CHAPTER LXIVAT SEASHEEREThe narrow white footpath had suddenly led nowhere. Patrine had found herself standing at the edge of a four-foot bluff, looking down upon a grassy plateau that gently sloped to the brink of the cliffs. A wire fence enclosed an aggregation of stone-grey wooden buildings dominated by a flagstaff and the latticed steel tower of a Wireless installation. The White Ensign flapped lazily from the halyards of the flagstaff, there were three hangars at a little distance away. A row of seaplanes sat on the grass before them, and some figures of men in overalls or the familiar Naval uniform moved in and out and about the machines busily as ants. Where the grassland stopped at the cliff-edge the roofs of other hangars showed, that were built upon the shingle. A little way out beyond the line of foam where the long green lips of the sea mumbled at the wet pebbles, another row of seaplanes lashed to buoys, rocked like gulls drowsing after a gorge of fish. And far out to sea, where the heavy trails of smoke bannering from the funnels of rushing grey hulls betokened the War activities of the Fleet in the Channel, and the conning-towers of big submarines sometimes pretended to be little stocky steamers sitting on the swell, two strange bat-like things rose and circled and swooped, and were hidden in grey-blue mists to rise again, and swoop and circle.... And a little dinghy with two blue figures in it was pulling out from the beach in the direction of the anchored planes."Beg pardon! But—aren't you Miss Saxham?"She craned her long neck, looking for the speaker, and found him in a youthful Flight Sub-Lieutenant, who, standing below the grassy bluff, was looking up with very brown eyes at the tall figure in the narrow skirt of tan, white and rose-pink chequers, the low-cut blouse of guipure lace, and the knitted silk coat of rose-pink. Buckled pumps adorned the well-arched feet, clad with navy blue silk stockings of liberal open-work. She sported a buff sunshade lined with rose, and a hat of rough tan straw, trimmed with quills of navy blue and rose-pink, sat coquettishly on the beech-leaf hair. She gave the boy one of her wide smiles, evading the "Yes" by nodding, and with a cat-like leap and scramble, he was up the grassy bluff and standing before her, blushing and saluting and holding out a scribbled paper-pad."For me?""For you—if you're Miss Saxham. It's a Wireless came this morning—from your—from a great friend of yours. Somewhere in France.""Oh—thank you!"She pulled off a loose buff glove and stretched a large white hand for the paper-pad. The message ran:"6 a.m. Now leaving Compiegne for Calais. Seasheere in five hours, barring accident. All my love to you. Alan."And the Lieutenant had thought her pale.... She kissed the paper and smiled at him bewilderingly. "Lucky beggar, Sherbrand," thought the Lieutenant. "What a glorious woman!" He extorted from Patrine, who would not be twenty until next August, the penalty for being built on a grander scale than other daughters of Eve. But she was asking:"Whom have I to thank for bringing Mr. Sherbrand's message?""Flight Sub-Lieutenant Dareless—and the thanks are quite on my side." He phrased the trite civility punctiliously, while the bold brown eyes beamed and twinkled: "For you're IT," they said; "just—clippingly—IT!""How did you know me?" began Patrine."Picked you up through the binnics from the bridge, ten minutes ago." The slim brown hand flourished, indicating a T-square-shaped space of well-watered turf marked off in whitewash lines upon the green aërodrome below. "We call things by their proper names so as not to lose touch, you understand? The short stretch is the Bridge, and the long strip aft at right angles—that's the Quarter-deck. The big hut No. 1 is our Wardroom—the Wing-Commander's cabin is divided off from it. The officers' cabins are in the small hut, No. 2, and the Warrant Officers and men divide No. 3. Of course we keep watches and post sentries—just as if we were at sea. That Territorial on guard near is relieving a man of ours, do you see?" He jerked his chin towards the moving brown figure. "What have we to guard? Oh, well, the hangars, and our Wireless"—another jerk indicating the latticed steel mast surmounting a telegraph hut wedded to a vibrating dynamo-shed. "We get reports from our patrols—most of 'em are fitted with radio-apparatus—and we receive and transmit messages. Long distance? Well, rather! We're frightfully swanky about our Wireless plant. It's Number One, H.P. Not big, but jolly powerful. A——"Six clear, silvery double-notes had sounded from a brass bell, hung beneath a little white-painted penthouse sitting on the blue strip of shadow on the westward side of the Wardroom hut. The Petty Officer who had rung the bell exchanged a brief word with the Territorial, and went back to the hangars from whence he had emerged. Patrine, with her heart in her mouth, asked the Sub-Lieutenant:"Was that a signal?""Only ship-time," said the brown-eyed one. "Six bells. Eleven A.M. And our man ought to be looming up in sight. He might hit Seasheere now at any minute. In fact, he's nearly an hour late.""You don't—you don't suppose——?"Fear had pinched and drawn and bleached her so that she looked forty behind her white veil with blue chenille dragonflies. Her pale mouth twitched and her black brows knotted over the haunted eyes that strained out to sea. The paper-pad, crunched to a mere wad, dropped from the hand that unconsciously released it. The boy picked it up, thrilled by this peep behind the scenes of another's romance."No, no! There's no fear of an accident, Miss Saxham. Perhaps a bit o' engine-trouble—you've got to travel slowish if she vibes too much. Or he might have spotted an Aviatik and delayed to have a biff at him—on the principle that ten Hun-birds make an evener bag than nine. We know what a terror he's getting to be with the Maxim. But what puts the fear of God into the flighty Taube quicker than anything is our R.N.A.S. Vickers' gun."Ah, did he know how horribly he tortured her! But a grey speck showed upon the delicately-misty distance eastwards, growing bigger, coming nearer, putting miles of green white, heaving water under its throbbing engine with effortless speed. Her glance leaped to Dareless, studying the oncomer between narrowed lids, and the hope that had kindled in her died out as he shook his head."One of ours, on the Home-flight from Belgium, Miss Saxham. Your man will pick up much higher, and to the south-east."And presently the latest type of Fleet hydroplane, a two-seater Batboat carrying two bareheaded young gentlemen, moaned into view, chasing its own wave-skipping, flying shadow at full stretch for the shore, came down in a long mallard-like glide, skidding over the water as the wild-duck does, and in a ruffle of glittering spray, continued the home-journey in the character of a motor-boat.Then there was a sharp squib-like crack, and from one of the anchored hydroplanes, a rocket went up and burst in a smoke-puff that hung in a little cloud of violet-grey upon the sunny air, and from the hangars on the shingle under the bluff streamed figures in blue overalls or grimy shirt-sleeves, and cheered and waved, standing ankle-deep in refluent water, topped with creamy sheets of foam. As the Batboat with her joyous navigators rushed spluttering to the shallow anchorage and tied up beside the Station planes, megaphones bellowed, motor-horns tooted, somebody banged on the ship's bell, a cornet struck up "Rule Britannia!" very much out of tune...."Well done, you two beggars! Oh! well done!" trumpeted Dareless, through his hollowed hands, and turned a beaming face on Patrine to explain that the hatless navigators of the Batboat were Lieutenants of a Flight stationed at Antwerp, and had shared in the Air Raid on the Zeppelin-sheds at Düsseldorf—early on the previous day.And then a droning song had come drifting down out of the sky to the south-eastward with a buzzing undernote in it that Patrine remembered well. Dareless had lifted his head for a rapid upward reconnaissance, and said with a flash of white teeth in his brown face:"Thumbs up, Miss Saxham!—this is your particular bird!"And Patrine had seen, small and high, and shining palely golden in the sunlight, the shape of the biplane that carried her lover, and her heart knocked twice in her bosom, heavily, as they knock behind the curtain before they ring up at the Comedie Française. A Clery's signalling-pistol had cracked and been answered from the Air-Station. Mechanics in overalls had appeared upon the green. Then the buzzing had stopped, and the second Bird of War, rising higher to escape the backwash of light airs from the cliffs, had launched into a splendid sweeping spiral, ending in a long glide, and alighted on the well-rolled Station aërodrome—and Sherbrand had come home.Surely never until the thought of Flight,—formed in the brain-cells of Man and fertilised by the lust of Adventure,—hatched out in the Bird that bears the Knight of To-day upon the air-path, did lover return to his lady after a fashion so wonderful as this.The Flying Men have always been coming. In the Book of Books you will read of them. Ecclesiasticus, the Preacher, foretold of the day when a Bird of the Air should carry the Voice, and That Which Hath Wings should tell the matter; and how these Winged ones rush and roar through the prophetic pages of Ezekiel and Daniel, you have but to open them to learn. Their shapes like locusts, their armoured bodies with great-eyed headpieces "like those of horses prepared unto battle," the noise made by their wings in flight "like the noise of chariots and horses running to battle," the wheels beneath their wings, the human faces appertaining to them, the inward fire that issues from them in scorching vapours,—are described with fiery eloquence in the Apocalypse of the Apostle of St. John, when the Fifth Angel sounds the Trumpet, and the King whose name is Exterminans, the Destroyer, reaches the culminating point of his terrific reign upon earth.Flight makes the world no more joyful, being mainly used for purposes of destruction, but nothing