That Which Hath Wings: A Novel of the Day
"Star-shell, rockets, and so forth. They regularly treat us to a
display before they begin to pound us again. Where are we fighting?
Oh, pretty busy north--as far as Ypres and as far south as La Bassee.
French on our right--French and Belgians on the left of us. More French
holding Verdun. My hat! what gorgeous fighters! Men of steel with
muscles of vulcanised rubber. And we thought the Gaul an
absinthe-drinking degenerate. I tell you we wanted this War to open our
eyes for us. Perhaps they did too! Here's one of the Sisters coming
now!"
Hurrying felt slippers with rope soles shuffled over stone pavements.
The key grated and the bolts shot back. A little Sister Portress in a
close guimpe and flowing black veil, with a blue-checked apron tied over
her habit, swung back the heavy door, holding her lantern high.
Just Heaven, upon how cold a night Madame had arrived from England!
Madame must be perished. But there was coffee, and soup _tres chaud_
not only for Madame but for M. l'Officier. And also the chauffeur.
Madame _la Superieure_ would never permit that either should proceed
without nourishment. If M. l'Officier and his attendant preferred not
to enter, the Sister would wait upon them in the car.
And so Patrine, after taking leave of her red-tabbed escort, was led
away to the Mother Superior, a little, bright-eyed, kindly Religious,
full of solicitude for Mademoiselle, who, confessing to having emptied a
Thermos of hot coffee, and a box of sandwiches during the later stages
of the transit, was borne away from the guest's refectory up and down
several crooked flights of ancient stairs to a white-washed apartment,
containing a _prie-dieu_ and a big plaster Crucifix, a great walnut bed
with faded _Directoire_ curtains, a minute washstand,--a faint smell of
scorched wood, emanating from the perforated metal registers of a
_calorifere_, and a bad little coloured print of Lord Roberts, within a
stitched border of yellow _immortelles_ and faded laurel-leaves, that
had been green and fresh six months before....
Patrine spent a white night in the town where the old brave heart of the
great soldier had given its last throb for England. Not because those
thudding guns in the north and east kept her wakeful--or because she had
never stayed in a convent before.
She was going to Sherbrand--her Flying Man--who had been supposed to be
dead and found to be living,--and who had written to say that he did not
want Patrine. The letter lay against her heart, and her hands were
folded tightly over it, as she lay staring with shining eyes at the
drawn curtains flapping in the chill breeze stinging through the open
window that had been fastened with a nail when the English guest
arrived.
*CHAPTER LXXI*
*LIVING AND DEAD*
"PATHETIC ECHO OF AIR-TRAGEDY. SHERBRAND, R.F.C., NOT DEAD OR PRISONER.
RESCUED BY AMERICAN RED CROSS AMBULANCE. IN HOSPITAL NEAR YPRES. WILL
RECOVER, BUT BLIND FOR LIFE."
The clamorous headlines had followed close on a telephone from Sir
Roland. Patrine had learned what it means to cry for joy--an
unforgettable experience. She had discovered that one who kneels down
to thank God for a boon so marvellous, has no words left to offer Him,
nor even tears and sighs.
She had written again and again to Sherbrand, saying only "_Let me come
to you!_" Passionate, pitiful, tender letters, answered after weeks of
delay by one page in the stiff, neat handwriting of the American Red
Cross Nursing Sister who acted as amanuensis for the blind man.
"_April_, 1915.
"You have said that you wish to visit me in my blindness. I thank you
for the expressed desire, but I cannot receive you here! I have never
been the kind of man who bid for pity from women, and the ties that you
broke, voluntarily, six months ago, I do not wish to renew. My mother
has been here to bring me some things"--the French and Belgian
decorations, guessed Patrine--"and has gone away again. She understands
that it is best for me to remain here, because, although the War is over
as far as I am actively concerned, I can hear the guns and breathe the
breath of battle, and know when the 'planes pass overhead, and follow
them in thought. There is little else a blind man can do, except make
toys or baskets! Do not think me bitter or discontented--I am
neither--quite O.K. I wish people had been told I brought down the
Zepp., that's all! With gratitude for your kind and friendly
remembrance,
"Yours most sincerely,
"A. S."
A formal letter, but between the cold, stiff lines Patrine had read
reproach, and love, and yearning. An unkind letter--but could she judge
him harshly, her poor blind eagle, sitting in darkness never to be
lifted, listening to the guns, and the battle-song of the Birds of War,
drifting down out of "his sky"?
There was Mass in the Convent chapel at seven next morning. A military
chaplain offered the Divine Sacrifice, and the rush-bottomed chairs were
occupied by soldiers, French Chasseurs and Zouaves, Senegalese and
Negroes, English Guards and Irish Fusiliers, Highlanders and a German or
two,--all patients from the Hospital under the management of the
Ursuline Sisters--a big building next door to the Convent, that had been
a young ladies' boarding school in the days before the War.
The chapel was a dusky place. So dusky that though the red carnations
and white Eucharis lilies in the Altar vases struck vivid notes of
colour in the light of the Altar candles, the ruby spark of the
Sanctuary lamp and the bright flame of the Paschal candle were barely
visible in the brooding gloom. You could only tell the place to be
crowded, by the deep-toned chorus of masculine voices joining fervently
in the _Confiteor_ and _Credo_. Pale green flashes momentarily lit up
the crimson and purple and tawny tracery of the round east window, and
the distant thudding of the guns at the Front made an accompaniment to
the sacred rite.
