust away the thought from her.
The Hound of Heaven had leaped upon her, flying.  She
felt his teeth in her garments, holding her back from the
invisible hands that dragged at her.  She knew that unseen
forces of Good and Evil were engaged in furious battle for
her soul....  And strangling, she gasped out incoherent
sentences, wild appeals to the Divine Pity....  In the
midst of these, startling her like a thunderclap, came a
hurried knocking at the door.

"Miss Pat!"

It was the voice of Mrs. Keyse, and as Patrine stumbled
to her feet and stood wild-eyed and shaking, the little,
matronly figure in the black silk gown of housekeeperly
dignity appeared upon the threshold of the room.

"You—wanted me, Mrs. Keyse?  Is it about the—the
yellow car?  Have they——"

The hoarse voice and the white, wrung face conveyed to
an ardent lover of Patrine that something was wrong with
her Doctor's niece.  Tragedy was in the air—but Discretion
is the better Part of Value, and nobody knew better than
Emrigation Jane what fierce passions could boil in the
Saxham blood.

"No, Miss Pat.  It's not the car, yet, though I fancied I
'eard one stop here a minute back.  It's the telephone in the
consultin' room ringin', and ringin',—and Chewse gone to
bed," Chewse being the trained maid who admitted patients
and received messages.  "And me with the best will in the
world never could make 'ead or tail of them tellermessages—except
the 'ulloing!  And pre'aps you'd come and write
down for the Doctor whatever it is they've got to say...."

"Very well.  Don't wait, I'm coming directly!"

Mrs. Keyse vanished, and with that dreamlike sense of
unreality upon her, Patrine followed downstairs and passed
along the silent corridor.  The electric lamp above the
Doctor's table had been switched on.  She took the
Doctor's chair and rang-up and waited, sitting where Saxham
had sat when Lynette's sweet lips first touched his
forehead—where the big man had planned self-murder in the darkest
hour of his despair.  The frayed patch on the Persian rug
beneath her feet had been worn by Saxham's usage.  The
triptych frame that held the portraits of Lynette and
Bawne drew Patrine's eyes as she sat waiting, and the
clench of her big white hand upon the table-ledge, the bend
of her black brows and the stern sorrow stamped upon her
face made her likeness to the Doctor more than ever
apparent now.

"Halloa!" she called, and the brusque harshness of her
own voice was startlingly like Saxham's.  A sense of
Destiny oppressed her.  She felt as one stifling in a
vacuum—drowning for lack of air.  Her prayers had rolled back
upon her soul unanswered.  The sense of spiritual desolation
intensified her desperate loneliness.  No good to pray
and cling until you broke your nails to that great Rock that
upholds the Crucifix.  Better let go, and be carried away by
the torrent.  Signs and wonders are not wrought in these
days!—said that other Patrine within Patrine—and if any
were, there would be no miracle.  You fool, you fool, to
dream of one!

She was sorry for herself as she sat there waiting.  This
little duty done, she would rise and obey that sinister
summons from the outer darkness.  Nothing on earth nor in
Heaven could help or prevent.  The sudden tinkle of the
bell came at this juncture.  The call was in Sir Roland's
well-known voice.

"Halloa! ... Is that you, Saxham?"

"Halloa!" she called back in that voice so strangely like
*his* and unlike her own.

"Good!  Well, my true friend and faithful coadjutor of
old time," said the crisp voice, shaken a little as though by
some irrepressible emotion or excitement, "some news has
been communicated to us by Wireless that will lift up your
heart and your wife's.  Are you listening? ... To-day,
about six P.M., near Langebeke, north-west of Ypres, at the
moment of the White Flag ruse that cost the Deershire
Regiment two hundred men, a two-seater Taube, flying low,
as though something were the matter with her engine, came
wobbling over the British lines.  Nobody shot at her—she
had just given our side sufficient reason for consideration
by dropping a highly-effective bomb on a wasp's nest of
German machine-gunners—and she crashed to ground
behind a battery of First Corps R.F.A.  Her German
pilot had been frightfully wounded.  His passenger, who
sat in his lap to steer—and dropped the bomb!—escaped
with a shake-up.  You've got the story?  Then, here's the
tag of it.  WE'VE GOT YOUR BOY!  Bawne was the lucky
fellow who only got a shaking.  He arrives at Charing Cross
to-night at twelve sharp!"

He added, as a stifled cry travelled over the wire:

"Congratulations with all my heart, to you and
Mrs. Saxham.  And to Miss Pat, though I'm afraid she pays,
poor girl, in sorrow for your joy.  There is a report that
Sherbrand's Bird of War No. 2 has been shot down by a
Zeppelin he encountered returning to the Front from England
to-day, to supply the place of an R.F.C. pilot—killed
while on observation-service near St. Yves—for Callenby's
Cavalry Corps."

There was a stifled sound of interrogation or an exclamation.
The Chief continued:

"He had no bombs.  It was madness to attack with only
a Maxim and their magazine-revolvers, but glorious madness
worth a thousand sane, reasonable acts.  As it is, the
Zeppelin—supposed to have been on her way from Ostend to
bomb St. O—was badly crippled and compelled to turn
back.  It was a shell from one of her Q.F.'s that exploded
Sherbrand's petrol-tank and set the Bird on fire.  The
machine was seen to fall in flames near Dixschoote—held by
the Germans.  Sherbrand and his observer must be
prisoners—that is, supposing they're alive.  Hard luck!  Break
it gently to the poor girl!  Good-night!"

There was no answering Good-night, only a faint thud
and rustle.  Sir Roland did not guess what he had done as
he rang off and hung the receiver up.  And Lynette,
coming into the consulting-room, noiselessly as a pale
moonbeam, found a big galumphing girl she loved lying
huddled between the chair and table, with her white face
pressed against the spot worn threadbare by the Doctor's
feet.

.. vspace:: 2

Coincidence, you say, perhaps.  Well, but what is Coincidence?
Is it a Dust-wind careering over the Desert in the
neighbourhood of the Pyramids, playing with straw and
twigs and dead locusts' wings, and one stray fragment of
printed paper, as a Mounted Division of the British
Expeditionary Force encamped upon the slope not far from
Gizeh, ride out with the dawn to exercise their horses on the
plain that is partly flooded by the Nile?  Or is it the ragged
quarter-sheet torn from an English newspaper, that wraps
itself about the spurred ankle of the big blond young
Englishman who rides the vicious chestnut mare?

Long lines of horses marching in threes for miles, black
and coffee-coloured natives in flowing jubbehs mixed up
with tanned young British Centaurs in sun-helmets and
khaki shorts—and the rag of paper clings to the leg of the
one man there whom its news concerns.  She who is dearer
than all save Honour is once more a free woman,—and his
faith and constancy are to meet their reward.  His letter
lies before me; a sentence pencilled more blackly than
the rest stands out upon the yellowish paper:

.. vspace:: 1

"*If this be accident it is incredible.  If Design, it is
miraculous.  And I had rather thank Heaven for a miracle
vouchsafed than owe even such happiness—to Chance.*"

.. vspace:: 2

When the deep swoon gave place to semi-consciousness,
the pale lips uttered nothing but broken words.  Locked
away safely behind them was the glorious news that would
have changed two people's lives.  Thus Lynette was still
ignorant of her own great happiness, when having helped
Patrine upstairs to her room and put her tenderly to bed,
she dismissed Mrs. Keyse to her own slumbers, and took
her place beside Patrine's pillow, listening to the sighing
breaths that were growing deeper and fuller, keenly alert for
the sound of the Doctor's latch-key and the Doctor's step
in the hall.

