That Which Hath Wings: A Novel of the Day

Representative.... Dear Lady Beauvayse is to be our Hon. Secretary.... With your legal knowledge and influence, and your passion for philanthropy, Sir Thomas, don't tell me You are going to keep out of this! You are damned if you do! did you say? Bless you! Who are these queer people coming in?" Two nuns in the familiar habit worn by Roman Catholic Sisters of Charity, little black-robed figures with starched white coifs, broad white guimpes and flowing black veils, had passed the Club windows a moment previously. A tall, slight woman in Quaker grey had seen and hurried in pursuit of the Sisters, recognised as members of a Belgian Community, to whom Mrs. Saxham explained the situation, speaking in her exquisite French. The Sisters replied in a less polished accent, their discreet eyes ignoring curious glances as their guide ushered them into the crowded drawing-room. The crowd parted before them, revealing Rachel and her children. The nuns moved forwards and stood within the radius of those heavy, vacant eyes. Life leaped into them. She cried out in her thick Flemish tongue and was answered, and rose up, the children clinging to her. In a moment the Sisters had advanced upon her, taken the baby from the cramped arms that now resigned it, taken the mother also into a pair of black-sleeved arms. And she was weeping on the bosom of Charity, and telling them the dreadful story that is told anew every day. Presently she and Vic, Josephine, Georgette, and Albert the big-headed, were eating cake and drinking coffee under the sheltering wing of the Sisters, but though some elderly Members still hovered in their neighbourhood, the question of a Fund and a Committee had usurped the attention of the Club. Lady Eliason and Lady Wathe were selecting a Quorum.... Rhona Helvellyn had proposed to Lynette an adjournment to the Chintz Room. They had reached the swing-doors of the drawing-room, when with violence they banged open to admit Brenda Helvellyn in the maddest spirits, escorted by Doda Foltlebarre and Sissi Eliason and half a dozen of the wilder, younger members of the Club. Said Rhona, barring her junior's way with a long thin arm as Brenda rollicked past her: "Mrs. Saxham, let me introduce my sister Brenda. Brenda admires you frightfully!" Brenda, staring with wide bright eyes at the object of her alleged admiration, offered a pink, moist, recently washed hand to Lynette. At Rhona's indignant exclamation she started and pulled away the hand, stammering: "They wouldn't let me! ..." "Wouldn't let you change into decent clothes when I'd 'phoned Home to have some sent here? Tell me another!" "Well, then, the things hadn't come!" "And if they haven't, why not have stayed upstairs until they do come?" "All alone.... Oh! I couldn't! Anything awful might happen up there...." The peach-face of sixteen winced and the eyebrows puckered. "And Doda and Sissi simply _love_ me in these things. They said I must come down and be seen!" Doda and Sissi and the guilty six exchanged rapturous winks and grimaces. Certainly a damsel of sixteen, whose superb crimson tresses are crowned with the squashed ruin of a muslin "Trouville" hat, and whose slender form is draped in the wilted wraith of a light green aquascutum, is more than likely to create a _succes fou_, on her appearance in a London drawing-room. "'Seen!'" Rhona snorted. "Well, you are a sight, there's no denying. From your head to your feet--My merry Christmas! what _have_ you got on your feet?" Brenda tittered nervously, poking out a slim foot in a huge golosh lined with wearied red flannel. "They're the Mere Econome's. There wasn't time to dress properly. We were turned out of the Convent, haven't I told you!--just as we stood. It was early in the morning. Seven o'clock Mass was just over. We were trooping in to the _Refectoire_ for coffee. We went to Mass and did our lessons, in spite of the awful guns. Then ... all at once--" She began to laugh, and a mask of fine glittering dew broke out over her peachy face from the temples to the upper lip. "The earth began to shake. The French were retreating from Charleroi. They streamed past and past, horsemen and guns and marching men, just as they'd gone by two days before when we waved and cheered them from the garden. Only this time there were wounded men.... The ambulance waggons were heaped with them--all bloody and dreadful.... Oh! And then the shells began to fall ... among the waggons and on the Convent! "The Germans are coming," the soldiers called to us. 'Fly while you have time!'" "Shut up!" Rhona ordered the girl. "Haven't I told you not to talk, you stoopid! There weren't any shells--it's all your silly nerves. There might have been--but there weren't!" "But the shells were hitting the Convent walls ... and bursting. The house was on fire. And the French Commandant said to the _Maitresse Generale_: 'It will be _rase_ over your heads if you remain, Madame. _On n'y fait quartier a personne--les Allemands_! They are advancing in incredible numbers. The road to Calais lies open before them because of the Great Catastrophe of yesterday. Our hearts are sad, not only for our own losses, but for the misfortunes of our friends across the----'" "WILL you be silent! He never said so!" With her scarlet head surmounting the shiny waterproof, Brenda rather reminded one of a Green Hackle, the likeness to the splendid gauze-winged fly being increased by the brightness of her eyes. Very round, very wide open, and with strange lines radiating from the pin-point speck of pupil to the outer band ringing the hazel irids, they stared from that crystal-beaded mask of hers. "But, Rhona," she reiterated, bewildered by her senior's vehemence of contradiction, "he _did_ say so! And the Convent was burning when we