The Light Heart (38 page)
Authors: Elswyth Thane
Miles developed pneumonia, which they had all dreaded so often before, and early in January he died. Phoebe was stunned and incredulous, and actually too angry to cry. Sometimes she felt an impulse to wild, demonic laughter, and sometimes she wanted to stamp and scream with rage. Once more she had tried with all her soul to do the right thing according to the book of rules, and again she had been brutally betrayed. Nothing was fair, and nothing made any sense.
If Miles had died before the baby began, she could have gone back to New York with a rather wistful episode closed, and plunged into work and found herself again. But now she was trapped and forsaken. The relentless child would be born, the fruit not of a great love, but rather of her own good intentions, which as usual had gone wrong and wantonly boomeranged her.
She knew almost at once, in her uncompromising way, that
now she did not want the child. There was no point in having it, with Miles gone. If she had loved Miles as she loved Oliver, it would have been something to cherish and adore. But poor Miles’s child stood only for another well-meaning blunder on her part which she had to see through for its own sake. Miles’s child stood for second best. Without its father, it had no place in the world.
She gave herself up grimly to the business of getting the thing over and living through it. She was thirty-two and would not have an easy time. Since it had become impossible to go on with two kinds of creation at once and her book must wait, she read a great deal as a defence against thinking, nailing her mind to the printed page and forcing herself to comprehend it before she turned to the next. She helped to make the baby’s clothes,
sometimes
with hands that shook with a kind of inner fury masked by smiling composure. She never gave way to tears or to the convulsions of frantic rebellion which tore through her like tornadoes without warning. And sometimes she tried to imagine what the little creature would be like, with such a heritage—Miles’s diffidences and anxieties, her own seething self-control.
Her ordeal was cut short by the baby itself, which arrived at the end of May more than a month too soon. It was small and sickly and pathetic, but it had made up its mind to live, and so had Phoebe. And it was duly christened Jefferson at Bruton Parish Church, as Miles would have wished. Sometimes she wondered, even while she fed it, if it would always, all its life, seem to her a total stranger.
B
Y THE
time she was well again, and able to go back to work on the unfinished book, the whole year with Miles had begun to have a curious, unreal quality, like a vivid dream—and she recognized in herself an echo of the summer in England when Oliver’s vital presence had turned Miles into a shadow, and made her life in Williamsburg seem as though it had happened to somebody else. The out-of-focus mood persisted confusingly, just as it had
followed her home to Williamsburg before and wrought upon her to send the letter to Oliver too late. Once more she was seeing double—the inviolate, insurgent thing that was herself, and the smiling automaton who moved through her days.
Including the baby, more than eighteen months of her life had gone by in a kind of fourth dimension over which she had had no control and of which she had only the haziest
recollections
now that she was back to normal again, comfortably bemused by a book, glued to a typewriter, turning out chapters which had apparently lain fallow in her mind only awaiting the day of release. This is either the best stuff I ever wrote or the very worst, she told herself, peeling off the pages,
concerned
that there seemed to be so little rewriting to do. Either I’ve lost the faculty of criticizing my own work, or I’ve got some sort of inspiration, she thought dubiously. Conny would hate being an inspiration….
When Bracken arrived for Christmas that year she let him read the first half of the manuscript, and it made him blink. “Gosh,” he said to Dinah in their room that night, for he had taken it to bed with him, “Phoebe is going to set the Thames on fire with this one. Everybody will run like hell from the serial rights, though.”
Dinah, who was half asleep with her back to the light, turned over.
“What’s it about?” she asked, coming awake as she was always ready to do if Bracken wanted to talk.
“It’s about Germans,” said Bracken. “Germans at home, Germans in England, Germans anywhere. It’s her own private declaration of war, and it’s a daisy! She’ll never dare to go back to Heidersdorf if she publishes this, I wonder if she realizes it!”
“Would they know?” asked Dinah.
“Of course they’d know, they never overlook anything!”
Bracken read on. Dinah squirmed round and lay with her cheek against his shoulder so she could read too. Pretty soon she said, “Golly!” and Bracken said, “I told you!” and turned the page. It was three o’clock before they put out the light.
Phoebe was delighted at Bracken’s reaction to the
manuscript
and promised to get it down as fast as she could, and said she didn’t care a hoot if everybody was going to be afraid of the serial rights. When he warned her that her name would be mud in Germany after the book came out she looked grave, for she had promised Rosalind she would come back, and already two summers had escaped her.