It was close upon the smallest hour.  Something had
detained Saxham.  Sitting in the darkened room beside the
long prone shape beneath the coverings, Lynette was free to
lean her head against the back of the chair she sat in and
yield herself to the bitter sweetness of memories of her lost
boy.

What the sorrow of Shakespeare wrought in deathless
lines no halting pen like mine dare strive to portray.
Enough that the beloved little ghost that haunted the
woman whose heart was breaking, was closer than ever
to Lynette on this night.  All day the sweet obsession had
thrust itself between Bawne's mother and solid, tangible
things.  The red-gold sheen of the boyish head, the gay
blue challenge of the laughing eyes, the coaxing tones of the
treble voice had tortured the senses they deceived.  She
had thrust him away with both hands, for ordinary,
commonplace duties claimed, and yielding led the way to
madness.  He had come back again and again, to be driven
away once more.  Now that her hands lay idle in her
lap—now that she was withdrawn from the world and its
realities, the beloved little ghost returned and had his will
with her.

Sitting in the haunted gloom, a strange conviction came
to Lynette.  This was not Grief, travestying in the figure of
the absent, but a visitation from the World Unseen....
Bawne was dead, and had been dragged back from the
threshold of the Beyond by her own unbridled yearnings.
Could there be a punishment more terrible than this?
Only those who have loved and lost, and clinging to their
faith in a Future Life, strive to bear patiently the burden
of bereavement, can comprehend the torture of this woman
in this hour.

The Presence grew more torturingly tangible.  The
empty shell of the house that had been Bawne's home was
full of his callings, his movements, his play, his laughter.
She heard his quick soft breathing behind her chair in the
darkness.  Once she could have vowed that a hard little
boyish hand brushed against her cheek.  Then she was
alone once more, except for the unconscious sleeper.  And
then the torture began all over again.

Bawne was coming home, late, from the Hendon Flying
Ground.  The long months of misery—the horror of the
War—had been a dreadful dream.  She heard the long
*br'r'* of the electric hall-bell under the impetuous insistent
finger—the small scurry of his entrance, a squawk from the
maid who answered night-calls—a whispered word or two,
and the clumping of the heavy little brogues upon the
stairs.  Would he trip at the corner where he always stubbed
his toe? she wondered—and she plainly heard him stumble.
Then her hair stiffened upon her head, and a long shudder
rippled through her.  The little clumping brogues had
stopped before Patrine's bedroom door.

"*Mother!*"

His voice called, and his well-known thump came on the
door-panel.  The handle clicked.  She controlled her
shuddering and forced her stiffened tongue to speech.

"*Come in, my own!*"

The tall door swung slowly inwards.  A wedge of brightness
from the lighted landing threw his shadow over the
white-enamelled door-post....  The darkness of the
room soaked it greedily up.  Then the doorway was a
square of radiance with a little ghostly figure framed in it.
All the light was behind him.  She could not see his face,
but she felt his eyes upon her....  Then the voice that
her ears were sick for said with a quaver in its treble:

"It's dark, but I can hear you breathing! ... Mother,
why didn't you and Father come?  I thought when I got there
I'd be sure to see you! ... But amongst all those faces
and faces not one was yours—and—Man alive!—I wanted
to blub a bit!  I'm not quite sure that I didn't, you know!"

She stretched her arms to the beloved little ghost, whispering:

"My poor, poor love, my baby, my treasure!  Mother
knows how much it hurt.  But be patient a little longer.
Soon—soon—your father and I——"

The woe-wave rose and swelled in her bosom, tears began
to run over her stiff white face.  The clasped hands she
stretched to him were quivering, but she controlled them
like the trembling of her voice.

"Go back to Paradise, my little son!  Wait patiently,
my love, my Angel!  I have been wrong, but I will grieve no
more!  I will be patient:—O! believe——"

A man's footsteps sounded on the staircase and the great
shadowy figure of the Doctor appeared behind Bawne's
little shape.  With a swift movement Saxham caught up
the bewildered boy, made one long stride across the threshold,
and put the warm, living treasure into the mother's
outstretched arms...

.. vspace:: 2

Once again big black-lettered contents-bills shrieked
from the railings and were worn after the fashion of heralds'
tabards by the vendors of newspapers, and the editions
were snapped up as fast as they came out.  Here are some
of the headlines:

.. vspace:: 1

"THRILLING ESCAPE OF KIDNAPPED BOY SCOUT FROM THE
HANDS OF THE HUN.  YOUNG HERO OF NORTH SEA ADVENTURE
LANDS BEHIND BRITISH LINES AT LANGEBEKE IN TAUBE
WITH A BOCHE PRISONER.  FULL STORY OF HOW SCOUT WHO
SAVED THE CLANRONALD PAPERS BOMBED THE GERMAN
MACHINE-GUNS.  DECORATION OF SCOUT SAXHAM WITH
'GOLDEN WOLF' BADGE BY ROYAL PRESIDENT AT ASSOCIATION
HEADQUARTERS.  PROBABLE TESTIMONIAL FROM BRITISH
PUBLIC.  AFTERNOON TEA WITH THE WAR MINISTER AT
WHITEHALL.  EXPECTED INVESTITURE WITH EDWARDIAN
ORDER OF MERIT.  WHAT YOU GET BY BEING PREPARED!"

.. vspace:: 2

And again:

.. vspace:: 1

"SPLENDID PLUCK OF BRITISH AVIATOR.  FIGHTS ZEPPELIN
ON WAY TO BOMB BRITISH HEADQUARTERS.  AIRSHIP CRIPPLED.
SHERBRAND R.F.C. KILLED.  FALLS IN FLAMES OVER
GERMAN LINES.  HEROIC END OF SOLE REMAINING HEIR TO
PENINSULAR WAR EARLDOM, AND INVENTOR OF THE HAWK-HOVERER
THAT SOLVES PROBLEM OF STABILITY.  WILL WAR
OFFICE ADOPT GREAT INVENTION, EMPLOYED BY ALLIES'
FLYING SERVICES?"

.. vspace:: 2

Three days later:

.. vspace:: 1

"SHERBRAND R.F.C. RECEIVES POSTHUMOUS HONOURS
FROM FRANCE AND BELGIUM.  CROIX D'HONNEUR AND ORDER
OF LEOPOLD.  WHY NOT BRITISH D.S.O.?"





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`A LOVER'S JOURNEY`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER LXX


.. class:: center medium bold

   A LOVER'S JOURNEY

.. vspace:: 2

The crossing—in this Arctic April weather when all of
Britain and Belgium and North-West France lay under
snowdrifts—had been calm and smooth enough for the worst
sea-stomachs on the steamer.  The tall young woman in the
Navy blue felt hat with the well-known V.A.D. ribbon, and
the long blue serge coat with the Red Cross shield-badge on
the left breast, seemed used to travelling alone in War-time.
She had secured a dry chair, set in the shelter of the
after-deck-saloon, and a lifebelt as stipulated by the authorities,
and tucked herself in her travelling-rug with her suit-case
under her feet before the lights went out.  Thus she had
remained throughout the passage, with her dark eyes looking
seawards, as deaf to occasional bursts of uproarious song
from a draft of returning Blighties packed on the lower-deck,
as to the siren's raucous shrieks.

