Part 34

The speaker's voice was drowned in an outburst of strident music. Barely two doors from the Club the piano-organ had broken out with "_La Barbanconne_." And as the walls vibrated to its shrill cries of triumph, and the wild disonances of a joy that touches frenzy, the cracked but vigorous tenor began to sing:

"Apres des siecles, des siecles d'esclavage Le Beige sortant du tombeau A reconquis par son courage Son nom, son droit et son drapeau. Et ta main souveraine et fiere Peuple desormais indompte Grava sur ta vielle banniere Le roi, la Loi, la Liberte!"

"_Sapristi_! It is strange that!" d'Asnay muttered at the first bars. "Mademoiselle Helvellyn devised the tableau, certainly, but who arranged the _entr'acte_?"

The shrill, unbearable frenzy of the piano-organ abated, the voice of the singer was more plainly heard. It chanted in thin nasal tones, with missed-out notes in each bar that were like gaps where teeth had been in an old sorrowful singing mouth:

"O Belgique, O mere cherie, A toi nos coeurs, a tot nos bras, A toi noire sang, O Patrie----"

While Margot, a-tiptoe en her chair, peered through the screen of towering feathers at the Club's Distinguished Visitors,--wondering that within the wall of absorbed faces there should be so little to attract or interest. Nothing more intriguing than the homely figure of a Flemish peasant woman, with four young children huddled round her, and a baby at her breast.

*CHAPTER LVII*

*THE BELGIAN WIFE*

Desolate advance-guard of the vast army so soon to invade the shores of Britain, how familiar the figure is now that was then so strange to us in the quaint old-world fashion of its homely garments, the thick white dust and travel-stains that covered it, from the linen coif to the wooden shoes.

She was not old, the woman who sat with her little flock gathered about her, on the Indian stool that had supported the superb person of von Herrnung, what time he had held forth to Mrs. Charterhouse and Lady Wastwood upon the loftiness of German Kultur, the perfection of German female beauty, and the overwhelming mental and bodily superiority of the German Superman. A Walloon peasant from a village near Jodoigne where she and her husband had worked upon a tiny farm.

Perhaps a dozen words of French were hers: "_Tout brule!_" and "_En Angleterre ou il n'y a pas de Boches!_"

We were to learn to reap terrible meanings from that hoarse, faint parrot-cry. Truths that raised the hairs upon the flesh and chilled the blood were to be imaged for us in the blank vacuity of her unseeing stare. We were to learn why all her children squinted, from Vic, the sturdy man of seven, and Josephine, his junior, possibly by a year, down to Georgette of the chubby cheeks and crinkly, roguish eyelids, and Albert, of the round blue stare, the big white-haired head, and the marvellous bow legs.

In their dull stunned quietude and their clayey pallor, the mark of the Beast was branded upon them, down to the livid baby in its little cap of soiled linen, swaddled in the old red shawl, that bound down its arms. You might have thought it dead, but for the flutter of a muscle in the cheek, and the faint movement of its lips, feebly sucking at the breast that had been large and bounteous, and now was lax, and flabby, covered by a network of darkish violet veins.

"_Who are they? ... What are they? ... Where do they come from? ... Why were they brought here? ... Does no one know? ... Will no one tell? ..._"

The silence of amazement was now breaking. The mouths belonging to the faces under the nodding feathers, old and young, handsome and ugly, vacuous and clever, silly and intellectual, were all prattling interrogations like the above. Pride of Place and Joy of Life, Thirst of Pleasure, Lust of Power, Gaiety and Weariness, Wisdom and Folly, Humbug and Sincerity, Meanness and Generosity, ringed-in the dusty group of wooden-shod mysteries and most frightfully wanted to know! And nobody offered any solution of the puzzle. The piano-organ was playing half a dozen doors below the Club, the cracked old tenor quavering to its accompaniment:

"_Nous le jurons tu vivras!_ _Tu vivras toujours grande el belle_ _Et ton invincible unite_ _Aura pour devise immortelle----_"

The music suddenly broke off. A policeman had ordered the organ to move on....

"_Tout brule!_"

Hitherto the Belgian woman had not looked up, nor changed her listless attitude. Now she lifted her empty expressionless eyes, and hoarsely iterated her parrot-cry. The suckling at her breast whimpered and let go the nipple. She glanced at it, saying in her own thick Flemish tongue:

"_Daar is geen melk._"[1]

[1] "There is no milk."

