Part 33

"She was very young, very pretty, the bride of a month, and passionately enamoured. When her husband received orders to proceed with his Regiment of Chasseurs to the Belgian Front, she made him a scene of desperation. She would do this and that mad thing if he did not take her. Then she became calmer. She had exacted a promise from her doting cavalryman. She should visit him at the Front at a suitable opportunity. She chose her own moment, my faith!--and what a moment! She appeared in her husband's quarters in the French cavalry camp near Antoineville when the Germans were attacking Dinant. When the Cavalry Division of the Prussian Guards, and the Cavalry of their First Division, with some infantry battalions and machine-gun companies crossed the Meuse, and we were to attack, she was lying in his arms, the little idiot! He told her to go and she would not. Then he entreated her--a fatal error that!"

The cigarette was burning crookedly, forgotten between Raymond's fingers.

"Then he commanded her. She laughed, and kissed him. He gave back the kiss, drew his revolver and shot her dead. Then he ran out--in time to mount and wheel to his place as second in command of his squadron, before the Regiment swept on to the charge. Fate was kind to him. He charged like a Centaur, and died like a soldier of France the Beloved. Tell the story to Mademoiselle Saxham. She is magnificently handsome, but forgive me! not a patriot. And a woman without patriotism is--an altar without a Sacred Host and a lamp without a flame."

They went into the hotel. When the Frenchman had secured a quiet bedroom on the fourth floor, and intimated that no German was to serve him, they went together into the dining-room.

"_Pfui_! It smells of soot, and petrol, and drainage, this London air of yours," said Raymond, as he chose a table in a quiet corner. "You will eat with me? No! Then smoke and share my wine." He ordered cutlets, _petit pois_, a sweet omelette, and a bottle of Beaujolais, and, filling his own glass and one for Sherbrand, touched brims gaily and said with a smile: "To France and her Allies, Victory! On earth," a clink, "by sea," a clink, "under the sea," another clink, "and in the Air!"

He clinked three times, and emptied the glass thirstily. Sherbrand asked:

"Was the battle near Dinant a big affair?"

"Not big." He broke a roll and munched bread. "Not on the grand scale. A _spectacle tres interessante_, regarded from the--archaic point of view. An example of the ancient _mode de bataille_ that will be dead as the Dodo in three months. _Chasseurs a cheval_ and German Imperial Guard Regiments charging and meeting with shocks like thunder. Much slaughter. So fierce was the onslaught upon our side that the Germans were driven back across the Meuse. Many missed the bridge and were drowned. One French regiment followed them in pursuit for several _kilometres_. They were led by the man of whom I have told you. A glass to his memory--and _hers_!"

They touched full glasses and drank. Raymond went on.

"My Flying Centre was near Maubeuge on the 16th. Some _escadrilles_ of my command were engaged that day near Dinant. My faith! those _cotellettes_ are slow in arriving." He munched more bread, and his blue eyes narrowed smilingly. "We had only the little bombs we used in Morocco, but yes!--we did some good work with the _balles-bon_. Flying low, at ordered distances--for to make War by Air successfully the science of tactics must assist the aviator.... What says your great Field Marshal, who has bent his neck to the collar-work of Administration--who has conjured an Army of trained soldiers out of your shops and counting-houses, and playing-fields,--and will make another and another when the time comes?"

Sherbrand quoted the words uttered by the great voice now quenched for ever in the bitter waters of the North Sea.

"_Until aviators learn to fly, manoeuvre, and attack in regular formation, the Fifth Arm will remain a useless limb._"

"_Tonnerre de Dieu!_ but that goes to the point," said Raymond, "straight and sharp as a thrust from his sword. If we possessed that man we should make use of him. He should be Marshal of France, or President or Emperor--all we should ask of him would be to lead us. _Notr'_ Joffre would not be jealous--they would agree like the hilt and the hand. But I was telling you of an attack by the _flechette_.... You may imagine how the Uhlans loved that rain of steel. It changed the retreat to a rout. Only it spoiled so many German horses. Right through the man, you understand, into the animal! ... Sieves on four legs are useless as Remounts for French Chasseurs."

"And the German Field Flight?" Sherbrand interrogated.

