How Madame Ribot travelled third-class all night to Boulogne, where she was crowded on board a steamer with Belgian refugees and American tourists, whom she found equally objectionable in interfering with her comfort, and then finally to London and Truckleford, was a narrative which excited such sympathy in the simple vicarage that life there was soon adapted entirely to her habits. News that her daughters were safe was a relief to her: but the announcement that they were on their way to join her brought a premonition of overcrowding.
The same kind of journey that she had made the three cousins made. From London Henriette went on to Truckleford, but Helen astounded her sister by remaining in town, giving as her reason that she wanted to see if she could not sell some of her sketches. She said nothing of her trip to America, which she realised once she saw the crowds of stranded Americans must be given up for the present for want of steamer accommodation. Herau revoirto Phil had been spoken at the Victoria Station; a handshake, with the understanding that they would meet at Truckleford. Thus they parted without his knowing her hotel. A few hours later she was sitting beside the desk of an agent while he looked over her few finished sketches. As businesslike as M. Vailliant, he told her to go home and do more, and he would try to dispose of those that were completed.
Something which had been working in Phil's secret brain had come to a head. The recollection of having been marched up a village street between two Prussian bayonets did not sit easily in the blood of his inheritance of freedom. The French were fighting against that kind of tyranny; those poor Belgian women and children on the steamer were the victims of it. When he stepped ashore at Folkestone it was with the thrill of relief of one who has come to the home of another kind of principle, which was that of his inheritance. Here they were speaking his own tongue; here the system was individualism. The green pastures and hedges had an appeal which they lacked before he crossed the Channel. On the train anattachéof the Paris Embassy whom he knew had introduced him to a general, who had asked Phil to look in at the War Office. In London the press and the hoardings called to arms. War was in the air; and he was young. Instead of trying to push his way through the crowd in front of the steamship offices, he went to a cable office and sent a despatch to Longfield:
"With your permission I am going to fight. Answer."
Dr. Sanford received this message only twenty-four hours later than one from Paris announcing that Phil was on his way to London. The girl in the telegraph office saw the Doctor passing along the street on his afternoon constitutional just after the despatch had been clicked in from New York. It was not her business to know what was in telegrams once she had transcribed them; but this one was like a hot breath from the cataclysm shot across the Atlantic into a quiet New England village. She pretended to be busy as she watched the Doctor. On this occasion his spectacles happened to be in the right-hand trousers' pocket, which was the last one that he investigated. Ever since he had had to wear spectacles he had tried in vain to establish a system of carrying them in the same pocket; but in order to have it work he must think which was the right pocket when he put them in, rather than when he came to look for them.
The girl was amazed when he gave no indication of excitement after the reading, let alone a start of surprise, which "certainly beat me," to put it in her own language, "considering how he worshipped Phil and Phil was asking permission to be killed in Europe like he was asking permission to go fishing. People are queer, and never so queer as when they get notice of sudden death or an elopement!"
When she asked, belying her gasping curiosity, if there was any answer, the Doctor said "None!" in his quiet, absent-minded way, as he folded the telegram and this time put the spectacles in his inside coat pocket.
"I must think this over a little before I speak to mother about it," he thought, after he had turned into the street and as soon as he was capable of thinking—such had been the blow of the message. The shadow of the statue lay across his path at the time. He looked up at the ancestor questioningly. The ancestor kept on charging British redcoats.
Dr. Sanford took a long way around back to the house. Every familiar landmark seemed to recall some boyhood anecdote of Phil. If only there had been two boys or a girl! With all of his thinking he was blank-minded when he sat down in his favourite chair on the porch.
"What's happened, dear?" Mrs. Sanford asked at once. She knew his signs of emotion better than the telegraph girl.
"Why, I have another cable from Phil," he replied.
"Is he ill or hurt? Don't hold back—I want to know!"
"No, he's well. It isn't that. It's—well—it's asking our permission——"
"I know! He wants to fight!"
Now, how could she guess that? But she was an amazing woman, as he had often said.
"Yes." He passed the cablegram to her.
"I'm not surprised," she said, after reading it. "I'd been fearing it all along."
"Yes, he could not stand by and see such wrong done without wanting to strike his blow. I honour him for it."
"But he's Phil—the only boy we have!"
"I am leaving it to you," the Doctor concluded. "He will not if you say not."
"We'll think it over," said Mrs. Sanford.
When they broke silence and began a discussion of the pros and cons it was only to return to silence; for they were merely rehearsing the heads of trains of thought that occurred to both of them in a vicious circle. At the supper table Jane realised that something was wrong, and poignantly wrong.
"If it's about Phil," she blurted out, "I guess I'm entitled to know!"
