That Which Hath Wings: A Novel of the Day
"Tell me, when you lighted and placed those three candles and knelt
down--what did you intend--what was it for? A practical insurance
against a railway-accident?"
The dull, ill-timed gibe was no sooner uttered than she sickened with
self-contempt. For Sherbrand answered with direct simplicity:
"Well, no! Call my three candles a reminder that I have asked Our
Lady's help and protection and guidance for three dear people. My
father, my mother, and my wife that is to be. For myself I asked that I
might never disappoint you. You don't know how I shall try to live up
to your belief in me!"
"You dear boy!" Touched to the quick response of tears she could barely
falter: "You're a million times too good for me, if only you knew!"
"I know this--that the wide world doesn't hold another woman like my
woman! Why, Pat, the very sound of your voice lashes all the blood in
me into big red roaring waves of love."
"'Big red roaring waves.' Oh, Alan!"
She laughed, driving back the hot salt tears that stung her eyelids.
The taxi was waiting at the corner of Blount Street, patiently ticking
out twopence. Sherbrand whistled and it approached them. But this time
Patrine did not enter. She could not now drive to Waterloo. It was
much, much too late. She refused even to be dropped anywhere. She
infinitely preferred walking. It was quite a pleasant stroll from there
to Harley Street.
So they wrung hands and looked in each other's eyes and parted. When
the taxi vanished round the corner of Blount Street, the tall,
gallantly-borne figure in the golden-braided hat and pale rose gown
began to walk swiftly towards Grosvenor Square. Suddenly it paused,
wheeled, and returned upon its paces, passed through the gate in the
railings and disappeared into the church.
In bed that night in the chintz-hung room at Harley Street, Patrine,
recalling the experience that had followed the yielding to that
irresistible prompting, wondered if it had actually taken place, or were
woven of the tissue of dreams.
Kneeling upon a bast matting-covered hassock behind the door of the
narrow little wooden cell into which she had slipped as a tall,
grey-haired officer in Service khaki passed out,--she had rested her
elbows upon a narrow ledge before her and peered through a close grating
of bronze wire at a figure dimly descried beyond.
The priest was white-haired and of small stature. A meagre ray of light
falling from above upon the hands clasped over the ends of the narrow
stole of violet-purple that hung loosely about his neck, showed them
wasted and yellow-white and deeply wrinkled. By the testimony of the
hands he was an old man. Something in the manner of her address must
have struck him as unusual. She had not spoken six words in her quick,
hot, stammering whisper before he lifted a hand and said
authoritatively:
"Stop!"
And as she had arrested the rush of her words, he had continued, in a
grave, dry voice, quite devoid of unction or sympathy, cautiously
lowered and yet wonderfully distinct:
"You say that you wish to 'confide something' to me 'under the seal of
Confession,' and you are not a Catholic!"
"No, I am not! I suppose I would be called--a sort of Christian,
though." She said it haltingly. "Does my not being a Catholic prevent
you listening to anything I ... want to say?"
The dry voice came back:
"I do not refuse to hear what you have to say. But Confession,
Absolution, and Penance are Catholic Sacraments. I cannot extend the
benefits of the Church to one who stands without her pale."
"I'm sorry! ... I suppose, I really haven't got the right to ask advice
from you, or to expect you to keep anything--secret?"
There was a little old man's cough. The dry voice followed:
"I did not say that. As a priest, I am bound to give good counsel to
those who ask it. And I promise you, also as a priest, to respect your
confidence.... Now if you desire to go on--for I have several penitents
waiting--I will ask you to do so. Be clear and truthful and brief.
Mention no person by name. Let there be no exaggeration. Now begin!
..."
"It's like this..." And she had blurted out the ugly, sordid story,
that in the plain, unvarnished narration grew uglier and more sordid
still.
He had listened without the movement of an eyebrow or the twitch of a
muscle. At certain points where she had deviated from the sheer fact by
a mere hairsbreadth the dry little cough had interjected: "Think again!"
When she touched upon the circumstances that had resulted in "another
man's" offer of marriage:
"You have accepted this other?" he had asked, and followed her
affirmative by saying, quietly, just as he had told her she was not a
Catholic: "You have not told him of--what has taken place. Is he an
honourable, upright man?"
"Very!"
"H'mm!" said the dry cough. "What is his religion?"
"He is a Catholic."
"H'mm! ... A devout Catholic?"
"He seems--awfully keen on his Church!"
A silence had followed, during which the beating of Patrine's heart and
the singing of the blood in her ears had seemed to fill the clean little
wooden place. Then:
"Do you intend to tell this keen Catholic," asked the merciless voice,
"that you do not come to him--pure?"
"No! ... At least..." The heave of her bosom against the little shelf
before the lattice made the dry wood quiver and creak. A deep sigh
broke from her. The priest's voice continued:
"You have made it quite clear why you have applied to me. To be
encouraged not to tell! But even for your own sake I advise you to make
confession. Do you expect God's blessing upon a marriage that is--upon
your side--a fraud?"
"Men aren't angels!" Patrine burst out rebelliously. "How do I know that
he--Yes, I do know!"
His face had risen up before her, and his voice was in her ears saying
with that note of gladness in it: "I come to you clean!" and shame and
compunction choked her, as she added:
"He's straighter than I should have believed it possible for any man to
be."
