"You saint, Pat!" Margot, amidst Raymond's polite excuses, had recognised Sherbrand's hatchet-face under the khaki cap. "You've stolen a whole morning for me from your Flying Man. Why didn't you tell me he'd come back to town? How perfectly tophole he looks in tea-leaves! Franky and I came across that French officer who was with him, last June, in Paris. We're been rubbing noses on the strength of having met before. Is Alan going to the Front? My poor Pattums, it'll be your turn to be haunted. Here's Rhona Helvellyn. Cheer, Rhona! Do tell us why you look so smudgy? Have you been hiding up the chimney of the House of Commons, or bombarding a Minister's front door with coal?"
She beckoned, and Rhona came stalking through the crush of marvellously got-up members, the round, fair, freckled boy-face that topped her long swan-neck and deceptively sloping shoulders pinched with weariness under the wreck of a Heath hat, her usually immaculate tailor-mades covered with the dust of what might have been a Claxton Hall conflict or a Downing Street Demonstration, and strange fires burning in her light-lashed eyes.
"Am I such a sweep? I feel one! But so'd you be grubby if you'd done the crossing from Folkestone to Ostend and back again to London without a dab of a puff. I'd an appointment here at three-thirty." Beyond anything in life Rhona plumed herself on her punctuality. "Mrs. Saxham—the Mrs. Saxham, had promised to meet me in the Chintz Room." The Chintz Room is the first-floor drawing-room securable for private teas and interviews. "We got in too ravenous even to wash for lunch. You should have seen us eat. My hat! the scrum on those boats. And the dirt. Nothing but a Turkish bath will get me clean again. As for Brenda, she's a nigger." Thus Rhona in her loud young accents. "Nobody'd believe she'd been born a white girl!"
"Is she here?"
"My Christmas! I should rather hope so! Upstairs scraping off the top-crust before I take her to Eccleston Square. Don't do to startle the Mater. She's been frightfully off-colour with worry over her precious youngest. You see, Brenda was due home for the Autumn holidays from the Convent of the Dames de l'Annonciation at Huin on the Sambre, when the War broke out. And—Huin's near Charleroi, where they say the Germans are—and we'd nary a letter, and no answer to a hailstorm of wires from the Mater. So I got passes and permits on the Q.T. and skipped over to Ostend—to see what might be done."
"And you got through?"
"Did I? Not much! We don't get things properly rubbed into us—tucked away in our blessed old island. I forgot that Belgian trains wouldn't be running from Ostend to Brussels, now the Germans have got a grab on there.... As for getting South-East by Courtrai and Valenciennes—all trains were required by the Allies for military purposes. Perhaps if I'd been a hefty War Correspondent or an Army Nursing Sister or a V.A.D. in diamond earrings and a Red Cross armlet, I'd have had a chance. But I'm doubtful! Transport officers, English and Belgian, keep their mouths shut—and once they've opened them to say "No!" they never open 'em again. And"—Rhona breathed as though she had been running—"there were Official War News placards stuck up at the Customs Office, and on the quays and at the Préfecture. They said that the Germans under von Buelow have been having a scrap with the 5th French Army on the Sambre—from Namur to Charleroi—and that the French have been beaten back. And the hospitals are crowded with Belgian and German wounded"—she gulped and something twinkled on her pale eyelashes—"and trains crammed with more keep coming in and in. I've seen some sights, I tell you, that gave me horrors. That showed me, even more than those Ostend quays and wharves and squares and Places—packed solid with refugees—Great Christmas!—shall I ever forget 'em!—the devilish, hellish work of War!"
"Refugees.... Common people?" Margot was a little puzzled. Rhona nodded and repeated:
"Refugees. Swells and mechanics, rag-pickers and shopkeepers, sweeps, schoolgirls, lacemakers, and students. Professors, priests, and prostitutes. Madame la Comtesse and her gardener's wife, wheeling the babies in trams and go-carts. Dust-covered, dirty, done up, desperate, with faces that make you think of the damned in the Tartarus scenes of Orpheus and Eurydice. And someone squealed my name, and there was Brenda. Just got in, with three of the Sisters, and a baker's dozen of English pupils and a herd of other miserables, evacuated from Charleroi and Huin. Three-and-a-half days on the journey, travelling by fits and starts on branch-lines—tramping when trains weren't available. Eating whenever anything was to be had, and going without when there wasn't! Sleeping in barns and on the floors of railway-station platforms, or waiting-rooms, when they were lucky—such a pack of tramps you never saw in your life. But Great Scott! how thundering glad I was to get hold of Brenda and whisk her away from that Chorus of the Damned in Orpheus, pent up like cattle behind ropes, and moaning and stretching their arms out to the sea!"
"Why on earth the sea?"
