Count de la Grange was in the yard with his trap and a peasant's cart for the baggage soon after dawn. He was fretting a little lest his passengers should be late, but relieved to find that the General was absent.
"There will be a crush. All the village knows. Everybody is trying to get away," he said.
Jacqueline had coffee ready and insisted that they must take it before they started. Madame Ribot wore a veil and had too much powder on her face; but nothing was lacking in hers or the Count's manners. Not until he had helped her into the trap, and they were well started on the way, did it occur to any one to ask where Helen was.
"She is walking to the station," said Madame Ribot, with ready ease, "as she wanted to see some one in the village."
"It is the last train," said the Count, "but I told the station master not to say so to the public or the station might be mobbed. I have the tickets. Though I've been up all night I feel quite fresh."
"I knew that I could depend upon you, even if the General did not come," Madame Ribot assured him.
"I wonder where the General is?" remarked the Count, confidentially flicking the venerable horse with the whip and holding the reins in the manner of one driving a four-in-hand.
"He had other business, I was told," said Madame Ribot casually.
At that moment, indeed, the General was concerned with whether it was better to put a basket of carrier pigeons under his bed or in a closet off the kitchen, and this old soldier of France was little concerned with any rivalry with the Count or with Madame Ribot's affairs. He had forgotten their existence.
It was well that the Count had the tickets or he could hardly have got past the crowd of old men and women and children and their belongings in every kind of portmanteau or knotted in handkerchiefs, towels and sheets, and well that he had influence with the station master which took the party onto the platform before the others. Places were found in the train for Madame Ribot and Henriette to sit down, while the Count and Phil stood, with bundles and children around their legs.
"But Helen has not come!" exclaimed Phil.
"Nor will she!" said Madame Ribot, weary and irritated. She had not risen before nine for many years and loathed travelling even in a first-class compartment alone, to say nothing of the present disgustingly crowded conditions. "Her walking to the station was a ruse. She is going to remain at Mervaux to look after our things."
"Alone, with the Germans coming?" Phil demanded. He also showed signs of irritation to match hers.
"She begged to," Madame Ribot explained. "Some one ought to stay, and she said it would give her subjects for her drawings."
"A fine courage, but——"
Already the station master was ringing his bell. Phil dragged his bag from under the seat and sprang out onto the platform.
"I'll bring her by the next train!" he called.
"There will be no next train!" put in the Count.
"At any rate, she must not be left alone to receive the German army!"
"Perhaps she doesn't want you!" put in Henriette, rising and leaning out of the window in protest. "I wouldn't. It's Helen's own idea and I know Helen. Come to Paris with us!"
"No, I'm going to Mervaux to see the Germans!" Phil replied promptly.
Henriette gave her mother a swift glance, then one at Phil.
"If Helen, why not I?" she exclaimed.
"But——" gasped Madame Ribot. She half rose, put out her hand to arrest Henriette who had taken up her own bag, but was jerked back to her seat by the motion of the starting train.
"To Mervaux, now we've seen you safe on your way!" said Henriette. "It's what I wanted to do all the time."
She passed her bag to Phil and held out her hand to him as he ran beside the train. He caught her literally in his arms as she whirled around when she alighted, and she was smiling up into his eyes with adventure's call in her own after she was firm on her feet, her face close to his.
"Thank you, cousin! Well done!" she murmured.
Madame Ribot had collapsed, her head bent, her hands drooped in her lap.
"We are off! You need have no worries now, Madame," said the Count. "No army can travel as fast as a railroad train."
But she did not hear him and was all unconscious of her surroundings. Just one thing was clear in her mind: the look that Henriette had given Phil when she made her decision. The mother and probably she alone, though a thousand people had looked on, would have recognised its meaning. The thing had come and in the way she had dreaded. She who had relived her youth in her daughter had seen the last chapter of her own story reflected in the feature which she had most dreaded. She had flirted with many men without more than a flutter of the heart and so had Henriette. Then she had fallen in love suddenly, without reason, and in headstrong insistence had married, to repent afterward.