can rob the Flying Man of his shining gloriole of Romance. The boy who was building toy aëroplanes of card and elastic a few years back has rediscovered the Flying Dragon of the Cretaceous period, broken and tamed the winged monster into a War steed, and thundered down the forgotten roads of the Pterodactyl and the Rukh, to reap shining honours upon the battlefields of the mutable Air. And if the girl who chaffed the boy of old worships him to-day as St. George, Sir Lancelot, Sir Galahad, and Le Bon Sieur de Bayard rolled into one, who shall blame her? Not I, for one!In the instant of reunion, when the tall brown figure came swinging to meet her, and the strong hard hands gripped her own, Patrine loved him more than ever. Sherbrand's was not a romantic greeting, but it thrilled her nevertheless."They've asked us to lunch here, but it's ready at the Cottage. Shall we accept? It's for you to decide."His tone had indicated his keen desire for thetête-à-têtein preference. Disappointment had shadowed his clear eyes when Patrine had voted for luncheon at the Air Station, inwardly longing to be alone with him—to be alone.And yet, despite the longing, the haunting sense of a sword of Fate hanging over her, Patrine found the Wardroom lunch a jolly banquet. They were so young, those sunburnt faces, laughing about the plainly-furnished board. The Wing-Commander in charge of the Station proved to be something under thirty. To Patrine, occupying the place of honour on his right hand, he did the honours like a veteran. One of the navigators of the Batboat sat upon her other side, and Sherbrand was hervis-à-vis.Sherbrand was altered. She knew him older, harder, sterner.... Thinner to the verge of haggardness, with a deep vertical furrow graved between the thick eyebrows that made a bar of blonde fairness against the red of his deeply-burned skin. He had gone away a splendid youth. Now he returned with two silvery-yellow stars on the cuffs and shoulder-straps of his khaki tunic, a man seasoned and tempered as a bar of steel in the furnace-blast of War.The pleasant meal ended, and the jolly party broke up. Their hosts accompanied them to the gate of the Station enclosure, and the warmth and heartiness of Naval tradition had been in the farewells that had sped the departing guests upon their way:"Au revoir! All happiness!""So-long! We'll look after the 'plane all right!""Adios! Buenas noches!""Sayonara!""Siéda!""Good-bye and good luck! Now all together.... Hip—hip—" and a rousing British cheer.CHAPTER LXVGOOD-BYE, DEAR LOVE, GOOD-BYE!They had looked back to smile and wave their thanks, and an aged tennis-shoe, scientifically hurled by Dareless, had knocked the cap out of Sherbrand's upraised hand, and raised a cloud of chalky dust from the surface of the sunken road. Under cover of this they had crossed the road and climbed a slope together and found themselves standing in heavenly loneliness, with the sea beside them and their feet upon the thymy grasses blotted by the short shadows of their tall figures, under the almost vertical sun."Look!" Sherbrand had said, pointing to a whitewashed, red-tiled cottage cuddled in a hollow some quarter of a mile distant, girt with a gay frivolous little garden full of bachelor's buttons and sunflowers, lavender bushes and nasturtiums yellow and red. He slipped his hand within her arm and pressed it, whispering: "There's our Eden—and my dream has come true!"Her heart choked her. They moved on together shoulder to shoulder, her elbow resting in the bend of his strong arm, and her hand lying in his. The air they breathed was sweet with heady, nameless fragrance, the burning golden light that haloed them seemed the effluence of their love. Anguish and rapture mingled in the chalice of the perfect hour for Patrine. Nothing but rapture was in the draught for Sherbrand, though a faint fold showed between his eyebrows as he said suddenly:"Hang it! I've forgotten to ask the Station fellows to give me a night's shakedown. However, there's a decent hotel in Seasheere. My bag is still in the machine, by the way.... Did you send someone on to the cottage with your traps?""I——"She began to falter. It was coming.... But his eagerness delayed the moment of revelation. The track they followed dipped down and they found themselves in a grassy basin. The turf cupped up on every side and they were alone, lidded by the blazing turquoise sky.At the bottom of the green nest he stopped, and next moment his embrace enveloped her. She forgot, as an answering flame burned in her blood, all the things that she had meant to say. "I'll have my hour," shot through her whirling brain, "I must have something of him to keep in remembrance. He has never loved me—nor I him—so passionately as now. Oh, my God!"He released her with a happy sigh, and they sat down on the shadowed side of their green nest, a deep dimple in the cheek of the sunny, smiling Earth, and looked in each other's eyes. He said, as she took off her hat and threw it aside and turned her unveiled, unshadowed face back to his:"Your dear cheeks are thinner, I fancy, Pat. Have you been worrying much about me?"She nodded, thinking of her sleepless nights passed after reading his few letters, or when his letters had failed to come."Pretty badly—in the days of the Retreat from Mons. You piloted that French officer over the Channel and—whiff!—you vanished. What has become of him?""Wing Commandant Raymond? He's riding the storm and directing the whirlwind somewhere on the French Front. I got my orders to join the R.F.C.-unit acting with a rearguard battery of the Second Army Corps as soon as I'd dumped him. As for the work with the battery, it was always the same thing. We flew out against von Kluck's advance, spotting their gun-emplacements and getting the range for our gunners. And under us a dark-brown river with five branches rolled South. And that was the Retreat."His arm was round her, her cheek was pressed to his, her bosom heaved against him. She turned her lips to his in a quick kiss, and whispered:"And when you came down out of your sky 'like pigeons homing at nightfall'—that's a sentence in one of your letters—d'you recognise it?—the river went on rolling still?""Just the same, without a break. And what a—welter. Remnants of crack infantry brigades tangled with the rags of cavalry squadrons—grimy, hairy, ragged chimney-sweeps with bandaged feet and empty bellies, and blackened tongues hanging out, and blind, blank, staring eyes.... Imagine all the toy soldier outfits in the kiddy-shops of Regent Street emptied into the gutters and you'll get an idea of what the thing was like.... And Transport and Supply-columns jumbled with bits of R.G.A. batteries and R.F.A.—three dying horses to a howitzer, and one gunner left out of six! Bands of refugees and troops of stragglers. Lunatics led along howling and gibbering. Lorries, carts, and motor-vans crammed with swollen-footed cripples—cheek by jowl with bloody spectres evacuated from Field Hospitals that were reddening the sky with their burning in the rear. A day-and-nightmare to haunt one for ever if the end had been different—" He caught his breath. "But when I remember that we straightened the muddle—brought Order out of Chaos—turned on the Germans and bit to the bone—I pray that the memory may stay with me always, so that I may teach your sons and mine what it means to be Englishmen!""Oh, Alan! My poor boy! ..." She caught him in her arms with sudden passion, strained him to her and then freed herself from him, and moved away, signing to him that he must not approach. "What you hope for can never be! I'd have told you this before if I'd been decent, but I wanted your kisses—I was hungry for the touch of you—and the sound of your voice in my ears after all these weeks and weeks——""Then why do you say it can never be—and tell me in the same breath that you long for me and love me?" His light brows were drawn into a heavy line over his stern grey eyes. "Aren't you and I going to be married? Is it possible that you'd draw back—now?""Because your wife should be a pure woman, and I am not, it is possible. Don't move! Don't come nearer! If you do I'll never have the courage to tell—what must be told!"And he had sat still, as a figure in carved khaki-coloured stone with his knees apart and his knotted hands hanging between them, and his eyes, curiously hard and pale against the strong red sunburn of his face, fixed immovably upon her mouth. When she ended there had been a great silence; and she had looked up at the azure dome lidding their green nest, wondering why the burning, perfumed breeze had suddenly turned cold. His voice recalled her:"Why have you told me this?""To be honest." She hugged her knees. "To give you a chance for freedom before you were handicapped with me for life, poor boy!""And how do you suppose it makes me feel?" He breathed roughly, and gritted his teeth, wringing his hands in one another so strongly that the knuckles started death-white against the reddened skin. She heard herself saying lamely:"I knew you'd be horribly sick about it and hate me!""I don't hate you. But I want to killhim! He took you to that damnable place and—" He bit his lip and swallowed. "How long was that before I met you at Hendon? Three days—and our day of meeting—the meeting I thanked God for!—was July 18th. This is October—the 14th—to be particular. You must know what I'm driving at. Is there—any danger——"She said in a level voice, looking at him steadily:"I have deserved it—but I think God is going to be kinder to me than to—punish me in that way." Her eyes flickered and fell from his. "It was because—I was so awfully afraid at first that I made up my mind to marry you. And now—and now you know the very worst of me.""Hardly the worst." He drew breath roughly, and the cloud upon his forehead lightened a little. "We'd have been man and wife before I flew for France—if you'd let me have my way. Why didn't you?""I—Oh!