That Which Hath Wings: A Novel of the Day
usage undergone by Englishmen and Englishwomen, we may not dwell, but I
do not think we are likely to forget.
Recall again, how vast public spaces carefully kept and tended by
Committees and boards and Councils, became, as at the stroke of a wand,
huge training camps of young, keen, healthy if pale-cheeked Britons in
ill-fitting gingerbread or mustard-coloured clothes. How groups of
unoccupied London houses, or large vacant stores, or the head-centres of
the Y.M.C.A. in various districts, would suddenly overflow with bronzed
and sturdy warriors of the Regular Forces, and as suddenly empty again.
The platforms of railway termini, closely guarded and barred from the
public, would be dotted with neat stacks of Lee Enfield rifles, while
regularly-breathing sleepers in khaki pillowed on their packs, shielded
by the peaks of their tilted caps from the blue-white electric glare, or
the yellow dazzle of the morning sun. A whistle--a snort and clank of
two big locomotives--and the platforms under the reverberating glass
roofs would be empty again, under the dusty yellow sunshine, or the
blue-white electric glare.
Remember all this to the daily accompaniment of those huge shrieking
headlines, the trotting of innumerable iron-shod hoofs, the ceaseless
rolling of iron-shod wheels, the clatter and vibration of huge
motor-lorries, vans, and waggons commandeered for the use of the
Auxiliary Transport (brilliantly painted in thousands of instances, and
proclaiming in foot-long capitals the virtues of Crump's Curative
Saline, or Bango's Extract of Beef), mingled with the steady tramp of
marching men, all through the days and nights. By night you lay and
listened to these sounds, mingled with the bleating of flocks of sheep,
and the bellowing of herds of cattle, until the hoofs and wheels and
marching boots mingled into the roar of one great ink-black, awful
River, whose ice-cold woe-waters--sprung from some mysterious
source--swept through our villages and towns and cities, carrying with
them millions of lives, brute and human, towards the blood-red dawn of
Death.
*CHAPTER LIII*
*FRANKY GOES TO THE FRONT!*
With the First Infantry Brigade of the First British Expeditionary Force
went the First Battalion of the Bearskins Plain.
Exchanging with Ackroyd, "too sick a man for fighting" (who parted with
several superfluous inches of appendix and convalesced in time to go out
with the Second Battalion and meet a glorious end at Ypres), Franky was
swallowed up in the vortex of Aldershot. 000, Cadogan Place saw him but
once more before the roaring flood whirled him away, like a slim brown
autumn leaf, to the Unknown.
His gift to Margot on the night of their parting was a silver elephant
of truculent aspect, having ruby eyes and mother-o'-pearl tusks and a
howdah on its back, accommodating a "Gladsome Days" pull-off kalendar.
"You're such nuts on mascots and gadgets, best childie, I thought I'd
get you this beggar for a keepsake. Saw it in a shop in Bond Street.
It goes like so!"--Franky demonstrated by sticking a penknife-blade
under the liberal whack of leaves that had become obsolete since the
First of January. "Rather a neat notion. Something appropriate for
every day o' the week," he continued, indicating a rhymed distich
appearing beneath the current date. This, the first of many utterances
on the part of the Silver Elephant, ranging from the idiotically
inappropriate to the appositely malign, ran as follows:
"_Be very kind to Pussy-cat_
_And handle her with care:_
_You would not pull her by the tail_
_If her claws grew out of there!_"
"Well, if that's the best this beast can do--" began Margot, sternly
surveying the proboscidean. Then she softened, meeting Franky's
disappointed eyes, and said it was a lovely present and she would always
keep it on the table by her bedside. She and Franky were almost lovers
again for the brief time that yet remained to them. She even endured
without open resentment his continual references to the child.
"Take care of you both for my sake, won't you, Kittums? Of course, long
before Christmas I hope to be back with you! But"--he tenderly crushed
the little figure to him as he sat on the bedside holding it
embraced--"but if by any old chance I get sent in--remember what kind of
man I'd like my boy to be. Sanguine, ain't I?--on the point of his
being a boy--putting a pink geranium in the front window before the
house is built, but still----"
He laughed awkwardly, and brushed off a shining drop of moisture that
splashed on the slender brown leather strap that marks the officer's
caste. A third star showed on his khaki sleeve, but he had made no
reference to it, and Kittums omitted to ask what it meant. He kissed
her gravely on the eyes and lips and forehead, unwound the slender arms
that clasped his neck, and gently laid her back upon the pillows. Then
with: "Good-night and God bless you!" he went quietly out of the room.
The hall-door shut and a servant put the chain up, and the waiting car
slid away to the Tower. For "I'm to kip down at the old shop for
to-night," Franky had explained, "and shepherd five hundred strengthy
foot-sloggers--fat as prize bullocks every one of 'em!--to Nowhere in
Particular in the morning."
Margot cried a little when the hall-door shut, and then fell soundly
asleep among her big pillows. Waking as a ray of five o'clock sunshine
penetrated between the blue-green silk blinds and the lacy curtains, to
realise that Something had gone out of her life.
Something wilful, petulant Kittums had not valued until the hall-door
had shut behind it. Something that--crawling, shuddering
thought!--might never return. She sat up in bed, hugging her knees and
staring into a Future without any Franky in it, a tragic little picture
against the background of the big frilled pillows, her great dark eyes
wide and wild under her tumbled gold brown hair-waves, her paleness
enhanced by the rose-silk night-sheath, a maelstrom of thought,
emotions, apprehensions, terrors, whirling in the humming-bird brain.