One cause alone had sent Henriette back to Mervaux: the man who was returning there in order that Helen should not be alone. After all the chances she had had and played with, Henriette, too, had acted without reason when the impulse came. Helen was to blame. It was partly jealousy with Henriette, as it had been with Madame Ribot; the desire for conquest baffled by some humbler person. Her daughter was "running after" this cousin from America who had nothing to offer except America; but so had she herself run after a man who, at least, was not poor.
Back with Phil in face of all the proprieties which Madame Ribot held in such esteem in her later years! All her hopes and plans ruined! It was wicked, ungrateful, shameful—and due to the damnable war. But she had done her best for Henriette. Why worry? She had to live. She had had no sleep. She was in a wretched state and she must look a hundred years old. Worry made wrinkles. Her conscience was clear and—yes, she had to live. Experience was the only teacher. Henriette would have to repent at leisure as she herself had done.
"You arranged it all wonderfully," she said, as she looked up with one of her choice smiles to the Count.
"Madame, the object of my service made it a delight," said the Count.
He tried to arrange the baggage to give her feet more freedom and at the same time to keep from twitching from twinges of gout. He felt twice as old as Madame Ribot.
Back in his little house the General, who had decided to keep the pigeons under his bed, felt as young as he had at Gravelotte. Such is the way of war.
Yes, an awkward business, this, of a man and two girl cousins in a country house. Phil was sensible of it as he started to walk back from the station with Henriette, carrying her bag and his own.
"We have Jacqueline," she said, as if divining what was in his mind. "A most dependable person, Jacqueline. Mother is quite safe and we shall see the war. Besides, we simply could not leave Helen alone."
Coming to the top of a rise they stopped short. The steady thunder of the guns became suddenly audible and against the green background of distant woods little puffs of smoke that seemed born of nothing were breaking and spreading into a mist which was as innocent-looking as a fleecy cloud on a summer day.
"One cannot realise what is going on there," remarked Phil, "though we shall if it comes to us."
"Then we go into the cellar, don't we, and wait?"
"I believe that is the rule," he said. "You've a good spirit."
"That is easy when a woman has a man along whom she can rely upon," she replied cheerfully. "We have not been used to having a man at Mervaux."
When they entered the house they found that Helen was still absent. Jacqueline did not know where she had gone.
"I suppose the first thing is to settle down again," said Henriette.
Phil took her bag upstairs. When he returned to the sitting-room Helen was just entering.
"You!" she exclaimed. "I——" and she paused, no words coming to her. When she had thought that the house, the world, and the battle were hers came this intrusion by the one person whom she did not wish to see again! She ought to welcome him and she could not break silence.
"We could not let you remain here alone when we heard that you were going to stay," he explained. "In fact, could you expect any decent cousin to do otherwise?" he added.
Her eyes which had been stonily dull gave their first signal. It was smiling mischief, which developed into one of her laughs.
"It was such a surprise that I must have looked as if I were seeing ghosts," she said. "It's a tribute to Jacqueline's omelets. You see, I relied on them to keep the Germans from looting the house. I meant to meet the invader with an omelet instead of an olive branch."
She carried the part off well once she was started, leaving him puzzled and wishing that she would continue her mood—any mood that livened her features.
"Oh, I didn't think I could stand at the door and defy the German hosts!" he explained. "Only, being a man, well—I——"
"You were going to play the masculine part of protector. I do feel more safe. Any woman must, being a woman and subject to conventional sex inheritances"—this with a trifle of condescension, which was shattered by utter astonishment as Henriette appeared.
"I did not mean to make you jump out of your shoes," said Henriette.
"Mother was aboard the train all right?" Helen asked.
"Yes; quite."
"Did she want you to come back, too?"
"No. What kind of a sister did you think I was, you brave, foolish Helen? Did you think I would go to Paris and leave you here?"
She had slipped her arm around Helen's waist with a rallying burst of affection, which concluded with a kiss and a nestling of her cheek against Helen's as she looked at Phil. The two faces were close together, Henriette smiling devotedly and Helen quite still in contrast; the one at her best and the other at her worst. Then Helen looked around at her sister studiously and back at Phil.
"I'm glad you both came," she said. "I—is there another train to Paris?" she asked abruptly.
