That Which Hath Wings: A Novel of the Day

one could worship! You could hate magnificently and forgive greatly, and love to the very verge of death! That was said to me of the Doctor, and you are like him!" "Don't!" she said, wincing. "You don't know me!" He answered firmly: "But I do know you! I knew you the moment I saw you in Paris. You're the girl I have been waiting for ever since I read Morris's 'Eredwellers'. You're The Friend! Now I've found you I shall never let you go again!" What midsummer madness was this, prompting him to sweet audacity? His, "I shall never let you go!" had a convincing, manly ring. She quickened her steps, wading through a shallow sea of shadows, through which the warm short turf came up to meet her feet. He kept by her side, and together they moved towards the Valkyr-ring of fire, changing as they advanced into isolated pillars of towering flame outlining the huge white oval of Fanshaw's landing-place. Here and there the goblin-like shapes moved, stirring the flares with rods, feeding the blaze with something from vessels they carried. And two other figures stood in talk by the telegraph-hut, recognisable, outlined against the oblong of electric radiance framed by the doorway, as Saxham and the Chief. "This is a bit previous, you think? Headlong--ill-considered on my part--to have spoken like this to a girl I've only met once before? You must understand--a man who follows a risky profession gets into the way of not waiting for to-morrow, because to-day may be the wind-up. Say you are not angry!" Sherbrand pleaded. "No, you poor dear boy! But you're so awfully mistaken!" There was a rich and exquisite tenderness, it seemed to Sherbrand, in the deep, full, breathy tones. "I'm not a bit what you think me! There is nothing worthy of worship in a woman like me," said Patrine. He asked, as they walked side by side from patches of brilliant blue-white light into deep oases of shadow: "May I say more? May I tell you that I've thought of you ever since that Paris night.... What things I've called myself--if you only knew!--for not getting your address. But I swore I'd find you somehow, and I would have! I'd know your voice among a thousand. If I were blind, and forgot other people's faces, I should always see yours painted against the dark. At night--now! when I shut my eyes ... there it is! You are not angry?" "No--I'm only sorry for you!" she said in her deepest, sweetest tone. "Sorry?" There was keen anxiety in the face that was illuminated by the petrol-flare they were passing. "You're not--married--or going to be?" he asked. "Neither!" "Thank God!" said Sherbrand simply and sincerely. "Now I'll go on! My rank bad luck gives me a kind of right. This morning I got up solid in the conviction that you and I were meant for one another; that we should somehow be brought together; that the French Government would make it possible for me to marry you by buying my hawk-hoverer--for with only the two hundred a year my uncle left me, and the two hundred my Instructorship here brings me--how could I possibly have the nerve to ask you to be my wife? And--" He caught his breath, "And everything I'd dreamed came real. The test succeeded! I dived down out of my sky to find You! Miracle of miracles. And not twenty minutes later--I found myself nearly, if not quite--a ruined man. For if my invention has been swiped off to Germany, France will never buy, for money--what her neighbour gets for nought!" "I understand. My poor Flying Man, you've been plucked of some of your wing-feathers!" "I don't care, if you'll wait for me until they grow again!" How grim a day had been followed by this night of wonder! Woven of the shining stuff of dreams it seemed, then and for long years after, to Patrine. Their intimacy grew and ripened like a magic beanstalk in the light of the red moon and the fierce blue petrol-flares. She said with a catch in her breath--like Sherbrand's: "You must be serious!" "I never was more so!" She amended: "We must be sensible! Oh! but this has been a close-packed day!" "Hasn't it!" Sherbrand agreed, as they moved on side by side, from islands of raw, glaring light into broad pools of lustreless darkness, their tall heads level, for Patrine carried her hat of silver spangles swinging from the top of the sunshade with the lengthy stick. "Sometimes, for weeks, the days slip by smoothly as the beads of a Rosary over a baby's finger. Then--bang-bang-bang! they explode--like a rocket fired by a signal-pistol--until things fizzle out into dulness again." "It's true!" Her bosom rose in a sigh. "But it's possible to get awfully fed up with banging and fizzling. One can learn to long--just for a little dulness, as long as it means quiet and rest, and peace of mind." That Patrine should voice such an aspiration was incredible even to the speaker. "_How changed I must be!_" she said to herself, as Sherbrand answered her: "With heathery moors and towering scaurs, and galloping trout-rivers brabbling over lichened boulders--and Somebody one loves to talk to--one calls that kind of dulness a happy honeymoon!" She thrilled as his hand, swinging freely by his hip, touched hers, lightly, enclosed, and then released it. He was no tardy lover, this Flying Man. He knew a thousand times better than von Herrnung how a girl should be courted and wooed. For, with her heart in joyful tumult, and her usually pale cheeks warmed and rosy with shy blushes, it was a girl who walked beside Alan Sherbrand that night. I am sorry she could forget so easily the slip that had led her over the frontier line, the Rubicon that can never be recrossed. But in fact she did forget, just as a young man would have forgotten. Though she was to remember as only a woman can remember, and to suffer as only a woman can. In the midst of the