When they told her, she said:
"Against that thieving Kaiser and for them poor little Belgiums! He just couldn't help it! That's Phil all over. But it ain't the United States' war, it's Europe's; and all I've got to say is that maybe he'll never come back. He'll just be killed and buried over in them furrin parts."
"We've thought of that, Jane," replied Mrs. Sanford.
"You're going to let him do it!" gasped Jane. "He won't, though, if you say not."
"Buried in furrin parts!" Jane repeated in fresh horror. This was the most awful aspect of it to her. If one insisted on being killed it ought to be at home, where he could be laid in the family plot.
After supper the Doctor and Mrs. Sanford went into the study, though it was early September and hot. There they sat silent as the flow of still waters which run deep.
"I leave it to you and to him," she said quietly, after a time.
Dr. Sanford hunted in his desk and found a telegraph blank, and rapidly in his fine, small hand which was suggestive of his mental self-possession when he had a pen between his fingers, he wrote:
"Yes, by Jehovah, fight if your heart is in the cause and you are not fighting for fighting's sake."
After Mrs. Sanford, who had been sitting very still, had read it she nodded. The decision was made. It takes such occasions as this to prove that fortitude still survives in quiet people who live on quiet village streets.
Before going to bed Dr. Sanford wrote to the vicar of Truckleford:
"It has been our aim to teach Phil self-reliance and to decide for himself. He is going to fight for the same kind of a cause that the ancestor fought for, this time with the British. He is very far away from us, but we are happy to think that he will have a second home with you."
He showed the letter to Mrs. Sanford, who approved it.
As soon as Phil received the cable he moved on the War Office. As he approached that enormous pile of stone he felt his inconsequence and quizzically wondered if anybody had ever laughed inside its solemn halls. Would the General whom Phil had met on the train see him? An august person who attended at the door allowed him to write his name on a slip of paper, and after a while a messenger conducted him to the General's office, through the long, gloomy corridors, which seemed to protest against the activity which the war had brought.
The General was doing the work of five men because there were so few officers who knew how to do that kind of work and trying, English fashion, not to make any show of it, in order to preserve his appearance of poise and leisureliness. He asked Phil what his training had been and then stepped into an adjoining room, where he spoke to another general. The door had been left open, so that the other general could look over the slim figure, with its well-moulded features, which stood awaiting the result.
"Rather got me, his wanting to fight, so different from the usual soldier of fortune type," he said. "Nice chap, well set up, from one of the great American colleges. Just the man for the guns. Thatattachéfellow said he came from good old stock, which you can see for yourself."
He returned, after the other general had written the name of Philip Sanford on a sheet of paper, to say that Philip Sanford would be gazetted a second lieutenant of artillery. They were making second lieutenants rapidly at the War Office in those days. Phil did not know anything about guns, but, then, he knew as much as many other second lieutenants of artillery.
"You will get word when and where to report," said the General. "And jolly fine of you, I must say!"
The thing was done; no turning back, now. The next step was to send a cable announcing his decision to his employer, who replied:
"Go ahead. We'll keep your job for you!"
Phil enclosed his father's cablegram in a letter to the vicar of Truckleford, which was answered by a telegram reminding him that he was expected "home" very soon. With only thirty-six hours which he could call his own before he reported for duty, he set out by the early afternoon train. He had bought all the textbooks of gunnery that he could find in the shops, and had sat up cramming the previous night. Four of them were in his bag and one was under his arm, along with some magazines that he had bought at the stall, as he followed the porter down the platform of the station.
His recollection of all that had happened since he had taken that same train two months ago was startled by one of the associations of the first journey in the life entering a compartment just ahead of him. Helen Ribot, too, was going to Truckleford. He wondered how he should interpret her start, with its long-drawn "Oh!" at sight of him; but she hastened to make her own interpretation when she had recovered from her surprise.
"It's the first time I've been down," she said, "and I'm going only for a day, as I'm very busy and living regularly in London, now."
There was a cheery tone of independence in the closing statement, for statement it was. In the midst of war Miss Helen Ribot had made her own start in the world. Then some commonplaces. Yes, her mother was still at Truckleford and Henriette with her. Both were well. Had he heard from home? Yes, it looked as if the Germans had made a decided stand on the Aisne.
"I see that you are prepared to read. So am I," she concluded pleasantly, as she took a book out of her bag.
Puzzled by this new Helen, so poised and affable but somehow uncousinly, there was nothing to do but follow her suggestion. As he turned the leaves of one of the big illustrated weeklies he noted something so distinctively familiar with the first glance at the double page, that he would have recognised a single figure of the drawing of the Germans in retreat from the Marne, without having the confirmation of Helen Ribot's signature in the lower right-hand corner.
"Caught!" he exclaimed triumphantly, as he turned the page about and held it up before her. "The fell secret of Mervaux revealed to the public at large! Congratulations!"