"No, that was the last," Phil answered.
"So we are here together, come what will," she said slowly, with an odd emphasis. "I just came back for my drawing things. The French are retreating along the road and the German shells are coming nearer. I can't afford to waste a minute."
She took up her drawing materials from the table. As she turned to leave the room, something in her attitude made Phil arrest her.
"You are not going into danger?"
"No, not in the least; to sketch is all," she replied.
"I think that my part is to keep watch of you," he said. "May I go with you?"
"And I want to see, too!" Henriette put in.
"Come on, then. If you are going to look after us both we must not be separated," said Helen.
She walked ahead, however, leaving them to follow. From the terrace they cut across the fields behind the battery. Its commander was too busy to pay any attention to them and the rider with the caissons galloping over the field with more shells, careening and slewing as the knowing hands guided the horses, did not give even passing notice to the young man and two young women.
Helen dropped on the ground with her back to a shock of wheat and began to sketch the battery. She was in action no less than the gunners of thesoixante-quinze, whom she made live in lines drawn by her swift fingers on white paper. Phil, unable to tell what was the gunners' target or which if any of the white balls of smoke in the distance were made by the screaming messengers they sent, looked around at her and it seemed quite in keeping that she should be present, her shoulders drawn in, her lips moving, as she sketched, with Phil and Henriette in the role of spectators.
"Now for the road!" she said, rising.
There, mistily through the dust, blue coats and red trousers showed in a moving stream to the rear between intervals of transport. The guns had had something of the splendour of war, but not these weary men leaving the soil of France behind to the enemy, beards from four weeks' campaigning white and brown with dust, eyes sunken, feet hobbling and sore, plodding on to the rear.
From this point of high ground a small town was visible in another lap of the hills, where French towns prefer to lie snug from the wind. The air was clear; sound carried far. A scream different from that of the shells from the mouth of French guns was heard; a scream that came toward them and ended in a crash, as if a steel ball had split into fragments, as it had. Over the house-tops of the town rose a cloud of dust and black smoke. Then another, and, sound travelling slower than sight, they again heard the rush of the projectile and its burst. Henriette gripped Phil's arm, but said nothing.
An officer of infantry looked around and nodded at the burst over the town in understanding. He spoke to an old colonel with white moustache who seemed asleep on his horse. The colonel shook his head as much as to say that there was no danger; that nothing could reach them at that range.
Helen had not seen the bursts in the town. She was trying to get the old colonel, the wounded men on the tops of wagons, the wounded on foot, in lines which should tell of the meaning of retreat in the suggestiveness of types.
"I'm not sure that we ought to remain here," said Phil.
"Why not?" asked Helen.
He pointed to the bursting shells.
"Oh, I couldn't go away!" was her only response.
Then the pencil dropped from her hand. Phil ducked as instinctively as if some one had struck the back of his neck and Henriette clung close to him with a cry of terror, for that approaching scream which had been distant was coming straight for them in the growing volume of a horror that froze the marrow. All the men on the road struck for one side or the other, their ducking forms flashing immutably on the retina of the eye in that awful second before a cloud of earth and dust spouted from an explosion on the other side of the road.
They were still alive. It was miraculous that they should be when they had died a score of deaths in that second. Helen tried to pick up her pencil and Henriette moaned: this much of an impression before the second shell came. It was nearer; death this time, without doubt. But it burst a hundred yards in front of them and some fragments whizzed by their ears.
Phil looked around for cover; for anything which would give them some protection. There was nothing near except wheat shocks. He swung Henriette around on the other side of him from the direction of the shells and called out to lie down. He could think of nothing else unless they ran. But which way should they run? The next burst was between them and the house; the next on the other side of the road. That was four. He remembered that batteries had four guns and fired in salvos. The target was evidently the road and the thing to do, then, must be to get away from the road.
"Run for it!" he cried. "That gully!"
Helen sprang up. Henriette tried to rise and could not. She was numbed with terror. Her eyes in mortal appeal spoke her helplessness. He was almost glad of this. It made him seem of some use as a masculine being in face of this hellish burst of destruction, which made unarmed men as feeble as a fly under a hammer. He did the natural thing, picked her up in his arms. She seemed very light, very yielding and trembling and strangely pale, beautiful, and trusting.