—It seemed so mean.... A kind of child-stealing. You were so unsuspecting, and so generous, and soclean!" She bit her lips, and the tears welled over her underlids.... "You shamed me into being straight with you. I'd loved you from the beginning. But it was as though my love had left off crawling and grown a pair of wings.""Answer me straight." He turned so as to face her. "Did you ever love that German?""To my shame be it spoken—never for an instant! After that night at the Upas I hated him unspeakably. Only when I thought he was dead, I began to let up a little on the hate."He looked at his hands and unknotted them and knotted them, and said suddenly:"You may be interested to know that he is not dead, but very much the other thing. He is scouting and spotting for von Kluck's gunners on their south and west Fronts, and sometimes bombing positions he has skried out—and doing it all superbly, damn him! He has been degraded to the rank of a Supernumerary Flying officer for some breach of duty that got to the Kaiser. And he has evidently made his mind up to make good in this War. They pick him for all the dangerous missions. He seems unkillable—and we've tried our hardest. And wherever he goes—until now I've kept this from you—he takes—the Saxhams' son!""Bawne! ..."She shaped the name dumbly, with lips that were pale as poplar leaves. "God forgive me!" her conscience whispered. "How little I have thought of Bawne!""Yes. I mean Bawne!"So odd was the contrast between the speaker's grim, set face and the bald simplicity of his language, that her white lips twitched with a crazy desire to laugh, as he added:"I've been keen for a long time on coming across the man who pinched my hawk-hoverer and kidnapped my friend's son—and putting the fear of God into him with an automatic revolver, or a Maxim.... But now that I know—this!"—the deadly contempt in the voice is inconveyable—"a clean death hardly meets his case. Good cartridges seem wasted in killing that fellow. One wants to set one's heel down—hard on him—and scrunch!"He had sat silent, staring before him yet a moment longer. Then he gathered himself together and got up from the grass, glanced at his wrist-watch and said, holding out his hand to assist her in rising:"Well, let's be going. It's half-past three. They'll expect us to tea at the cottage. By the way, you haven't told me. Did you send on your bag from the station when you came?"She shuddered violently, and leaped up without touching the offered hand. The west was all dappled with tiny pearly cloudlets, their shadows were lengthening momentarily, the salt smell of the sea was on the breeze that came in languid puffs. But the wine of joy that had brimmed their green bowl had been emptied out by her own hand, and the draught now held to her flinching mouth was bitterer than hemlock and blacker than Styx. That change in his face and voice—"What do you suppose? I brought no bag. I am going home by the next train." She glanced at a little jewelled wrist-watch he had given her and back at the mask-like face, that said:"You mean we part here, for good! Is that it?""For good—or bad. My poor boy——"He put her "poor boy" from him with a gesture of the hand. He asked in a flat, toneless voice:"Am I a blackguard like von Herrnung? You came down here to marry me. What will be said afterwards—if——""I'm past caring what people think or say!" she flashed at him angrily. "I've told you that I will not marry you!—that I'm not fit to be your wife. Oh! if you suppose it didn't hurt——"A rush of tears drowned out his altered visage. She turned away, fighting for composure, summoning all her woman's pride to help her at her need. That swaying grace, that alluring physical perfection—had never appealed to Sherbrand's senses so irresistibly...."Patrine!"She heard his eager footsteps following her. She was snatched into his masterful embrace, assailed by his stormy kisses, wooed by his passionate words of love beyond her power to resist. The flood in the veins of both was rising, the force of the warm rushing torrent was bearing them away, she cared not whither, so that she might keep those arms about her still."Patrine! My woman of women—do you think I'd let you go from me? Not I! I'll have you for my wife whether you will or no! We'll forget—all that! We'll be happy in spite of it. Won't we?""No!" she gasped out."We will, I tell you!" He laughed out with ringing triumph and bent his head, seeking her evasive mouth with his own. Hard pressed she had panted:"Don't ask me to marry you! I'd never, never do it! Unless you were poor and sick and a nobody—and wanted a woman to nurse and work for you.... Then—the wag of a finger or the wind of a word would bring me to you. But—I swear it before God!—I won't marry you as you are!""You will!""I've sworn I won't. But—" She had whispered it in a kiss of fire—"I will give you—what that other man took!"And Sherbrand had uttered a hoarse sound like a sob, and unwound her arms from about his neck, and said, holding her hands close in his and looking sternly in her swimming eyes:"I'm no saint, God knows!—but I'm a better man than to take what you offer. Halloa! That's Davis. What's up now?"A distant whistle had made him prick his ears. He whistled back and ran lightly up to the brink of the grassy punch-bowl in time to meet the little black-avised Welshman—hero of the Paris episode in connection with the girl with the goo-goo eyes. Davis had handed him a paper-pad. Sherbrand had read it, scrawled a reply on the blank side to be dispatched by the Station's Wireless, and hurried back to Patrine."We—couldn't have been married to-morrow anyway. The man who undertook to replace me while I went on leave has been killed doing reconnaissance on our new Front in North-West France. I'm recalled.""Recalled?"He nodded. The British Force had been deftly transferred from its position on the Aisne to a base at St. Omer, you will remember, thus blocking the Calais Gate. The New Offensive was taking shape. Sherbrand had continued:"So—if you're to catch the three-fifty from Fearnchurch to Charing Cross—we'll have to run!"And as the screech of a distant engine had sounded from the direction of Fearnchurch Station, he had caught up the veiled hat and thrust it upon Patrine, grabbed her thin rain-coat and vanity bag and sunshade, and hurried her back to the flinty railway-station by the way she had come. And with the banging of the carriage-door, her woman's heart had broken. She had felt it bleeding drip, drip, drip! as Sherbrand's tall bare head and grave sad eyes had receded out of sight.And the train had been delayed at the next station, waiting for the passage of a troop-train crammed with eager faced young men of Kitchener's Army, concrete answers to the famous Call to Arms and the First Five Questions—nearly half an hour. So that rounding the curve beyond the last signal-cabin for the clanking journey through the short tunnel, Patrine had seen, some miles to seaward of the glittering white prow of the North Foreland, a biplane with its wings reddened by the sunset, flying south-east."Oh! good-bye, Alan!" she had whispered, knowing that she would never see her Bird of War again. He had been caught and dragged back into the fiery whirl of the cyclone without the hope that nerves and supports and brings adventurers back. Sorrowful and stern, baulked of his heart's desire, grimly bent on meeting von Herrnung, and wreaking retribution for a horrible wrong, upon the red head of the Kaiser's Flying Man.CHAPTER LXVIMORE KULTURThe boy's slight figure seemed to shrink upon itself as the stony eyes looked at him, and the teeth showed under the red moustache, not tightly curled now, but stiffened and pointing to the eyes. Von Herrnung set a foot upon the broken wall and leaped into the baker's parlour, staggering slightly as he alighted amongst the rubbish on the broken floor. He had been drinking, but not to excess, for the restaurant-cellars having been thoroughly gutted by his countrymen, the wreckage of the bar behind which Madame had sat, busy with her embroidery, had yielded barely a half-tumbler of Cognac and a single bottle of Champagne.Having drunk enough to spur memory and not to lull his snarling grievances to slumber, he had come forth to blunt the tooth of his bitter hatred on the boy. For, since that queer tickling, pleasurable sensation experienced in his first tantalization of Bawne's hunger, every new weal marked upon the wincing body, every fresh bruise inflicted on the shuddering soul of Her Dearest, imparted to von Herrnung a ferocious pleasure in comparison with which mere vicious indulgence palled."So, there you are, little English pig-dog," he said in German, as the blue eyes met his own and fell away before them and the colour sank out of the young face. "Get you back to theMarket-platzthere and wait for me. I have some business with your friend."He stretched out a long arm, picked up the boy by the slack of his garments, and with a turn of the wrist dropped him into the street. His ears were pricked for the cry that should follow the slight scrambling fall of the light body on the rubbish. It failed to come, and he frowned. Presently— Meanwhile here was game of a larger kind. He looked down from his superb height upon the bloodstained figure in the stretcher. Its eyes were closed, and the haggard face beneath the grime and bristles had the yellowish-white of old wax. He spoke to it harshly, in his English, and the brownish lids split apart and the gaunt sick eyes glimmered up at him. But no reply came from the livid lips. He rapped his foot sharply on the floor, repeating:"I suppose you know you are my prisoner, sir?" and a strange spasm of mingled amusement and irony twitched the muscles of the haggard mask. The faded negatives of eyes regarded him with the ghost of a smile in them. The dissolving voice said in tones no louder than a sigh:"Possibly. But not—for long!"The voice stopped short. As von Herrnung took a step nearer to the stretcher, his toe stubbed against and caught in the strap of a leather case lying on the littered floor. He picked up the case and smiled as he drew out a costly pair of Zeiss binoculars. His own, though hailing from the Jena workshop, only magnified to 12x. These registered 25x. On the metal rim of the larger lense was engraved the style and title of the owner: "Capt. Rt. Hon. Viscount