The journey to Folkestone was all a dream, a dream that she was glad to be dreaming, because she was now on the other side of the barrier that separated people at home from those at the front. The queerest thoughts passed through her mind. She understood for a moment the poor groping endeavors of the war-bereft to break through those darker barriers of the material world, and get into touch, no matter how vaguely, with the world beyond. She felt that in some strange way she was succeeding.
They had lunch on the train. She forced herself to drink some black coffee, and nibble at some tepid mutton. She was vaguely conscious that the correspondents were enjoying themselves enormously at the expense of the State, and she shuddered at the grotesque sense of humor which she discovered amongst her thoughts at this moment.
The Channel-crossing on the troop-ship brought her nearer yet. There was hardly standing-room on any of the decks, and the spectacle was a very strange one, for all the crowded ranks in khaki, officers and men, had been ordered to wear life-belts. A hospital ship which had just arrived was delivering its loads of wounded men to the docks, and these also were wearing life-belts.
The sunset-light was fading as the troop-ship moved out, and the seas had that peculiar iridescent smoothness, as of a delicately tinted skin of very faintly burning oils, which they so often wear when the wind falls at evening. On one side of the ship a destroyer was plowing through white mounds of foam; and overhead there was one of the new silver-skinned scouting air-ships.
Away to the east, a great line of transports was returning home with the wounded, and the horizon was one long stream of black smoke. It was all so peaceful that the life-belts seemed an anomaly, and it was difficult to realize the full meaning of this traffic. The white cliffs of England wore a spiritual aspect that only the hour and its grave significance could lend them; and May Margaret thought that England had never looked so beautiful. There were other troop-ships all crowded, about to follow, and their cheers came faintly across the water. The throb of the engines carried May Margaret's ship away rhythmically, and somewhere on the lower deck a mouth organ began playing, almost inaudibly, "It's a Long, Long Way to Tipperary." The troops were humming the tune, too softly for it to be called singing, and it all blended with the swish of the water and the hum of the engine-room, like a memory of other voices, lost in France and Flanders. May Margaret looked down at the faces. They, too, were grave and beautiful with evening light; and the brave unquestioning simplicity of it all seemed to her an inexpressibly noble thing. She thought for a moment that no pipes among the mists of glen or mountain, no instrument on earth, ever had the beauty of that faint music. It was one of those unheard melodies that are better than any heard. The sea bore the burden. The winds breathed it in undertone; and its message was one of a peace that she could not understand. Perhaps, under and above all the tragedies of the hour, the kingdom of heaven was there.
The cliffs became ghostly in the distance, and suddenly on the dusky waters astern there shone a great misty star. It was the first flash of the shore searchlights, and May Margaret watched it flashing long after the English coast had disappeared. Then she lost the searchlight also; and the transport was left, with the dark destroyer, to find its way, through whatever perils there might be, to the French coast. Millions of men—she had read it—had been transported, despite mines and submarines, without the loss of a single life. She had often wondered how it was possible. Now she saw the answer.
A little black ship loomed up ahead of them and flashed a signal to their escort. Far through the dusk she saw them, little black trawlers and drifters, Lizzie and Maggie and Betsy Jane, signaling all that human courage could discover, of friend or foe, on the face of the waters or under them.
In a very short time they caught the first glimpse of the searchlights on the French coast; and, soon afterwards, they drew into a dark harbor, amid vague cheerings and occasional bursts of the "Marseillaise" from wharves thronged with soldiers of a dozen nationalities. A British officer edged his way through the crowd below them on the quay, and waved his hand to Julian Sinclair.
"Ah, there's our military guide, Captain Crump. Now, if you'll follow me and keep together, we'll get our passports examined quickly, and join him," said the latter, obviously relieved at the prospect of sharing his neutrals with a fellow-countryman.
There followed a brief, but very exact, scrutiny and stamping of papers by an aquiline gentleman whose gold-rimmed spectacles suggested a microscopical carefulness; a series of abrupt introductions to Captain Crump on the gloomy wharf; a hasty bite and sup in a station restaurant, where blue uniforms mingled with khaki, and some red-tabbed British staff-officers, at the next table, were drinking wine with some turbaned Indian Princes. It was a strange glimpse of color and light rifting the darkness for a moment. Then they followed Captain Crump again, through great tarpaulined munition-dumps and loaded motor-lorries, to the two motor-cars behind the station. In these they were whirled, at forty miles an hour, along one of the poplar-bordered roads of France that seemed to-night as ghostly as those titanic alleys of Ulalume, in the song of May Margaret's national poet. Once or twice, as they passed through a cluster of cottages, the night-wind brought a whiff of iodoform, and reminded her that flesh and blood were fighting with pain and death somewhere in that darkness.