"Hurry on, Helen! I'll keep up with you, I'm so scared!" he called.
His voice sounded quite merry, as he meant it should. What travesty! He wished that he were back in Longfield or Mexico, anywhere than in that particular portion of France which a German battery was pounding. Other figures were running, too. The world seemed full of skurrying figures. Flight was the fashion.
More screams, ending in explosions, and with every one the figure in his arms trembled. But each scream was farther behind them as they hurried on. When he reached the gully he laid his burden on the grass at the bottom of it. If the target were the road they ought to be safe. At least, he could take a minute to decide what next to do. He looked back toward the road and saw the soldiers forming line in the fields under the direction of their officers. The old colonel sitting erect on his horse still remained beside the road, shouting his commands. A black cloud hid him and when it cleared away he and the horse were gone and there was a hole in the road where they had been. Then a crack overhead drew Phil's attention from the road. There was a whizzing through the air and little spurts of dust rose from the earth, and over all a puff of smoke like those he had seen in the distance against the green hills. Phil understood that this was shrapnel and the other which burst in the earth was a high explosive.
What next? The gully was not long. Should he attempt another run? But a shrapnel bursting over the other end of the gully made him hesitate. The two girls were hugging the bank and he dropped down beside Henriette, who caught his hand in hers, trembling again with new fear. Helen was lying face downward, holding fast to her portfolio. She looked toward him and in her eyes was the mischievous challenge and on her lips was playing the same humour he had seen across the table at Truckleford.
"Now don't you wish you had gone on to Paris?" she asked.
"Not unless you came," he answered. "Look there!"
Another high explosive had burst, and where they had been sitting beside the road a rising column of smoke showed a hole.
"I—I——" whispered Henriette, and her eyes spoke what her lips could not.
But was the road the target? Another scream straight for them and again they thought: "This is death!" The explosion twenty or thirty yards short of the gully covered them with dust. A human something, red and blue, half rolled, half tumbled down the bank at their feet and lay there inert, stunned. A gash showed on the soldier's cheek and his hand reached for his arm where the torn flesh was trickling red. With the other he fumbled instinctively for a first field dressing.
Here was something positive to do. Phil, who had envied the cool officers directing their men in the preoccupation of action, tore down the sleeve and opened the dressing. There was silence now; no screams in the air; no explosions. Yes, utter silence had settled over the field except for the officer's commands. Drops of blood fell from the soldier's cheek on Phil's hands as he applied the first aid and Henriette's fingers were aimlessly hovering about trying to assist.
"You are a good spirit, Mademoiselle," said the soldier, happy in the realisation of life and the cessation of the shell-fire.
"Yes, Henriette," Phil added.
"I will go on," said the soldier, scrambling to his feet. "It is nothing."
"But are you strong enough?" Phil protested.
"I was not hit in the legs. A little farther along the road I'll get on a wagon," he said. "And you, Monsieur, you and the ladies run to the nearest cellar. That one has fainted, Monsieur—and thank you!" He was gone.
Phil turned to see Helen prostrate, her head on her portfolio. But she recovered herself as he started toward her, looking up at him vaguely; then with a surge of vitality and a gesture of disgust she sat up.
"It was the sight of blood," she said. "I could not bear that. I'm very ashamed, but quite all right, now," she concluded, with a toss of her head and a smile.
"I helped dress his wound, poor fellow!" Henriette murmured.
Phil leapt up the side of the gully, with a view to finding which was the safest and quickest way back to the chateau. The scene before him, so clear in its meaning even to his unknowing civilian eye, held his attention for the instant to the exclusion of his object. Those little moving spots coming over a hill this side of the town, scattering under puffs of shrapnel, must be the French rearguard; and the shells from the battery behind the woods bursting over the hill beyond must be aimed at German infantry. To the end of the gully and then sharp to the right across the open was the best route for the chateau.
"And for us it is double quick, before we get more shells!" he called to the girls as he dropped back into the gully and gave his hand to Henriette to assist her to rise. Helen was already on her feet, quite herself again.