Norwater, Royal Bearskins Plain."A find in the dual sense. He restored the binoculars to their case, unbuckled the strap and slipped it under his heavy bandolier of cartridges, hanging the case beside his own, loosened the upper stud-clips that fastened his goggled helmet, and pushed it back so as to reveal his whole face. The gaunt eyes were open, looking at him attentively. He asked them:"May it not be that we have met before? In Paris, yes? On the night of the Grand Prix. At the Hotel Spitz,ja, ja, gewiss! A dinner given by Sir Thomas Brayham for Lady Wathe and a few friends. You were one of the friends. I another. How is the old woman, do you know?"Kreutzdonnerwetter!what inconceivable insolence! The eyes looked through him as though he had not been there. His hard blue eyes, already injected with blood, grew savage, and a purplish tinge suffused his florid skin. He reflected an instant, pulled a capacious silver spirit-flask from the deep side-pocket of his pneumatic, half-filled the drinking cup that capped it, and knelt down beside the stretcher, saying quite pleasantly, in his gutturals:"See, here is some capital Cognac. Let me give you a sip, eh? Then you will feel better." He poured a dram between the teeth, and waited through a spasm of coughing, wiped the blood and mucus from the gasping lips with a rag of the torn clothing, then pulled a stool from amongst the rubbish, sat down near the feet of the wounded man, facing him, and took a long pull of the belauded brandy from the neck of the big flask."That does more good than canteen coffee," he said, and sucked his red moustache appreciatively. He set down the flask on the floor between his feet, found his case, and carefully chose a cigar."A zigarre? No! You will, then, perhaps not object to my smoking? We of the Field Flight have to comfort ourselves with snuff when in the air. To burn tobacco and blaze up like a star-shell and come down like a charred rocket-stick, that is not at all agreeable orpraktisch.Sapperlot!you are not a very amusing companion. Nevertheless, my fellow, I drink to your jolly good health!"He knocked off the ash of his cigar, cleared his throat, and spat, just clearing Franky's shoulder. The flicker of anger in the sunken eyes brought a glitter of malice into his own. He sent out a long swaggering stream of smoke, and knocked the ash from his cigar with the little finger of his ringed left hand, continuing:"You see, I have cut the long thumb-nail that amused you when we met in Paris. The Day has come—though you would not join me in drinking to its dawning!—and the German eagle has dipped his claws in English blood. We Prussians have beaten out the iron sceptre of World Power with giant blows upon the War Anvil, and the sun that never set upon the swanky British Empire, has already risen to find the Roast Beef of Old England in danger, and the Triple Entente a bankrupt syndicate." He shrugged and twisted his red moustache, tilted his big body sidewise, and spat at a carefully-calculated angle, missing the other shoulder of the victim as he pursued:"But you do not know ...Donnerwetter!how should you?—lying here like a stuck pig! Yesterday—in the neighbourhood of Ypres—took place the ultimate, conclusive battle, in which the German mammoth pounded the British Lion into pulp. Your little British Expeditionary Force may be said to exist no longer. Your Brigade of Guards, who boast that, like the Samurai, they do not surrender while yet unwounded, is practically extinct. Maddened by despair the officers shot the few men who remained and then blew one another's brains out. Your Commander-in-Chief is our prisoner, Sir Rothesay Craig has been killed, also General Callonby and General Jones-Torrian. The French Generalissimo has surrendered, with the 5th French Army. The 6th French Army has been chopped into sausage-meat. So, all is over! Total Kaput!""If what you say is Gospel," said the weak voice, and the faded eyes had the ghost of a smile in them, "why do I keep on hearing our guns?"For the hurly-burly of battle in the South had broken out afresh as though in contradiction. The crazy floor vibrated, the tottering walls shook with the distant fury of sound:Thud—thud—thud—thud!and the muffledBoom!—Crash!of immense explosions. And through all the steady slogging of Royal Garrison Artillery howitzers, and the tireless, dogged hammering of Field Artillery eighteen-pounders."Macht nicht!"Von Herrnung shrugged contemptuously, though his keen ear did not miss the fact that the guns were coming nearer: "That must go on—for a little!—until the last show of resistance is broken down. If it be a military virtue not to be aware when you are beaten—your big-jawed, dull-brained, short-headed British bull-dogs of soldiers have that virtue, of course. But comes the awakening! The Russian Navy has been blown off the Baltic, the Czar has accepted our Kaiser's ultimatum—the Belgian Government has made its submission—the Belgian Army has laid down its arms. Our 17-inch siege-howitzers are bombarding the shores of England from their emplacements at Calais. The Army of Invasion is embarking—your British Navy—the floating bulwark of your Empire—lies at the bottom of the North Sea. Ministers run from one end of England to the other, begging, coaxing, persuading—your proletariat. There is panic in the English War Office, and despair at Buckingham Palace; rebellion in the streets of London,débâclein the City, and stampede in the West End. To-morrow the Emperor of Greater Germany and the Crown Prince, Viceroy of the Brito-German Possessions, will, with the Empress enter Paris. Ten miles of films will record for all Posterity this colossal and magnificent scene. The London pageant of triumph follows. Well may you weep, my unlucky fellow, over the collapse and ruin of your proud country"—for tears were really trickling from the puckered eyelids of the now flushed and quivering face. "Himmelkreuzbombenelement! You are not weeping. You are laughing, you dirty English swine!""What else do you—expect—when you're so—dashed amusin'?" gasped Franky painfully. "Roll along with some more of it—why don't you, Anatole?""You do not believe me, no? You think that I am rotting," von Herrnung shrugged his huge shoulders and laughed with forced heartiness. "Always to rot, that is the English custom." He added, with a cruel relish: "Desto besser, you will die more pleasantly. For of course you will die. This is the third day you have lain here,Alter junge, and you have the smell and colour of gangrene. You are a lump of carrion, Norwater, not worth the taking away!""Possibly not!"The eyes met his calmly, though their laughter had died out. It angered von Herrnung to be baulked of the ferocious enjoyment he had promised himself. He finished the Cognac slowly, seeking in the fiery drink a spur to inventiveness, and sucked his moustache slowly as he capped and pocketed the flask."I am hellishly sorry, I assure you, Norwater," he said, adopting a bluff and hearty manner as he sucked the stump of the nearly finished cigar. "One is hardened to death and wounds in War, but one is human. And I have been on friendly terms with many Englishmen andAngenehme Englânderinnsuch as Lady Wathe, whom I have known for years, and that superb brunette, Mees Saxham. We flirted desperately that night in Paris. Later on, in London, she became my mistress——""You lie, you aëroplane-stealing cad!" said Franky, feebly but with great distinctness. Von Herrnung swore and spat, full in his face. Its nostrils winced disgust, but the brown eyes were indomitable. And from the blue lips came a mere thread of human utterance, pregnant with scathing irony:"I—say to you what the—Belgian woman said to your Kaiser—when his—horse splashed her. 'This kind of filth—wipes off!'""You think so, eh? You——"Von Herrnung clenched his fist, and might have dashed it in the eyes that defied him, but for a sudden, significant change in the sound of those distant guns. The barrage of the German Field Artillery was becoming intermittent. The slogging of the British had increased in energy.A flare of red spurted into the Kaiserman's pasty cheeks, and his hard eyes lighted eagerly. He forgot his rule of sleeping off liquor before again taking to the air. With a confidence in his own powers largely justified by his successes, his mind leaped to the scene of conflict. Now, when the German batteries were weakening, was the moment for the arrival of a pilot-aviator of the Imperial Field Flight, skilled as aërial observer and signaller, and known to be indifferent to risk.Here was the chance one had hoped for. Restitution of the forfeited decoration. Restoration to the Emperor's favour. Reinstatement in the lost place upon the regimental roster. Promotion—the bestowal of new honours—danced before him like little, gaudy demons, drowning with their buzz the voice of prudence, luring him to the essay."I am compelled to leave you now, Norwater," he said smilingly to the man on the stretcher; "thanks so much for our interesting chat! I shall carry away a pleasant recollection, and leave you also a memento in the shape of a bomb, which I shall drop on you when I have climbed to a suitable height. SoGut Abend, Alter junge. Though before I go there is a trifling formality——"He knelt down by the stretcher, and without unnecessary gentleness rifled the pockets of the wounded man. The victim had swooned when von Herrnung rose, transferring to his own person a small purse, heavy with English sovereigns, and a pigskin case full of crisp French banknotes, with a thin gold wrist-watch that had a luminous dial, and a coroneted monogram upon the back.Sheer waste, according to the German War Book, issued by the Great Staff for the use of German officers, to leave upon the person of the fallen opponent articles likely to be of use to the conqueror. He rinsed his hands in the water-can, and dried them on his clothing, pulled up his helmet, fastened it, and buttoned his pockets, straightened his bandolier, nodded pleasantly at the reflection of his giant person in the skewed wall-mirror, jumped lightly through the window-gap, and went upon his way.