She rocked the baby for whom she had no milk. Its feeble whimper was not stilled. She went on to that accompaniment:

"_De Duischer kwamen. Zy hebben alles gebrand! De geburen,--mijn voder--mijn man is gedood! Zy hebben hem in het vuur geworpen!_"[2]

[2] "The Germans came. They burned everything. The neighbours, and my father, and my husband are dead. They threw them into the fire."

The baby's whimper became a wail of feeble protest. It fought and struggled frantically under the old red swathing shawl. The shawl loosened, slid to the floor, and the wizened arms rose free and jerking. One arm, tightly bandaged below the elbow, ended in a raw and bloody stump. She regarded it with her drained-out stare, not trying to replace the strappings that had bound it, saying in the heavy voice of a sleep-walker:

"_Dees ook hebben ze gedaan. God sta ons bij!_"[3]

[3] "This too they did. God help us!"

And sobs and weeping broke out around her, as though that little handless arm had been a veritable rod of Moses bringing water from the living rock. But no sigh lifted her bosom, nor were her dry eyelids moistened with the dew of tears. Prussian militarism had wrought its work upon her. She and hers had been trodden as grapes in the Hohenzollern Winepress. Those emptied eyes had seen things done that might well make devils laugh in Hell.

The Club walls vanished away as we looked, and behind that stricken figure spread the devastated plains of Belgium, the Sorrowful, the Glorious, who has endured agony and shame unutterable, that her neighbours might go free. We had a vision of the Son of Man descending in a blood-red, rainy dawning, and heard Him saying to the apostles of German Kultur:

"_Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of these ... ye have done it unto Me!_"

And not a woman among us who had a man with the British Expedition, but prayed in her soul, fervently:

"Vengeance is Thine, for Thou hast said it. But make _him_ Thy scourge, O Lord!"

*CHAPTER LVIII*

*SHERBRAND BUYS THE LICENCE*

The spell of silence was broken. Excitement seethed as Patrine escaped out of the crush in the drawing-room and returned to the vestibule. There, subsiding into one of the tall-backed chairs beside the table that held the Members' Register and Visitors' Book, she waited, hoping against hope that the tall figure in khaki might reappear under the Club portico.

"Patrine!"

"Oh, Alan!--you came back after all!"

Her gloom changed to radiancy. She rose up as the tall figure of Sherbrand passed under the portico, and hurried to him, emptying her budget of regrets. "I've behaved like a cad. Do forgive me! Don't be wrathy. But you can't be--or you'd never have come back."

"You dear, it's all right!" He caught the outstretched hands in both his and wrung them. "Forget--and let's be happy." The truth about Bawne tugged at him as he said the words, but he had determined not to torture her with that horror. He went on, with the frankness that she found so lovable, "I was vexed, but it was idiotic of me not to have told you about the Commission before."

"And the man. Your French sossifer," she went on, "who looked at me as though I ought to live in a cage at the Zoo? What must he have thought of your taste in young women? What mustn't he have said when he got you out of the way?"

"Oh, not much!"

"Go on. Rub it in!"

"Well then"--Sherbrand's mouth was steady, but the laughter in his eyes was not to be controlled--"he saw I was fearfully sick at your having shown temper before him. And he told me not to be chagrined because a handsome woman had made me a little drama."

"F'ff!" She winced and set her teeth on her crimson underlip. "He knew I'd ask and you'd tell me. He saw me--squirming--in his mind's eye. Oh! and how he's hit me off. For I _was_ awfully like the heavy leading lady of a tin travelling theatre-company. Aren't you ashamed of me? Don't you loathe me?" she wooed with entreating eyes.

"Frightfully. Tell me--where can we have a cosy talk together? I've got a whole hour before I'm due at Hendon," he said.

"The Rose-and-Green Divan--but there are sure to be people smoking there. Oh!--I know. The Little Library. Nobody ever goes in, and it's got a door opening into the Divan. Friends of Members aren't admitted into the Library--but if you're caught there--you say you were coming out of the Divan, where outsiders are allowed--and opened the wrong door--do you switch on?"

