Part 15

He told her: "Father brought me here as a reward for making a model aeroplane. 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.

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 employe 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!"

*CHAPTER XXVII*

*SIR ROLAND TELLS A STORY*

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 Aeronautique, 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 aerial 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 aerial stabiliser had gained the suffrages of Messieurs the Chiefs of the Aeronautique Francaise. 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!"

*CHAPTER XXVIII*

*THE GOD FROM THE MACHINE*

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 aeroplane. 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 aerodrome. 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.