That Which Hath Wings: A Novel of the Day
a place whence the chestnut-brown hair had been shaven, showed the
outline of a deep, jagged gash. "You are hurt! You have had some awful
accident! ... Was it a motor-smash? Doesn't it pain you?" Kittums asked
breathlessly. For d'Asnay had touched the surgical strapping with his
gloved hand, and his smiling face had winced.
"It is nothing, Madame," he assured her, "and it was not caused by an
accident. It is merely a whiff of _schrapnel_--a love-gift from
_Messieurs les Boches_."
"You are _wounded_?"
"Madame, that is what one calls it, when one suffers _a coup d'obus_.
They are common, these little tokens, on our side of the North Sea.
Mine has procured me a visit to London, and the pleasure of meeting
you."
She looked at him like a grieved child, and her lips so quivered that he
softened to her behind the crinkles of his smiling bearded mask.
"You speak like this because you think I am heartless and indifferent.
Perhaps I have been--until to-day! We are so far from things. We see
nothing. And we hear so little about the War!"
"Alas, Madame!" came the answer. "Forgive the cruel prophecy, that the
moment approaches when you will hear too much!"
The swing-doors thudded behind them like guns at a great distance. The
capacious ground-floor drawing-room, not usually crowded before
luncheon, was thronged nearly to the walls. A vacant space in the
centre presumably accommodated the Distinguished Visitors. But between
these and Margot's quickening curiosity intervened a solid wall of
backs.
The Distinguished Visitors must be Royalties, decided Margot, as she
skirted the barrier, looking right and left for a peephole, recognising
the vast back of Sir Thomas Brayham, the skeleton back of the Goblin,
the willowy back of Trixie Wastwood, the backs of Lady Beauvayse,
Cynthia Charterhouse, Tota Stannus, and Patrine Saxham with other backs
pertaining to divers dear friends, consolidated into the rampart of
humanity over which the towering feathers of Vanity Fair nodded and
bobbed and waved.
"They're taking it in," Margot heard Rhona mutter, behind her.
"'_Somebody's playing off a joke on us_,' would be the first thing
that'd come into their blessed heads. Well!--let 'em think what they
choose. Ask me why I did it, Comte, and I swear I couldn't tell you.
Blue murder! how my arms ache. But so must yours. You nursed the
biggest of the babies all the way from Ostend to Charing Cross."
"Mademoiselle is right!" The swift, fierce undertone was d'Asnay's.
"They do not comprehend yet. Not yet!" He breathed hissingly through
his nose. "Wait--and presently the Truth will leap at them and strike
them _entre les yeux_. But a place must be found for the friend of
Mademoiselle!" He came noiselessly to the side of Margot. "A chair, so.
A footstool, so. Madame will step on the one and mount to the other.
Permit, Madame, that I offer my assistance! Now Madame commands an
excellent view of--shall I call it--the spectacle?"
The speaker's voice was drowned in an outburst of strident music.
Barely two doors from the Club the piano-organ had broken out with "_La
Barbanconne_." And as the walls vibrated to its shrill cries of
triumph, and the wild disonances of a joy that touches frenzy, the
cracked but vigorous tenor began to sing:
"Apres des siecles, des siecles d'esclavage
Le Beige sortant du tombeau
A reconquis par son courage
Son nom, son droit et son drapeau.
Et ta main souveraine et fiere
Peuple desormais indompte
Grava sur ta vielle banniere
Le roi, la Loi, la Liberte!"
"_Sapristi_! It is strange that!" d'Asnay muttered at the first bars.
"Mademoiselle Helvellyn devised the tableau, certainly, but who arranged
the _entr'acte_?"
The shrill, unbearable frenzy of the piano-organ abated, the voice of
the singer was more plainly heard. It chanted in thin nasal tones, with
missed-out notes in each bar that were like gaps where teeth had been in
an old sorrowful singing mouth:
"O Belgique, O mere cherie,
A toi nos coeurs, a tot nos bras,
A toi noire sang, O Patrie----"
While Margot, a-tiptoe en her chair, peered through the screen of
towering feathers at the Club's Distinguished Visitors,--wondering that
within the wall of absorbed faces there should be so little to attract
or interest. Nothing more intriguing than the homely figure of a
Flemish peasant woman, with four young children huddled round her, and a
baby at her breast.
*CHAPTER LVII*
*THE BELGIAN WIFE*
Desolate advance-guard of the vast army so soon to invade the shores of
Britain, how familiar the figure is now that was then so strange to us
in the quaint old-world fashion of its homely garments, the thick white
dust and travel-stains that covered it, from the linen coif to the
wooden shoes.
She was not old, the woman who sat with her little flock gathered about
her, on the Indian stool that had supported the superb person of von
Herrnung, what time he had held forth to Mrs. Charterhouse and Lady
Wastwood upon the loftiness of German Kultur, the perfection of German
female beauty, and the overwhelming mental and bodily superiority of the
German Superman. A Walloon peasant from a village near Jodoigne where
she and her husband had worked upon a tiny farm.
Perhaps a dozen words of French were hers: "_Tout brule!_" and "_En
Angleterre ou il n'y a pas de Boches!_"
We were to learn to reap terrible meanings from that hoarse, faint
parrot-cry. Truths that raised the hairs upon the flesh and chilled the
blood were to be imaged for us in the blank vacuity of her unseeing
stare. We were to learn why all her children squinted, from Vic, the
sturdy man of seven, and Josephine, his junior, possibly by a year, down
to Georgette of the chubby cheeks and crinkly, roguish eyelids, and
Albert, of the round blue stare, the big white-haired head, and the
marvellous bow legs.