CHAPTER LXIV
AT SEASHEERE
The narrow white footpath had suddenly led nowhere. Patrine had found herself standing at the edge of a four-foot bluff, looking down upon a grassy plateau that gently sloped to the brink of the cliffs. A wire fence enclosed an aggregation of stone-grey wooden buildings dominated by a flagstaff and the latticed steel tower of a Wireless installation. The White Ensign flapped lazily from the halyards of the flagstaff, there were three hangars at a little distance away. A row of seaplanes sat on the grass before them, and some figures of men in overalls or the familiar Naval uniform moved in and out and about the machines busily as ants. Where the grassland stopped at the cliff-edge the roofs of other hangars showed, that were built upon the shingle. A little way out beyond the line of foam where the long green lips of the sea mumbled at the wet pebbles, another row of seaplanes lashed to buoys, rocked like gulls drowsing after a gorge of fish. And far out to sea, where the heavy trails of smoke bannering from the funnels of rushing grey hulls betokened the War activities of the Fleet in the Channel, and the conning-towers of big submarines sometimes pretended to be little stocky steamers sitting on the swell, two strange bat-like things rose and circled and swooped, and were hidden in grey-blue mists to rise again, and swoop and circle.... And a little dinghy with two blue figures in it was pulling out from the beach in the direction of the anchored planes.
"Beg pardon! But—aren't you Miss Saxham?"
She craned her long neck, looking for the speaker, and found him in a youthful Flight Sub-Lieutenant, who, standing below the grassy bluff, was looking up with very brown eyes at the tall figure in the narrow skirt of tan, white and rose-pink chequers, the low-cut blouse of guipure lace, and the knitted silk coat of rose-pink. Buckled pumps adorned the well-arched feet, clad with navy blue silk stockings of liberal open-work. She sported a buff sunshade lined with rose, and a hat of rough tan straw, trimmed with quills of navy blue and rose-pink, sat coquettishly on the beech-leaf hair. She gave the boy one of her wide smiles, evading the "Yes" by nodding, and with a cat-like leap and scramble, he was up the grassy bluff and standing before her, blushing and saluting and holding out a scribbled paper-pad.
"For me?"
"For you—if you're Miss Saxham. It's a Wireless came this morning—from your—from a great friend of yours. Somewhere in France."
"Oh—thank you!"
She pulled off a loose buff glove and stretched a large white hand for the paper-pad. The message ran:
"6 a.m. Now leaving Compiegne for Calais. Seasheere in five hours, barring accident. All my love to you. Alan."
And the Lieutenant had thought her pale.... She kissed the paper and smiled at him bewilderingly. "Lucky beggar, Sherbrand," thought the Lieutenant. "What a glorious woman!" He extorted from Patrine, who would not be twenty until next August, the penalty for being built on a grander scale than other daughters of Eve. But she was asking:
"Whom have I to thank for bringing Mr. Sherbrand's message?"
"Flight Sub-Lieutenant Dareless—and the thanks are quite on my side." He phrased the trite civility punctiliously, while the bold brown eyes beamed and twinkled: "For you're IT," they said; "just—clippingly—IT!"
"How did you know me?" began Patrine.
"Picked you up through the binnics from the bridge, ten minutes ago." The slim brown hand flourished, indicating a T-square-shaped space of well-watered turf marked off in whitewash lines upon the green aërodrome below. "We call things by their proper names so as not to lose touch, you understand? The short stretch is the Bridge, and the long strip aft at right angles—that's the Quarter-deck. The big hut No. 1 is our Wardroom—the Wing-Commander's cabin is divided off from it. The officers' cabins are in the small hut, No. 2, and the Warrant Officers and men divide No. 3. Of course we keep watches and post sentries—just as if we were at sea. That Territorial on guard near is relieving a man of ours, do you see?" He jerked his chin towards the moving brown figure. "What have we to guard? Oh, well, the hangars, and our Wireless"—another jerk indicating the latticed steel mast surmounting a telegraph hut wedded to a vibrating dynamo-shed. "We get reports from our patrols—most of 'em are fitted with radio-apparatus—and we receive and transmit messages. Long distance? Well, rather! We're frightfully swanky about our Wireless plant. It's Number One, H.P. Not big, but jolly powerful. A——"
Six clear, silvery double-notes had sounded from a brass bell, hung beneath a little white-painted penthouse sitting on the blue strip of shadow on the westward side of the Wardroom hut. The Petty Officer who had rung the bell exchanged a brief word with the Territorial, and went back to the hangars from whence he had emerged. Patrine, with her heart in her mouth, asked the Sub-Lieutenant:
"Was that a signal?"
"Only ship-time," said the brown-eyed one. "Six bells. Eleven A.M. And our man ought to be looming up in sight. He might hit Seasheere now at any minute. In fact, he's nearly an hour late."
"You don't—you don't suppose——?"
Fear had pinched and drawn and bleached her so that she looked forty behind her white veil with blue chenille dragonflies. Her pale mouth twitched and her black brows knotted over the haunted eyes that strained out to sea. The paper-pad, crunched to a mere wad, dropped from the hand that unconsciously released it. The boy picked it up, thrilled by this peep behind the scenes of another's romance.
"No, no! There's no fear of an accident, Miss Saxham. Perhaps a bit o' engine-trouble—you've got to travel slowish if she vibes too much. Or he might have spotted an Aviatik and delayed to have a biff at him—on the principle that ten Hun-birds make an evener bag than nine. We know what a terror he's getting to be with the Maxim. But what puts the fear of God into the flighty Taube quicker than anything is our R.N.A.S. Vickers' gun."
Ah, did he know how horribly he tortured her! But a grey speck showed upon the delicately-misty distance eastwards, growing bigger, coming nearer, putting miles of green white, heaving water under its throbbing engine with effortless speed. Her glance leaped to Dareless, studying the oncomer between narrowed lids, and the hope that had kindled in her died out as he shook his head.
"One of ours, on the Home-flight from Belgium, Miss Saxham. Your man will pick up much higher, and to the south-east."
And presently the latest type of Fleet hydroplane, a two-seater Batboat carrying two bareheaded young gentlemen, moaned into view, chasing its own wave-skipping, flying shadow at full stretch for the shore, came down in a long mallard-like glide, skidding over the water as the wild-duck does, and in a ruffle of glittering spray, continued the home-journey in the character of a motor-boat.
Then there was a sharp squib-like crack, and from one of the anchored hydroplanes, a rocket went up and burst in a smoke-puff that hung in a little cloud of violet-grey upon the sunny air, and from the hangars on the shingle under the bluff streamed figures in blue overalls or grimy shirt-sleeves, and cheered and waved, standing ankle-deep in refluent water, topped with creamy sheets of foam. As the Batboat with her joyous navigators rushed spluttering to the shallow anchorage and tied up beside the Station planes, megaphones bellowed, motor-horns tooted, somebody banged on the ship's bell, a cornet struck up "Rule Britannia!" very much out of tune....
"Well done, you two beggars! Oh! well done!" trumpeted Dareless, through his hollowed hands, and turned a beaming face on Patrine to explain that the hatless navigators of the Batboat were Lieutenants of a Flight stationed at Antwerp, and had shared in the Air Raid on the Zeppelin-sheds at Düsseldorf—early on the previous day.
And then a droning song had come drifting down out of the sky to the south-eastward with a buzzing undernote in it that Patrine remembered well. Dareless had lifted his head for a rapid upward reconnaissance, and said with a flash of white teeth in his brown face:
"Thumbs up, Miss Saxham!—this is your particular bird!"
And Patrine had seen, small and high, and shining palely golden in the sunlight, the shape of the biplane that carried her lover, and her heart knocked twice in her bosom, heavily, as they knock behind the curtain before they ring up at the Comedie Française. A Clery's signalling-pistol had cracked and been answered from the Air-Station. Mechanics in overalls had appeared upon the green. Then the buzzing had stopped, and the second Bird of War, rising higher to escape the backwash of light airs from the cliffs, had launched into a splendid sweeping spiral, ending in a long glide, and alighted on the well-rolled Station aërodrome—and Sherbrand had come home.
Surely never until the thought of Flight,—formed in the brain-cells of Man and fertilised by the lust of Adventure,—hatched out in the Bird that bears the Knight of To-day upon the air-path, did lover return to his lady after a fashion so wonderful as this.
The Flying Men have always been coming. In the Book of Books you will read of them. Ecclesiasticus, the Preacher, foretold of the day when a Bird of the Air should carry the Voice, and That Which Hath Wings should tell the matter; and how these Winged ones rush and roar through the prophetic pages of Ezekiel and Daniel, you have but to open them to learn. Their shapes like locusts, their armoured bodies with great-eyed headpieces "like those of horses prepared unto battle," the noise made by their wings in flight "like the noise of chariots and horses running to battle," the wheels beneath their wings, the human faces appertaining to them, the inward fire that issues from them in scorching vapours,—are described with fiery eloquence in the Apocalypse of the Apostle of St. John, when the Fifth Angel sounds the Trumpet, and the King whose name is Exterminans, the Destroyer, reaches the culminating point of his terrific reign upon earth.