Helen lowered her head, flushing at this accusing broadside of publicity staring her in the face, while he was as happy as if the picture were his own.
"It's corking!" he said.
"Yes, the agent liked it, and he has sold others, too," she said, looking up, the magic of the whole business in her eyes. "And they want more. Think of that! And the agent is going to send them to America and thinks that they will sell there!"
It would be false to say that Helen was over set-up with her success; but she was human. Better, that double page was a token of freedom earned and gained. Henceforth, she could be herself.
"Cartoons, too!" she added, when she saw how interested he was. "They particularly want cartoons, some of the editors. I did a series of that old von Stein after I showed the one of you knocking von Eichborn down."
"Good heavens! You——" Would print it, he was going to say, but broke off, for she was laughing in a way that saved him from gulping down the bait.
"But I'm not going to sell any cartoons unless I need to in order to pay the rent. I mean, it spoils the fun I get out of them."
"So we are earning our own living, now," he said. His admiration was transparent. He had earned his and knew what it meant to get a start.
Helen nodded.
"I've got forty pounds already to go with the thousand francs. Let's see, that is almost four hundred dollars in American money! I'm a proud wage-earner and even consider becoming a bloated bond-holder!"
She was smiling and laughing all the time, this changed, this free Helen, still uncousinly, a person apart, and buoyantly happy—until she caught a glimpse of herself in the small panel mirror opposite. Then her features relaxed.
"And you?" she asked, putting out her hand for her book, which she had laid on the seat. "Have you got passage back to America yet?"
"No. I——" And he told her briefly what he had done.
With the very announcement, the mirror warning and another warning which sprang from the memory of the scene under the tree at Mervaux were forgotten in the impulse which made her lean across the aisle in passionate interest.
"It was like you!" she exclaimed. "The old father and mother at home, what did they say?" She wanted to know all about it. "And Peter Smithers?" she added.
"Not heard from yet," Phil replied. "It's surprising how you recollect Peter."
"I'd like to make a cartoon of Peter; I don't know why, for I've never heard a dozen sentences about him. And in the artillery! Then you'll be doing the sort of thing we watched thesoixante-quinzedoing at Mervaux. And you're a real sub-lieutenant! Aren't you proud?"
"Oh, fit to burst!"
"And you will be ordering people about and others will be ordering you about," she continued, returning to the mischievous vein. "I shall have to make another cartoon of how our newest subaltern looked to himself the first time he had on his uniform and how he felt when the general came to inspect his battery for the first time."
Just then it occurred to Helen that she had talked enough; but it had not occurred to her to tell him that she had put her name down on a list which would ensure her wearing a uniform and working in a hospital—she who dreaded the sight of blood. No, this was her business. Now she took up her book again with a sense of relief, and settled well down in the corner of the seat, as if to make herself as small as possible. She held the book well up, her lowered lashes just showing above the cover's edge.
Phil glanced up from his artillery cramming at times to find her still reading, or, if she were looking away from the page, it was out of the window, unconscious of his presence. At such moments her eyes would open wide as some object interested her vividly, most vividly for an instant, seeing pictures, making pictures, always. A fine nobility about the forehead; indeed, a beautiful forehead, with its rich, dark eyebrows under the crowning glory of the hair that seemed to hold the particles of sunlight that filtered through the glass, and small, delicately-shaped ears set close to the head. There was more in that head than he had ever guessed. Only a small part of its infinite variety came out of the fingers' ends on to white paper.
Why he did not know, but the scene under the tree came into his mind. Her abounding sense of humour could not resist the trick when he was making that serious, patternlike lover's speech which he swore he would never make again in the same way. She had had the best of many jokes on him, whether the irresistible mood of mischief possessed her to make a cartoon or to draw him gazing lovelorn into Henriette's face. For it had not occurred to him what she thought must be so palpable—the true character of that "Yes," which excoriated her whenever she was with him alone.
He glanced at the drawing on the open page at his side, took it up to look at it again, amazed afresh at its quality and atmospheric reality, and put it down without attracting her attention. She was happy; she had succeeded in the one thing she cared for. It was pleasant to be there opposite her in her triumph on this September day, flying past English hedges, thinking of many things, including the destiny that had sent him to Europe on a holiday to become a soldier; and it was with a touch of regret that he noted a landmark which told him that the train was drawing into Truckleford. She slipped the book back in her bag and the face he saw was that of the plain Helen, singularly dull and lifeless till she drew a sigh and in her eyes appeared a peculiar light, as she explained:
"Here we are at last!"
Mrs. Sanford, as well as the vicar and Henriette, was on the platform to welcome him; but Madame Ribot had found the weather quite too warm for walking. Henriette waved her hand as she smiled her welcome when the train ran past them. The vicar took Phil's hand in his and held it affectionately in a long clasp; and Mrs. Sanford flushed when he kissed her.
