Part 31

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.

*CHAPTER LII*

*KHAKI*

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.

*CHAPTER LIII*

*FRANKY GOES TO THE FRONT!*

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:

"_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!_"

"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:

"_May All Your Hours_ _Be Bright As This!_"

*CHAPTER LIV*

*OFFICIAL RETICENCE*

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 Conde 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 aeroplanes 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.

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.