"Their Fifth Arm was represented," said Raymond, sipping his burgundy, "by many Taubes and Aviatiks armed with the machine-gun and some ordinary bombs of _schrapnel_,--also a dirigible of 'Parsifal' type dropping big bombs. We were hampered in our offensive by a prejudice which does not trouble the Germans. To throw bombs upon friend and foe alike--that is not our idea of War. It annoyed me, and I wasted on that flatulent brute of a 'Parsifal' all my remaining _flechettes_ and little Morocco bombs. Aha, the _cotelettes_!"

A waiter set them before him. He tucked his napkin under his chin, and helped himself, and said:

"Thus, though I had damaged her steering-gear and riddled her outer envelope, and the Flying Pig wallowed in difficulties below me, I could not pursue the advantage I had got. When the pilot of an Aviatik launched himself to the rescue, all the ammunition of my carabine was exhausted. I had one cartridge left in my automatic revolver, and not a single bomb with which to return the compliments of the German's _mitraille_. My petrol-tank had been perforated. My single bullet missed him. The duel was too unequal, so I withdrew from the field, leaving him to cavalier the Flying Pig. We may meet again upon terms more equal, when French military aviators fight with machine-guns. And now to business. It concerns your gyroscopic stabiliser, the patent of which my Chiefs desired to buy for the use of our _Service Aeronautique_. You demanded, according to M. Jourdain's statement, L8,000 and a royalty for the world-patent. We will buy it of you outright for L12,000. Is it agreed?"

Sherbrand straightened in his chair, and said, looking the other squarely in the eyes:

"No, sir, thank you! You see, though the War Office wouldn't have anything to say to me----"

"It occurs to you that now you may find a market for your invention?" _To the devil with this smug young British tradesman!_ thought Raymond behind his knitted brows. "Come!" he said. "Another proposal. Will you make and supply us with your hawk-hoverer? Or sell us the right to manufacture a thousand for the sole use of the S. Ae.? Name your price--I shall not be frightened. It is not State money, but my private fortune that I draw upon--with the approval of my Chiefs. It has been my whim to lavish on my _escadrille_ what other men hang in jewels upon their mistresses. Efficiency is my vice. I have heard of worse!" He scrawled some invisible figures with a polished finger-nail upon the tablecloth and exclaimed, with a laugh and a shrug: "_Sapristi_! At even a hundred pounds apiece you would soon be a millionaire, even without the fortune you expect from your War Office! Upon occasion it pays to be a patriot. Decide, Monsieur, lest my patience run dry before my purse!"

"I've not asked you a hundred, sir," Sherbrand said with his disarming simplicity. "I can make and sell the hoverers at a profit for L60. It's the cutting and welding of the horizontal flanged screws with the acetylene flame that eats up that money. But for the cost of the process, hang it!--I'd have had more than seventy ready by me now."

"You have seventy, you say, laid by in readiness?"

"Laid by in grease," said Sherbrand, "at the aerodrome."

"Waiting the moment when the authorities at Whitehall awaken to the fact that you are a genius, _mon ami_! _A la bonne heure_! We buy your seventy equilibrisers!"

"I'll sell you ten," said the British tradesman doggedly. "And I'll give the Belgian Government another ten, if you think they'd honour me by accepting them?"

"_Parole d'honneur_! I can guarantee they will. And of the other fifty?"

"They are for England to take or leave," said Sherbrand. "No doubt I'm an ass, but a man must act according to his lights."

"They are stars, your lights," said Raymond with a crackling oath, "and they point the path of Honour!" He pulled a cheque-book and a fountain-pen from a pocket within his tunic and wrote a cheque on the Credit Lyonnais for the price of the ten stabilisers, their packing, carriage and duty, saying as he signed, and tossed the lilac slip of paper across the tablecloth: "Your endorsement is my receipt. For the stabilisers--they must be sent not later than to-morrow. I would give something if I could fly back to France with a couple in my valise. But patience! In a week at most we will give the Germans news of us. Perhaps I shall have the good fortune of a _rencontre_ with my Boche pilot-aviator. For--listen, lieutenant! He too possessed the device that solves for the _avion_ the problem of stability. And--listen well!--he carried a young boy with him in the _nacelle_. It was the man who robbed you. Von Herrnung! Could you not have guessed before?"

