Meanwhile everybody who could get near the Belgian refugees excitedly pressed hospitality upon them.... The desolate mother was termed "Poor Dear" in a dozen different keys of sympathy. But she only looked with dull vague eyes in the faces of would-be philanthropists. When kindly hands tried to draw the little ones away, she grabbed them and held on.
"She doesn't understand us, the Poor Dear Creature!" Thus the Goblin, gulping within her rows of pearls, red-eyed under her towering osprey panache. "What she has suffered! It shatters one to realise. Can one credit that dear Count Tido could have belonged to such a race? Miss Helvellyn claims her by right of discovery, I believe, so farewell to my plans for her benefit! But Belgians, I understand, are to be had in any quantity, and Belgians I must and will have! Think of those rows and rows of new cottages standing empty at Wathe Regis, and that huge caravanserai that nobody can live in at the corner of Russell Square! Do you hear me, Sir Thomas? Oh, how clever of you, Lady Eliason! Sir Thomas, listen! Lady Eliason positively promises that Sir Solomon shall interest himself in this. Of course there must be a Fund, and a Committee, and a Headquarters! The Fund must be Huge, the Committee 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 succès 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 Mère Économe'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 Réfectoire 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 Générale: 'It will be rasé over your heads if you remain, Madame. On n'y fait quartier à 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 Charité?" 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 overwhelmed by numbers and forced to Retreat? Will nobody stop that horrible organ? Will nobody answer me?"
It was the tragic crowning of that day of trivial happenings that the Iron Curtain that had baffled us so persistently should rise to the tune of a music-hall ballad at the touch of a schoolgirl's hand. Long before the huge funeral broadsheets broke out in the gutters of Fleet Street, the Strand, Pall Mall, and Piccadilly, screaming of the RETIREMENT OF THE FRENCH FORCES FROM NAMUR AND CHARLEROI, DISASTER TO THE BRITISH EXPEDITIONARY ARMY, DECIMATION OF FAMOUS REGIMENTS, AND THE RETREAT FROM MONS, the Tidal Wave of Mourning that was to sweep the United Kingdom from end to end had crashed down upon the Club.
Ah! how one had underrated them, those dead men who, living, had seemed to hold themselves so lightly. Who, submitting to be outclassed in Sport even while holding it the thing best worth living for, had smilingly accepted those hateful records of 1912-1913.
Theirs is a glorious record now. Above the huge Roll that is wreathed with bloodstained laurels, droop the Flags of the Allied Nations, their heavy folds all gemmed with bitter tears. Each nightfall finds the endless Roll grown longer. Each day-dawn sees the Hope of noble houses, the pride and stay of homes gentle and simple swallowed up in the abyss that is never glutted! How long, O Lord? we cry, yet comes no nearer the End for which the smallest children pray.
And the women.... In the Book of the Prophet Ezekiel we read of a valley of dry bones over which the Spirit of the Creator breathed. When that Wind from Heaven stirred them, the dead white bones put on Life and rose up. A change as miraculous has been wrought in Woman since the Black Deluge left a deposit of new-made widows and mourning mothers, red-eyed sisters and silent wan-faced sweethearts, sitting about the little tables where the empty places showed as awful gaps.
The bereaved did not shed many tears. Their grief was too deep to be emotional, their newly-awakened spirit too lofty for complaint. Their pride in their dead men was their upholding. Their bleeding hearts they only showed to GOD. Before then, He was for many of us non-existent: for many more a remote, passively observant Personality but tepidly interested in the affairs of the human race. Would these have learned to know Him, think you, if there had been no War?
And those whom every newspaper unfolded, every knock at the door might smite with dire intelligence, right bravely they bore themselves through that fortnight-long, hideous pipe-dream of the Long Retreat South. For many of these the torture of suspense was to give place to cruel certainty, after that unforgettable Sunday of the Sixth September, when at a distance of twelve kilometres from Paris the retirement of the Allied Armies suddenly changed to an Advance, and the columns of German Guard Uhlans in hot pursuit of the British Force, were routed by Generals Gough and Chetwode with our 3rd and 5th Cavalry Brigades. For many, many others, the strain has never since slackened. They lie o' nights as they lay through those nights of September, 1914, and feel the bed shaking, and the floors and walls vibrating, as the outer rings of vast concussions spread to them through the troubled ocean of atmosphere. And in the mornings they will tell you calmly:
"Oh, yes. He is alive, but where he is there is terrible fighting. I heard the guns." ...
No arguments of people whose sons or husbands are not with the Army in Belgium, or France, Italy, or Palestine, will convince them that they do not hear the guns. Or that, borne upon the waves of a subtler medium than air are not conveyed to them finer, more mysterious vibrations.
Thoughts that meet thoughts. Mental appeals—demands—entreaties.... The hands of their souls, reaching out through the dark hours, clasp those of other souls in greetings and farewells.