Flight makes the world no more joyful, being mainly used for purposes of destruction, but nothing can rob the Flying Man of his shining gloriole of Romance. The boy who was building toy aëroplanes of card and elastic a few years back has rediscovered the Flying Dragon of the Cretaceous period, broken and tamed the winged monster into a War steed, and thundered down the forgotten roads of the Pterodactyl and the Rukh, to reap shining honours upon the battlefields of the mutable Air. And if the girl who chaffed the boy of old worships him to-day as St. George, Sir Lancelot, Sir Galahad, and Le Bon Sieur de Bayard rolled into one, who shall blame her? Not I, for one!
In the instant of reunion, when the tall brown figure came swinging to meet her, and the strong hard hands gripped her own, Patrine loved him more than ever. Sherbrand's was not a romantic greeting, but it thrilled her nevertheless.
"They've asked us to lunch here, but it's ready at the Cottage. Shall we accept? It's for you to decide."
His tone had indicated his keen desire for thetête-à-têtein preference. Disappointment had shadowed his clear eyes when Patrine had voted for luncheon at the Air Station, inwardly longing to be alone with him—to be alone.
And yet, despite the longing, the haunting sense of a sword of Fate hanging over her, Patrine found the Wardroom lunch a jolly banquet. They were so young, those sunburnt faces, laughing about the plainly-furnished board. The Wing-Commander in charge of the Station proved to be something under thirty. To Patrine, occupying the place of honour on his right hand, he did the honours like a veteran. One of the navigators of the Batboat sat upon her other side, and Sherbrand was hervis-à-vis.
Sherbrand was altered. She knew him older, harder, sterner.... Thinner to the verge of haggardness, with a deep vertical furrow graved between the thick eyebrows that made a bar of blonde fairness against the red of his deeply-burned skin. He had gone away a splendid youth. Now he returned with two silvery-yellow stars on the cuffs and shoulder-straps of his khaki tunic, a man seasoned and tempered as a bar of steel in the furnace-blast of War.
The pleasant meal ended, and the jolly party broke up. Their hosts accompanied them to the gate of the Station enclosure, and the warmth and heartiness of Naval tradition had been in the farewells that had sped the departing guests upon their way:
"Au revoir! All happiness!"
"So-long! We'll look after the 'plane all right!"
"Adios! Buenas noches!"
"Sayonara!"
"Siéda!"
"Good-bye and good luck! Now all together.... Hip—hip—" and a rousing British cheer.
CHAPTER LXV
GOOD-BYE, DEAR LOVE, GOOD-BYE!
They had looked back to smile and wave their thanks, and an aged tennis-shoe, scientifically hurled by Dareless, had knocked the cap out of Sherbrand's upraised hand, and raised a cloud of chalky dust from the surface of the sunken road. Under cover of this they had crossed the road and climbed a slope together and found themselves standing in heavenly loneliness, with the sea beside them and their feet upon the thymy grasses blotted by the short shadows of their tall figures, under the almost vertical sun.
"Look!" Sherbrand had said, pointing to a whitewashed, red-tiled cottage cuddled in a hollow some quarter of a mile distant, girt with a gay frivolous little garden full of bachelor's buttons and sunflowers, lavender bushes and nasturtiums yellow and red. He slipped his hand within her arm and pressed it, whispering: "There's our Eden—and my dream has come true!"
Her heart choked her. They moved on together shoulder to shoulder, her elbow resting in the bend of his strong arm, and her hand lying in his. The air they breathed was sweet with heady, nameless fragrance, the burning golden light that haloed them seemed the effluence of their love. Anguish and rapture mingled in the chalice of the perfect hour for Patrine. Nothing but rapture was in the draught for Sherbrand, though a faint fold showed between his eyebrows as he said suddenly:
"Hang it! I've forgotten to ask the Station fellows to give me a night's shakedown. However, there's a decent hotel in Seasheere. My bag is still in the machine, by the way.... Did you send someone on to the cottage with your traps?"
"I——"
She began to falter. It was coming.... But his eagerness delayed the moment of revelation. The track they followed dipped down and they found themselves in a grassy basin. The turf cupped up on every side and they were alone, lidded by the blazing turquoise sky.
At the bottom of the green nest he stopped, and next moment his embrace enveloped her. She forgot, as an answering flame burned in her blood, all the things that she had meant to say. "I'll have my hour," shot through her whirling brain, "I must have something of him to keep in remembrance. He has never loved me—nor I him—so passionately as now. Oh, my God!"
He released her with a happy sigh, and they sat down on the shadowed side of their green nest, a deep dimple in the cheek of the sunny, smiling Earth, and looked in each other's eyes. He said, as she took off her hat and threw it aside and turned her unveiled, unshadowed face back to his:
"Your dear cheeks are thinner, I fancy, Pat. Have you been worrying much about me?"
She nodded, thinking of her sleepless nights passed after reading his few letters, or when his letters had failed to come.
"Pretty badly—in the days of the Retreat from Mons. You piloted that French officer over the Channel and—whiff!—you vanished. What has become of him?"
"Wing Commandant Raymond? He's riding the storm and directing the whirlwind somewhere on the French Front. I got my orders to join the R.F.C.-unit acting with a rearguard battery of the Second Army Corps as soon as I'd dumped him. As for the work with the battery, it was always the same thing. We flew out against von Kluck's advance, spotting their gun-emplacements and getting the range for our gunners. And under us a dark-brown river with five branches rolled South. And that was the Retreat."
His arm was round her, her cheek was pressed to his, her bosom heaved against him. She turned her lips to his in a quick kiss, and whispered:
"And when you came down out of your sky 'like pigeons homing at nightfall'—that's a sentence in one of your letters—d'you recognise it?—the river went on rolling still?"
"Just the same, without a break. And what a—welter. Remnants of crack infantry brigades tangled with the rags of cavalry squadrons—grimy, hairy, ragged chimney-sweeps with bandaged feet and empty bellies, and blackened tongues hanging out, and blind, blank, staring eyes.... Imagine all the toy soldier outfits in the kiddy-shops of Regent Street emptied into the gutters and you'll get an idea of what the thing was like.... And Transport and Supply-columns jumbled with bits of R.G.A. batteries and R.F.A.—three dying horses to a howitzer, and one gunner left out of six! Bands of refugees and troops of stragglers. Lunatics led along howling and gibbering. Lorries, carts, and motor-vans crammed with swollen-footed cripples—cheek by jowl with bloody spectres evacuated from Field Hospitals that were reddening the sky with their burning in the rear. A day-and-nightmare to haunt one for ever if the end had been different—" He caught his breath. "But when I remember that we straightened the muddle—brought Order out of Chaos—turned on the Germans and bit to the bone—I pray that the memory may stay with me always, so that I may teach your sons and mine what it means to be Englishmen!"
"Oh, Alan! My poor boy! ..." She caught him in her arms with sudden passion, strained him to her and then freed herself from him, and moved away, signing to him that he must not approach. "What you hope for can never be! I'd have told you this before if I'd been decent, but I wanted your kisses—I was hungry for the touch of you—and the sound of your voice in my ears after all these weeks and weeks——"
"Then why do you say it can never be—and tell me in the same breath that you long for me and love me?" His light brows were drawn into a heavy line over his stern grey eyes. "Aren't you and I going to be married? Is it possible that you'd draw back—now?"
"Because your wife should be a pure woman, and I am not, it is possible. Don't move! Don't come nearer! If you do I'll never have the courage to tell—what must be told!"
And he had sat still, as a figure in carved khaki-coloured stone with his knees apart and his knotted hands hanging between them, and his eyes, curiously hard and pale against the strong red sunburn of his face, fixed immovably upon her mouth. When she ended there had been a great silence; and she had looked up at the azure dome lidding their green nest, wondering why the burning, perfumed breeze had suddenly turned cold. His voice recalled her:
"Why have you told me this?"
"To be honest." She hugged her knees. "To give you a chance for freedom before you were handicapped with me for life, poor boy!"
"And how do you suppose it makes me feel?" He breathed roughly, and gritted his teeth, wringing his hands in one another so strongly that the knuckles started death-white against the reddened skin. She heard herself saying lamely:
"I knew you'd be horribly sick about it and hate me!"
"I don't hate you. But I want to killhim! He took you to that damnable place and—" He bit his lip and swallowed. "How long was that before I met you at Hendon? Three days—and our day of meeting—the meeting I thanked God for!—was July 18th. This is October—the 14th—to be particular. You must know what I'm driving at. Is there—any danger——"
She said in a level voice, looking at him steadily:
"I have deserved it—but I think God is going to be kinder to me than to—punish me in that way." Her eyes flickered and fell from his. "It was because—I was so awfully afraid at first that I made up my mind to marry you. And now—and now you know the very worst of me."
"Hardly the worst." He drew breath roughly, and the cloud upon his forehead lightened a little. "We'd have been man and wife before I flew for France—if you'd let me have my way. Why didn't you?"
"I—Oh!—It seemed so mean.... A kind of child-stealing. You were so unsuspecting, and so generous, and soclean!" She bit her lips, and the tears welled over her underlids.... "You shamed me into being straight with you. I'd loved you from the beginning. But it was as though my love had left off crawling and grown a pair of wings."
