Part 10

"Look here, Duncan," I said, "there's only one real chance for us. We've got to swim to the mainland, but we can't do it by daylight. We've got to pass six hours till it's dark enough, and there's only one way to do it. How far can you swim under water?"

"About fifty feet," he said. "You're going crazy, old man, it's a mile and a half to the mainland."

"Duncan, you're a devil of a man for getting into a scrape. But when it comes to getting out of one, I feel a little safer in my own hands. Can you get as far as that rock under water?"

"I think so," he said, and caught on to the suggestion at once.

The cries were coming along the cliff's edge now, and it was a question of only half a minute before some of our pursuers would be on the top of us.

"Hurry, then. Swim to the north of the rock, and don't come up till you're on the other side. If you feel yourself rising, grab hold of the sea-weed, and keep yourself down till you've hauled round the rock. Quick!"

There was a crashing in the bushes, not fifty yards away, along the cliff, as we dived into the clear green water. The plunge carried one further than I expected, and four or five strokes along the bottom of the sea brought me to the base of the rock. It was quite easy to turn it, and I was relieved to find that there was a good ledge for landing on the further side, only an inch or two above the level of the water, and quite screened from the island by the rock itself, which was about ten feet in length, and curved in a half-moon shape, with the horns pointing towards the mainland. In fact, it was like a large Chesterfield couch of stone, covered with brown sea-weed, and resolutely turning its back on the island. We were luckier than I had dared to hope; and when, in a few seconds, Duncan had coiled himself on the ledge beside me, I saw by his grin that he thought we had solved the problem of escape. For five minutes we lay dead still, listening to the clamor along the cliff from which we had just dived.

"Thank the Lord, we get the sun here," said Duncan at last, as the sounds died away. "There's only one thing that worries me now. What are we to do when they come round in a boat?"

"They won't think of that for some time," I said, "but when they do, we must take to the water again, and work round behind the rock. We ought to be able to keep it between us and the blighters, with any luck. We've only got to keep enough above water to breathe with; and I've seen some fine camouflage done with a little sea-weed before now."

We looked at the yard-long fringes of brown sea-weed, and decided that it would be possible to defy anything but the closest inspection of our rock by the simple process of sliding down into the water and pulling the sea-weed over our heads, on the side next to the island. There was a reef which would prevent a boat passing on that side.

Our clothes were almost dried by the blazing sun before we were disturbed again. Duncan was ruefully contemplating a corn-cob pipe, which he affirmed had been ruined by the salt water. He poked the stem at a huge sea-anemone, which immediately sucked it in, and held it as firmly as a smoker's mouth, with so ludicrous an effect that Duncan's risible faculties were dangerously moved. I was half afraid of one of his volcanic guffaws, when we both heard a sound that struck us dumb,--the sound of oars coming steadily in our direction. We slipped into the water, according to plan, hauled ourselves round behind the rock, and drew the long thick fringes of sea-weed over our heads. We held ourselves anchored there by the brown stems, and kept little more than our noses above the water. No concealment could have been more complete. The boat passed on; and in five minutes we were back again on our ledge, and drying in the sun.

"Good Lord," said Duncan, suddenly, "that was a near shave. I'd forgotten that beastly thing."

He pointed to the sea-anemone, which was still sucking at the yellow corn-cob pipe. It looked like the bristling red mouth of some drunken and half-submerged sea-god, and could hardly have been missed by the boat's crew, if they had been looking for anything like it.

"Lord, what a shave!" he said again. "What would Schramm have said if he had seen it!"

Then, as we stared at the absurd marine creature, we rocked in silent spasms of mirth--human beings are made of a very queer clay--picturing the bewildered faces of the Boches at a sight which would have meant our death.

The sense of humor was benumbed in both of us before long. The sun was dropping low, and we did not dry as quickly as before. There was a stillness on the island, which boded no good, I thought, though our pursuers evidently believed that we had escaped them.

"They probably think we swam ashore earlier in the game," said Duncan. "They must be sick at not having spotted us."

"I wonder what they are up to now?"

"Probably destroying evidence, and getting ready to clear out, if they really have a notion that their big men over here may be involved. Unfortunately, these papers don't give anything away, so far as I can see except that they're addressed to Schramm; but it's quite obvious what they were doing."

We lay still and waited, listening to the strangely peaceful lapping of the water round our rock, and watching the big sea-perch and rock-cod that moved like shadows below.

"I wonder if that fellow suspects mischief," said Duncan, pointing over the cliff. "By Jove! isn't he splendid?"

Over the highest point of the island a white-headed eagle was mounting, in great, slow, sweeping circles, without one beat of the long, dark wings that must have measured seven feet from tip to tip.