"We are very proud!" she murmured. "But we fear that we have done wrong in not trying to prevent it."
"But his father said 'Yes, by Jehovah!'" put in the vicar. He did not tell Phil that he was having that telegram framed to hang under the portrait of the ancestor.
Henriette and Helen were left to follow, as the vicar and his wife took possession of Phil.
"Oh, we've heard all about it from Henriette!" said Mrs. Sanford. "And—and I must confess that what I particularly liked was the way that you knocked that beast of a Prussian down."
"Yes," said the vicar, stiffening out of his usual stoop and stopping. "But what was it? I am very curious. Er—I boxed a little myself when I was young. Just a straight lead with the right?"
"No," said Phil, turning and holding up his finger at Henriette. "I've a bone to pick with you for telling!"
"Later!" she smiled back.
"If not a straight lead with the right, what was it?" persisted the vicar.
"An upper cut to the jaw!" Phil murmured awkwardly.
"Very effectual, always!" replied the vicar. "Now, he was standing about like this, and you ducked like this to let his blow by?"
"My dear, this is positively shocking!" gasped his wife, mindful that they were in the village street at the time.
"Then you gave it to him like this——" and there the vicar of Truckleford brought his fist up in correct fashion and pressed it against the correct section of Phil's physiognomy. "Exactly!" he concluded, chuckling. "I remember once I used it in a little row—before I had taken orders, my dear, before I had taken orders!"
When they turned in at the vicarage gate they found Madame Ribot at ease on a lawn chair in the shade near the tea-table, looking as charming as usual and with a novel on her lap as usual.
"Now I may thank you in person for the part of a brave gentleman that you have played!" she said to Phil in her delightful way. "And you, my truant Helen, you've found time to come and see your mother, too," she added, as she embraced Helen.
"But have you seen this?" demanded Phil when all were seated around the tea-table. "We have a distinguished person with us. I had the honour of riding down in the train with her from London—with none other than that celebrated artist who is now sipping tea out of a cup just like any everyday person."
He held up the double page for all to see. Helen continued to look into her teacup as they passed the picture around.
"Very timely! Just what the editors wanted," said Henriette. "I'm so glad, Helen!"
Madame Ribot seemed most surprised of all at the actuality of the thing. She drew a long breath of realising satisfaction.
"And you did this in the midst of all that shellfire, you poor dear—I mean——" exclaimed Mrs. Sanford.
"Oh, I don't mind being called poor dear!" said Helen in a soft, impersonal way. "What a bad-tempered person I have been!" she added.
The vicar rose from his chair and went over to Helen, taking her hand in his and patting her on the head. In his heart he had ever been as fond of Helen as had General Rousseau, though fondness for Helen was not the fashion among the friends of the Ribots. A little success had made her almost important.
"And the shell that hit between us, did you hear about that?" Phil went on.
"No," said the vicar. "Henriette didn't mention that. What about it? We heard how Helen fainted when she saw the wounded soldier."
"No fainting this time—a coal box, bang in our faces! I thought that our artist was gone forever."
"If you keep this up," said Helen, "you will make people think that it was I who was the hero of the movies and knocked the villain down; and in that event I shall have to publish the cartoon of you doing it as documentary evidence to the contrary. Beware of the power of the press!"
He had won one of her laughs and a full tilt of challenge from her eyes.
"And who cried good and clapped her hand?" he asked.
"The assembled hero-worshipping multitude!" she replied.
For the moment in their banter they had taken possession of the conversation. Suddenly Helen realised it. She had been teased and she was giving him as good as he sent. The smile died on her lips; the flame out of her eyes. She was plain Helen drinking tea in silence and wishing that she was not there. When her mother made some remark, she slipped away into the house and out by a side entrance into the lane, glad to be alone.
It had all passed by the ears of the vicar and his wife as young people's nonsense, pleasant to hear. These two could think of only one thing: the fact of Phil's presence; the fact that there was a Sanford to fight for the cause.
As he turned to Henriette, Madame Ribot was watching, while pretending to look at the pictures in the weekly. She wanted to know the effect of the ten days which they had spent at the chateau together. Scarcely perceptible the set frown on her brow, which was only erased when an automobile stopped at the gate. Madame Ribot liked the low purring of costly motors. It was as rich and delectable to her as the rustling of silk.
The Marquis of Truckleford had come to see the vicar about Belgian refugee plans and other war work, which, for the first time in weeks, had not been the principal topic of conversation at the vicarage tea-table. Phil was not used to meeting marquises; few work on construction gangs in the Southwest or are seen in New England villages. He did not know how you "My Lorded" or "Your Graced" them, or whatever it was, or how often; but he talked to the Marquis without self-consciousness, just as he would to any other human being, and the results seemed quite satisfactory. The Marquis inquired about the identity of the general whom Phil had seen at the War Office.