It seemed to Sherbrand that he had always guessed. Raymond went on:

"When I read of the finding of the wreck of your 'Bird' in the North Sea, I knew what _coup_ the Prussian and his confederates had carried out. We had met in Berlin, and at the Hanover aerodrome, and at Paris. And--I could have shot him the other day if it had not been for the child. The legions of the modern Attila employ women and babes as bucklers and breastworks, by their Emperor's order. Perhaps he carried the boy for protection!" His moustache bristled like an angry cat's as he added:

"A beastly idea, but the German Idea is bestial. Well, _au 'voir_! To-morrow, six _demie_, we start from the aerodrome!"

He rose, whisked his napkin over his mouth, and said, giving Sherbrand a hearty hand-grip:

"I shall be punctual. Do not forget. My compliments to Mademoiselle!"

But Sherbrand was occupied less by thoughts of his angry love than by Raymond's story of the boy in the German warplane. He telephoned to Sir Roland and to Saxham before he drove back to the Club thinking:

"Bawne!--It must be Bawne!--out there in the midst of all those horrors. If I could only meet that fellow von Herrnung! ... I've owed him no grudge because he robbed me.... But--for this--I could kill him now!"

*CHAPTER LVI*

*LA BRABANCONNE*

"You saint, Pat!" Margot, amidst Raymond's polite excuses, had recognised Sherbrand's hatchet-face under the khaki cap. "You've stolen a whole morning for me from your Flying Man. Why didn't you tell me he'd come back to town? How perfectly tophole he looks in tea-leaves! Franky and I came across that French officer who was with him, last June, in Paris. We're been rubbing noses on the strength of having met before. Is Alan going to the Front? My poor Pattums, it'll be your turn to be haunted. Here's Rhona Helvellyn. Cheer, Rhona! Do tell us why you look so smudgy? Have you been hiding up the chimney of the House of Commons, or bombarding a Minister's front door with coal?"

She beckoned, and Rhona came stalking through the crush of marvellously got-up members, the round, fair, freckled boy-face that topped her long swan-neck and deceptively sloping shoulders pinched with weariness under the wreck of a Heath hat, her usually immaculate tailor-mades covered with the dust of what might have been a Claxton Hall conflict or a Downing Street Demonstration, and strange fires burning in her light-lashed eyes.

"Am I such a sweep? I feel one! But so'd you be grubby if you'd done the crossing from Folkestone to Ostend and back again to London without a dab of a puff. I'd an appointment here at three-thirty." Beyond anything in life Rhona plumed herself on her punctuality. "Mrs. Saxham--_the_ Mrs. Saxham, had promised to meet me in the Chintz Room." The Chintz Room is the first-floor drawing-room securable for private teas and interviews. "We got in too ravenous even to wash for lunch. You should have seen us eat. My hat! the scrum on those boats. And the dirt. Nothing but a Turkish bath will get me clean again. As for Brenda, she's a nigger." Thus Rhona in her loud young accents. "Nobody'd believe she'd been born a white girl!"

"Is she here?"

"My Christmas! I should rather hope so! Upstairs scraping off the top-crust before I take her to Eccleston Square. Don't do to startle the Mater. She's been frightfully off-colour with worry over her precious youngest. You see, Brenda was due home for the Autumn holidays from the Convent of the Dames de l'Annonciation at Huin on the Sambre, when the War broke out. And--Huin's near Charleroi, where they say the Germans are--and we'd nary a letter, and no answer to a hailstorm of wires from the Mater. So I got passes and permits on the Q.T. and skipped over to Ostend--to see what might be done."

"And you got through?"

"Did I? Not much! We don't get things properly rubbed into us--tucked away in our blessed old island. I forgot that Belgian trains wouldn't be running from Ostend to Brussels, now the Germans have got a grab on there.... As for getting South-East by Courtrai and Valenciennes--all trains were required by the Allies for military purposes. Perhaps if I'd been a hefty War Correspondent or an Army Nursing Sister or a V.A.D. in diamond earrings and a Red Cross armlet, I'd have had a chance. But I'm doubtful! Transport officers, English and Belgian, keep their mouths shut--and once they've opened them to say "No!" they never open 'em again. And"--Rhona breathed as though she had been running--"there were Official War News placards stuck up at the Customs Office, and on the quays and at the Prefecture. They said that the Germans under von Buelow have been having a scrap with the 5th French Army on the Sambre--from Namur to Charleroi--and that the French have been beaten back. And the hospitals are crowded with Belgian and German wounded"--she gulped and something twinkled on her pale eyelashes--"and trains crammed with more keep coming in and in. I've seen some sights, I tell you, that gave me horrors. That showed me, even more than those Ostend quays and wharves and squares and Places--packed solid with refugees--Great Christmas!--shall I ever forget 'em!--the devilish, hellish work of War!"