In their dull stunned quietude and their clayey pallor, the mark of the
Beast was branded upon them, down to the livid baby in its little cap of
soiled linen, swaddled in the old red shawl, that bound down its arms.
You might have thought it dead, but for the flutter of a muscle in the
cheek, and the faint movement of its lips, feebly sucking at the breast
that had been large and bounteous, and now was lax, and flabby, covered
by a network of darkish violet veins.
"_Who are they? ... What are they? ... Where do they come from? ... Why
were they brought here? ... Does no one know? ... Will no one tell?
..._"
The silence of amazement was now breaking. The mouths belonging to the
faces under the nodding feathers, old and young, handsome and ugly,
vacuous and clever, silly and intellectual, were all prattling
interrogations like the above. Pride of Place and Joy of Life, Thirst
of Pleasure, Lust of Power, Gaiety and Weariness, Wisdom and Folly,
Humbug and Sincerity, Meanness and Generosity, ringed-in the dusty group
of wooden-shod mysteries and most frightfully wanted to know! And
nobody offered any solution of the puzzle. The piano-organ was playing
half a dozen doors below the Club, the cracked old tenor quavering to
its accompaniment:
"_Nous le jurons tu vivras!_
_Tu vivras toujours grande el belle_
_Et ton invincible unite_
_Aura pour devise immortelle----_"
The music suddenly broke off. A policeman had ordered the organ to move
on....
"_Tout brule!_"
Hitherto the Belgian woman had not looked up, nor changed her listless
attitude. Now she lifted her empty expressionless eyes, and hoarsely
iterated her parrot-cry. The suckling at her breast whimpered and let go
the nipple. She glanced at it, saying in her own thick Flemish tongue:
"_Daar is geen melk._"[1]
[1] "There is no milk."
She rocked the baby for whom she had no milk. Its feeble whimper was
not stilled. She went on to that accompaniment:
"_De Duischer kwamen. Zy hebben alles gebrand! De geburen,--mijn
voder--mijn man is gedood! Zy hebben hem in het vuur geworpen!_"[2]
[2] "The Germans came. They burned everything. The neighbours, and my
father, and my husband are dead. They threw them into the fire."
The baby's whimper became a wail of feeble protest. It fought and
struggled frantically under the old red swathing shawl. The shawl
loosened, slid to the floor, and the wizened arms rose free and jerking.
One arm, tightly bandaged below the elbow, ended in a raw and bloody
stump. She regarded it with her drained-out stare, not trying to
replace the strappings that had bound it, saying in the heavy voice of a
sleep-walker:
"_Dees ook hebben ze gedaan. God sta ons bij!_"[3]
[3] "This too they did. God help us!"
And sobs and weeping broke out around her, as though that little
handless arm had been a veritable rod of Moses bringing water from the
living rock. But no sigh lifted her bosom, nor were her dry eyelids
moistened with the dew of tears. Prussian militarism had wrought its
work upon her. She and hers had been trodden as grapes in the
Hohenzollern Winepress. Those emptied eyes had seen things done that
might well make devils laugh in Hell.
The Club walls vanished away as we looked, and behind that stricken
figure spread the devastated plains of Belgium, the Sorrowful, the
Glorious, who has endured agony and shame unutterable, that her
neighbours might go free. We had a vision of the Son of Man descending
in a blood-red, rainy dawning, and heard Him saying to the apostles of
German Kultur:
"_Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of these ... ye have done
it unto Me!_"
And not a woman among us who had a man with the British Expedition, but
prayed in her soul, fervently:
"Vengeance is Thine, for Thou hast said it. But make _him_ Thy scourge,
O Lord!"
*CHAPTER LVIII*
*SHERBRAND BUYS THE LICENCE*
The spell of silence was broken. Excitement seethed as Patrine escaped
out of the crush in the drawing-room and returned to the vestibule.
There, subsiding into one of the tall-backed chairs beside the table
that held the Members' Register and Visitors' Book, she waited, hoping
against hope that the tall figure in khaki might reappear under the Club
portico.
"Patrine!"
"Oh, Alan!--you came back after all!"
Her gloom changed to radiancy. She rose up as the tall figure of
Sherbrand passed under the portico, and hurried to him, emptying her
budget of regrets. "I've behaved like a cad. Do forgive me! Don't be
wrathy. But you can't be--or you'd never have come back."
"You dear, it's all right!" He caught the outstretched hands in both
his and wrung them. "Forget--and let's be happy." The truth about
Bawne tugged at him as he said the words, but he had determined not to
torture her with that horror. He went on, with the frankness that she
found so lovable, "I was vexed, but it was idiotic of me not to have
told you about the Commission before."
"And the man. Your French sossifer," she went on, "who looked at me as
though I ought to live in a cage at the Zoo? What must he have thought
of your taste in young women? What mustn't he have said when he got you
out of the way?"
"Oh, not much!"
"Go on. Rub it in!"
"Well then"--Sherbrand's mouth was steady, but the laughter in his eyes
was not to be controlled--"he saw I was fearfully sick at your having
shown temper before him. And he told me not to be chagrined because a
handsome woman had made me a little drama."
"F'ff!" She winced and set her teeth on her crimson underlip. "He knew
I'd ask and you'd tell me. He saw me--squirming--in his mind's eye.
Oh! and how he's hit me off. For I _was_ awfully like the heavy leading