The soap was drying on Dalroy’s face, but he thrust his head out of the window to look at two of Britain’s first line swaggering through the gateway of the inn, and whistling, “It’s a long, long way to Tipperary.” Smith and Shiney were true types of the somewhat cynical but ever ready-witted and laughter-loving Londoner, who makes such a first-rate fighting man. They were just a couple of ordinary “Tommies.” The deadly fury of Mons, the daily and nightly peril of the march through a land stricken by a brutal enemy, the score of little battles which they had conducted with an amazing skill and hardihood—these phases of immortality troubled them not at all. An eye-rolling and sabre-rattling emperor might rock the social foundations of half the world, his braggart henchmen destroy that which they could never rebuild, his frantic gang of poets and professors indite Hymns of Hate and blasphemous catch-words like “Gott strafe England”; but the Smithies and Shinies of the British army would never fail to cock a humorous eye at the vapourers, and say sarcastically, “Well, an’ wot abart it?”
Somehow, on 7th September 1914, there was a hitch in the naval programme devised by the Deutscher Marineamt. The Belgian packet-boat, Princess Clementine, steamed from Ostend to Dover through a smiling sea unvexed by Krupp or any other form of Kultur. Warships, big and little, were there in squadrons; but gaunt super-Dreadnought and perky destroyer alike was aggressively British.
England, too, looked strangely unperturbed. There had been sad scenes on the quay at the Belgian port, but a policeman on duty at the shore end of the gangway at Dover seemed to indicate by a majestic calm that any person causing an uproar would be given the alternative of paying ten shillings and costs or “doing” seven days.
The boat was crowded with refugees; but Dalroy, knowing the wiliness of stewards, had experienced slight difficulty in securing two chairs already loaded with portmanteaus and wraps. He heard then, for the first time, why Irene fled so precipitately from Berlin. She was a guest in the house of a Minister of State, and one of the Hohenzollern princelings came there to luncheon on that fateful Monday, 3rd August.
He had invited himself, though he must have been aware that his presence was an insult and an annoyance to the English girl, whom he had pestered with his attentions many times already. He was excited, drank heavily, and talked much. Irene had arranged to travel home next day, but the wholly unforeseen and swift developments in international affairs, no less than the thinly-veiled threats of a royal admirer, alarmed her into an immediate departure. At the twelfth hour she found that her host, father of two girls of her own age—the school friends, in fact, to whom she was returning a visit—was actually in league with her persecutor to keep her in Berlin.
She ran in panic, her one thought being to join her sister in Brussels, and reach home.
“So you see, dear,” she said, with one of those delightfully shy glances which Dalroy loved to provoke, “I was quite as much sought after as you, and I would certainly have been stopped on the Dutch frontier had I travelled by any other train.”
The two were packed into a carriage filled to excess. They had no luggage other than a small parcel apiece, containing certain articles of clothing which might fetch sixpence in a rag-shop, but were of great and lasting value to the present owners.
At Charing Cross, while they were walking side by side down the platform, Irene shrieked, “There they are!” She darted forward and flung herself into the arms of two elderly people, a brother in khaki, with the badges of a Guard regiment, and a sister of the flapper order.