Courteous fellow-passengers, chiefly British and Belgian
officers returning from leave, would have been ready enough
to have chatted with the young woman who was going to the
Front.  Such attentions as they offered her she accepted
frankly.  One got her tea and sandwiches, another offered
chocolate, another a foot-warmer.  Yet another insisted on
lending her an unnecessary extra rug.  They pointed out the
hovering Fleet hydroplanes, and the diligently-scouting
searchlights of the destroyers guarding the sea-way, and the
Hull-bound Dutch liner whose neutrality was proclaimed
in illuminated side-letters, blazing like a sea-Alhambra upon
the east horizon, and the Hospital ship that passed close,
coming from Boulogne laden with wounded, the huge Red
Cross upon her flank picked out with blazing green lights.

One and all united in assuring the wearer of the
V.A.D. uniform that there was no danger.  Though when the red
and green eyes on the ends of the East and West jetties
winked into sight over the coal-black shining water, her
fellow-passengers congratulated Patrine as heartily as
though some peril had been escaped.

"Nothing more doing, Pinkums, old thing!" said an
experienced youngster of twenty to a susceptible senior
whom Patrine's unprotected condition had roused to a
strong sense of responsibility.  "She's got enough passes
from British and French Headquarters to make a poker-hand.
I saw her showin' 'em to the authorities at Folkestone.
Besides, have heart, there's a Red Tab here to
meet her.  We'd better hence it before we're snubbed."

And they saluted, and clattered down the crowded gangway,
grabbing their valises and buttoning up their British
warms, and hurried away to get into trench-kit, webbings,
and waders, and swell the crowd in the railway-station—waiting
to go up to the Front and carry on with the hourly,
momentary game of touch-and-go with Death.

While Patrine looked eagerly about her, listening to the
hum of the vast human beehive.  This was not the big
rambling, old-fashioned French seaport one had known so
well before the War.  Under sky-blind arc-lights and red,
green, and white lamps, every form of activity imaginable
in connection with the running of that now huge and
complicated machine, the British Field Army, seemed even at
this hour to be in full swing.  The rumble of steam-cranes
and the roar of dynamos, the panting of pneumatic
hold-dischargers, the clank of couplings, and the shrieks of
locomotives mingled with the tinny voices of gramophones from
the recreation-rooms at the great packed barracks and
crowded camps, and the sounds of song and laughter and
applause from music-halls and picture-palaces.

"Yes, it goes on most of the time," said the Red Tab who
had come to meet Patrine, an officer upon the Staff of the
Commandant of a Headquarters not far from—a certain
place where Miss Saxham wished to go.  "The Army's got
to be rationed and equipped and horsed and foraged, and
timbered and coaled and petroled and munitioned, as well as
cobbled and engineered and patched and tinkered and
nursed—don't you follow me?  And these Base Ports are
jolly useful.  Nobody goes to bed much, I fancy.  Perhaps
they'll make up the sleep they've lost by-and-by, after the
War."

"What-ho, Nubbins!  Back from the Old Shop?  Sorry!—didn't
happen to see you weren't alone!"

The station had vomited a flood of khaki, tumbling down
the half-lit quays to take later boats by storm.  A tall,
lanky officer of Gunners had hailed Red Tab effusively;
then, seeing him to be engaged with a lady, hurried on with
apologies and a salute for Patrine.

"Don't mind me!  Do call back your friend," she urged.
"He seemed so glad to see you."

"Thanks much.  If you don't mind.  Whewip!  Whewip!"

And the other, recalled by a shrill whistle, wheeled and
came back upon his stride, to grasp the offered hand.
Whereupon, ensued the following strictly private duologue:

"How goes the Battery?"

"First class.  And your crowd?"

"Crawling along as per, usual.  Congrats on the
Oudstyde affair!"

"Thanks frightfully!  But the whole thing was a bit of
a fluke—everyone knows that.  *They* had thrown down a
gas-attack and the wind went about-face.  So we stayed
where we were and shelled them through their chlorine.
Then they got their Reserves up and came on in lumps—the
old Zulu formation—and Pyers and his Engineers got to
work with the"—the speaker's voice dropped to an
undertone—"what Pyers calls the 'Piffbozzler.'"

"The rose by any other name——" quoted Red Tab, and
went on: "I'd have given a tenner to have been there!—and
as for old Clanronald—I wonder if he got leave
from—wherever he is—to see the stunt that day?"

Said the Gunner:

"If he did—and had such a thing as a stomach about
him, he must have simply—vomited!  Pyers says he felt
like the Angel with the Flaming Sword—when he didn't
feel like an Indian jeweller with a blowpipe—frizzling a
column of white ants marching over the floor.  You've
seen how the things come on and on——"

"Yahgh!" remarked Red Tab expressively.

"But—just for once—we didn't happen to be on the
frizzled side.  The C. in C. has laughed to the verge of
hysterics over a leader in the Berlin *Lokal Anzeiger*, with
reference to the realised dream of the 'homicidal maniac'
Clanronald.  'A deplorable example of the perversion of *Die
Wissenschaft* at the murderous hands of English military
chemists,' they called it.  Pretty neat from Boches who've
been pumping burning paraffin into our trenches, and
suffocating platoons of men with asphyxiating gases, ever
since May."

"And particularly appropriate from people who bribed a
crack Professor of Literature to engage as librarian at Gwyll
Castle—set the Library Wing on fire and steal the portfolio
with the plans of the 'homicidal maniac' three weeks before
the War—when Prinz Heinrich and old Moltke were
stopping in London.  They'd promised their agent twelve
million marks if he succeeded.  Wonder what he got from
them when the plot fizzled out?  Well, so-long!  Any
message for Edith?'

"Tell her you saw me topping, and remember me to your wife!"

And they gripped hands and parted, and Red Tab hurried
back to the tall young woman waiting on the flagstones
under a blue shaded arc-lamp, saying:

"Good of you not to mind.  But a shame to keep you
waiting.  No—we go out at this gate.  I've got a car
waiting.  More cushy than a crowded railway-carriage—unless
you'd have preferred going by train?"

The grey landaulette waiting in the side-street presented
no more unusual feature than unusually heavy armoured
tyres, and a guard of razor-edged steel bars protecting the
front seat.

"In case of barbed wire—strung across country roads,"
explained Red Tab.  "One runs a chance of getting
decapitated—travelling fast at night—or in foggy weather—without
a jigger of this sort.  Let me stick this cushion at your
back and tuck the rugs about you.  There's a Thermos in
the pocket with hot coffee—and sandwiches in a box.  Don't
restrain your appyloose if you feel at all hungry!  The grub
was put in specially for you.  No: you won't hear the guns
yet, except at intervals, and rather faintly.  Fact—I've
heard 'em in the South of England more distinctly than one
does here!  But at St. O—, twenty-eight miles from the
Front—they're loud enough at times—though there's
nothing much doing.  Things have been as dull as ditch-water
and none of us'll be sorry when the Boches get a move
on again.  No—thanks, I'm not coming inside!  Responsible
for your safety.  Advise you to tuck up and go to by-by!"

