She uttered an incredulous exclamation and drew back.
“Is this the truth? Why didn’t you tell me before?”
“He forbade me. You were not to know.”
Close above them, in the shrubbery, Stilling warbled:
“Nita, Juanita, Ask thy soul if we must part!”
Wrayford held her by both arms. “Understand this—if he comes in, he’ll find us. And if there’s a row you’ll lose your boy.”
She seemed not to hear him. “You—you—you—he’ll kill you!” she exclaimed.
Wrayford laughed impatiently and released her, and she stood shrinking against the wall, her hands pressed to her breast. Wrayford straightened himself and she felt that he was listening intently. Then he dropped to his knees and laid his hands against the boards of the sliding floor. It yielded at once, as if with a kind of evil alacrity; and at their feet they saw, under the motionless solid night, another darker night that moved and shimmered. Wrayford threw himself back against the opposite wall, behind the door.
A key rattled in the lock, and after a moment’s fumbling the door swung open. Wrayford and Isabel saw a man’s black bulk against the obscurity. It moved a step, lurched forward, and vanished out of sight. From the depths beneath them there came a splash and a long cry.
“Go! go!” Wrayford cried out, feeling blindly for Isabel in the blackness.
“Oh—” she cried, wrenching herself away from him.
He stood still a moment, as if dazed; then she saw him suddenly plunge from her side, and heard another splash far down, and a tumult in the beaten water.
In the darkness she cowered close to the opening, pressing her face over the edge, and crying out the name of each of the two men in turn. Suddenly she began to see: the obscurity was less opaque, as if a faint moon-pallor diluted it. Isabel vaguely discerned the two shapes struggling in the black pit below her; once she saw the gleam of a face. She glanced up desperately for some means of rescue, and caught sight of the oars ranged on brackets against the wall. She snatched down the nearest, bent over the opening, and pushed the oar down into the blackness, crying out her husband’s name.
The clouds had swallowed the moon again, and she could see nothing below her; but she still heard the tumult in the beaten water.
“Cobham! Cobham!” she screamed.
As if in answer, she felt a mighty clutch on the oar, a clutch that strained her arms to the breaking-point as she tried to brace her knees against the runners of the sliding floor.
“Hold on! Hold on! Hold on!” a voice gasped out from below; and she held on, with racked muscles, with bleeding palms, with eyes straining from their sockets, and a heart that tugged at her as the weight was tugging at the oar.
Suddenly the weight relaxed, and the oar slipped up through her lacerated hands. She felt a wet body scrambling over the edge of the opening, and Stilling’s voice, raucous and strange, groaned out, close to her: “God! I thought I was done for.”
He staggered to his knees, coughing and sputtering, and the water dripped on her from his streaming clothes.
She flung herself down, again, straining over the pit. Not a sound came up from it.
“Austin! Austin! Quick! Another oar!” she shrieked.
Stilling gave a cry. “My God! Was it Austin? What in hell—Another oar? No, no; untie the skiff, I tell you. But it’s no use. Nothing’s any use. I felt him lose hold as I came up.”
*****
After that she was conscious of nothing till, hours later, as it appeared to her, she became dimly aware of her husband’s voice, high, hysterical and important, haranguing a group of scared lantern-struck faces that had sprung up mysteriously about them in the night.
“Poor Austin! Poor Wrayford… terrible loss to me… mysterious dispensation. Yes, I do feel gratitude—miraculous escape—but I wish old Austin could have known that I was saved!”
Coming Home
I
The young men of our American Relief Corps are beginning to come back from the front with stories.
There was no time to pick them up during the first months—the whole business was too wild and grim. The horror has not decreased, but nerves and sight are beginning to be disciplined to it. In the earlier days, moreover, such fragments of experience as one got were torn from their setting like bits of flesh scattered by shrapnel. Now things that seemed disjointed are beginning to link themselves together, and the broken bones of history are rising from the battlefields.
I can’t say that, in this respect, all the members of the Relief Corps have made the most of their opportunity. Some are unobservant, or perhaps simply inarticulate; others, when going beyond the bald statistics of their job, tend to drop into sentiment and cinema scenes; and none but H. Macy Greer has the gift of making the thing told seem as true as if one had seen it. So it is on H. Macy Greer that I depend, and when his motor dashes him back to Paris for supplies I never fail to hunt him down and coax him to my rooms for dinner and a long cigar.
Greer is a small hard-muscled youth, with pleasant manners, a sallow face, straight hemp-coloured hair and grey eyes of unexpected inwardness. He has a voice like thick soup, and speaks with the slovenly drawl of the new generation of Americans, dragging his words along like reluctant dogs on a string, and depriving his narrative of every shade of expression that intelligent intonation gives. But his eyes see so much that they make one see even what his foggy voice obscures.
Some of his tales are dark and dreadful, some are unutterably sad, and some end in a huge laugh of irony. I am not sure how I ought to classify the one I have written down here.
II
ON my first dash to the Northern fighting line—Greer told me the other night—I carried supplies to an ambulance where the surgeon asked me to have a talk with an officer who was badly wounded and fretting for news of his people in the east of France.
He was a young Frenchman, a cavalry lieutenant, trim and slim, with a pleasant smile and obstinate blue eyes that I liked. He looked as if he could hold on tight when it was worth his while. He had had a leg smashed, poor devil, in the first fighting in Flanders, and had been dragging on for weeks in the squalid camp-hospital where I found him. He didn’t waste any words on himself, but began at once about his family. They were living, when the war broke out, at their country-place in the Vosges; his father and mother, his sister, just eighteen, and his brother Alain, two years younger. His father, the Comte de Réchamp, had married late in life, and was over seventy: his mother, a good deal younger, was crippled with rheumatism; and there was, besides—to round off the group—a helpless but intensely alive and domineering old grandmother about whom all the others revolved. You know how French families hang together, and throw out branches that make new roots but keep hold of the central trunk, like that tree—what’s it called?—that they give pictures of in books about the East.
Jean de Réchamp—that was my lieutenant’s name—told me his family was a typical case. “We’re very province,” he said. “My people live at Réchamp all the year. We have a house at Nancy—rather a fine old hôtel—but my parents go there only once in two or three years, for a few weeks. That’s our ‘season.’…Imagine the point of view! Or rather don’t, because you couldn’t….” (He had been about the world a good deal, and known something of other angles of vision.)
Well, of this helpless exposed little knot of people he had had no word—simply nothing—since the first of August. He was