"So Duggy made you a second lieutenant!" said the Marquis. "Sound chap! So, so! I'll write a letter about you to Starrow, who is a peg above Duggy. Must say I liked the way that you knocked that Hun down. The vicar and I were puzzled. What was it, a straight lead with the right?"
"No, an upper cut, like this!" interrupted the vicar, giving another exhibition of how it was done.
"Just as I said from the start!" declared His Lordship. "Pleased the old chap in the frame in the dining-room, wouldn't it?"
At dinner Phil was seated again under the English ancestor, only to find that this did not mean an escape from ancestors, as he was facing the American. The vicar had had the photograph of the statue at Longfield framed, and on the opposite side of the room the man of Massachusetts seeking the blood of British redcoats was charging toward the man of Hampshire, who, with uptilted chin, was defying all comers.
"At breakfast some morning you may find the table overturned, chairs broken and the dining-room all gory," Phil said.
"Really!" gasped Mrs. Sanford. She was so serious about the ancestors that at first she took him literally.
"The American is better dressed for such an affair," Phil continued, "but I fancy that the Briton did his fighting in shirt-sleeves, too. He was in that ornate get-up only when he posed for his portrait."
"They would both be in shirt-sleeves for this cause!" declared the vicar.
"Yes, and perhaps for the cause for which the American fought, too," Phil suggested.
"Very likely. I am proud of them both!" said the vicar.
But he and Mrs. Sanford were proudest of the living Sanford who was going to fight in the cause of the moment. The hour was the living hour of blows. Here was one who was about to strike a blow for a childless pair, who had never so much wanted a son as then in order that they might give him for their country. A son of their blood had come to them, now. They wanted to know more about him, his boyhood, his school-days, and the campaigns of the revolutionary ancestor—everything that put links in the chain of inheritance. Phil complied when he realised the genuineness of their interest, but found himself stumbling in details.
"Father knows everything he did," he said. "In fact, we have his diary; but I confess——"
"Too much ancestor!" put in Helen.
It was the first that she had spoken, and even this exclamation was casual and disinterested. Seated across from him as she had been at the first dinner, her plain part in her plain gown was much the same as then, only she was more subdued. Henriette was by his side, in the same part of beautiful woman and beautiful gown. She added her questions to the vicar's. Madame Ribot's only question was about Peter Smithers.
"We must get him to Europe," she said, when the vicar and Mrs. Sanford were declaring that now Phil's father and mother would surely come to England on their long-promised visit.
"I'd like to see Peter in Europe," said Phil.
"So should I!" declared Helen irresistibly. "I should like to have seen him having a set-to with von Stein."
What a cartoon! A whole series of Peter Smithers in moods of rage and humility; Peter shaking his fist; Peter threatened with firing squads and blank walls; Peter and old von Stein—there you had a contrast! Her eyes were dancing; she was laughing to herself as the pictures flitted before her vision, only to bite her lip when she noticed her mother's stare and lapse into the marking-time attitude which she had planned to take her through the meal.
"Yes, of course we must invite Peter," said Madame Ribot. "Do write to Dr. Sanford about it."
"Do, please!" chimed in Henriette.
The vicar was looking to Phil for his lead in the matter.
"By all means!" he said.
Just then his glance happened to meet Helen's, and hers seemed to convey a repressed irony, which melted into that blankness of expression with its self-effacement that always puzzled him. Always the artist—always changing, he thought, while Henriette's charm was unvarying.
"And you will stay on here?" he said to Henriette.
"No. I, too, am going to do my bit," she replied.
She was to take a course in nursing and go to France with Lady Truckleford's hospital unit.
"You were so good at binding up the wounded soldier's arm in the gully that I foresee a great success," said Phil.
She flushed slightly, averting her glance. Always her blushes were accompanied by the appropriate manner and gesture. When she looked back at him her face was in repose, her lips parted faintly, her eyes deep wells of grateful recollection—the Henriette whom he had carried from the roadside to the gully.
"We shall both be in France," she said; "you fighting and I nursing—both doing our bit."
In that deliciously pregnant second before she took a last sip of coffee her smile implied more than her words.
When they went out on the lawn Madame Ribot asked Helen to fetch a shawl, and after she had placed its silken folds around her mother's shoulders she slipped away into the darkness, the others in their preoccupation not missing her. Madame Ribot at ease in a long chair, the others walked up and down until again came a motor's purr to the gateway and Lady Truckleford appeared to talk of war relief. She was bubblingly talkative, was Lady Truckleford, delightfully fussed over her hospital project, and demonstrative over Henriette, who seemed to have won her affections completely. It was quite late when she departed.