"Answer me straight." He turned so as to face her. "Did you ever love that German?"
"To my shame be it spoken—never for an instant! After that night at the Upas I hated him unspeakably. Only when I thought he was dead, I began to let up a little on the hate."
He looked at his hands and unknotted them and knotted them, and said suddenly:
"You may be interested to know that he is not dead, but very much the other thing. He is scouting and spotting for von Kluck's gunners on their south and west Fronts, and sometimes bombing positions he has skried out—and doing it all superbly, damn him! He has been degraded to the rank of a Supernumerary Flying officer for some breach of duty that got to the Kaiser. And he has evidently made his mind up to make good in this War. They pick him for all the dangerous missions. He seems unkillable—and we've tried our hardest. And wherever he goes—until now I've kept this from you—he takes—the Saxhams' son!"
"Bawne! ..."
She shaped the name dumbly, with lips that were pale as poplar leaves. "God forgive me!" her conscience whispered. "How little I have thought of Bawne!"
"Yes. I mean Bawne!"
So odd was the contrast between the speaker's grim, set face and the bald simplicity of his language, that her white lips twitched with a crazy desire to laugh, as he added:
"I've been keen for a long time on coming across the man who pinched my hawk-hoverer and kidnapped my friend's son—and putting the fear of God into him with an automatic revolver, or a Maxim.... But now that I know—this!"—the deadly contempt in the voice is inconveyable—"a clean death hardly meets his case. Good cartridges seem wasted in killing that fellow. One wants to set one's heel down—hard on him—and scrunch!"
He had sat silent, staring before him yet a moment longer. Then he gathered himself together and got up from the grass, glanced at his wrist-watch and said, holding out his hand to assist her in rising:
"Well, let's be going. It's half-past three. They'll expect us to tea at the cottage. By the way, you haven't told me. Did you send on your bag from the station when you came?"
She shuddered violently, and leaped up without touching the offered hand. The west was all dappled with tiny pearly cloudlets, their shadows were lengthening momentarily, the salt smell of the sea was on the breeze that came in languid puffs. But the wine of joy that had brimmed their green bowl had been emptied out by her own hand, and the draught now held to her flinching mouth was bitterer than hemlock and blacker than Styx. That change in his face and voice—
"What do you suppose? I brought no bag. I am going home by the next train." She glanced at a little jewelled wrist-watch he had given her and back at the mask-like face, that said:
"You mean we part here, for good! Is that it?"
"For good—or bad. My poor boy——"
He put her "poor boy" from him with a gesture of the hand. He asked in a flat, toneless voice:
"Am I a blackguard like von Herrnung? You came down here to marry me. What will be said afterwards—if——"
"I'm past caring what people think or say!" she flashed at him angrily. "I've told you that I will not marry you!—that I'm not fit to be your wife. Oh! if you suppose it didn't hurt——"
A rush of tears drowned out his altered visage. She turned away, fighting for composure, summoning all her woman's pride to help her at her need. That swaying grace, that alluring physical perfection—had never appealed to Sherbrand's senses so irresistibly....
"Patrine!"
She heard his eager footsteps following her. She was snatched into his masterful embrace, assailed by his stormy kisses, wooed by his passionate words of love beyond her power to resist. The flood in the veins of both was rising, the force of the warm rushing torrent was bearing them away, she cared not whither, so that she might keep those arms about her still.
"Patrine! My woman of women—do you think I'd let you go from me? Not I! I'll have you for my wife whether you will or no! We'll forget—all that! We'll be happy in spite of it. Won't we?"
"No!" she gasped out.
"We will, I tell you!" He laughed out with ringing triumph and bent his head, seeking her evasive mouth with his own. Hard pressed she had panted:
"Don't ask me to marry you! I'd never, never do it! Unless you were poor and sick and a nobody—and wanted a woman to nurse and work for you.... Then—the wag of a finger or the wind of a word would bring me to you. But—I swear it before God!—I won't marry you as you are!"
"You will!"
"I've sworn I won't. But—" She had whispered it in a kiss of fire—"I will give you—what that other man took!"
And Sherbrand had uttered a hoarse sound like a sob, and unwound her arms from about his neck, and said, holding her hands close in his and looking sternly in her swimming eyes:
"I'm no saint, God knows!—but I'm a better man than to take what you offer. Halloa! That's Davis. What's up now?"
A distant whistle had made him prick his ears. He whistled back and ran lightly up to the brink of the grassy punch-bowl in time to meet the little black-avised Welshman—hero of the Paris episode in connection with the girl with the goo-goo eyes. Davis had handed him a paper-pad. Sherbrand had read it, scrawled a reply on the blank side to be dispatched by the Station's Wireless, and hurried back to Patrine.
"We—couldn't have been married to-morrow anyway. The man who undertook to replace me while I went on leave has been killed doing reconnaissance on our new Front in North-West France. I'm recalled."
"Recalled?"
He nodded. The British Force had been deftly transferred from its position on the Aisne to a base at St. Omer, you will remember, thus blocking the Calais Gate. The New Offensive was taking shape. Sherbrand had continued:
"So—if you're to catch the three-fifty from Fearnchurch to Charing Cross—we'll have to run!"
And as the screech of a distant engine had sounded from the direction of Fearnchurch Station, he had caught up the veiled hat and thrust it upon Patrine, grabbed her thin rain-coat and vanity bag and sunshade, and hurried her back to the flinty railway-station by the way she had come. And with the banging of the carriage-door, her woman's heart had broken. She had felt it bleeding drip, drip, drip! as Sherbrand's tall bare head and grave sad eyes had receded out of sight.
And the train had been delayed at the next station, waiting for the passage of a troop-train crammed with eager faced young men of Kitchener's Army, concrete answers to the famous Call to Arms and the First Five Questions—nearly half an hour. So that rounding the curve beyond the last signal-cabin for the clanking journey through the short tunnel, Patrine had seen, some miles to seaward of the glittering white prow of the North Foreland, a biplane with its wings reddened by the sunset, flying south-east.
"Oh! good-bye, Alan!" she had whispered, knowing that she would never see her Bird of War again. He had been caught and dragged back into the fiery whirl of the cyclone without the hope that nerves and supports and brings adventurers back. Sorrowful and stern, baulked of his heart's desire, grimly bent on meeting von Herrnung, and wreaking retribution for a horrible wrong, upon the red head of the Kaiser's Flying Man.
CHAPTER LXVI
MORE KULTUR
The boy's slight figure seemed to shrink upon itself as the stony eyes looked at him, and the teeth showed under the red moustache, not tightly curled now, but stiffened and pointing to the eyes. Von Herrnung set a foot upon the broken wall and leaped into the baker's parlour, staggering slightly as he alighted amongst the rubbish on the broken floor. He had been drinking, but not to excess, for the restaurant-cellars having been thoroughly gutted by his countrymen, the wreckage of the bar behind which Madame had sat, busy with her embroidery, had yielded barely a half-tumbler of Cognac and a single bottle of Champagne.
Having drunk enough to spur memory and not to lull his snarling grievances to slumber, he had come forth to blunt the tooth of his bitter hatred on the boy. For, since that queer tickling, pleasurable sensation experienced in his first tantalization of Bawne's hunger, every new weal marked upon the wincing body, every fresh bruise inflicted on the shuddering soul of Her Dearest, imparted to von Herrnung a ferocious pleasure in comparison with which mere vicious indulgence palled.
"So, there you are, little English pig-dog," he said in German, as the blue eyes met his own and fell away before them and the colour sank out of the young face. "Get you back to theMarket-platzthere and wait for me. I have some business with your friend."
He stretched out a long arm, picked up the boy by the slack of his garments, and with a turn of the wrist dropped him into the street. His ears were pricked for the cry that should follow the slight scrambling fall of the light body on the rubbish. It failed to come, and he frowned. Presently— Meanwhile here was game of a larger kind. He looked down from his superb height upon the bloodstained figure in the stretcher. Its eyes were closed, and the haggard face beneath the grime and bristles had the yellowish-white of old wax. He spoke to it harshly, in his English, and the brownish lids split apart and the gaunt sick eyes glimmered up at him. But no reply came from the livid lips. He rapped his foot sharply on the floor, repeating:
"I suppose you know you are my prisoner, sir?" and a strange spasm of mingled amusement and irony twitched the muscles of the haggard mask. The faded negatives of eyes regarded him with the ghost of a smile in them. The dissolving voice said in tones no louder than a sigh:
"Possibly. But not—for long!"
The voice stopped short. As von Herrnung took a step nearer to the stretcher, his toe stubbed against and caught in the strap of a leather case lying on the littered floor. He picked up the case and smiled as he drew out a costly pair of Zeiss binoculars. His own, though hailing from the Jena workshop, only magnified to 12x. These registered 25x. On the metal rim of the larger lense was engraved the style and title of the owner: "Capt. Rt. Hon. Viscount Norwater, Royal Bearskins Plain."