The car settled into its speed when the ups and downs of
the old town had been left behind, and the belated activities
of the Base Port had died into a distant hum.  It slackened
pace when the blaze of its headlights showed long black
columns of laden motor-lorries upon the wintry roads ahead
of it—or horse-drawn transport waggons—or droves of
animals, the steam of whose breath and shaggy hides hung
over them in a cloud—or bodies of men in heavy marching
order—French and British soldiers wearing the new steel
headpiece,—shaped after the fashion of Mambrino's helmet,
like a basin turned upside down.

And sometimes there were the halts at barriers or
patrol-posts near towns or villages, where the light of swung
lanterns reddened the moustached faces of gendarmes of
Chasseurs.  But usually when Patrine cleared a space
upon the misty window-glass, the snow-covered landscape
would be flying past under the fitful moonlight, with the
elongated shadow of the grey Staff car galloping beside it
like a demon dog.

Midnight was striking from an ancient church-tower
when, passing the guarded barriers of a town of old-world
houses, and stopping in a street running from a Place bathed
in frosty moonlight, and dominated by a vast cathedral,
Red Tab, with icicles on his clipped moustache and fur
collar, got down and tapped upon the rimy glass.

"Sorry to wake you up, Miss Saxham!" he said, opening
the door as Patrine sat up, straightened the dented brim of
her hat and blinked denial of her slumberousness, "but here's
the end of your journey.  This is the Ursuline Convent of
St. O—, where we've arranged for you to billet to-night.
The Superioress is a frightfully hospitable old lady, and my
uncle—I mean Sir Roland—thought you'd be more cushy
with the Sisters than at a common hotel!"

.. vspace:: 2

"Sir Roland is always kind.  But you, Captain
Smyth-Howell?"  She looked out at her red-tabbed escort with
compunction as he tugged at the chain of a clanging bell,
and beat his mittened hands together, stamping upon the
pavement to warm his frozen feet.

"Me?  Oh, I'm pushing on to Divisional Headquarters—twenty-five
miles from this place and five miles north of the
Belgian frontier.  You'll be sent on to Pophereele in the
morning, first thing.  The French Chaplain of the Red
Cross Hospital there is staying for the night with the Bishop
at the Palace here.  A tremendously agreeable old bird the
Chaplain—and a Monsignore of the Vatican.  I've met
him—and he said he'd be delighted to look after you.  Don't
get down—it's frightfully slippery!"

But the tall, womanly figure was already standing beside
him on the snowy cobblestones, tilting a round white chin
towards the sky, and narrowing long eyes—"queer eyes" he
mentally termed them—to see the better through her veil.

"What glorious stars!"

He liked the soft warmth of her voice, as he answered:

"Magnificent, aren't they?  Look at Draco blazing away,
high over the north transept of the Cathedral.  And that
would be Aquila—I rather fancy—lowish on the horizon,
over that ruined tower.  That's a bit of their famous
Abbey——"

"Great Scott!"

"Did anything startle you?" he asked.  "You said——"

"I know I said it, but I didn't mean to.  There, again—"  She
pointed as forked tongues of pale rainbow-tinted fire
leaped up from the northern horizon, throwing into
momentary relief the Cathedral's stately bulk and the huddled
housetops.

"Those are Boche fireworks!"

"Fireworks?"

"Star-shell, rockets, and so forth.  They regularly treat
us to a display before they begin to pound us again.  Where
are we fighting?  Oh, pretty busy north—as far as Ypres
and as far south as La Bassée.  French on our right—French
and Belgians on the left of us.  More French holding
Verdun.  My hat! what gorgeous fighters!  Men of
steel with muscles of vulcanised rubber.  And we thought
the Gaul an absinthe-drinking degenerate.  I tell you we
wanted this War to open our eyes for us.  Perhaps they did
too!  Here's one of the Sisters coming now!"

Hurrying felt slippers with rope soles shuffled over stone
pavements.  The key grated and the bolts shot back.  A
little Sister Portress in a close guimpe and flowing black
veil, with a blue-checked apron tied over her habit, swung
back the heavy door, holding her lantern high.

Just Heaven, upon how cold a night Madame had arrived
from England!  Madame must be perished.  But there was
coffee, and soup *très chaud* not only for Madame but for
M. l'Officier.  And also the chauffeur.  Madame *la
Supérieure* would never permit that either should proceed
without nourishment.  If M. l'Officier and his attendant preferred
not to enter, the Sister would wait upon them in the car.

And so Patrine, after taking leave of her red-tabbed escort,
was led away to the Mother Superior, a little, bright-eyed,
kindly Religious, full of solicitude for Mademoiselle, who,
confessing to having emptied a Thermos of hot coffee, and a
box of sandwiches during the later stages of the transit, was
borne away from the guest's refectory up and down several
crooked flights of ancient stairs to a white-washed apartment,
containing a *prie-dieu* and a big plaster Crucifix, a
great walnut bed with faded *Directoire* curtains, a minute
washstand,—a faint smell of scorched wood, emanating from
the perforated metal registers of a *calorifère*, and a bad little
coloured print of Lord Roberts, within a stitched border of
yellow *immortelles* and faded laurel-leaves, that had been
green and fresh six months before....

Patrine spent a white night in the town where the old
brave heart of the great soldier had given its last throb for
England.  Not because those thudding guns in the north
and east kept her wakeful—or because she had never stayed
in a convent before.

She was going to Sherbrand—her Flying Man—who had
been supposed to be dead and found to be living,—and who
had written to say that he did not want Patrine.  The letter
lay against her heart, and her hands were folded tightly over
it, as she lay staring with shining eyes at the drawn curtains
flapping in the chill breeze stinging through the open window
that had been fastened with a nail when the English guest
arrived.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`LIVING AND DEAD`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER LXXI


.. class:: center medium bold

   LIVING AND DEAD

.. vspace:: 2

"PATHETIC ECHO OF AIR-TRAGEDY.  SHERBRAND, R.F.C.,
NOT DEAD OR PRISONER.  RESCUED BY AMERICAN RED
CROSS AMBULANCE.  IN HOSPITAL NEAR YPRES.  WILL
RECOVER, BUT BLIND FOR LIFE."

.. vspace:: 2

The clamorous headlines had followed close on a telephone
from Sir Roland.  Patrine had learned what it means to cry
for joy—an unforgettable experience.  She had discovered
that one who kneels down to thank God for a boon so marvellous,
has no words left to offer Him, nor even tears and sighs.

She had written again and again to Sherbrand, saying
only "*Let me come to you!*"  Passionate, pitiful, tender
letters, answered after weeks of delay by one page in the
stiff, neat handwriting of the American Red Cross Nursing
Sister who acted as amanuensis for the blind man.

.. vspace:: 2

.. class:: noindent

"*April*, 1915.

.. vspace:: 1

"You have said that you wish to visit me in my blindness.
I thank you for the expressed desire, but I cannot
receive you here!  I have never been the kind of man who
bid for pity from women, and the ties that you broke,
voluntarily, six months ago, I do not wish to renew.  My
mother has been here to bring me some things"—the
French and Belgian decorations, guessed Patrine—"and
has gone away again.  She understands that it is best for me
to remain here, because, although the War is over as far as
I am actively concerned, I can hear the guns and breathe
the breath of battle, and know when the 'planes pass
overhead, and follow them in thought.  There is little else a
blind man can do, except make toys or baskets!  Do not
think me bitter or discontented—I am neither—quite O.K.
I wish people had been told I brought down the Zepp.,
that's all!  With gratitude for your kind and friendly
remembrance,

.. vspace:: 1

.. class:: noindent white-space-pre-line

   "Yours most sincerely,
       "A. S."