"H'mm!" The dry hacking old man's cough came again. He sniffed twice,
sharply. Now he was speaking again.
"You have not known many--or any Catholic men before this one. Your
doubt as to the existence of masculine purity proves with what type of
persons you have hitherto mixed. For your own sake you will be wise to
tell the truth to this gentleman. If you loved him you would tell him
for his. Now you must leave. I have given you too much time as it is.
Repeat after me as I dictate." He clasped the withered hands and began
briskly: "_Oh, my God----_"
After a brief ineffectual hesitation, Patrine echoed him. He went on
trailing after him a voice that stumbled and dragged:
"_Oh, my God! I am very sorry that I have offended Thee by the sin of
fornication, and have yielded up my body to uncleanness, instead of
keeping myself pure as Thou commandest. I beseech Thee for the love of
Thy Son my Saviour Jesus Christ to bestow upon me the grace of a genuine
sorrow for my sin; and while I implore that Thou wouldst mercifully
spare me the ruin and disgrace I have merited by my own act, I
faithfully promise Thee to profit by the bitter lesson I have learned.
But if I find myself as the natural consequence of my wickedness----_"
"_--of my wickedness----_"
The dragging echo failed. A mist came before her eyes.
"Go on," said the stern voice from the other side of the grating. It
went on dictating:
"_But if I find myself as the natural consequence of my sinfulness about
to be the mother of a child, I vow not to be guilty of any violence to
the innocent. But to bear my bitter punishment meekly, as coming from
Thy Hand. Amen._"
She said the words. He blessed her with some such words as these:
"Now may God bless and forgive you, and bring your soul from darkness
into His Light. Leave me now. Please shut the door."
She heard the dry little hacking cough again as she closed it after her.
But she did not go away thinking him harsh and merciless. She had seen
great shining tears dropping, dropping upon those withered hands.
*CHAPTER LII*
*KHAKI*
Remember how upon the great grey canvas of London, broadly splashed in
with khaki, from the becoming dead-leaf of the Regular troops to the
deadly ginger of the newly mobilised Reserve or the hideous
mustard-yellow of the latest recruit to the newest Territorial
unit--Recruiting posters of every shape, size, and method of appeal to
patriotism, suddenly flared out, ranging from the immemorial
red-and-blue printing on white to the huge pictorial hoarding-plaster in
monochrome. Dash in as values the glow of re-awakened patriotism, the
resounding silences in which Royal Messages to British Citizens and
lieges were delivered by grave officials in scarlet gowns and curly
white wigs, and the singing of the National Anthem by huge crowds
gathered in front of Buckingham Palace, to cheer, over and over again
the King, the Queen, and the Heir to the British Throne.
Recall how keenly-curious Britons densely thronged the neighbourhood of
the Houses of Parliament, eager to ascertain the British attitude
towards France and other Continental Powers; while immense aggregations
of people blocked the entrance to Downing Street, surging outside the
wrought-iron screens protecting Ministerial windows; congesting
Whitehall until omnibuses proceeded at a snail's pace.
Revive the strange newness of things, the snap and tingle of seeing not
only Royal Palaces and Government Offices, but vital places such as
Arsenals, Docks, Railway, and Electric Power stations, Powder-magazines
and Munition Stores closely guarded by men in tea-leaf or ginger-brown.
Sickly the hot flush of things so new with the pale dread of ruin, the
ugly rumours of Invasion. Shadow in broad and black, a panic on the
Stock Exchange, the dizzying fall of prices on Continental Bourses, the
record slump on Wall Street, the frenzied stampede of the run upon the
Banks, the Proclamation from the steps of the Royal Exchange of the
strange thing called by nearly everybody--anything but a Moratorium; as,
for example, a Monatorial, a Monoroarium or Honorarium, and so on.
Who could ever forget the excitement attendant on the sailing of famous
passenger and cargo-liners with quick-firers and Maxims nosing through
steel shields abaft the lower bridge? How the Red Cross notified its
surgeons, nurses, and ambulance-helpers to hold themselves ready for
business, and a neat khaki rig-out that had puzzled us in several
unfamiliar details, turned out to be the Service uniform of the Royal
Flying Corps.
German and Austro-Hungarian Reservists of all classes, summoned home by
the strident bellow of Fatherland, surged round their respective
Consulates. Prince Cheraowski, Representative of Germany, having had
his passports handed him, shrugged the shrug of a disgruntled man,
lighted a cigarette, and took a farewell constitutional through St.
James's Park. And, on the Declaration of War with Austria-Hungary a few
days later, Count Lensdorff received his walking-ticket, and gracefully
vanished from the scene. And from the hall-doors of one Embassy in
Carlton House Terrace and another in Belgrave Square, British workmen,
cheerfully whistling, unscrewed the massive brazen plates. Crowds
watched the operation in phlegmatic silence; the single individual who
loosed a "boo" being promptly bonneted by a disapproving majority, and
moved on by the police, while the windows of the British Embassy at
Berlin were being shattered by brickbats, as were those of divers
British consulates and Legations throughout the Fatherland. On the mud,
stones, and verbal filth lavished on their inmates, of the Yahoo-like