left!" "If it was, you're to forget it--d'you hear me? And look here, if you dare to talk like this at home----" "I won't. I know the Mater mustn't be upset! Look here, I'll swear I won't, if that'll do! Only don't say I've got to stop upstairs, will you? They're so gay here," Brenda pleaded humbly--"it'll help me to forget!" "All right!" and with a warning scowl from Rhona the sisters parted. Lynette Saxham asked, looking after the little bizarre figure of Brenda with wistful tenderness in her eyes: "Will she recover from the shock of the horrors she has seen the more quickly because you forbid her to speak of them?" "I don't know.... I haven't thought.... It's my mother I bother most about.... You see, Roddy's Battery--Roddy's my brother--has gone with the Expedition. If Brenda talks rawhead and bloody-bones--but I'll take care she don't, the little fool!" The eyes of both women followed the funny little figure. Lynette said as it was absorbed in a crowd of laughing friends: "Would you prefer that we finished our talk here?" She glanced at the settee in a glass-screened angle near the fireplace, and Rhona assented with evident relief. Her Chiefs of the W.S.S.S., she explained, were anxious that Mrs. Saxham should consent to speak at the Royal Hall Mass Meeting of Protest Against the Delay of Parliament in passing the Woman Suffrage Bill. The Meeting was fixed for the middle of October. Mrs. Saxham's sympathy with the Movement was to be gathered from her writings. A personal expression would be valued by the W.S.S.S. "I am in sympathy to the extent of joining in any form of protest or any description of organised Demonstration that is not characterised by violence," said Lynette. "To brawl at public meetings"--Rhona wondered whether she had heard of her own baulked attempt to heckle the Bishops at the Guildhall Banquet?--"to assault public personages and damage private or public property is not the method by which the Franchise will be gained. To make war upon men is not the way, I think, to win their suffrages for women. But I will gladly speak at the Meeting, please be kind enough to tell the Chiefs." "It's awfully sporting of you--when you've been in such trouble. It must have been quite too awful," bungled Rhona, "about your boy!" "About my boy! ..." Lynette caught her breath and nipped her lower lip between her teeth to keep back the cry that else must have escaped her. "You are kind.... You will be infinitely kinder if you say no more!" "I beg your pardon. I'm frightfully clumsy!" apologised Rhona. "Roddy--my brother who's at the Front--once told me that I had the tact of a steam-cultivator and the discretion of a runaway motor-bus." She added: "I'm afraid you think I was rough on Brenda. But the Mater's heart-trouble keeps us all on tenterhooks, and for her sake--no matter what horrors are hinted or whispered--nothing shall make me believe--anything but the Best, until the Worst is brought to my door! You understand, don't you? ... What's that? Young Brenda----" A gust of laughter drew the eyes of both women to the Green Hackle, who, surrounded by an appreciative circle, including Margot and Trixie Wastwood, Cynthia Charterhouse, Doda and Sissi, was performing the maddest _pas seul_ that ever held the floor. One huge golosh flew off, shaving a gilt-and-crystal electrolier as she finished with a daring high kick, and dropped down breathless and panting between Margot and Cynthia Charterhouse. "You crazy child!" cooed Mrs. Charterhouse, patting one of the pink hands. "I feel crazy!" gurgled Brenda, while Doda picked up her battered Trouville hat and Sissi retrieved hairpins scattered over the Club carpet. "Oh, my stars! You don't know, you'll none of you ever guess what it is to me to find you all so gay!" She bounced on the springy seat until her red locks tossed like the mane of a Shetland pony. "Now I really can believe--really!--that the whole thing's been a bad dream! Like you get when Sisters have been too busy to boil the potatoes soft, or take the cores out of the stewed apples." She turned her head and the sparkling mask of tiny beads broke out again over her flushed face. "Who are those _Soeurs de Charite_?" she asked, for the circle of elderly Members had melted away and the two Religious were now going, taking with them the Belgian mother and her children, to whom--of course at the Club's expense--they were to afford a temporary home. "What are they here for? Why, that's the woman who came with us on the boat from Ostend! Ah, my God!--it's all true! I can't tell lies any more! Do you hear, Rhona?" and the bizarre little figure leaped up and stood before them, defiant and panting. "Not even for you and Mother!" The voice broke in a wail. "Oh! how can you bear to see everyone so gay when the Guards and Gunners have been killed at Mons? Seven thousand lying dead, the French Commandant told us. Thousands taken prisoners--and we sit laughing here----" Lynette Saxham caught the little body as it doubled on itself and dropped like a shot rabbit. She carried it to one of the settees, and knelt by it, loosening the clothes, working with swift and motherly hands. The piano-organ had come back, or another like it,--and was jolting out the popular pseudo-pathetic strains of "Good-bye, Little Girl, Good-bye!" The swing-doors had thudded behind the nuns and their charges. Lady Wathe was just saying to Lady Eliason: "Then you, dear, will personally apply to the Foreign Office and the Home Office and the Belgian Ambassador and the County Council. Pray count on me for _all_ the rest! Sir Solomon is a Tower of Strength! You agree with me, don't you, Sir Thomas? Mercy on us! _What_ a commotion! Who has had a telegram from the Front? Who says the Guards and Gunners have been annihilated? Who says the British Expedition has been