He nodded, repressing the desire to ask in whose company she had been caught there, and followed the tall lithe figure down a short corridor leading to the back of the ground-floor. The corridor ended in the Little Library, a studious apartment of bathing-machine dimensions, walled with curiously new-appearing books of information and reference, and containing two small writing-tables, each supported by a rosewood-stained Windsor, a brace of baskets, and two deep, cushiony, Rothmore chairs. A Member of mature years and mountainous proportions slept placidly in one of these, with Whitaker's Peerage balanced at a perilous angle on the vanishing indications of what must once have been her lap. The subdued murmur of voices trickled in from the adjoining smoking-room with vaporous wisps of Turkish and Virginia. Save for the stout slumbering Member the lovers were beautifully alone.

"Good! Oh, boy!--to have got you back again," Patrine said breathlessly after their kiss. She dropped down noiselessly into the springy embraces of the vacant Rothmore, and Sherbrand smiling, perched upon the chair's broad arm.

"This is an unbecoming contrast--isn't it?" She leaned her beech-leaf tinted head against the plastron of the khaki tunic as his strong hand crept behind her supple waist. "But I don't care, I can't think of anything but you, Alan. When do you start to-morrow, and from where? I suppose you mustn't tell me?" She sighed, rubbing her cheek against him as the strong arm embraced and held her. "Oh me! What it is to be the sweetheart of a soldier. Why--Alan!"

She lifted her head and looked at him, frowning, and her long eyes were black between the narrowed lids. "Do you know how your heart jumped when I said 'soldier'? Does it mean as much to you as all that?"

He began to stammer a little.

"Oh--well!--you see--we Sherbrands have worn the King's coat for ages. Ever since there were any Sherbrands--going by the portraits in the gallery at Whins--where my father lived when he was a boy. He used to describe them to me until I knew them as well as he did from the Sir Alan who fought with Talbot against the French at Castillan Chatillon as a boy, and got killed at Bannockburn thirty-five years later, down to the jolly old Sir Roger, who fought like a Trojan at Badajoz. He was my great-grandfather, so I suppose I've always had a secret hankering for the Service. Like the inherited nostalgia Hillmen's children have for the mountains, or sailors' for the sea. The kind of feeling that sets the little Arctic foxes in the Zoo howling at the first sprinkle of snow in December. Only I knew I mustn't yield to it. You know the reason why!"

"You told me, and I answered that that kind of reason couldn't affect you."

"Now you shall hear a plan I've been nursing." His arm again engirdled her. "Do you know Seasheere? It's a little grassy, cliffy, shingly village on the South-East coast, three-hours' journey from Charing Cross. There's a Naval Air Station there that was a Seaplane School not long ago. We used to send 'em pupils from Hendon: there's a cottage where they take lodgers not far off. I spent three weeks there last summer, fishing and motor-boating when I wasn't making friends with Goody Two Shoes----"

"Who's Goody Two Shoes?"

"The hydroplane!" His voice broke in laughter. "Did you think I meant a girl?"

"I'm an idiot. Go on about your plan, dear."

"Oh--well! The cottage I stayed at was jolly comfortable, and the landlady the tidiest old woman that ever grilled a chop. Now suppose--to-morrow, or a week, or two months hence you got a wire from Somewhere in France or Belgium saying: '_Seasheere--such-a-day-and-such-an-hour--Alan_'--would you pack your kit for a week-end and hop into the train, and come?"

"Without asking--without telling--Aunt Lynette or Uncle Owen?" She asked the question breathlessly.

"We'll tell the Doctor and Mrs. Saxham directly afterwards." He leaned his cheek on the beech-leaf hair and his arm tightened about her waist possessively. "You said my heart jumped just now when you called me a soldier. How it will jump when I pick you out with the glasses, a tiny black speck on the cliffs at Seasheere, waiting with the sunset behind you, or the dawn in your eyes to welcome me back from over the sea. Oh, my girl!"--his voice wooed her irresistibly--"I've dreamed wide awake of the joy of such a greeting.... It's up to you to make my dream come true!" He kissed her hair. "And we'll watch the day die, and sup together, and you'll sleep at my nice old woman's cottage. And I'll turn in at the Air Station--and next morning we'll be married at Seasheere Catholic Church!"

"Married--that's your plan? Ah, Alan! shall we ever be married?" she sighed.