"As they say in America, we must beat it!" she exclaimed.
So they ran to the end of the gully and then across the field. The German guns seemed to have lost interest in that part of the world. They stopped on the terrace by common impulse, so keen is curiosity when danger seems out of reach but is still at large within view; the girls breathless and flushed and Phil with that indescribable relief of a man who has been under fire with women and sees them safely out of it. Of course they were only comparatively safe. They were within the range of many guns and at any minute that a German commander would choose, another tornado would break over their heads.
The French could be seen still more distinctly now, trickling over the landscape in retreat, in and out of the cover of valleys and woods, with puffs of shrapnel smoke in vicious pursuit. It all seemed like some game, until another one of those hideous screams ended in a crash in front of the woods that hid the French battery. The next was in the woods. This was enough to tell the battery commander that his hiding-place was located. In a race with death, the battery horses galloped up and away went the guns, with the German shells smashing the emplacements which had just been vacated. But the tenacious, skilful gunners did not go far—only behind the next ridge, where they began again to pour death into the advancing German infantry.
"I thought so!" came a voice breaking in upon the little group. "Nobody is so foolhardy as a woman!" said General Rousseau, shaking his finger at Helen and Henriette. "When I heard that you were staying behind I came at once to warn you. That is not fireworks out there; it's death. Any minute it may be turned on these woods or on the chateau. Your place is the cellar, both of you, till this is over, do you hear?" he thundered, "or I'll take my stick to you!" He was so peremptory that Henriette turned to go, but Helen hesitated.
"And you, too, Mademoiselle!" he commanded.
"Attention! About face! March!" said Helen, saluting and clicking her heels together.
"Promise me you will not go wandering about the village making sketches till all firing is stopped!"
"My business is making sketches, not making promises!" replied Helen.
"You——" The General made for her threateningly with his stick and she ran on down the path.
"This was her doing, sticking on here, wasn't it?" asked the General. "I've known her, Monsieur, since she was a child," he added thoughtfully.
Professional instinct crowded her out of mind as he swept the field with '70 field glasses which were slung over his shoulder.
"No rout—an orderly retreat!" he said. "We are not beaten. Joffre having failed to bar the way in Belgium is going to fight on the Marne. I have seen our corps commander and talked to him. Oh, it was very fortunate to find that I knew him. He was one of my lieutenants when I was a captain. I'm very happy, Monsieur, for I feel that I still serve—yes, serve France!"
"I wish I could!" exclaimed Phil. "It hurts to see those blue coats and red trousers coming back; but I don't believe they will go far."
"Then you are for France! I am glad! But only a Frenchman can know how a Frenchman is for France!"
A shrapnel broke over the woods, its bullets slittering through the leaves.
"We had better see if those young women have gone into the cellar," said the General. Another shrapnel crashed its ugly message even nearer, a fragment striking at his feet. "Women are the very devil under fire," he added. "They will never take cover. A soldier considers it duty. Now if that does not send them into the cellar," he continued, as a heavy reverberation came from the direction of the village, "they have no sense at all. You have young legs. Run on and look after them."
Phil found it no effort to run; his only regret was that he could not fly.
"Never did have much respect for shell-fire!" mumbled the General. "I hope they don't hit my pigeons. I'd better go home and look after them."
He walked on at a dignified pace, while the shells continued to burst over the woods and occasional high explosives in the village. Phil met him at the door of the house and reported:
"Your orders are obeyed, sir. They are in the cellar."
"Excellent!"
"And they have sent orders to you. You are to come into the cellar, too, sir!"
"I must look after my pigeons. I never had much respect for shell-fire——" He stopped short, struck by a thought. "If I were hit it would be just as serious as if my pigeons were hit. I——"
"Quite so!" put in Phil. He had taken a liking to the General, whom war, to his mind, had transformed from a gallant old fussbudget of a beau to a brave and simple gentleman.
"You have guessed my secret—the secret of my pigeons?" gasped the General in alarm.
"Have I? Yes, I'm afraid I have, and I——" Something caught in his throat as he looked into the piercing grey eyes of the General. "I hope you know that the secret is safe."