.. vspace:: 2

A formal letter, but between the cold, stiff lines Patrine
had read reproach, and love, and yearning.  An unkind
letter—but could she judge him harshly, her poor blind
eagle, sitting in darkness never to be lifted, listening to the
guns, and the battle-song of the Birds of War, drifting down
out of "his sky"?

There was Mass in the Convent chapel at seven next
morning.  A military chaplain offered the Divine Sacrifice,
and the rush-bottomed chairs were occupied by soldiers,
French Chasseurs and Zouaves, Senegalese and Negroes,
English Guards and Irish Fusiliers, Highlanders and a
German or two,—all patients from the Hospital under the
management of the Ursuline Sisters—a big building next
door to the Convent, that had been a young ladies' boarding
school in the days before the War.

The chapel was a dusky place.  So dusky that though the
red carnations and white Eucharis lilies in the Altar vases
struck vivid notes of colour in the light of the Altar candles,
the ruby spark of the Sanctuary lamp and the bright flame
of the Paschal candle were barely visible in the brooding
gloom.  You could only tell the place to be crowded, by the
deep-toned chorus of masculine voices joining fervently in
the *Confiteor* and *Credo*.  Pale green flashes momentarily lit
up the crimson and purple and tawny tracery of the round
east window, and the distant thudding of the guns at the
Front made an accompaniment to the sacred rite.

The French priest officiating was a lean, short, elderly
personage with brilliant eyes set in a mask of walnut-brown
wrinkles and a resonant voice that was illustrated by
beautiful, illuminating gestures as he preached.

"Let none say in your hearing, unrebuked, that this
War is an unrelieved misfortune," he said to his hearers.
"Recognize with me, my French compatriots, the Divine
Mercy as extended particularly to France in this fiery ordeal!
Her towns and villages have been destroyed,—her buildings
have been shattered, her sons in countless thousands slain,
but her national character has been purified—the soul of
her people has been raised from the mire.  If there is one
here present among you—whatever may be his nationality,—who
is conscious of loving Virtue better and loathing
Vice more intensely, since the beginning of this War—then
the War has been a blessing—to him—and not a curse!
Acts have been performed—and are repeated hourly—acts of
a sublime and touching selflessness and an almost Divine
tenderness,—not only by men and women who are mild and
gentle, but by the roughest and the most abandoned of
either sex.  The good seed was sown in time of peace—ah
yes, my children! but it might have perished.  And now
Our Lord, who loves flowers, has caused these pure and
exquisite blossoms to spring for Him from the field of War."

After his tiny sermon, delivered in French, and repeated in
English, he hesitated a moment before turning to the Altar
and said, with emotion in his mobile face and quick utterance:

"I have to ask a favour of you this morning.  It is that
at the Commemoration of the Departed you will unite with
me in a mental act of prayer.  Prayer for the soul of one
to whom the gift of Faith, not being sought, was not given.
A soul that has passed forth in darkness into the presence of
Him who is the Light."

He turned away and began the *Credo*.  As the deep chorus
of male voices followed, Patrine found herself agreeing with
the preacher's discourse.

"What was it," she asked herself, "that led me out from
overheated, crowded rooms, oppressive with the scent of
flowers and perfumes of triple extract—where the Tango
and the Turkey Trot were being danced by half-clad,
painted women and effeminate young men—and set my
feet upon a mountain-slope with the free winds of heaven
blowing upon me?  I must answer—It was the War!"

As the great waves of the *Credo* surged and beat against
the old brown rafters she went on thinking:

"What has made me quicken to the call of Humanity—awakened
me to the knowledge of my sisterhood with my
fellow-women?  What has taught me how to live without
dissipation and do without useless luxuries?  Again—the
War!  And oh! what has taught me the meaning of Love
in all its fulness, and set within the shrine of my heart this
great sacred sorrow, and kindled in my soul the pure
altar-flame of Faith?  The War, the terrible War!"

She prayed for Sherbrand at the Commemoration of the
Living!  A somewhat incoherent petition that her Flying
Man might be helped to bear his blindness, and find some
happiness in her unchanged love.  And the thought of the
dead Agnostic haunted her.  Who was the man, and what
had brought about his ending?  Was he a patient in the
Ursuline Hospital?

A French, an English, or a German soldier?  By a subtle
change in her mental purview, recollections of von Herrnung
began to occupy her mind.

"I will not think of him!—I will not!" she said to herself
desperately.  Then the obsession assumed an acute form.
All that she most wished to forget in her relations with the
Kaiser's Flying Man was being revived in her memory.
Scene by scene, sentence by sentence, she was forced to live
over the hated Past again.

She must have risen from her knees and left the chapel,
so unbearable became the torment, but that the sacring bell
rang its triples, the deep tones of the *Sanctus* answered from
the turret, and the Host was lifted up.  Then her tense
nerves relaxed.  The almost tangible presence of evil
withdrew itself.  She breathed more freely, and peace flowed in
balmy waves upon her stormy soul.  In prayer for herself
and those who were most dear to her, she lost the sense of
the unseen hands plucking at her garments and the soundless
voice whispering at her ear.  And presently at the
*Ipsis Domine*, when supplication is made by priests and
people for the departed, she prayed for the soul of the
Denier—that the Divine Mercy might reach and enfold him, and
lead him yet into the Way of Peace.

"*Christ is risen who created all things, and who hath had
pity upon mankind....  Purchased people, declare His
virtues, alleluia!  Who hath called you out of darkness into
His admirable light.*"

To Patrine the Call had come.

It was Easter Week and there were many communicants.
The nuns and the French and English Red Cross nurses
helped the lame to reach the Altar-rails and guided the
blind.  When a tall, blond young English Officer with
bandaged eyes and an empty sleeve was led up to his Master's
Table, Patrine was grateful that the chapel was so dusk.

She was to meet the Chaplain of the Pophereele Stationary
Hospital after Mass, the Mother Superioress had said.
Thus, guided by an Ursuline Sister, she passed from the
chapel into a long, whitewashed cloister looking on the
garden, its open arches facing the doors of what had been
class-rooms, and now were wards.  Another Ursuline, the
Sister Superintendent of the Hospital, with a young, gentle
face framed in her close white guimpe and flowing black
veil, sat writing in a big book at a plain deal table.  Near
her were some shelves with rows of bottles and a chest of
drawers with measuring-glasses upon it, and a pestle and
mortar and druggists' scales.  Above the table a black
wooden Crucifix hung against the whitewashed wall.

"This is Soeur Catherine, who keeps the Hospital accounts
and dispenses the medicines, and posts the register
in which we set down the names of all the wounded received
and discharged.  Take care, Mademoiselle!  That paint is
new and comes off!" cried the chaperoning Sister, snatching
aside the skirt of Patrine's long blue V.A.D. coat.

She had brushed, in passing, against a wooden tablet
that leaned against the wall near the door through which
she had come.  A big square of black-painted deal
surmounted by a gabled and eaved Cross of German pattern,
and bearing an inscription in white Gothic lettering:

.. vspace:: 1

.. class:: center white-space-pre-line

   "HIER RUHT IM GOTT
   EIN DEUTSCHER FLIEGENDE OFFIZIER."