He laughed softly, pressing her against him.

"The little Catholic Church I've mentioned was built for the very purpose. Perched on the cliffs as though it might spread its rafters any minute and flap away to sea." He kissed her hair again. "Don't think I'm spinning fairy-tales. I've got a Special Licence, so there's no need to bother about time, or previous residence in the district, or anything stuffy. Nothing's wanted but Opportunity, the church, and the priest. And that the local Registrar should put in an appearance. That's necessary, as we're not of the same faith--yet!"

She freed herself from his embrace, rose to her superb height, and stood over him.

"You've arranged all this--without consulting me for a minute. You and your landlady--and your Licence and your Registrar! Boy, I am sensible of a great desire to box your ears soundly for this!"

"I'd rather take a clout from you than a kiss from any other woman."

She tapped him lightly on both ears, and said, putting a butterfly touch of lips in the middle of the broad, tanned brow:

"There are both clout and kiss. Now show me the Special Licence."

He thrust his hand into a pocket behind the plastron of the khaki tunic and pulled out a note-case she had bought and given him. The shiny square of parchment-paper bearing the signature of his Grace the Archbishop of Canterbury drew both their heads together over it. In a compartment meant for stamps was a hard, thin, metallic circle, shining yellow through tissue paper folds.

"The--Ring?" she whispered.

"The Ring!" He nodded, smiling, as she bent her face over it, kissed the tissue paper reverently, stuck the Licence back in its compartment, and gave him back the case.

"And you had these in your pocket this afternoon when I was such a horrid beast to you?"

"They were burning a hole right into my chest. Why, Pat, you're--crying!"

She half turned away, mopping her wet eyes with her flimsy little handkerchief.

"Because--because--it's so blessedly sweet and dear of you to have planned this. Do you--do you really want it so much?"

"More than anything under the sky," said Sherbrand. "And, don't you see, it settles the question of providing for you, splendidly! If we're married, and I get--pipped--Somewhere at the Front--" He stopped short, for one of her large hands firmly covered his mouth.

"I won't have it. You're not to speak like that, ever!" said a muffled voice above his head. "If you were killed--don't you understand--everything'd be over for me! It's a kind of nasty little Death--only to have you hint at it."

"All right!" he mumbled penitently, and kissed the hand. It was withdrawn, and he went on:

"I have my little fortune, though Flying has made a hole in it. And I'd naturally like--as my mother is provided for--the stuff to go to my wife."

"Oh! if I only were--good enough, I would be your wife to-morrow!" she groaned.

He got up and took her masterfully in his arms.

"No more of that. I can't stick being made out a--bally pattern. You are a hundred times too good for me!"

"_But not at all patriotic_," came drifting back upon him in the voice of Raymond. His embrace never slackened, but he asked of her a question, looking for the answer to lighten in her eyes: "Pat--you've not said yet that you're glad they've given me my Flying Commission!--that you're British enough to give your man, if it came to giving--for the Old Shop! I know you are!--of course you are!--but say it--I'd like to hear you."

"I--I----" She caught her breath and her eyes wavered miserably under his steady gaze. "I'm not a little bit o' good at telling decent proper lies. I love England--but I love you heaps, heaps, _heaps_ best!" He felt her pant between his arms.... She writhed her long white neck like a creature in desperate agony. "I want to eat my cake and have it!" she wailed, evading his eyes. "Now you know me, you'll despise me. But it's the truth--anyway! I'd like a man to send to the War--and a man to keep for myself!"

His arms wrapped her closely and his heart plunged madly against her bosom. He kissed her on her yielded mouth, and the kiss was a living flame.

"That will be when we are married and you have a son!" he whispered, and a drowning horror enveloped her. She cried out and thrust him back, and might have sunk down at his feet and told her dreadful story then....

Whitaker's Peerage intervened, sliding from the lap of the obese, reposeful Member, and falling to the carpet with a resounding thump. The indignant eyes of the awakened lady glared at Sherbrand over her gold-rimmed spectacles. She demanded, snorting:

"Since when has this room--_hr'runk!_--been thrown open to visitors?"

"I'll inquire," Sherbrand stammered, and the guilty couple fled. That night Patrine wrote on a card "Seasheere," and thenceafter wore it in her bosom. But many weeks were over her head before the Call came.

*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.