"Refugees.... Common people?" Margot was a little puzzled. Rhona nodded and repeated:

"Refugees. Swells and mechanics, rag-pickers and shopkeepers, sweeps, schoolgirls, lacemakers, and students. Professors, priests, and prostitutes. Madame la Comtesse and her gardener's wife, wheeling the babies in trams and go-carts. Dust-covered, dirty, done up, desperate, with faces that make you think of the damned in the Tartarus scenes of Orpheus and Eurydice. And someone squealed my name, and there was Brenda. Just got in, with three of the Sisters, and a baker's dozen of English pupils and a herd of other miserables, evacuated from Charleroi and Huin. Three-and-a-half days on the journey, travelling by fits and starts on branch-lines--tramping when trains weren't available. Eating whenever anything was to be had, and going without when there wasn't! Sleeping in barns and on the floors of railway-station platforms, or waiting-rooms, when they were lucky--such a pack of tramps you never saw in your life. But Great Scott! how thundering glad I was to get hold of Brenda and whisk her away from that Chorus of the Damned in Orpheus, pent up like cattle behind ropes, and moaning and stretching their arms out to the sea!"

"Why on earth the sea?"

A foreign voice, resonant and rather nasal, startled Margot by answering:

"Pardon, Madame. Because these most unhappy fugitives believe that salvation and safety may be found in England, from whence come those strong brown English soldiers who are fighting in Belgium now."

"Are there--" Margot was beginning. But Rhona was introducing the speaker at length as Comte d'Asnay, Capitaine Commandant and Adjutant of the Belgian General Staff, Attached to the General Staff on the Third Division of the Belgian Army, and d'Asnay was saying with a smile:

"Mademoiselle bestows upon me all my titles, possibly because we Belgians have so little else left."

"Except Honour," snapped Rhona.

"Except our Honour and our self-respect, and a few other non-negotiable securities," he said, "that do not bring us much of credit on the Bourses of Vienna and Berlin. But Madame was asking of the refugees. Many from Liege have escaped to Antwerp or into Holland, thousands are rushing from Namur into the bosom of France. But from Louvain and Brussels and Tirlemont they flock to Ostend. The steamers of the Channel service are crowded with those who have money and can obtain the necessary _laissez-passers_. Your town of Folkestone is encumbered with arrivals. Were stones pillows there would be a head for every stone. But those who have neither money nor passports--and many of these were rich a week ago--remain, as Mademoiselle has told you, to weep, and stretch their arms towards the sea."

"They'd rush the boats," declared Rhona, "only that the Companies keep up the gangways. I suppose," she grimaced, "the authorities at Ostend don't want a scare. They believe--I hope they may get it!--there'll yet be an Autumn Season. Hang these profit-hoggers! If I'd my way I'd lower every blessed gangway and let everyone who wanted walk on board. If Belgium hadn't faced the music there'd be Germans in England now, murdering and burning.... They've a right to come. Let 'em all come! Britain's big enough, I should hope!"

"_Brava, Mademoiselle. Bis!_" d'Asnay applauded noiselessly. "That is what you said to me on the deck of the steamer. Say it again, say it often, and the people will be let come!"

"Oh, I've my plan." Rhona's light eyes sparkled wickedly. "People here want waking up. They're kept in cotton-wool. Eyes bunged up and ears stuffed. What they want is--to see and hear. Well, a few of 'em are doing it. That," she nodded knowingly at d'Asnay, "is where my Distinguished Visitors come in."

The lips under the fiercely-waxed moustaches smiled. Margot liked the look of this officer of the Belgian General Staff, with the savage eyes and the smooth olive skin, the pointed chestnut beard, fiercely-waxed moustache, and the cool, polite manner. He wore the uniform of the Belgian Chasseurs a Cheval, and the vulture-plumes of his high shako were cut and broken and scorched in places, the gold braiding of his dark blue tunic was tarnished and weather-beaten, and the grey, blue-striped overalls and spurred black knee-boots were rusty with old mud and white with new dust. "You're from the Front?" she queried, as she moved with Rhona and the Belgian towards the glass swing-doors, giving access from the vestibule to the Club's big ground-floor drawing-room.