"We'll renew that walk to-morrow, shall we?" Henriette said to Phil as they parted on the stairs. While she was undressing her mother came into the room.
"You were very beautiful to-night, dearie," said Madame Ribot, taking her daughter's hands in hers. "And it's settled between you and Cousin Phil?"
Henriette smiled.
"That means that it is?"
Again Henriette smiled, in a confident way.
"It is!" said Madame Ribot. "Well——" and she kissed Henriette good-night, closing the scene without further inquiry, as became a wise woman who knew or thought she knew her daughter. "It's splendid about Helen," she added, pausing in the doorway.
"Very!" Henriette replied. "Yes, she's found her place drawing for the press."
Helen, who had thought that she had conquered happiness, was far from it. She had cried out to her mirror: "Oh, if it weren't for that nose I wouldn't be such a fright!" only to call herself a fool. The result of her conflicting emotions was to hurry downstairs and look up the railroad timetables. Then she went to her mother's room, a pale, distrait figure of impatience, with face drawn.
"I'm going to take the seven-o'clock train in the morning," she said. "It's my work, you see."
She had come quite close to her mother's side so abruptly that it was disturbing to her mother's composure.
"You know best about that," said Madame Ribot, looking up at Helen's features with a return of the old wonder that Helen should be her child.
"Please explain and say good-bye to the others, won't you?"
"Yes. And, Helen, it's all settled between Henriette and Cousin Phil, isn't it?"
"If she wishes."
"If she wishes! What do you mean by that?" Madame Ribot had turned in her chair with a penetrating glance from her little eyes.
"Why, what I say. But I don't know. I——"
Helen wavered.
"You were with them all the time at the chateau?"
"Yes. If she wishes," was all that Helen could say, her voice crackling in its dryness.
"That she has not wished it on other occasions. I see!" murmured Madame Ribot. "She does this time."
"Good-bye!"
"Good-bye! You've done wonderfully, Helen. Of course, it is better than nursing if you continue to make it go. You see, I was anxious about you if anything happened to me."
"And I've been very trying sometimes. I'm sorry!"
There was something whose place even successful drawings for the press could not supply—affection. Helen was singularly hungry for it to-night.
"Of course you will write us and come down to see us!" said Madame Ribot.
"Of course!" Helen repeated.
She wished to be taken into her mother's arms, but it did not happen. And she was glad when the dawn, which found her awake, came and she softly glided downstairs on her way to the station.
Peter Smithers on his "little farm" in Massachusetts, walking about and surveying the latest improvements and his high-bred cattle and swine, was hardly conscious that a woman leisurely undoing her hair in a vicarage in Truckleford was thinking of him. He had a fortune, poor man; and he was not unused to being the object of plots as the result of its possession. In her day Madame Ribot had been as fond of spinning webs of intrigue as she had of late the threads of recollection which had helped to pass the time.
"Phil will come out of this war with European habits formed," she thought. "His Longfield will seem very tame to him, then. He may win distinction—but his family is enough. The one other thing needful"—it was the thing that Peter Smithers had. As a loving and dutiful mother her part was clear. "Peter Smithers must be brought to Europe; and then I——" Madame Ribot smiled at herself in the mirror, conscious that a long lapse of inaction need not necessarily have weakened her powers. She could already hear the soft purr of Peter Smithers's powerful car at the gate.
Nor did Peter, looking through the hothouses of that miserable little farm of his, know that the two white heads of an English vicar and his wife were thinking of him.
"That ten days in the chateau seem to have had one result, unless my eyes deceive me," said the vicar in a half-whisper, as if the secret held back for this family conclave might be overheard by the walls.
"You saw it, too?" said Mrs. Sanford. "Of course, as a woman I saw it at once. And, Franklin, don't forget about inviting Peter Smithers. Hasn't it all turned out wonderfully! And Helen, too!"
"Oh, it's ripping about Helen, ripping!" exclaimed the vicar. "That little warrior! I always believed in her."
"But her mother did seem to me anything but appreciative."
"She never is, except when she is ordering people about."
"Yes, so I've found!" assented Mrs. Sanford.
"And you have done your best to make her happy in that respect," said the vicar.
"It's the easiest way, my dear, and she is our guest."
The next day the two did not allow any interruption from them to interfere with Henriette's walk with Phil, but rather gave their blessing of smiles. Henriette set the direction, which was to the same hill as before; and the quiet scene of Hampshire valleys in September had an appeal to him that it had not had before the war. For a remote ancestor of his had fought for this as the later one had fought for his New England valleys.
"I feel the call of both this and France," said Henriette. "How can one think of painting!" Indeed, the portrait lay with its back against the wall at Mervaux. She had forgotten to bring it and had never been more dissatisfied with anything that she had done.