"I do. You are a man of honour and you have said that you are for France. And the only way to do my duty to France is to keep alive. I go into the cellar."
As they passed through the kitchen a pane of glass fell with a tinkling crash as a shell-fragment hit it and a saucepan rattled.
"Jacqueline will object to the Germans making omelets in her kitchen," said the General. "No one has ever appreciated Madame Ribot's cellar more than myself," he remarked as he descended the stairs. "Her wines are excellent. H-m, they are shelling the village pretty freely, though we have no troops there—a joke on the Germans."
"But the people—what of them? Are they safe? Will they know enough to take cover?" asked Helen.
"Of course," said the General.
"It's horrible to think that Mère Perigord and the children should be exposed out of ignorance!" Helen sprang past the General and up the stairs.
"This is where I intervene!" said Phil, starting after her.
"I told you women were the very devil under fire," murmured the General. "No sense of fear like men."
"And why not I?" Henriette, too, was going.
But the General stopped the way.
"No, young woman," he said. "I'm looking after you and if I had been your mother——"
"You'd have spanked me!" put in Henriette, making a charming grimace and dropping back into her seat against the wine bin. "Helen will be the death of Cousin Phil yet," she added. "She's in an awful state of nerves."
"Seems perfectly normal," remarked the General. "I've always liked Helen," he added tartly.
When Helen and Phil came out into the village street not a soul was in sight. The little community of peasants' houses with its old church was as dead as Pompeii. They went into Mère Perigord's living-room and looked into the bedroom without finding her. When Helen called down into the cellar a quavering voice answered:
"Of course, you goose, and do you go right back to your own cellar or come down here. What do you think we are—fools? Why, one goes to a cellar as naturally as one puts up an umbrella in a rain!"
The shelling had stopped when Helen and Phil reached the street again. Soon faces began to appear in the doorways and the village came to life.
"It reminds me of prairie dogs ducking for their burrows," said Phil. "I ought to explain that——"
"Oh, I know what prairie dogs are," replied Helen. "But, seriously, there is a question I want to ask." She was smiling faintly, but her eyes had a defiant spark. "Are you going to follow me wherever I go?"
"Yes, if you are in danger."
"Is that fair?" she demanded.
"It's cousinly," he replied.
"But what if Henriette and I go in different directions?" she continued methodically.
"In that case, I see that you prefer that I go with Henriette. I—I think you know better how to take care of yourself."
She flushed and looked down. It had not occurred to her whither the questions were leading.
"Yes, of course," she said.
"Then I shall follow her, unless she remains in the cellar. In that case I'll follow you."
"Very well," she assented, with a shrug; and looking up again: "I'm ashamed of myself for fainting this afternoon. It was the sight of blood. I haven't thought of that. It makes me afraid, and war means that, and I had wanted to see war."
They met the General coming out of the chateau, and Phil noted again how straight he was and how confident and happy. It was a picture of the old warrior which he was ever to remember. Indoors they found Jacqueline, now that the shell-fire had ceased, busy preparingdéjeuner, while she abused the Germans for having dented a saucepan. War or no war, people must eat. Her business was to cook and she went about her business, French fashion. The result of being up all night and under fire, as the General or any other old campaigner could have told them, was that the three cousins were ravenously hungry. They had a surprising sense of security, though guns and rifle-fire could be heard around them. In a few hours they had become habituated to war.
Helen was silent, thinking in pictures, the multitude of pictures that she had seen that morning. It seemed to her that she had enough material to keep her drawing for a lifetime.
"That black hole is the place where we sat beside the road," said Henriette, looking across to Phil with a grateful smile. Then she referred to the scene in the gully and spoke of how brave and cheery the wounded soldier had been, even as blood was dropping from his cheeks.
"Don't!" exclaimed Helen, with a shudder.
"Sorry, dear!" said Henriette, and changed the subject.
After exhaustion and hunger, food; and after food nature, even within sound of the guns, will assert itself on an August day. If one of the shells bursting half a mile away had burst in the garden, then nature would have yielded to nervous excitement, which may manifest itself in outward calm or in chattering teeth. In either instance, the strain is there.
"I confess to feeling sleepy," said Henriette, nodding, her long lashes drooping after the meal.
