I gasped. The shrapnel eyes menaced me.
"She could not speak of herself, d'you see? It was salvation to think only of others, so that she'd not told him that she was engaged to my father. Love from any other was the last thing she was thinking of. After what had happened she was living from one breath to another and she dared not consider her own affairs. The night before they reached Cairo, Kitchener asked her to marry him. He was over forty then; she was nineteen. She told him of her engagement, of course—told him also that it might be she would never marry at all; a life of her own and happiness [pg 323] seemed impossible now. She might go into a sisterhood. Work for others was what she must have. Then, unexpectedly, my father was at Cairo to meet her, and Kitchener went to him and told him. From that on the two men were close friends. My people were not married till five years later, and when I came to be baptized General Kitchener was godfather. All my young days I was used to seeing him about the house at intervals, as if he belonged to us. I remember his eyes following my mother. Tall and slight she was, with a haunted look, from what she'd seen; she moved softly, spoke softly. It was no secret from the two, my father and mother, that he loved her always. Yet, so loyal, so crystal he was that my father had never one moment of jealousy. On the contrary they were like brothers. Then they died—my father and mother. The two almost together. I came into Kitchener's hands, Lord Kitchener by then. When he met me in London, a long lad of seventeen, he held my fingers a second and looked hard at me.
"'You're very like her, Donald,' he said. And [pg 324] held on. And said it again. 'Your mother's double. I'd know you for her boy if I caught one look of your eyes, anywhere,' he said. 'Her boy.'—Well—what? Do I want more tea? Of course, I do."
For the smiling plump maid had long ago brought the steaming stuff, the bread and butter and jam and plum cake, I had officiated and General Cochrane had been absorbing his tea as an Englishman does, automatically, while he talked.
About us the tables were filling up, all over the rose-garden. The Americans were there with the beautiful long-legged giant deer-hound puppy, Jock, and were having trouble with his table manners. People came in by twos and threes and more, from the river, with the glow of exercise on their faces; an elderly country parson sat near, black-coated, white-collared, with his elderly daughter and their dog, a well-behaved Scottie this one, big-headed, with an age-old, wise, black face. And a group of three pretty girls with their pretty pink-cheeked mother and a young [pg 325] man or so were having a gay time with soft-voiced laughter and jokes, not far away. The breeze lifted the long purple and rose-colored motor veils of mother and daughters. The whole place was full of bright colors and low-toned cheerful talk, yet so English was the atmosphere, that it was as if the General and I were shut into an enchanted forest. No one looked at us, no one seemed to know we were there. The General began to talk again, unconscious as the rest of anything or anybody not his affair.
"I got my commission in 1915 in K-1, Kitchener's first hundred thousand, and I went off to the front in the second year of the war. I had a scratch and was slightly gassed once, but nothing much happened for a long time. And in 1916, in May, came the news that my godfather, the person closest to me on earth, was drowned at sea. I was in London, just out of the hospital and about to go back to France."
The old General stopped and stared down at the graveled path with its trim turf border lying at his feet.
"It was to me as if the world, seething in its troubles, was suddenly empty—with that man gone. I drifted with the crowd about London town, and the crowd appeared to be like myself, dazed. The streets were full and there was continually a profound, sorrowful sound, like the groan of a nation; faces were blank and gray. Those surging, mournful London streets, and the look of the posters with great letters on them—his name—that memory isn't likely to leave me till I die. Of course, I got hold of every detail and tried to picture the manner of it to myself, but I couldn't get it that he was dead. Kitchener, the heart of the nation; I couldn't comprehend that he had stopped breathing. I couldn't get myself satisfied that I wasn't to see him again. It seemed there must be some way out. You'll remember, perhaps, that four boats were seen to put off from the Hampshire as she sank? I tried to trace those boats. I traveled up there and interviewed people who had seen them. I got no good from it. But it kept coming to me that it was not a mine that had sunk the ship, that it [pg 327] was a torpedo from a German submarine, and that Kitchener was on one of the boats that put off and that he had been taken prisoner by the enemy. God knows why that thought persisted—there were reasons against it—it was a boy's theory. But it persisted; I couldn't get it out of my head. I was in St. Paul's at the Memorial Service; I heard the 'Last Post' played for him, and I saw the King and Queen in tears; all that didn't settle my mind. I went back to the front, heavy-hearted, and tried to behave myself as I believed he'd have had me—the Sirdar. My people had called him the Sirdar always. Luck was with me in France; I had chances, and did a bit of work, and got advancement."
"I know," I nodded. "I've read history. A few trifles like the rescue of the rifles and holding that trench and—"
The old soldier interrupted, looking thunderous. "It has a bearing on the episode I'm about to tell you. That's why I refer to it."