.. vspace:: 2

"That is for the grave of the German officer who died
yesterday.  One of the Bavarian soldiers is painting it.  He
has not finished—he has only gone away for a moment to
get some more *céruse* from Mother Madeleine."

Sister Catherine offered the explanation.  She added, as
the tall English girl glanced at something that lay on the
deal table beside the register:

"That is his flying-cap, poor man! and the belt that
shows his *rang militaire*.  They will be placed upon the pall
when they carry him to the cemetery.  But pardon!  One
should have observed before that Mademoiselle was suffering!
What!  Mademoiselle is not ill, not even a little
fatigued?  Then what Mademoiselle needs is a *petit déjeuner*."

And Patrine was whisked away to the guest's refectory
to be refreshed with *pistolets* and coffee.  Monseigneur
would follow a little later.  Madame la Superieure had
arranged for Monseigneur to take *déjeuner* with M. l'Aumonier.
Later, Monseigneur hoped for the pleasure of
meeting the English Mademoiselle.

Mademoiselle's tall rounded figure, ushered by the little
active Ursuline Sister, had barely passed through the glazed
swing-doors leading from the cloister to the Convent, when
the short, spare, elderly priest who had celebrated Mass
entered from the chapel, followed by the Convent Aumonier,
who had served him at the altar.  Even as the nun
rose from her table, the vividly clear eyes of Monseigneur, set
in the mask of dry walnut-brown wrinkles, dropped on the
painted head-board propped against the wall.

"That is for him?"

The supple right hand of Monseigneur waved towards
the chapel, then extended itself to the Sister, who curtsied
and kissed his amethyst ring.

"For him, Monseigneur," answered the Aumonier, to
whom the question had been addressed.

"*Dieu veuille avoir son âme!*"

The left sleeve of Monseigneur's decidedly rusty serge
soutane bore the well-known brassard.  Its scarlet and white
peeped between the folds of his heavy black mantle as he
made the Sign of the Cross.

"His name is missing from the inscription," he
commented, producing a battered silver snuff-box and helping
himself to a generous pinch.  "Why, might one demand?"

"The initials will be painted in presently, Monseigneur.
There will be no name—by desire of the deceased!"

"He preferred anonymity?"  The amethyst ring of
Monseigneur's prelacy flashed violet as he dusted the
brown powder from his upper-lip with a blue checked
handkerchief.  "The Père Aumonier tells me," his startlingly
clear eyes were on the Sister, "that terrible as were
his injuries, he might have recovered—that his death
occurred suddenly and unexpectedly."

"But yes, Monseigneur, he might have recovered!"  The
fair face framed in the narrow guimpe was shadowed
and troubled.  "The *coup d'obus* had spared the brain,
arteries, and vertebra.  His sight was uninjured—M. le
Commandant and his colleagues had achieved wonders in
the partial restoration of the visage.  Speech was
difficult—but we could understand him—unless he was sullen and
would only speak German to us.  But at those times a
Bavarian soldier interpreted—he who has painted the
headboard for the grave."

"He—the German officer—was grateful to those who
nursed him?" inquired Monseigneur of the Aumonier.

The stout little Chaplain visibly hesitated.  It was the
Sister who answered in her clear and gentle voice:

"Alas! no, Monseigneur!  He was arrogant, even brutal.
But then—he suffered so terribly, in mind as in body—one
could not be angry at anything he said.  He could not
resign himself to his disfigured condition.  It was
intolerable, he would cry, that he should now be an object of
horror to women—women who had worshipped him almost
as a god!"

"Chut—chut!  Eh—well!  One presumes he meant a
certain type of women," observed Monseigneur.

"Possibly so, Monseigneur."  The simplicity of the fair
face in the narrow guimpe was touching.  "For when we
assured him that we did not regard him with horror he
would say to us: 'That makes nothing!  I speak of women.
You are only nuns.'"

"But nuns are women," objected Monseigneur.

"Monseigneur, he said not.  When his condition seemed
to him most miserable he found relief in saying
things—abusive—outrageous—about nuns.  We didn't mind.  We
pitied him—poor Number Twenty!  But the French and
English officers in the same ward resented this.  They
entreated us to remove him to a separate room.  This we
did, and at his request the Bavarian was placed in the same
apartment—he has been an officer's servant—and is active
and useful, even though he has lost a leg.  Thus things went
better.  Poor Twenty seemed more contented.  He even
looked forward to leaving the Hospital!"

"And then?  A change?—a relapse?" suggested Monseigneur.

"A change.  He became more gloomy—more violent
after a letter arrived for him from England at the *Jour des
morts*.  Since two days comes another letter.  We heard
him raving of perfidy, the folly of his agents—the injustice
of his Emperor—the revenge upon the Englishwoman that
he would never have now! ... Then all was quiet.  Towards
morning the Bavarian came out of the room and called
an orderly.  The Herr Hauptmann was sleeping, he said, in
such a queer way....  From that unnatural stupor he
never awakened.  All his letters and papers were torn up
and scattered in fragments.  There was a little cardboard
box on the night-table and a pencil *billet* for me.  I am to
send a ring he always wore to the address of a noble young
lady at Berlin.  She was his *fiancée*, I believe,
Monseigneur.  He thanks me for the little I have been able
to do for him!—he begs the Sisters to pardon his rudeness....
He wishes no name upon his grave—but to be forgotten....
Poor broken body—poor rebellious heart—poor
stubborn, desperate soul!"

"You think, then, that—he killed himself?" asked
Monseigneur with directness.

"I dare not think!"  She was searching in her table
drawer with tears dropping on her hands.  "I can only
pray that the autopsy of the surgeon will not reveal that the
death was not natural.  Look, Monseigneur!—this is his
ring.  A big black-and-white pearl.  And under the pearl,
which lifts up—is a little box for something....  A relic
perhaps—or a portrait, or a lock of a friend's hair."

"It might serve as a reliquary—at need, my child," said
Monseigneur, examining the platinum setting.  He gave
one swift glance at the unsuspicious Aumonier and another
at the innocent nun.  He peered again narrowly at the
empty hiding-place, to the shallow sides of which a few
atoms of glittering grey dust were adhering.  He lifted
the ring to his nose and sniffed, tapped the little box on his
thumb-nail, and touched his tongue to one of the glittering
grey specks.  Then he hastily spat in his handkerchief,
and thunder-clouds sat on the furrowed forehead over the
great hooked beak.

"Listen!"

The nun started and grew paler still.  She hurried to the
glazed doors opening on the garden and threw them wide
apart.  As the chill outer air rushed in, sporting with the
scant white locks of M. l'Aumonier, fluttering the purple
lappets at the throat of Monseigneur, and tugging as with
invisible hands at the Sister's thin black veil, approaching
footsteps crunched over the sloppy gravel of the cloister
walk.

.. vspace:: 2

The small stout figure of the Sister-Keeper of the mortuary
headed the small, solemn procession.  She held up her
habit out of the slush, and carried as well as a mammoth
iron doorkey, a small bunch of spring flowers.

A stretcher-squad of the French Red Cross followed the
Sister of the mortuary.  In life the man they bore must
have been a magnificent specimen of humanity.  In death
the length of his rigid form appeared phenomenal.  The
black velvet pall, over which had been draped the black-red-white
German War Ensign, was far too short to cover the
stiff blanket-swathed feet.  That they projected beyond
the stretcher-end with an effect of arrogance and obstinacy,
was the thought that occurred to one of the three people
gathered in a little group upon the threshold of the
cloister-doors.