new, wonderful happiness, so strangely threaded not only for Patrine, with bitter loss and tragic possibilities, she suffered a quite intolerable twinge of memory in the sudden recollection of the boldly-scrutinising look cast upon her by the bearded man in the white Naval uniform. She did not realise that an imperious gesture of the brown hand, whose wrist had sported a massive gold watch-bracelet, had whisked von Herrnung off the scene. But she guessed that the huge red-haired Prussian, bowing at the side of the big blue F.I.A.T., had clicked his heels before a master who could break him at his will. He had boasted.... They _knew_! Not only the bearded man whose look had stung so, but the close-shaven old Colossus with the tortoiseshell-mounted pince-nez on his thick heavy nose and the huge wart on his yellow cheek. And the sallow diplomat in the Homburg hat shadowing the sly glance and the moustache tucked up by a sinister smile under his drooping Oriental nose. They all knew.... Even the servant had worn the leer that is born of knowledge, as he said in his Teutonic gutturals: "The lady is a friend of the gentleman who brought her here..." Horrible! But she would not remember. She banished the hateful, knowing faces with a gallant effort and turned to Sherbrand, asking whether he had been an Eton, or Rugby, or Harrow boy? For had her Flying Man borne the cachet of the Public School Patrine Saxham would have infinitely preferred it. That it is possible to be a snob even in the most tragic or romantic moment of one's existence, she had not realised before she discovered herself to herself in this way. "Downside was my school," he said quite proudly. Patrine had no acquaintance with Downside. "My father would have liked me to go to Harrow; but my uncle--my mother's brother--who paid for my education!--being a Catholic, naturally preferred the place where the Faith was taught. And my mother--as naturally--shared his preference. I was happy at Downside. The Fathers were thundering good to me. I worked hard--and I played hard--and when it wasn't Swot, or cricket, or football, or fives, or boxing, it was the making of flying-sticks, just shaved laths with paper wings, at first--and then a dodge much more ambitious, a model Wright in varnished card, with a propeller worked by a rubber release.... My father was pleased at my being a chip of the old block in my turn for mechanics. But when I wouldn't go up for Woolwich--when I entered at Strongitharm's College of Engineering on Tyneside, and spent two years at Folsom's Works at Sunderland--he rather gave me up, I fancy, as a low-minded kind of cad." He shook himself as though to shake off the adverse paternal judgment. "I had my reasons for not going in for the Army, though I love it. They weren't easy to explain, and so I didn't try. But my father never liked the idea of my being a civil engineer. Even my mother, and my uncle--dear old fellow--he understands me better now!" "Why?" "Because he's dead!" said Sherbrand simply, "and the Holy Souls know everything!" "The Holy Souls?" By the glare of the flare-light her puzzled eyes questioned him. "The Holy Souls in Purgatory. They're privileged to help us. We help them--by praying for them. It's--a spiritual intercommunication--a kind of endless chain. A circuit of influence, received and transmitted, not by etheric flashes, but by a medium more subtle. Prayer--in a word!" His bright-winged intellect had outstripped her heavier, duller intelligence. She suddenly felt like a caterpillar on a cabbage-leaf, slow-moving, groping, but dimly conscious of a distant affinity with the jewel-winged butterfly hovering high in golden air.... "_Prayer_," she repeated dully, "do you believe in prayer?" "Naturally!" said Sherbrand--"since I believe in God. Do not you? ..." "I hardly----" In the ensuing pause Patrine had a brief retrospective vision of the curate who had prepared her for Confirmation, and who had talked of the Almighty as though He were a crotchety but benevolent old man. And last time she had been to Church--a fashionably attended High Church in the West End--another curate in a black cassock and tufted biretta had preached about the 'Par of Card, the baptismal dar of Grace, the bar of flars,' in which our first parents dwelt in Eden, 'the fatal ar' in which they sinned, and the 'shar of tars' with which Eve lamented her fall. "No," she said bluntly, "I don't think I believe in God at all now, though it sometimes seems as though there must be Somebody behind things!--Somebody who punishes--Somebody who laughs! As for a religion, I don't suppose I've ever had one. Oh, yes!--my religion is Aunt Lynette!" A mental picture of Lynette, years ago in the Harley Street nursery, teaching a curly-headed baby Bawne to say his evening prayer, while a great galumphing girl stood in the doorway and looked and listened, rose up and brought with it the horrible choking sensation. She fought with it as Sherbrand said: "I think you are speaking of Mrs. Saxham? Well, one must have a star to hitch one's waggon to. And she is a star--if ever I saw one! A woman with a face like a Donatello Madonna, or a tall lily growing in the garden-cloisters of some Italian mountain-convent, and who has the Faith,--ought to be able to teach you to believe in God! Why not ask her? I once knelt in a Church near her, and saw her praying. She seemed--very close to what Norman or someone else called the Eternal Verities." "She will be nearer still," said Patrine with sudden, savage roughness, "if anything happens--if Bawne is killed! She will die of a broken heart!" "Then why not pray," argued Sherbrand, "that she may get him back again? Why not try it? There's nothing else that helps so well!" "Pray!" The tall girl stopped short and swung round on him, facing him.