The French priest officiating was a lean, short, elderly personage with
brilliant eyes set in a mask of walnut-brown wrinkles and a resonant
voice that was illustrated by beautiful, illuminating gestures as he
preached.
"Let none say in your hearing, unrebuked, that this War is an unrelieved
misfortune," he said to his hearers. "Recognize with me, my French
compatriots, the Divine Mercy as extended particularly to France in this
fiery ordeal! Her towns and villages have been destroyed,--her buildings
have been shattered, her sons in countless thousands slain, but her
national character has been purified--the soul of her people has been
raised from the mire. If there is one here present among you--whatever
may be his nationality,--who is conscious of loving Virtue better and
loathing Vice more intensely, since the beginning of this War--then the
War has been a blessing--to him--and not a curse! Acts have been
performed--and are repeated hourly--acts of a sublime and touching
selflessness and an almost Divine tenderness,--not only by men and women
who are mild and gentle, but by the roughest and the most abandoned of
either sex. The good seed was sown in time of peace--ah yes, my
children! but it might have perished. And now Our Lord, who loves
flowers, has caused these pure and exquisite blossoms to spring for Him
from the field of War."
After his tiny sermon, delivered in French, and repeated in English, he
hesitated a moment before turning to the Altar and said, with emotion in
his mobile face and quick utterance:
"I have to ask a favour of you this morning. It is that at the
Commemoration of the Departed you will unite with me in a mental act of
prayer. Prayer for the soul of one to whom the gift of Faith, not being
sought, was not given. A soul that has passed forth in darkness into the
presence of Him who is the Light."
He turned away and began the _Credo_. As the deep chorus of male voices
followed, Patrine found herself agreeing with the preacher's discourse.
"What was it," she asked herself, "that led me out from overheated,
crowded rooms, oppressive with the scent of flowers and perfumes of
triple extract--where the Tango and the Turkey Trot were being danced by
half-clad, painted women and effeminate young men--and set my feet upon
a mountain-slope with the free winds of heaven blowing upon me? I must
answer--It was the War!"
As the great waves of the _Credo_ surged and beat against the old brown
rafters she went on thinking:
"What has made me quicken to the call of Humanity--awakened me to the
knowledge of my sisterhood with my fellow-women? What has taught me how
to live without dissipation and do without useless luxuries? Again--the
War! And oh! what has taught me the meaning of Love in all its fulness,
and set within the shrine of my heart this great sacred sorrow, and
kindled in my soul the pure altar-flame of Faith? The War, the terrible
War!"
She prayed for Sherbrand at the Commemoration of the Living! A somewhat
incoherent petition that her Flying Man might be helped to bear his
blindness, and find some happiness in her unchanged love. And the
thought of the dead Agnostic haunted her. Who was the man, and what had
brought about his ending? Was he a patient in the Ursuline Hospital?
A French, an English, or a German soldier? By a subtle change in her
mental purview, recollections of von Herrnung began to occupy her mind.
"I will not think of him!--I will not!" she said to herself desperately.
Then the obsession assumed an acute form. All that she most wished to
forget in her relations with the Kaiser's Flying Man was being revived
in her memory. Scene by scene, sentence by sentence, she was forced to
live over the hated Past again.
She must have risen from her knees and left the chapel, so unbearable
became the torment, but that the sacring bell rang its triples, the deep
tones of the _Sanctus_ answered from the turret, and the Host was lifted
up. Then her tense nerves relaxed. The almost tangible presence of
evil withdrew itself. She breathed more freely, and peace flowed in
balmy waves upon her stormy soul. In prayer for herself and those who
were most dear to her, she lost the sense of the unseen hands plucking
at her garments and the soundless voice whispering at her ear. And
presently at the _Ipsis Domine_, when supplication is made by priests
and people for the departed, she prayed for the soul of the Denier--that
the Divine Mercy might reach and enfold him, and lead him yet into the
Way of Peace.
"_Christ is risen who created all things, and who hath had pity upon
mankind.... Purchased people, declare His virtues, alleluia! Who hath
called you out of darkness into His admirable light._"
To Patrine the Call had come.
It was Easter Week and there were many communicants. The nuns and the
French and English Red Cross nurses helped the lame to reach the
Altar-rails and guided the blind. When a tall, blond young English
Officer with bandaged eyes and an empty sleeve was led up to his
Master's Table, Patrine was grateful that the chapel was so dusk.
She was to meet the Chaplain of the Pophereele Stationary Hospital after
Mass, the Mother Superioress had said. Thus, guided by an Ursuline
Sister, she passed from the chapel into a long, whitewashed cloister
looking on the garden, its open arches facing the doors of what had been
class-rooms, and now were wards. Another Ursuline, the Sister
Superintendent of the Hospital, with a young, gentle face framed in her
close white guimpe and flowing black veil, sat writing in a big book at
a plain deal table. Near her were some shelves with rows of bottles and
a chest of drawers with measuring-glasses upon it, and a pestle and