“I might go this year before it’s published,” she ruminated.
“You’d better, if you’re going,” said Bracken. “We’ll get that war any minute now, and travelling might be difficult.”
“Who is going to fight whom?” Phoebe asked with some sarcasm.
“Germany is going to fight England,” he told her flatly. “It may not start that way, but that’s how it will end. France—Russia—Austria—the Balkans—they’re just also-rans. The main event is London against Berlin. To see who really rules the waves.”
“England, of course,” said Phoebe.
“Of course,” he agreed promptly. “But she’s going to have to demonstrate very soon. Somebody has to lick Germany and teach her manners. I only hope we’ll have the sense over here to pitch in and help.”
Phoebe stared at him.
“
America?
”
she cried. “Fight
Germany?
I’ve been down here in the backwoods too long. What’s going on in the world?”
“The Prussian so-and-so’s have got their eye on the Panama Canal,” said Bracken.
Phoebe didn’t argue, though the words hit her plunk in the midriff, nor did she tell him he was crazy. Bracken never spoke without the book, and he and Dinah had been months abroad last summer. It was no good asking him how he knew. The chances were a hundred to one that he was right.
“I’ve just sent Johnny Malone to Berlin,” said Bracken. “He speaks German now. I thought you’d like to know.”
“Give him my love next time you write,” said Phoebe.
“I wish I could,” said Bracken, who had never approved of her marrying Miles.
I
T WAS
the following June before the book was finished, and Phoebe took it up to New York herself, leaving little Jeff at home with Sue and his Mammy, who was Delilah’s eldest daughter Rachel. She went to stay with Dinah and Bracken, who were soon to sail for their usual summer abroad. She wanted to buy some clothes and see some plays and get in touch with things again. And she had half promised to go on to Germany.
Bracken didn’t come home to dinner the first evening she was there and Dinah explained.
“He’s sitting up with the transatlantic cable,” she said. “They’ve shot that Austrian Archduke who married Sophie Chotek, remember?”
“
Did
he marry her?” asked Phoebe, dimly recalling old scandals.
“Morganatically he did. She died with him, poor soul, at a place called Sarajevo. Bracken says this may be the kick-off.”
“
War?
” cried Phoebe, thoroughly startled, and Dinah nodded.
“It’s the time of year,” she said vaguely.
“But—not because of Ferdinand and his Sophie Chotek!”
“He was Franz Josef’s heir,” said Dinah. “Bracken says
anything
can start it now. They’re only waiting for an excuse. Things have been touchy there ever since Austria annexed some territory a few years ago.”
“But I still don’t see that England comes into it.”
“War spreads, Bracken says. And they’re all tied up in alliances and guarantees. England has got to stand by France, and France has got to stand by Russia, and they’ve both got to stand by Belgium—and so on.”
“Wh-what about Oliver and Charles?” asked Phoebe, dazed.
“They’ll be in it, of course. And so will Bracken—as a correspondent, the way he went to Cuba.” Dinah’s eyes were dark. “They get shot at just the same as soldiers”
“Oh, poor Rosalind—she always dreaded this so!”
“We never liked to say anything,” Dinah began slowly, “but the chances of her getting out of Germany if they declare war on England are pretty slim. She’ll be practically a prisoner.”
“Can’t we do something about it? Can’t we get her out
first?
”
“How?” asked Dinah resignedly. “She
married
him!”
“I promised to go back,” said Phoebe. “What if I sailed with you next week and asked her to meet me somewhere—Paris, or Switzerland, if she can’t get to London.”
“But, Phoebe, you’ve got the baby!”
“I don’t think he’d miss me much, at his age. If I could get Rosalind to come to Paris for a few days’ shopping, suppose, even if Conny came along we might be able to save her—”
“Darling, I don’t think you quite comprehend,” said Dinah gently, for living with Bracken made one a realist, “if war is declared Conrad will be mobilized—civilians can’t travel about to shop—frontiers will be closed—France will be enemy territory for Rosalind.”
“But there must be some way!” Phoebe insisted. “Let’s get hold of Johnny in Berlin! Bracken could come at it some way through Johnny, and he could go to see her!”
But Bracken said firmly that Johnny had a couple of other things to see to just now, and two days later a cable forwarded to Phoebe from Williamsburg settled it:
Don’t
come.
Don’t
try.
Love
always.
ROSALIND.