A find in the dual sense. He restored the binoculars to their case, unbuckled the strap and slipped it under his heavy bandolier of cartridges, hanging the case beside his own, loosened the upper stud-clips that fastened his goggled helmet, and pushed it back so as to reveal his whole face. The gaunt eyes were open, looking at him attentively. He asked them:
"May it not be that we have met before? In Paris, yes? On the night of the Grand Prix. At the Hotel Spitz,ja, ja, gewiss! A dinner given by Sir Thomas Brayham for Lady Wathe and a few friends. You were one of the friends. I another. How is the old woman, do you know?"
Kreutzdonnerwetter!what inconceivable insolence! The eyes looked through him as though he had not been there. His hard blue eyes, already injected with blood, grew savage, and a purplish tinge suffused his florid skin. He reflected an instant, pulled a capacious silver spirit-flask from the deep side-pocket of his pneumatic, half-filled the drinking cup that capped it, and knelt down beside the stretcher, saying quite pleasantly, in his gutturals:
"See, here is some capital Cognac. Let me give you a sip, eh? Then you will feel better." He poured a dram between the teeth, and waited through a spasm of coughing, wiped the blood and mucus from the gasping lips with a rag of the torn clothing, then pulled a stool from amongst the rubbish, sat down near the feet of the wounded man, facing him, and took a long pull of the belauded brandy from the neck of the big flask.
"That does more good than canteen coffee," he said, and sucked his red moustache appreciatively. He set down the flask on the floor between his feet, found his case, and carefully chose a cigar.
"A zigarre? No! You will, then, perhaps not object to my smoking? We of the Field Flight have to comfort ourselves with snuff when in the air. To burn tobacco and blaze up like a star-shell and come down like a charred rocket-stick, that is not at all agreeable orpraktisch.Sapperlot!you are not a very amusing companion. Nevertheless, my fellow, I drink to your jolly good health!"
He knocked off the ash of his cigar, cleared his throat, and spat, just clearing Franky's shoulder. The flicker of anger in the sunken eyes brought a glitter of malice into his own. He sent out a long swaggering stream of smoke, and knocked the ash from his cigar with the little finger of his ringed left hand, continuing:
"You see, I have cut the long thumb-nail that amused you when we met in Paris. The Day has come—though you would not join me in drinking to its dawning!—and the German eagle has dipped his claws in English blood. We Prussians have beaten out the iron sceptre of World Power with giant blows upon the War Anvil, and the sun that never set upon the swanky British Empire, has already risen to find the Roast Beef of Old England in danger, and the Triple Entente a bankrupt syndicate." He shrugged and twisted his red moustache, tilted his big body sidewise, and spat at a carefully-calculated angle, missing the other shoulder of the victim as he pursued:
"But you do not know ...Donnerwetter!how should you?—lying here like a stuck pig! Yesterday—in the neighbourhood of Ypres—took place the ultimate, conclusive battle, in which the German mammoth pounded the British Lion into pulp. Your little British Expeditionary Force may be said to exist no longer. Your Brigade of Guards, who boast that, like the Samurai, they do not surrender while yet unwounded, is practically extinct. Maddened by despair the officers shot the few men who remained and then blew one another's brains out. Your Commander-in-Chief is our prisoner, Sir Rothesay Craig has been killed, also General Callonby and General Jones-Torrian. The French Generalissimo has surrendered, with the 5th French Army. The 6th French Army has been chopped into sausage-meat. So, all is over! Total Kaput!"
"If what you say is Gospel," said the weak voice, and the faded eyes had the ghost of a smile in them, "why do I keep on hearing our guns?"
For the hurly-burly of battle in the South had broken out afresh as though in contradiction. The crazy floor vibrated, the tottering walls shook with the distant fury of sound:
Thud—thud—thud—thud!and the muffledBoom!—Crash!of immense explosions. And through all the steady slogging of Royal Garrison Artillery howitzers, and the tireless, dogged hammering of Field Artillery eighteen-pounders.
"Macht nicht!"
Von Herrnung shrugged contemptuously, though his keen ear did not miss the fact that the guns were coming nearer: "That must go on—for a little!—until the last show of resistance is broken down. If it be a military virtue not to be aware when you are beaten—your big-jawed, dull-brained, short-headed British bull-dogs of soldiers have that virtue, of course. But comes the awakening! The Russian Navy has been blown off the Baltic, the Czar has accepted our Kaiser's ultimatum—the Belgian Government has made its submission—the Belgian Army has laid down its arms. Our 17-inch siege-howitzers are bombarding the shores of England from their emplacements at Calais. The Army of Invasion is embarking—your British Navy—the floating bulwark of your Empire—lies at the bottom of the North Sea. Ministers run from one end of England to the other, begging, coaxing, persuading—your proletariat. There is panic in the English War Office, and despair at Buckingham Palace; rebellion in the streets of London,débâclein the City, and stampede in the West End. To-morrow the Emperor of Greater Germany and the Crown Prince, Viceroy of the Brito-German Possessions, will, with the Empress enter Paris. Ten miles of films will record for all Posterity this colossal and magnificent scene. The London pageant of triumph follows. Well may you weep, my unlucky fellow, over the collapse and ruin of your proud country"—for tears were really trickling from the puckered eyelids of the now flushed and quivering face. "Himmelkreuzbombenelement! You are not weeping. You are laughing, you dirty English swine!"
"What else do you—expect—when you're so—dashed amusin'?" gasped Franky painfully. "Roll along with some more of it—why don't you, Anatole?"
"You do not believe me, no? You think that I am rotting," von Herrnung shrugged his huge shoulders and laughed with forced heartiness. "Always to rot, that is the English custom." He added, with a cruel relish: "Desto besser, you will die more pleasantly. For of course you will die. This is the third day you have lain here,Alter junge, and you have the smell and colour of gangrene. You are a lump of carrion, Norwater, not worth the taking away!"
"Possibly not!"
The eyes met his calmly, though their laughter had died out. It angered von Herrnung to be baulked of the ferocious enjoyment he had promised himself. He finished the Cognac slowly, seeking in the fiery drink a spur to inventiveness, and sucked his moustache slowly as he capped and pocketed the flask.
"I am hellishly sorry, I assure you, Norwater," he said, adopting a bluff and hearty manner as he sucked the stump of the nearly finished cigar. "One is hardened to death and wounds in War, but one is human. And I have been on friendly terms with many Englishmen andAngenehme Englânderinnsuch as Lady Wathe, whom I have known for years, and that superb brunette, Mees Saxham. We flirted desperately that night in Paris. Later on, in London, she became my mistress——"
"You lie, you aëroplane-stealing cad!" said Franky, feebly but with great distinctness. Von Herrnung swore and spat, full in his face. Its nostrils winced disgust, but the brown eyes were indomitable. And from the blue lips came a mere thread of human utterance, pregnant with scathing irony:
"I—say to you what the—Belgian woman said to your Kaiser—when his—horse splashed her. 'This kind of filth—wipes off!'"
"You think so, eh? You——"
Von Herrnung clenched his fist, and might have dashed it in the eyes that defied him, but for a sudden, significant change in the sound of those distant guns. The barrage of the German Field Artillery was becoming intermittent. The slogging of the British had increased in energy.
A flare of red spurted into the Kaiserman's pasty cheeks, and his hard eyes lighted eagerly. He forgot his rule of sleeping off liquor before again taking to the air. With a confidence in his own powers largely justified by his successes, his mind leaped to the scene of conflict. Now, when the German batteries were weakening, was the moment for the arrival of a pilot-aviator of the Imperial Field Flight, skilled as aërial observer and signaller, and known to be indifferent to risk.
Here was the chance one had hoped for. Restitution of the forfeited decoration. Restoration to the Emperor's favour. Reinstatement in the lost place upon the regimental roster. Promotion—the bestowal of new honours—danced before him like little, gaudy demons, drowning with their buzz the voice of prudence, luring him to the essay.
"I am compelled to leave you now, Norwater," he said smilingly to the man on the stretcher; "thanks so much for our interesting chat! I shall carry away a pleasant recollection, and leave you also a memento in the shape of a bomb, which I shall drop on you when I have climbed to a suitable height. SoGut Abend, Alter junge. Though before I go there is a trifling formality——"
He knelt down by the stretcher, and without unnecessary gentleness rifled the pockets of the wounded man. The victim had swooned when von Herrnung rose, transferring to his own person a small purse, heavy with English sovereigns, and a pigskin case full of crisp French banknotes, with a thin gold wrist-watch that had a luminous dial, and a coroneted monogram upon the back.
Sheer waste, according to the German War Book, issued by the Great Staff for the use of German officers, to leave upon the person of the fallen opponent articles likely to be of use to the conqueror. He rinsed his hands in the water-can, and dried them on his clothing, pulled up his helmet, fastened it, and buttoned his pockets, straightened his bandolier, nodded pleasantly at the reflection of his giant person in the skewed wall-mirror, jumped lightly through the window-gap, and went upon his way.