"It's too splendid to be the German eagle. Praise the Lord, it's the native species; and he's taking his time because he has to take wide views. He has to soar high enough to get his bearings."

Up and up, the glorious creature circled, till he dwindled in the dazzling blue to the size of a sea-gull; and still he wheeled and mounted, till he became a black dot no bigger than an English sky-lark. Then he moved, like a bullet, due east.

"I almost believe in omens," said Duncan. "Ah, look out! There they come!"

The masts of a large yacht, which must have emerged from the private harbor of which Captain Humphrey spoke, came slowly round the island. We had only just time to slip into the water, behind our rock, before she came into full view. She passed so near to us that the low sun cast the traveling shadows of her railing almost within reach of my hand; and the shadows of her two boats on the port side came along the clear green water between us and the island, like the gray ghosts of some old pirate's dinghies.

She must have been still in sight, and we were still in our hiding-place, when it seemed as if the island tried to leap towards the sky, and we were deafened by a terrific concussion. Fragments of wood, and great pieces of stone, dropped all round us in the poppling water, and more than one deadly missile struck the rock itself.

"They've blown up the whole show!" cried Duncan. "There can't be anybody left alive on the island!"

We waited--ten minutes or more--to see if other explosions were to follow. Then we swam for clam-beach to investigate. It was littered with fragments of the buildings that had been destroyed. The tarred roof of a shed had been dropped there almost intact, as if from the claws of some gigantic eagle. The pine-wood looked as if it had been subjected to a barrage fire; and, in many places, the undergrowth was burning furiously.

We dashed up the path, with the smoke stinging our eyes, towards the dull red glow, which was already beginning to rival the deepening crimson of the Maine sunset. The central portion of the house was still standing, though much of it had been blown bodily away, and the fire was laying fierce hands upon it from all sides. We turned to the north, where we supposed the wharf had been. The remains of half a dozen sheds were burning on one side of the cove, and it looked as if half the cliff had been tumbled into it on the other.

The heat of the fire along the wharf was so fierce that we turned back to the house again.

"Well," said Duncan, "there's evidence enough to give a few good headlines to the neutral press,--'_Gasoline Explosion on Maine Coast! Wealthy New Yorker Escapes Death in Fiery Furnace!_' Fortunately, there's also enough for Washington to lay up in its memory."

Another section of the house fell as we looked at it; and we saw the interior of the dining-room, with the flames licking up the three remaining walls. By one of those curious freaks of high-explosive, the table was hardly disarranged; and our last glimpse of it, through a fringe of fire, showed us those twelve queer champagne glasses. They stood there, flickering like evil goblins, a peach in every glass....

We watched them for five minutes. Then the whole scintillating fabric collapsed; and we sat down to wait for the frantic motor-boat, which was already thumping towards us, with the reporter of the _Rockport Sentinel_ furiously writing in her bows.

VIII

MAY MARGARET

"_Clerk Sanders and May Margaret Walked ower yon garden green, And sad and heavy was the love That fell thae twa between._"

May Margaret was an American girl, married to a lieutenant in the British Army named Brian Davidson. When the regretful telegram from the War Office, announcing his death in action, was delivered to her in her London apartment, she read it without a quiver, crumpled it up, threw it into the fire, and leaned her head against her arm, under his photograph on the mantel-piece. When her heart began to beat again, she went to her bedroom and locked the door. This was not the Anglo-American love-affair of fiction. Both of them were poverty-stricken in the estimation of their friends; and it was only by having her black evening dress "done over," and practising other strict economies for a whole year, that May Margaret had been able to sail from New York to work in an European hospital. The marriage had taken place a little more than three months ago, while Davidson was home on a few days' leave.

After the announcement of his death, she did not emerge from her room until the usual letter arrived from the front, explaining with the usual helplessness of the brother officer, that Davidson was really "one of the best," that "everybody liked him," and that "he was the life and soul of his company." But the letter contained one thing that she was not expecting, an official photograph of the grave, a quarter-plate picture of an oblong of loose earth, marked with a little cross made, apparently, of two sticks of kindling wood. And it was this that had brought her back to life again. It was so strangely matter-of-fact, so small, so complete, that it brought her out of the great dark spaces of her grief. It reminded her of something that Davidson had once written in a letter from the trenches. "Things out here are not nearly so bad as people at home imagine. At home, one pictures the war as a great blaze of horror. Out here, things become more sharply defined, as the lights of a city open up when you approach them, or as the Milky Way splits itself up into points of light under the telescope. I have never seen a dead body yet that looked more imposing than a suit of old clothes. The real man was somewhere else."