He answered:

"There are several Fronts--and I have the honour to come from one of them, Madame."

"With dispatches?"

"Possibly with dispatches, Madame!" He answered with an amused side-glance at the small, vivacious face. "Though there are swifter methods of transmitting intelligence than by entrusting letters to a messenger's hands."

As he moved beside her, courteously replying, she saw the crimson and green enamelled, purple-ribboned Cross of the Belgian Order of Leopold shining upon the dark blue tunic-breast.

"How are--things--getting on? Nobody tells us anything," twittered the humming-bird. "We might live at the North Pole."

"Madame might find even at the North Pole compensations for the low temperature and the lack of society." The vulture-plumes on the dark blue shako nodded as he turned his face to her. "In the fact that there are no Boches there," he added, and the smile that had curved the soldierly moustache vanished as though the word had wiped it from his mouth.

"Do tell me what are Boches?" Margot begged, kindling to interest. He answered with an intensity that dug deep lines at the angles of his nostrils, and puckered the corners of the eyes that burned under his frowning brows:

"They are a nation of beings, Madame, that are no longer men!"

"Germans you mean, don't you?" she asked after a little pause of bewilderment, staring with shocked, dilated eyes at the left side of d'Asnay's close-cropped head, now revealed to her as he removed his shako, and standing a little in advance of the two women, held back with the thrust of his broad shoulders a leaf of the drawing-room swing-doors. The four-inch square of white surgical plaster adhering to a place whence the chestnut-brown hair had been shaven, showed the outline of a deep, jagged gash. "You are hurt! You have had some awful accident! ... Was it a motor-smash? Doesn't it pain you?" Kittums asked breathlessly. For d'Asnay had touched the surgical strapping with his gloved hand, and his smiling face had winced.

"It is nothing, Madame," he assured her, "and it was not caused by an accident. It is merely a whiff of _schrapnel_--a love-gift from _Messieurs les Boches_."

"You are _wounded_?"

"Madame, that is what one calls it, when one suffers _a coup d'obus_. They are common, these little tokens, on our side of the North Sea. Mine has procured me a visit to London, and the pleasure of meeting you."

She looked at him like a grieved child, and her lips so quivered that he softened to her behind the crinkles of his smiling bearded mask.

"You speak like this because you think I am heartless and indifferent. Perhaps I have been--until to-day! We are so far from things. We see nothing. And we hear so little about the War!"

"Alas, Madame!" came the answer. "Forgive the cruel prophecy, that the moment approaches when you will hear too much!"

The swing-doors thudded behind them like guns at a great distance. The capacious ground-floor drawing-room, not usually crowded before luncheon, was thronged nearly to the walls. A vacant space in the centre presumably accommodated the Distinguished Visitors. But between these and Margot's quickening curiosity intervened a solid wall of backs.

The Distinguished Visitors must be Royalties, decided Margot, as she skirted the barrier, looking right and left for a peephole, recognising the vast back of Sir Thomas Brayham, the skeleton back of the Goblin, the willowy back of Trixie Wastwood, the backs of Lady Beauvayse, Cynthia Charterhouse, Tota Stannus, and Patrine Saxham with other backs pertaining to divers dear friends, consolidated into the rampart of humanity over which the towering feathers of Vanity Fair nodded and bobbed and waved.

"They're taking it in," Margot heard Rhona mutter, behind her. "'_Somebody's playing off a joke on us_,' would be the first thing that'd come into their blessed heads. Well!--let 'em think what they choose. Ask me why I did it, Comte, and I swear I couldn't tell you. Blue murder! how my arms ache. But so must yours. You nursed the biggest of the babies all the way from Ostend to Charing Cross."

"Mademoiselle is right!" The swift, fierce undertone was d'Asnay's. "They do not comprehend yet. Not yet!" He breathed hissingly through his nose. "Wait--and presently the Truth will leap at them and strike them _entre les yeux_. But a place must be found for the friend of Mademoiselle!" He came noiselessly to the side of Margot. "A chair, so. A footstool, so. Madame will step on the one and mount to the other. Permit, Madame, that I offer my assistance! Now Madame commands an excellent view of--shall I call it--the spectacle?"