The ray of sunshine presently touched the face of the electric clock and
elicited a malicious twinkle from the ruby eyes of the Silver Elephant.
Remembering her promise, Kittums put out a hand, pulled off the
paper-slip bearing the date of the previous day and read:
"_May All Your Hours_
_Be Bright As This!_"
*CHAPTER LIV*
*OFFICIAL RETICENCE*
The First British Expeditionary Force was in France. Thus much after
considerable delay was vouchsafed us. Some studiously unenlightening
Field post-cards, some industriously Censored private letters, some
Press narratives and photographs were permitted us, of Highlanders,
Guards, Scots Greys, Middlesex, Worcestershires, Gordons, and others,
brought in upon the midnight tide and debarking from huge transports at
Boulogne and Havre and Rouen, under burning blue skies and a sizzling
sun. The illustrated weeklies and the cinematograph showed them, with
battery after battery of R.F.A. and R.H.A. and R.G.A., Ammunition parks
and columns, and Engineers with pontoons on motor-waggons, and Field
Ambulance units, endlessly streaming into or out of the canvas cities
erected on the sites of the old Napoleonic camps. Showed also Comic
Relief, in the familiar form of British Tommy, grinningly appreciative
of the welcome accorded him by command of the French Republic; meekly
submitting to be plucked bare of buttons and badges, by sirens who
sought these with offerings of chocolate, wine, and fruit. This meagre
pabulum we champed, possessing our souls perforce, in patience; sitting
before the great iron curtain of official reticence that had glided down
into its grooves as though it never meant to go up again.
Then, with the whiffling swoop of the Jabberwock--the Food Scare was
upon us. Letters showered from venerable maiden aunts in remote country
districts, describing economies practised by our great-grandmothers in
1801 and 1814. Hot-eyed friends buttonholed one and whispered of Famine
that was coming, and pressed crumpled pamphlets, dealing with Food
Values, into one's unwilling hand. The Specie Scare came next, rousing
the most phlegmatic to frenzied indignation. What! In lieu of the
smooth plump British sovereign and half-sovereign welcomed in every
corner of the civilised world, must we perforce accept the "magpie," or
One Pound note, and the "pinky" or ten-shilling bill!
People frothed and vituperated. We were all frothing, what time the
stocky Kalmuck-faced von Kluck with 130,000 Germans of the Kaiser's
First Army came rolling down in overwhelming force upon the First and
Second British Army Corps. Eighty thousand men of our blood holding the
line of the canal from Conde to "a place called Mons" with, as the
flanking angle, another place called Binche.
The 5th French Army was in full retreat from Namur and Charleroi; borne
back by the resistless pressure of von Buelow, Chief of the Second Army
of Attila, 250,000 strong. The 4th French Army was retiring before von
Hahsen and a third tidal wave of armed Germanity--humping its huge snaky
columns after the fashion of the looper caterpillar--along the menaced
line of the Meuse.
The Krupp and Skoda motor-howitzers that had crushed Belgian fortresses
like eggshells were coming into position; the circling enemy aeroplanes
were directing with smoke-rockets the uncannily excellent shooting of
the German Artillery. We who thought we had no more than a couple of
Army Corps in front of us, and possibly a Division of Cavalry, were
beginning to realise the ugly truth. As the frightful blizzard of iron
and flame broke upon the British batteries, and the shallow trenches
made in desperate haste and crowded with the flower of the British Army,
began to lose the shape of trenches, to melt--to become mere scratches
in the earth, littered with human scrap....
We did not suspect, we never dreamed of grave disaster to our Forces,
though some of us were strangely haunted by well-loved looks and dear
familiar touches before the Iron Curtain of official silence lifted that
quarter-inch and the thick red stuff oozed slowly underneath.
An hour or two before the Great Awakening, Margot had 'phoned asking
Patrine to come round. Arriving, her friend found Kittums sorely
exercised in spirit. The housekeeper, in tears, had sought an interview
on the Food Question and entreated her lady to lose no time in
provisioning the domestic citadel with Flour, Sugar, Bacon, Tea, Coffee,
Potatoes, Cereals, and tinned meats against the approaching days of
famine. She begged to submit a List. It would be well to lose no time
for all the Banks were breaking. She felt it her duty to mention the
fact.
"And so I told Wallop to dry her poor old eyes," explained Kittums, "and
I'd go and buy up the Army and Navy Stores as soon as I'd had a look in
at what Franky calls the Dross House, just to ask the Manager, as man to
man, if there's any chance of the Bank going biff? Your adorable
Lynette and your Uncle Owen may say that hoarding things to eat isn't
playing the game and all that. Well! When you're too sharp-set to think
Imperially, come round here and I'll grub the lot. How is your Flying
Man?"
"Doing some Army Coaching. Out Farnborough way," said Patrine. "I've
not set eyes on him twice since that Club lunch."
"When Franky cottoned to him so," said Margot. "You've not had a
scrimmage?"
"God forbid!"
"Engaged people always squabble."
"Alan and I don't," asserted Patrine.
The car came round and they drove to the Bank. Most Banks had enjoyed a