"Bawne!—It must be Bawne!—out there in the midst of all those horrors. If I could only meet that fellow von Herrnung! ... I've owed him no grudge because he robbed me.... But—for this—I could kill him now!"
CHAPTER LVI
LA BRABANÇONNE
"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!"