"And you, Helen?"
"Perhaps. I'd like to try."
"Then do try, both of you," said Phil. "There's no telling how much we shall be kept awake when the Germans come. And I am going to exact a promise from you," he added, as they rose from the table, "that you do not leave the house or run any further risk to-day."
"And you?" the girls exclaimed together. There was something more than the usual start of surprise on the part of both when two people find that they have the same thought and have given utterance to it. Helen slipped out of the room, leaving the scene to Henriette.
"There is no dodging those big shells," she said, "so you must agree to take care, too. You see," she lowered her lashes thoughtfully and then looked up at him with a world of frank solicitude, "as you saved my life I feel an interest in yours."
"Not to mention that I have an interest in yours!" he interjected.
"I'm glad if you feel that way," she said; then added, as he bent toward her, under the spell of her beauty, "I promise! You promise!" She gave him her hand in sealing the bargain, but drew it away before his closed too tightly and smiled over her shoulder, saying, "I'm really sleepy," as she withdrew.
Phil was left with this vision of her to compare with that of her as she rested in his arms while he carried her from the roadside to the gully. Then he marvelled once more at the situation. How long should he be here with these two cousins? What was going on out there amidst the sound of the guns? With all the world around in action, it was not in his nature to remain still.
"Jacqueline, if any more shells come," he said, putting his head in at the kitchen door, "will you see that those two girls go into the cellar and stay?"
"I'll take a saucepan to them if they don't!" Jacqueline replied. "As for you, I suppose you are going out to try to be killed, like all the other foolish men in the world," she added, without any effort to restrain him.
On reaching the terrace Phil found himself with the last line of the French. In wait as for game, dust-laden figures were lying behind trees and in the open behind little banks of earth which they had spaded. They were firing and the rattle of rifles and the penetrating rat-tat of a French machine-gun from the woods at the other side of the village joined in the refrain. A thousand yards away he saw something as green as the fields, but visible on the grey ribbon of the road, melt into the earth under this burst of bullets. These must be the Germans. Sharp whistles and cracks about his ears—the answer from the rifles of the German skirmish line—made him leap to the cover of the largest tree-trunk in sight.
"We forced them to deploy!" he heard an officer say.
Then commands were given and the Frenchmen slipped backward on all fours till they were below the skyline, when they became running red legs under humped backs of blue as they hurried away according to plan—and just in time. For now the German guns, which had the signal, loosed their wrath on the village and the neighbouring woodland, where it was thought that the French infantry meant to make a stand in force. Phil stuck to his tree-trunk. But it did not seem of much use when he saw another tree cut in half as by a lumberman's axe with a curling black burst of smoke; and bark and limbs in all directions were being gashed by shell-fragments and shrapnel bullets.
Were the girls in the cellar? He had a sense of deserting his post of duty. He did not care to make the run to the house, but felt that he must; when his honest desire was to drop into the centre of the earth and close an armoured door behind him. So he started, having in mind that he had been second in the hundred-yard dash at college, but might have been first if he had had the incentive of the present moment.
There seemed an end of the outburst—probably an airman had signalled that the French were out of the woods—when one belated, harrowing scream seemed to have the pit of his stomach as a target just as he saw the white of a woman's gown, the wearer's face hidden by a branch. Then the crash came in front of him. Black smoke and a fountain of earth and shivered tree-roots hid the approaching figure and enveloped it, for it was nearer to the burst than he. Stunned, half thrown off his feet, as he regained them and realised that he was alive it was with the dagger thrust of horrible foreboding.
The thing which he might have prevented must have happened. He rushed into the smoke, stumbled into the shell-crater and clambered wildly out of it, to see Helen rising unhurt and shaking the fresh, moist loam and splinters from her gown. Her hair had been blown almost free of its fastenings by the blast. She threw back her head at sight of him, her startled eyes glowing with the wonder of her escape and the supple figure drawn up as if testing the unscathed existence of muscle and nerve. She might be unnerved at the sight of blood, but she was not afraid of shells.
"Thank heaven!" gasped Phil, and admiringly. "But what are you doing here?" he demanded, in the reaction of anger over her folly.