The spell of the art in which she really excelled was upon Phil; a deeper one than ever, owing to her more serious mood and the serious business before him, and it grew all the way from valley to hilltop and afterward in the leisurely descent. He spoke of his fortune. All he had was his pay as a second lieutenant.
"You have fortune enough," she said, pausing and giving him a long, full glance; "the fortune of war! It is the same that it always has been. The man goes away to fight!"
"And the woman waits!" he said.
"Yes, she waits!" she replied. Her smile was gentle and wonderful. "Isn't that enough?" she asked, giving him her hand in a prolonged clasp and then turning her cheek for the pressure of his lips.
"Quite!" he agreed.
She liked the way of it much better than a speech in the moonlight. Anything but that!
The letter which the Marquis of Truckleford wrote to the general who was a peg above "Duggy" gave Phil an early introduction to Flanders mud. An upstanding man the major to whom he reported. Fresh from the retreat of Mons and the fighting on the Aisne, he had been brought home to mould human clay into gunners. Then there was Jaffers, the regular sergeant, who regarded all recruits as children of his strict parenthood. Treating fledgling young officers with the respect due to their rank, he would whisper to them the right thing to do, the while he stood stiff at the salute.
"They will learn fast under fire," said Jaffers. "It's the blooming Boche shells that'll teach them to be quick about their lessons!"
By the hundred of thousands untrained men were drilling and waiting for uniforms and rifles. Every time that a gun was finished or a shell came out of the shops, a thousand hungry hands seemed to reach across the Channel for it. Phil became one of a myriad of units in a tiny orbit; a cog in one of the many little organisations which were to be assembled into a whole. His technical training stood him in good stead. At first, the battery drilled with heirlooms of the Victorian epoch, which might be useful for home defence against a bow-and-arrow invasion.
Then, one day somebody in the War Office signed a paper which meant that four tubes of steel were to give all the horse-drill and men-drill of Phil's battery a proud reality. New four-inch howitzers could not be kept long away from France in those days. They were needed in the Ypres salient, where the British were holding on by their teeth with their faces to the Germans and their backs to Calais.
Phil's letters about his daily existence ought to have cured an old pair in Longfield of any idea that he was fighting the whole war himself according to the methods of the revolutionary ancestor; though his mother to this day has never been convinced to the contrary. "Mud—and shells at the Germans and from the Germans; and more mud, a great deal more mud, and more shells at the Germans and more from the Germans," was the way that he described it. "I know that I shall never choose to spend a winter holiday in Flanders after the war is over," he said.
The business of the gunners was to hide their "hows" from prying German eyes by land and air and on telephone summons to pump destruction at some unseen point on the map, according to tabular calculations. At other times they might walk about in the mud or sit in the mud inside their dug-outs. It was enough to make a bold knight of olden story, who carried a Toledo or a Damascus blade, fall in a fit, as Phil remarked. Should the Germans locate them, a tornado of "krumps" descended on their position and they sat in the dug-outs considering whether or not everybody there would be "done in," as the English say, by a direct hit.
Then they moved to another place through the mud and built more dug-outs in the mud and began the daily grind over again, the vacancies caused by casualties being filled by recruits. But they had intervals in billets, where they crowded together in peasants' houses out of the zone of shell-fire, and smoked and read and waited for the mail, and expatiated on how it would seem to have a real bath in a real tub in a land where there was no mud.
Spring did come, though there were soldiers in the British army who thought that it never would. They could not comprehend how anything so pleasant could ever happen in war time in Flanders. It found Phil with a bit of white and blue ribbon on his blouse, which had been given for what other people, including a division commander, said was a gallant deed showing exceptional initiative. He was willing to accept their view as official, though he could not honestly agree with it. However, it was the source of enormous happiness in Longfield and Truckleford.
Once he had been back at Truckleford on leave for a week; and, after the mud, he did not mind if the vicar and Mrs. Sanford made as much fuss over him as if he were a real hero. Madame Ribot had returned to Paris. He had seen neither Henriette nor Helen, though Henriette wrote to him regularly. She was at one of the hospital bases not more than three hours' motor ride away; but if he had had ten motors he could not have gone to see her. Each tiny cog of the machine must keep in its place. None may go moving about at will.
He came to watch for Henriette's handwriting and the postmarks of Longfield as the two links with the world; and Truckleford had also become a part of his existence. Henriette seemed the adjutant of Lady Truckleford, devoted to her work. Her letters ever revived the thousand pictures of her from Truckleford to Mervaux and back again and the spirit of them was expressed in the words: "The woman waits while the man goes out to fight." Her references to Helen, who seemed to be at the same base but with another unit, were the only news he had of the other cousin except her drawings, which continued to appear in the weeklies. Helen, Henriette said, was still trying to get used to the sight of blood.
