Chapter XVI: Part 16

"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.

*CHAPTER LIX*

*THE WOE-WAVE BREAKS*

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 _succes 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 Mere Econome'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 _Refectoire_ 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 Generale_: 'It will be _rase_ over your heads if you remain, Madame. _On n'y fait quartier a 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 Charite_?" 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?"

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.

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.

*CHAPTER LX*

*KULTUR!*

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 Cure 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 Cure, that faithful shepherd of souls. Of M. le Cure'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 aerial 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.

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.

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 Cure--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.

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 Cure, 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:

"REVEILLEZ-VOUS, MESSIEURS LES ANGLAIS! VOUS ETES SURPRIT, LES ALLEMANDS SONT ICI! REVEILLEZ-VOUS! AUX ARMES! AUX ARMES!"

And another broad arrow of dazzling blue-white light showed motor-lorries packed with spiked helmets and green-grey tunics, behind the _kepis_ 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 melee 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.

"_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._"

"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, ueber 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:

"_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._"

"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 blesse_! 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....

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.

*CHAPTER LXI*

*LYNETTE DREAMS*

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 aerial 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?'