"Monseigneur....  My Father! ..."  Sister Catherine
was speaking in suppressed but eager accents.  "It is
Number Twenty.  They are taking him to the mortuary.
The Sister-Keeper promised to carry flowers as a sign that
all was well.  You understand, do you not?  The surgeons
have decided—thanks be to God!—that the poor man did
not poison himself!"

She dropped to her knees and began to say a decade of
her Rosary, the wooden beads running between her fingers
like brown water as she prayed.  The priests made the Sign
of the Cross silently as the body was borne past.  When the
last feather of the Black Eagle had vanished, and the
crunching of footsteps on sloppy gravel had thinned away
in distance, the nun rose.

"You feel happier now, my sister, do you not?" Monseigneur
asked kindly.

"Much happier, Monseigneur," she said, "for now I may
pray for him!"

Monseigneur, who had retained the ring, shut the hiding-place
with a decided click, snapped into its slot the end of
the bar that held the magpie pearl in place, and said as he
restored the bauble to the nun:

"Who knows but that some ray of Divine Grace may yet
shine upon that darkened soul!  Do as the owner begged of
you, and pray for him by all means!"

"That I will!" she said fervently.  "And you also, will
you not pray for him? the poor, proud Pagan who believed
no resurrection possible—unless one were to exist again as
a vapour or a tree.  Alas!  I fear I have sinned much in
yielding to the feeling he inspired in me!"

She added, meeting the keen glance of Monseigneur's
vivid eyes:

"The feeling of repugnance.  Of horror, Monseigneur!
Here comes the Bavarian to finish the inscription.  Well,
my good Kühler, you have got some more ceruse?"

The glass-doors had been darkened by the shape of a
one-legged man on crutches, a black-haired, swarthy fellow
dressed in the maroon flannel uniform distinctive of the
Hospital.  A little pot with a brush in it dangled from one
of his big fingers.  He glanced up under his heavy brows,
with a muttered word as he passed the Sister, and returned
the greeting of Monseigneur with a clumsy attempt at a
salute.

"You are better?  You are getting on?" said Monseigneur
to him in German.

"Better, *mein Vater*, and getting on."

"That is well!  And you have only a little bit to do, and
then your work is done?"

"Done, *mein Vater!*" echoed the one-legged man.

He went to the head-board where it was near the door
leading to the chapel, leaned his crutches against the wall,
and began cautiously and painfully to let himself down.
Monseigneur and the Aumonier hurried to his assistance,
saw him safely squatted upon his folded sack, took leave of
the Sister, who knelt to receive the blessing of the hand that
wore the amethyst ring,—and vanished through the farther
door at the urgent summons of a bell.

The Sister turned again to her big ledger.  A list of
articles appertaining to the deceased would have to be
checked and verified.  Two pairs of binoculars—surely the
one bearing the name and address of an officer in a British
Guards regiment ought to be sent to the Allies' Headquarters
at St. O—.  Two purses, one full of English sovereigns, a
stout roll of French bank-notes in a pigskin case, and so
forth.  When next she looked round, the Bavarian was
wiping his brushes.  The finished inscription now stood:

.. vspace:: 1

.. class:: center white-space-pre-line

   "HIER RUHT IM GOTT
   EIN DEUTSCHER FLIEGENDE OFFIZIER
   *\T. \v. \H.*
   30 YAHRE ALT."

.. vspace:: 2

"You are sorry for him, are you not, my good Kühler?"
the nun asked mildly as the Bavarian scrambled to his
solitary foot, and stood supporting himself against the wall.

"Sorry, my Sister?"  He spoke in thick Teutonic French,
and looked at her under his lowering black brows as he
reached his crutches out of the corner and tucked them
under his arms.  "Why should I be sorry?  He's dead—and
so an end of him.  *Total kaput* for another officer!"  He
saluted the Sister and stumped out.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`LOVE THAT HAS WINGS`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER LXXII


.. class:: center medium bold

   LOVE THAT HAS WINGS

.. vspace:: 2

Under a blue sky—the forget-me-not blue of April—tiny
blizzards—mere dust of snow—alternated with slashes of
sleet.  The road running east from Pophereele was villainous;
bad *pavé* in the centre, and on either side morasses of
mud from which rose at irregular intervals, scraggy poplars
hacked by shell-fire and barked by the impact of innumerable
iron-shod wheels.

An almost continuous line of transports bumped over the
abominable *pavé*.  Staff cars with British Brass Hats and
red French *képis* gold-braided, motor-guns and caissons,
motor-lorries, motor-ambulances, motor-cyclists,
pedestrians—chiefly Belgian peasants in tall peaked caps
and long blue blouses, caked to the knees in sticky mire.
Odd detachments of French Artillery, a squadron of
Chasseurs in the new uniform of sallow blue—a half-battalion
of magnificent, singing Canadians, loaded on the dark
green motor-buses that used to run from Holloway to
Westminster Bridge.

Where French police were posted at cross-roads and a
working-party of British Engineers were mending the
highway—filling up shell-pits, and the cunningly-concealed
emplacements where a battery of French 75's had been in
action a few months before, and the shrapnel-riddled houses
of a small village yet harboured a few wizened Flemish
peasants, was the point whence you first caught sight of the
towers of the ancient capital of Western Flanders, rising
above a bank of grey mist, sucked from the thawing earth
by the warmth of the April sun.

An historic city of gabled houses, a city on a river long
lost and vaulted over—a city as famous through its industries
of cloth-weaving, and the exquisite manufacture of cob-webby
lace of Valenciennes, as precious to students of Art
and Literature by reason of its stirring history, and the
wonders it enshrined.  A matchless city, the glory of
Flandre Occident, with its Cloth Hall of the marvellous
Early Gothic façades, its Renaissance *Nieuwerk* and ancient
*Stedehuus*, its glorious cathedral on the north opposite
the Halles, with the unfinished tower by Marten Untenhove,
and the triumphal arch in the West porch by Urban
Taillebert.

Since October, 1914, when a British Brigade with two
battalions of another B.B., had successfully withstood the
desperate attacks of the flower of the Prussian Imperial
Guard, the beautiful old city had suffered bombardment,
furious, purposeful, desultory, or intermittent, from the
enemy's 11.2-in. long range Krupps.  That First Battle—fought
upon a line extending from a few miles north-east of
the city—had been succeeded after the partial lull of winter,
by a second, a stubborn and sanguinary renewal of the
struggle, rendered hideous by the use of the Boche's
trump-card, flaming oil-jets and asphyxiating gas.

Now the pride of Flandre Occident stood as it stands
to-day, like the heart of a martyr calcined but unconsumed
in the cold ashes of the pyre.  Its sad and stately dignity
was marvellously beautiful, under the blue April sky, with
its lashes of wintry sleet.  Its gardens were dressed in green
spring livery, the grass was peeping between the cobble-stones,
the scorched and broken chestnut-trees that had
shaded the promenades on the site of its ancient ramparts
were thrusting out their pinky-brown finger-like buds.
And above the shell-pitted waste of uncut brass now
representing the Plaine d'Amour,—where the reviews used to
take place and the Kermesses, and athletic Club
competitions—where the aërodrome is cut by the line of the canal
that receives the waters of the subterranean river—a lark
was singing joyfully as it climbed its airy spiral, and a blind
man was standing by the twisted ruins of a British aëroplane
drinking in the music that rained from the sky.