People were coming to know Helen's name. Phil wrote to her in congratulation and the answer he received hardly invited further correspondence. It was unlike her, uncousinly, and it troubled him. She was very busy and very happy. She made a point of that—very happy. New memories of Mervaux occurred to him with the peculiar distinctness of details appearing, after what seemed a long lapse of time, with the freshness of sudden discovery in some recess of the mind. He was thinking that he should not mind sitting again for his portrait on the terrace, with Henriette smiling at her easel and Helen laughing over her cartoons of his proud career.
Spring not only came to Flanders, but the mud dried; the fields were carpeted with the tender green of young grain, and the canopies of foliage gave better cover for the "hows." Green, yes, but flat that vista from the gun-positions, while the graceful slopes of the Berkshires might be dripping and glistening as they had on the afternoon that he returned from the Southwest. Bill Hurley was at his accustomed place on the station platform, no doubt; Hanks, the druggist, was still branching out, no doubt. But Truckleford had the greater call of the two for him that day; for he had received a letter that his father and mother had at last undertaken their pilgrimage and had arrived at the vicarage, where they were waiting until he had another week's leave.
Another bit of news, too. Peter Smithers, without any warning to the War Lord, was about to visit Europe to see things for himself. Peter's only expressed view of Phil's action in going to war had been:
"About what you would expect. I gave him up long ago. So Ledyard's keeping the job for him—hm-m-m! Well, Ledyard's business isn't the sport of a lot of jockeying politicians."
Sometimes Phil had thought what if a shell should take off an arm or a leg, or otherwise maim him for life. Hundreds of thousands of others had thought the same. The merciful bullet through the heart or the wound that heals leaving one whole—these are a part of the game. But that jagged, tearing piece of shell-fragment—this was the devil of the new psychology of war.
It was a glorious morning that he went up to the trench to take his turn at observation. The sun made the wings of the planes overhead shimmer with silver and gold under a fleckless sky. The birds were singing their song in the midst of the song of bullets. It hardly seemed possible that death could lurk in the soft puffs of shrapnel smoke playing around the planes. Death should have no part in such a day. It was a day of life. Soft air to breathe, gentle breezes, kindly sunshine, and youth. Phil enjoyed the fact of existence as some superb privilege which deserved gratitude to earth and sky, and particularly to the sky, which was all that he could see as he entered the winding communication trench.
"Good-morning!"
The cheery greetings were exchanged between fellow-officers as if the game were not with death, but with racquets on an English lawn.
"They are strafing a bit up there," said one; which meant that there was some shelling in the front line, where little mirrors were set up on parapets of sandbags. Through these bits of glass you could look out on a field of weeds across to another line of sandbags, Britain burrowing on one side and Germany on the other of No Man's Land. Phil took the place of another lieutenant at the O.P., or Observation Post. Here he was in touch by telephone with his battery. He watched black bursts of smoke, which were the shells from its guns, and reported their proximity to the target. It was a matter of eyesight and judgment and speaking into a black disk—nothing dramatic about it.
Since he was at Mervaux he had learned much about those bursts of black smoke. He had seen many men knocked over by them. One monster had come even closer to him than the shell which had exploded between him and Helen, and on that occasion he had been dug out from under a tumbled parapet with a spade. When the Germans increased their shell-fire on any section of the British trenches, the British increased theirs on the Germans; then, in turn, the Germans increased theirs and the British increased theirs. Thus it happened on this particular morning, perhaps because the light was good for artillery observation. He was not looking to see what the German shells did to the British trench, but what his shells were doing to the German trench! "Right on!" He had announced the result of a shot when he heard the hurtling, growing scream of a nine-inch coming straight toward him.
After that the end of all sensation; oblivion, which had come to many another man from the burst of a nine-inch whether or not he ever awoke to life in this world.
After he knew not how long Phil felt some one pulling at his body, which seemed to rest under a great weight. This was all, and this only for a fleeting moment; he was uncertain whether he was in this world or the other. Then he was bumped against something and felt his hand brush the hard earth. Vaguely he reasoned that stretcher-bearers were carrying him around the traverse of a trench. A hot, moist sponge seemed pressed into his throat and something besides air was coming into his lungs and he was trying to cough it out. Utter darkness encompassed him and there was no sound.
All volition, all muscular and nerve-initiative had been beaten out of him. He could only try to breathe through that hot sponge and to keep that other trickling thing out of his lungs. It was not his mind that made this effort; only a body detached from his mind, acting involuntarily like the flouncing of a fish out of water. He lost consciousness again before he realised where he was hit; and the litter-bearers bore him on to the casualty clearing station. They did not know whether or not he was dead. Sometimes cases like that were and sometimes they were not when they reached the station.
"Better be, though," said the one who had the rear handles of the stretcher.
"Yes. I'd want to be," said the man in front.