She examined the photograph with a kind of curiosity. In this new sense of the reality of death, the rattle of the traffic outside had grown strange and dreamlike, and the rattle of the tea-things and the smell of the buttered toast which an assiduous, but discreet landlady placed at her side, seemed as fantastic and remote as any fairy-tale. All the trivial details of the life around her had assumed a new and mysterious quality. She seemed to be moving in a phantasmagorical world. The round red face of the landlady came and went like the goblin things you may see over your shoulder in a looking-glass at twilight. And the center of all this insubstantial dream-stuff was that one vivid oblong of loose earth, marked with two sticks of kindling wood, in the neat and sharply defined official photograph.

There was something that looked like a black thread entwining the arms of the tiny cross; and she puzzled over it stupidly, wondering what it could be. "I suppose I could write and ask," she said to herself. Then an over-mastering desire seized her. She must go and see it. She must go and see the one fragment of the earth that remained to her, if only for the reason that there, perhaps, she might find the relief of tears. But she had another reason also, a reason that she would never formulate, even to herself, an over-mastering impulse from the depths of her being.

May Margaret had no intimate friends in London. She had established herself in these London lodgings with the cosmopolitan independence of the American girl, whose own country contains distances as great as that from London to Petrograd. The world shrinks a little when your own country is a continent; and it was with no sense of remoteness that she now went to the telephone and rang up the London office of the _Chicago Bulletin_.

"I want to speak to Mr. Harvey," she said. "Is this Mr. Harvey? This is Mrs. Davidson,--Margaret Grant--you remember, don't you? I want to see you about something very important. You are sending people out to the front all the time, aren't you, in connection with your newspapers? Well, I want to know if you can arrange for me to go.... Yes, as a woman correspondent.... Oh, they don't allow it? Not at the British front?... Well, I've got to arrange it somehow.... Won't you come and see me and talk it over?... All right, at six-thirty. Good-by."

The official photograph was still in her hand when Mr. William K. Harvey, of the _Chicago Bulletin_, was announced. He was a very young man to be managing the London office of a great newspaper, but this was not a disadvantage for May Margaret's purpose.

"So you want to go to the front," he said, settling down into the arm-chair on the other side of the fire. "It would certainly make a great story. We ought to be able to syndicate it all through the Middle West; but you'll have to give up the idea of the British front. We might manage the French front, I think."

"But I want particularly to go to Arras. Surely, you can manage it, Mr. Harvey. You must know all sorts of influential people here." Her voice, with its husky contralto notes, rather like those of a boy whose voice has lately broken, had always an appeal for Mr. Harvey, and it was particularly pleasing just then. He beamed through his glasses and ran his hand through his curly hair.

"I was talking to Sir William Robertson about a very similar proposition only yesterday, and Sir William told me that he'd do anything on earth for the _Chicago Bulletin_, but the War Office, which is in heaven, had decided finally to allow no women correspondents at the British front."

May Margaret rose and went to the window. For a moment she pressed her brow against the cool glass and, as she stared hopelessly at the busses rumbling by, an idea came to her. She wondered that she had not thought of it before.

"Come here, Mr. Harvey," she said. "I want to show you something."

He joined her at the window. A bus had halted by the opposite pavement. The conductor was swinging lightly down by the hand-rail, a very youthful looking conductor, in breeches and leggings.

"Is that a man or a woman?" said May Margaret.

"A woman, isn't it?"

"And that?" She pointed to another figure striding by in blue overalls and a slouch hat.

"I don't know. There are so many of them about now, that on general principles, I guess it's a woman. Besides, it looks as if it would be in the army if it were not a woman."

"Yes, but I am an American correspondent," said May Margaret.

"Gee!" said Mr. Harvey, surveying her from head to foot. His face looked as if all the printing presses of the _Chicago Bulletin_ were silently at work behind it. She was tall and lean--a college friend had described her exactly as "half goddess and half gawk." Her face was of the open-air type. Her hair would have to be cropped, of course. "Gee!" he said again. "It would be the biggest scoop of the war."

A fortnight later, a slender youth in khaki-colored clothes, with leggings, arrived at the Foreign Office, presented a paper to a sad-eyed messenger in the great hall, and was led to the disreputable old lift which, as usual, bore a notice to the effect that it was not working to-day. The sad-eyed messenger heaved the usual sigh, and led the way up three flights of broad stone stairs to a very dark waiting-room. There were three other young men in the room, but it was almost impossible to see their faces.

"Mr. Grant, of the _Tribune_, wasn't it, sir?" said the messenger.

"Mr. Martin Grant, of the _Chicago Bulletin_," said May Margaret, and the messenger shuffled into the distance along a gloomy corridor which seemed to be older than any tomb of the Pharaohs, and destined to last as long again.