A foreign voice, resonant and rather nasal, startled Margot by answering:
"Pardon, Madame. Because these most unhappy fugitives believe that salvation and safety may be found in England, from whence come those strong brown English soldiers who are fighting in Belgium now."
"Are there—" Margot was beginning. But Rhona was introducing the speaker at length as Comte d'Asnay, Capitaine Commandant and Adjutant of the Belgian General Staff, Attached to the General Staff on the Third Division of the Belgian Army, and d'Asnay was saying with a smile:
"Mademoiselle bestows upon me all my titles, possibly because we Belgians have so little else left."
"Except Honour," snapped Rhona.
"Except our Honour and our self-respect, and a few other non-negotiable securities," he said, "that do not bring us much of credit on the Bourses of Vienna and Berlin. But Madame was asking of the refugees. Many from Liége have escaped to Antwerp or into Holland, thousands are rushing from Namur into the bosom of France. But from Louvain and Brussels and Tirlemont they flock to Ostend. The steamers of the Channel service are crowded with those who have money and can obtain the necessary laissez-passers. Your town of Folkestone is encumbered with arrivals. Were stones pillows there would be a head for every stone. But those who have neither money nor passports—and many of these were rich a week ago—remain, as Mademoiselle has told you, to weep, and stretch their arms towards the sea."
"They'd rush the boats," declared Rhona, "only that the Companies keep up the gangways. I suppose," she grimaced, "the authorities at Ostend don't want a scare. They believe—I hope they may get it!—there'll yet be an Autumn Season. Hang these profit-hoggers! If I'd my way I'd lower every blessed gangway and let everyone who wanted walk on board. If Belgium hadn't faced the music there'd be Germans in England now, murdering and burning.... They've a right to come. Let 'em all come! Britain's big enough, I should hope!"
"Brava, Mademoiselle. Bis!" d'Asnay applauded noiselessly. "That is what you said to me on the deck of the steamer. Say it again, say it often, and the people will be let come!"
"Oh, I've my plan." Rhona's light eyes sparkled wickedly. "People here want waking up. They're kept in cotton-wool. Eyes bunged up and ears stuffed. What they want is—to see and hear. Well, a few of 'em are doing it. That," she nodded knowingly at d'Asnay, "is where my Distinguished Visitors come in."
The lips under the fiercely-waxed moustaches smiled. Margot liked the look of this officer of the Belgian General Staff, with the savage eyes and the smooth olive skin, the pointed chestnut beard, fiercely-waxed moustache, and the cool, polite manner. He wore the uniform of the Belgian Chasseurs à Cheval, and the vulture-plumes of his high shako were cut and broken and scorched in places, the gold braiding of his dark blue tunic was tarnished and weather-beaten, and the grey, blue-striped overalls and spurred black knee-boots were rusty with old mud and white with new dust. "You're from the Front?" she queried, as she moved with Rhona and the Belgian towards the glass swing-doors, giving access from the vestibule to the Club's big ground-floor drawing-room.
He answered:
"There are several Fronts—and I have the honour to come from one of them, Madame."
"With dispatches?"
"Possibly with dispatches, Madame!" He answered with an amused side-glance at the small, vivacious face. "Though there are swifter methods of transmitting intelligence than by entrusting letters to a messenger's hands."
As he moved beside her, courteously replying, she saw the crimson and green enamelled, purple-ribboned Cross of the Belgian Order of Leopold shining upon the dark blue tunic-breast.
"How are—things—getting on? Nobody tells us anything," twittered the humming-bird. "We might live at the North Pole."
"Madame might find even at the North Pole compensations for the low temperature and the lack of society." The vulture-plumes on the dark blue shako nodded as he turned his face to her. "In the fact that there are no Boches there," he added, and the smile that had curved the soldierly moustache vanished as though the word had wiped it from his mouth.
"Do tell me what are Boches?" Margot begged, kindling to interest. He answered with an intensity that dug deep lines at the angles of his nostrils, and puckered the corners of the eyes that burned under his frowning brows:
"They are a nation of beings, Madame, that are no longer men!"
"Germans you mean, don't you?" she asked after a little pause of bewilderment, staring with shocked, dilated eyes at the left side of d'Asnay's close-cropped head, now revealed to her as he removed his shako, and standing a little in advance of the two women, held back with the thrust of his broad shoulders a leaf of the drawing-room swing-doors. The four-inch square of white surgical plaster adhering to 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 à 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 Barbançonne." 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:
"Après des siècles, des siècles d'esclavage Le Beige sortant du tombeau A reconquis par son courage Son nom, son droit et son drapeau. Et ta main souveraine et fière Peuple désormais indompte Grava sur ta vielle bannière Le roi, la Loi, la Liberté!"
"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 mère chérie, A toi nos coeurs, à 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.