"You—I came to see what you were doing—yes, what you were doing here!" she said, between deep breaths. "Why not?" She broke into laughter, that of the challenge across the table at Truckleford, that of even a more reckless humour.
"And your promise to stay in?" he asked.
"I made none!"
"And Henriette?"
"In the cellar."
"Thank heaven! But why are we talking here?" he added.
"Yes, why?" she said, turning to go.
Shells were still screaming far over the tree-tops.
"I think we are safe enough, for the German guns are firing over our heads at the French infantry," he said. "We are between the lines."
Helen said nothing, but walked on rapidly.
"We were very lucky," he continued. "I had a glimpse of you before the burst. It was an awful moment of suspense."
"If we had been a few yards further along or had started a few seconds sooner—how simple!" she added. "I mean, some more people would have been killed in this war—I mean—well, here we are!" and she looked up, smiling.
"None came near the house?" he asked.
"One burst outside the dining-room just as I was leaving," she answered, "but it couldn't have hurt anybody in the cellar. You see the house is quite intact," she added, as they came in sight of it. "I'm sure that Henriette is safe—and I must add another cartoon to the history of the surviving Sanford, how he dodged the shells!"
She gave him a full look this time which was all mischief. How could any woman be so cool after such a shock? But women can be cool even when their underlips are trembling, as Helen's was. In danger or out of danger, they keep to their parts. Phil could only feel that he had two wonderful cousins and that it was useless to speculate about anybody or anything. Splinters from the branches slashed by shells still clung to Helen's hair; they were a kind of crown of glory for her.
"Now for Henriette!" he said as they entered the house.
A moaning sob from below ceased when he called, and the answer came back, "All right!" an answer that was thick but genuine in its relief. Henriette met him at the foot of the cellar stairs trembling.
"It was awful being here alone!" she said convulsively. "One does like company. Do you think it's all over? And I was worried about Helen when that one burst so close and shook the whole house."
"Helen had a close call, but here she is," said Phil.
Jacqueline was in the dining-room. The wreckage of doors blown from their hinges by the explosion she had piled against the walls and was now engaged in sweeping up the earth and plaster.
"This is what a woman has to do when men go away to make war instead of staying at home and getting in the harvest!" she grumbled. "Nice mess they have made. So there you are, you foolish girls! I have about lost patience with you both. As I told Mademoiselle Henriette when she was moaning so, she might have been in Paris if she hadn't——"
"I was not moaning!" said Henriette sharply.
"No,ma chère, you were not. Thank God, you are alive! Though I don't know but we'd all be better dead than having our homes beaten down about our ears. Look at that!" as the broom disclosed a gash in the oak from a shell-fragment. "This floor I've been polishing for years. And you," she turned on Phil, "I thought that you were going to look after these young ladies and keep them from showing off! But like all men you had to go out and make war and show how brave you were."
"I give my word," said Phil, "that they will not escape again. If necessary I'll arm myself with one of your saucepans."
"The one that the Germans dented, if you wish," she replied. "I can't spare another."
"And the Germans will be here very soon," Phil added, to see what the effect would be.
"It's time. They've sent enough calling cards!" replied Jacqueline. "The dirty, worthless, murderous, savage beasts, eating, swilling, killing other women's boys and destroying other people's property! Now, if you don't bother me it's likely that you will get a better dinner after I've cleaned up."
Advisedly they withdrew into the sitting-room, where Phil became a Roman sentinel on guard. Soon they had glimpses of green figures with cloth-covered helmets working their way through the grounds and along the village streets. But the figures seemed to be too busy to pay any attention to the house. Then shells began to break over the village and grounds again, French shells into the advancing German infantry, which once more sent the cousins to the cellar. When they returned upstairs Jacqueline met them, highly excited.
"I saw it with my own eyes!" she exclaimed. "I couldn't keep indoors when our shells were coming. Yes, I saw one burst right in among the beasts and knock a lot of them over! Three never will get up again and they carried the others away, back to the Kaiser!"
Put a red cap on Jacqueline, and with the flashing of her black eyes she would have needed no further make-up for the storming of the Bastille.