In a few minutes, a young Englishman, who looked like an army officer in mufti, but was really a clerk in the Foreign Office, named Julian Sinclair, was making himself very charming to the four correspondents. To one of them he talked very fluently in Spanish: to another he spoke excellent Swedish, bridging several moments of misunderstanding with smiles and gestures that would have done credit to a Macchiavelli; to the third, because he was a Greek, he spoke French; and to Martin Grant, because he was an American, he spoke the language of George Washington, and behaved as if he were a fellow-countryman of slightly different, possibly more broad-minded, but certainly erroneous politics.

Then he gave them all a few simple directions. He was going to have the pleasure of escorting them to the front. It was necessary that they should be accompanied by some one from the Foreign Office, he explained, in order to save them trouble; and they had been asked to meet him there to-day for purposes of identification and to get their passports. These would have to be stamped by both the British and French military authorities at an address which he gave them, and they would please meet him at Charing Cross Station at twelve o'clock to-morrow morning. It was all very simple, and Mr. Martin Grant felt greatly relieved.

There was a drizzle of rain the next morning, for which May Margaret was grateful. It was a good excuse for appearing at the station in the Burberry raincoat, which gave her not only a respite from self-consciousness, but an almost military air. Her cloth cap, too, the peak of which filled her strong young face with masculine shadows, approximated to the military shape. It was a wise choice; for the soft slouch hat, which she had tried at first, had persistently assumed a feminine aspect, an almost absurdly picturesque effect, no matter how she twisted it or pulled it down on her close-cropped head.

She was the first of the party to arrive, and when Julian Sinclair hurried along the platform with the three foreign correspondents, there was no time left for conversation before they were locked in their compartment of the military train. They were the only civilians aboard.

She dropped into a corner seat with her newspaper. But her eyes and brain were busy with the scene outside. The train was crammed with troops, just as it had been on that other day when she stood outside on the platform, like those other women there, and said good-by to Brian. She was living it all over again, as she watched those farewells; but she felt nearer to him now, as if she were seeing things from his own side, almost as if she had broken through the barriers and taken some dream-train to the next world, in order to follow him.

There was a very young soldier leaning from the window of the next compartment. He was talking to a girl with a baby in her arms. Her wide eyes were fixed on his face with the same solemn expression as those of the child, dark innocent eyes with the haunted beauty of a Madonna. They were trying to say something to each other, but the moment had made them strangers, and they could not find the words.

"You'll write," she said faintly.

He nodded and smiled airily. A whistle blew. There was a banging of doors, and a roar of cheering. The little mother moved impulsively forward, climbed on to the footboard, threw her right arm around the neck of her soldier, and drew his face down to her own.

"Stand back there," bellowed the porters. But the girl's arm was locked round the lad's neck as if she were drowning, and they took no notice. The train began to move. A crippled soldier, in blue hospital uniform and red tie, hobbled forward on his crutch, and took hold of the girl.

"Break away," he said gruffly. "Break away, lass."

He pulled her back to the platform. Then he hobbled forward with the moving train and spoke to the young soldier.

"If you meet the blighter wot gave me this," he said, pointing to his amputated thigh, "you give 'im 'ell for _me_!"

It was a primitive appeal, but the boy pulled himself together immediately, as the veteran face, so deeply plowed with suffering, savagely confronted his own. And, as the train moved on, and the wounded man stood there, upright on his crutch, May Margaret saw that there were tears in those fierce eyes--eyes so much older than their years--and a tenderness in the coarse face that brought her heart into her throat.

The journey to Folkestone was all a dream, a dream that she was glad to be dreaming, because she was now on the other side of the barrier that separated people at home from those at the front. The queerest thoughts passed through her mind. She understood for a moment the poor groping endeavors of the war-bereft to break through those darker barriers of the material world, and get into touch, no matter how vaguely, with the world beyond. She felt that in some strange way she was succeeding.

They had lunch on the train. She forced herself to drink some black coffee, and nibble at some tepid mutton. She was vaguely conscious that the correspondents were enjoying themselves enormously at the expense of the State, and she shuddered at the grotesque sense of humor which she discovered amongst her thoughts at this moment.

The Channel-crossing on the troop-ship brought her nearer yet. There was hardly standing-room on any of the decks, and the spectacle was a very strange one, for all the crowded ranks in khaki, officers and men, had been ordered to wear life-belts. A hospital ship which had just arrived was delivering its loads of wounded men to the docks, and these also were wearing life-belts.

The sunset-light was fading as the troop-ship moved out, and the seas had that peculiar iridescent smoothness, as of a delicately tinted skin of very faintly burning oils, which they so often wear when the wind falls at evening. On one side of the ship a destroyer was plowing through white mounds of foam; and overhead there was one of the new silver-skinned scouting air-ships.