In the battered Rue d'Elverdinghe, behind a block of the
ruined prison, the car that had brought Sherbrand waited.
A grey car with the Red Cross and a miniature replica of
Old Glory on the bonnet.  The Belgian chauffeur smoked
cigarettes and read the *Independence Belge* industriously;
the American V.A.D. orderly smoked also, surveying the
wreckage at the end of the wide thoroughfare, between
whose gaunt and roofless walls was revealed a vista of the
Grand Place,—where the west façade of the Cathedral
reared, a calcined skeleton above the ruined Halles,—and
the Belfry whose massiveness defied the genii of destruction
for a few weeks to come.  Yet he kept his eye on his charge,
solicitously.  No creature is so utterly unaided by the
senses, so pathetically defenceless as a recently blind man.

Drives were part of the treatment prescribed for Sherbrand
by the American surgeon of the Hospital at Pophereele.
The chauffeur and the attendant were instructed to humour
him, and his humour craved solitude and the sense of space.
This excursion to the plain lying north-west of the stricken
city where Death and Ruin were Burgomaster and Bishop
was not the first by several.  The few remaining
inhabitants—the pale women who made lace in the shelter of broken
doorways, the feeble old folks from the almshouses, who
peered from their cellar-refuges at the crunch and grind of
armoured wheels upon the bricks and timbers heaped upon
the littered thoroughfares—dully wondered at these visits
of the blind Englishman.

They had seen many strange things of late, the red-eyed,
meagre, ague-bitten old people, since that day in early
October when fifteen thousand Kaisermen, chanting the
German War Song, had defiled for six mortal hours through
the streets of their ancient town.

"There are a great many of you gentlemen," some of the
old folks had ventured to say.

"That may be so," they had been told, "but we have
millions waiting to follow.  We are sure to win; the French
are cowards, and the English stupid fools.  As for
you—you are now all Belgo-Germans, our Kaiser has said so!
When we leave here we are going to Calais, Paris next, and
then London—it's nothing at all to get to London in our
magnificent Zeppelins!"

Then suddenly the Germans had gone away—and with
them trains of waggons crammed with booty.  A week
later, amidst the vivas of the people, twenty-one thousand
British had poured into the town.  They had rolled down
the streets like a tawny river singing lustily:

.. vspace:: 1

..

   |  "Here we are—here we are—here we are again!
   |    Hallo!  Hallo!  Hallo!  HALLO!"

.. vspace:: 2

And the crowd had been quick to catch up the chorus,
responding:

.. vspace:: 1

..

   |  "Eeeweea—eeweea—eeweea—eggain!
   |    Allo!  Allo!  Allo!  ALLO!"

.. vspace:: 2

And the British Headquarters had established itself in
its spider-web of Intelligence at the house of the
Burgomaster, and the very next day a Boche aviator had tried to
drop a bomb on it, and had been winged by a clever shot
from an anti-aircraft gun, and brought crashing down on
the Plaine d'Amour.  And there had been rejoicings on the
part of the young people who were thoughtless.  But the
wise old folks had known quite well that many more Taubes
would come.

What an autumn it had been, dear Lord! thought the
trembling old people.  The first Sunday in August, with its
decorations, processions, hymns, and litanies, all in honour
of Our Lady of Thuyn, had been turned into a demonstration
of penitents.  The Kermesse had been prohibited with
the other festivities.  No use baking honey-cakes and
marzipan.  Nobody would have bought them.  The Yprais were
too busy listening to the distant firing of terribly great guns.
All the window-panes rattled and shivered, and the earth
vibrated without ceasing.  Each morning brought dreadful
news, contradicted every afternoon, and confirmed at night.
Towns bombarded, townsmen shot, hung, or burned, children
and women—even nuns—violated and murdered.
Villages wiped out—these were the stories that found their
way into the deafest ears.  Crowds of refugees evacuated
from these towns and villages presently began to throng in.
Soon the streets were full from wall to wall.  Spies moved
everywhere, and no lights dared be shown at night-time.
Bread grew scarce, the dreadful sound of the guns drew
nearer.  Wounded, Allies and Germans also, were brought
in, in thousands, by the ambulance-cars.  The hospitals and
hotels and convents were full—all the schools—and many of
the private houses.  Terrible rumours gained ground of a
great battle about to be fought in the neighbourhood of the
town.

Peering from garret-windows by day or night, one could
see great banks of black smoke towering on the north, east,
and west horizons, pierced by broad licking tongues of
cherry-coloured flame.  Taubes and Allied aircraft fought
battles in the heavens.  Bombs were dropped upon public
buildings.  Death had begun to be common in the streets
when the first Krupp shells fell and exploded in the moat
behind the Abbey Church of St. Jacques.  Ten minutes
later—upon the doomed city fell the direst fury of the
German hate.

It had been as though hell had opened, as under that
hail of iron and fire the troops and transports of the Allies,
and the long processions of townspeople afoot and in carts
and carriages had rolled out of the town.  Even the dogs
had left, following their owners.  Like the cats—who clung
to their familiar surroundings, and had to be removed by
force, if they were to be taken—the old folks resisted the
sturdy hands that tugged at them.  "Leave us! ..."
they quavered.  "We are so old! ... We can never bear
the journey! ... We should only die upon the roads if we
were to go!"

Many did go, and many died, and of those who stayed
behind them, Steel, Iron, and Fire claimed a heavy toll.
But in the Northern quarter, some yet dwelt in cellar-basements,
feeding on mouldy flour, and frozen potatoes.  Sleeping
on sacks of straw, covered with rugs or blankets, warming
their lean, shivery bodies at braziers, choking behind
masks taken from slain men through deadly gas-attacks,—creeping
up between bombardments for a breath of purer
air.  Venturing forth to kneel upon the littered pavements
of roofless churches, and pray to Our Lord before His vacant
tabernacles and shattered Crucifixes—for an end to the
dreadful War.

And no answer came, it seemed, for all their praying.
They had grown used to the dampness underground.  Their
eyes were now accustomed to the gloom, as their ears to the
stunning crashes of the bombardments—and the perpetual
whirr and buzz and whine of the aircraft in the sky.  So
natural had become to them the abomination of desolation
that they actually resented the occasional visits of the Red
Cross car from Pophereele.

"Behold him again," they grumbled, "the tall, blind
Englishman.  What does he seek here?  Hardly to view
our ruins that he has no eyes to see!  And now in another
big grey car arrive a French priest and a woman, asking,
wherever they meet a soul to ask, if the blind Englishman
is here?  The priest is a Monseigneur—Old Ottilie swears
to the ring and the purple collar.  The woman is English,
it appears.  Perhaps she is the blind man's wife?"

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 aëroplane.

"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.

.. vspace:: 2

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.

.. vspace:: 2

"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 aërial 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, æons 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.

.. vspace:: 2

"We'll have children—stacks!" she assured him.  "Long-legged
boys with beaky, hatchet faces—boys who'll invent
and build aëroplanes 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....

.. vspace:: 2

"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!"

.. vspace:: 2

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:

.. vspace:: 1

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."

.. vspace:: 2

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.

.. vspace:: 3

.. class:: center

   THE END

.. vspace:: 6

.. pgfooter::