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 Condé 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 aëroplanes 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 Run and a few had experienced the combination of a Run with a Panic. There had been a severe Run on Margot's bank. Now it was over and a huge majority among the people who formed queues at the doors and crowded the counters were paying in the deposits they had nervously withdrawn. Relieved in mind, Kittums cashed a cheque of magnitude, and the respectable Williams turned the car in the direction of the Stores.
On this Day of the Great Awakening, Woman stormed the departments. Kittums and Patrine plunged into the scrum, to emerge after having achieved a modified success. Lady Norwater's explanation, that she required provisions in wholesale bulk because of a yachting-trip she meditated, had been hit upon by several thousands of other terminological inexactitudinarians. The mounds of bacon, the castled tins of tea and coffee, the sacks of sugar, rice, and cereals, the raisins, currants, and tinned comestibles—had been nearly all picked up by these knowing early risers. Still enough had been secured to relieve the mind of Mrs. Wallop, and scare the wolf from the threshold of 00, Cadogan Place.
"Beg pardon, m' lady." The sedate face of the respectable Williams looked over the last Brobdingnagian parcel transferred to his embrace. "I think if your ladyship 'as no objection it would be better to close the car."
"If it will close," began Margot, looking with interested speculation at the mountainous accumulation of bulky, whitey-brown string-tied bags and packages upon the front seat.
"FOOD 'OGS!" bellowed a man in a rusty bowler hat and soiled shirt sleeves, so suddenly and powerfully that Kittums jumped.
"Garn 'ome!" vindictively shrieked a fiery-faced female. "Greedy-guts! Yah! Git along 'ome!"
"FOOD 'OGS!" reiterated the Stentor in shirt sleeves, backed by an approving murmur from a crowd of dingily-clad men and women gathered upon the pavement right and left of the imposing entrance to the Stores.
"Now then, move on 'ere!" came from a policeman, and the crowd began to dissolve, with lowering glances. Motorcars were moving away, carrying their owners embedded in groceries. Others were driving up to the door.
"Move on, please!" repeated the Man in Blue.
"Not till I've got rid of these things. Call the Commissionaire. Tell him my name and number!—say the orders were given by mistake! ..." Margot went on, when the Alpine range of parcels had melted away under the combined efforts of chauffeur and Commissionaire: "Poor old Wallop will wail, but I've purged myself of the contempt of being a Food Hog. Great Snipe! to think of deserving to be called such an awful name. It made me feel all of seventeen stone, with a row of chins like saddle-bags!" She pinched her own dainty chin between a tiny finger and thumb. "Still, I've enjoyed the scrum," she went on, as the car slid towards Piccadilly. "It's bucked me splendidly! I shall know what to do now, when I want to lay my ghosts. You know one of them"—the little fingers twitched in Patrine's—"what's coming in November. The other started haunting me only a few days back." All the new-won colour had died out of the small oval face and the great dark eyes were tragic in their terror. "You're too good a pal to laugh. Well, then—I'll own up. Franky's my latest ghost of all!"
"But you have heard? You have had letters?"
The answer was strangled between a laugh and a sob.
"Letters. Three post-cards from Somewhere in France and a queer epistle all squares of blacking. Not much between—except that he is tophole and coming Home at Christmas and sends love to us both! That's Franky's way. He always talks as—" A shudder went through the little figure, and shadows were about the great wild eyes, and the pale lips quivered:
"Poor little Kittums!" said Patrine's big warm baritone. She slipped an arm tenderly about the little thing. Who could have dreamed that Kittums could care so about Franky—or any other man. "Are you worrying so badly, my dinkie?" she went on, soothingly: "Try not. It isn't wise!"
"I'm not worrying," came the weary answer. "I'm being haunted—that's all. Day and night since it started, his hands are on me and his eyes are looking at me. When I sleep, I'm wandering through desolate places looking, always looking for him! And thousands of other selfish, silly women are being haunted in the same way. Oh, Pat, be always kind when you're married to your Flying Man!"
"When!"—Patrine echoed. But what of sorrow or doubt her tone conveyed was lost upon Margot. She had told her own grief, and the telling had relieved her. Like the child with the kissed bruise, she could prattle of other things. She was twittering and chirping in the gay little voice Franky knew so well, as Williams, the respectable, turned smoothly into Short Street. There was a dense block at the corner by the Aldebaran Hotel, and amidst the swishing of the motor-engines and the fidgeting of plump carriage-horses, loathful of the sudden release of the pungent exhaust from escape-valves under their noses—a little piece of dialogue between two Cyprians on the near sidewalk drove home to both the occupants of the car.
One Cyprian was well-to-do, past thirty-five and expensively caparisoned for conquest, from the tall feather topping her stove-pipe hat and her burnished wig of Angora goat-hair, to her silk stockings of liberally-open pattern and the tips of her high-heeled, buckled shoes. Her hard eyes under their painted brows took critical stock of the other, younger woman, whose make-up could not hide ill-health, and whose flaunting fineries were the worse for wear.
Said Hard Eyes, indicating with a jerk of her powdered double chin, a procession moving down Piccadilly Circus-wards—a publisher's catchpenny advertisement of "WEEP NO MORE, MOTHERS!" ingenious in its employment of robust-looking matrons as bearers of the sandwich-boards plastered with posters of rose-colour and gold:
"You could give some of the swell West End ladies a tip or two, I reckon, Lallie, about that Purple Dreams dope?"
"Honest to God, I could! But I wouldn't!" The haggard eyes leapt viciously out of their languor. "Let 'em run up against it—same as me! Me that went all the way to Brussels to get the new treatment. Great Scott! When I came to I was black and blue and green all over. And my face! It was a fair scream!" She threw an appraising side-glance in a shop window. "No! My skin'll never be what it used, I reckon."
"But the"—the hard eyes between the elder woman's blued lids were hideously significant—"the Trouble, eh?"
"The Trouble"—Lallie's still girlish shoulders shrugged.—"Oh, that's all right! I heard no more of it! There's the one comfort. Good-bye, ducky. I got to meet somebody at the Cri."
"Well, better luck!" And as the block broke and the car moved on, the women nodded and parted. Margot and her friend Patrine did not look at each other as the car stopped before the Club.
A glance showed the vestibule crowded, the second pair of swing-doors thudded momentarily as members and their guests passed on into the Club rooms, without relieving the congestion that fresh arrivals renewed. Some doors above, a piano-organ in charge of two men was jolting out the last bars of the Russian National Anthem. One of the men, olive-skinned, grey-haired, and dressed in threadbare black, sang the words with perfunctory fervour in a cracked tenor voice. As the last chord banged out and the organist jerked the changing-lever over, and the Marseillaise summoned jangling echoes of its lyrical frenzy from the pavement and the surrounding walls, Patrine, meeting Sherbrand's eyes over the crowded heads of people, knew a sudden shock of apprehension in the strangeness of their regard.
For day and night since that strange, impulsive visit she had made to the Confessional—"You must tell him. It is your duty to tell him!" had sounded in her ears. She set her teeth and determined that she would never tell him, none the less knowing that the revelation would be made. A Power infinitely stronger than her woman's will was bearing upon it. Her treasure was in peril, her fairy-gold at any moment might turn to withered leaves at a breath from her own mouth.