It looked for a while as though Serbia might be able to handle it, with a lot of tact and the grace of God. Dinah and Bracken sailed on the Mauretania, and Phoebe returned to Williamsburg feeling tied and helpless, and waited anxiously each day for the Richmond paper to arrive, hours ahead of the
Star
from New York.
It was from Sue’s quiet house in Williamsburg that she watched the black cloud, at first no larger than a man’s hand,
gather above Europe as July ran out into August and the monstrous choosing up of sides began. Russia—Serbia—France—Belgium—England and the Oversea Dominions, the roll-call ran, against Germany and Austria-Hungary. It looked all right. It looked safe. But only Germany was ready.
In August Bracken’s dispatches from Belgium began to appear in the
Star,
which Phoebe received daily. He had got out to the Continent in time to see the Germans enter Brussels on the twentieth—an army with banners and bands, breaking into the famous goose-step as it approached the Grands
Boulevards
—they had sent up a fresh army corps, replacing the battered troops who had done the fighting, to make the entry more impressive—the Belgian population stood on the
pavement
and watched it in stony silence, and though it was
mid-afternoon
on a showery summer day, the air was cold and black with hate, wrote Bracken, as the Germans took possession of the main squares and spread out through the captured city.
A week later Louvain was burned, deliberately set fire to, house by house, amid atrocities and terror. In Brussels it was hard to believe what the people of Louvain were suffering. Brussels had been merely overrun, as by locusts. Its occupation was orderly, though severe. Rheims fell on September fourth, was retaken by the French and then was pounded by German artillery for four solid days…. This was a new kind of war, wrote Bracken. German
Schrecklichkeit
was a new weapon. There were no rules to this war.
A letter from Dinah said she was working for the Red Cross in an office established in the ballroom of one of the big houses in Park Lane where young officers now getting killed in France had been waltzing a few weeks before. Charles had been promoted full colonel and given command of a cavalry regiment and was already in France. Oliver would be going out very soon as a brigade-major. Edward was rushing round London trying to get a job as somebody’s ADC, and Archie would be chucked into the Judge Advocate General’s
department because he knew law, and was moaning that he would never see France.
In October there was a letter from Virginia:
You’ll never guess who has turned up in England (she wrote Phoebe) in a boatload of refugees from Antwerp! You see, my French being useful, I was asked to go down to Folkestone and help with the bewildered Belgian refugees who are streaming in there in such a state they don’t even know their own names any more. Last
Saturday
I had just got back to my hotel after an exhausting day sorting out wailing children and broken-hearted women and a few wounded, when one of our assistants ran up to say would I please come back at once to the quay because somebody was asking for me. And it was
Cousin
Sally!
Of course the last anybody here heard of her she was safe in the South of France, but little, as Bracken is fond of saying, did we know! Had you people in Williamsburg any idea that Cousin Sally had had a daughter years ago in France, not by any one of her three lawful husbands, and that this Clémence—herself duly married—then had a daughter called Fabrice, who is now sixteen? (Clémence is dead, and so is her husband, and Fabrice has been brought up by Cousin Sally and calls her
belle-mère
because Cousin Sally still doesn’t look like anybody’s
grand’ mère
.)
Fabrice was at school in Brussels, and when things began to look bad Cousin Sally went there to fetch her back to Cannes. But before they could leave Brussels mobilization set in, and made it impossible for civilians to travel, and the next thing they knew the Germans were right on top of them. I should have mentioned before—the whole thing is desperately complicated as you can see!—that with Cousin Sally beside Fabrice are her maid Elvire, a gaunt, middle-aged creature inclined to just sit and quietly drip with tears in the most pathetic way, and a
very silent man, also French, forty-ish, in delicate health, who naturally had to be kept out of the Germans’ clutches. So they all fled on to Antwerp, because that was the only train they could get into. And then Antwerp was bombed by the Zeppelins, and one bomb fell right at the end of the street where they were, and they
saw
the Zeppelin overhead, and saw the houses which were hit, and the dead bodies—and it was all just as we were told it would be, with vertical death and destruction as well as the old-fashioned horizontal kind, and Charles, God bless him, was right, and I only hope the right people listened to him in time.
Not long after that Namur went, and Antwerp began to be shelled by German artillery, and they had the most hair-raising escape down the Scheldt in a fishing boat, which was one of the last to get away, with the city on fire behind them and hot flying ashes falling in their hair. They thought it was a boat going to Ostend, but it came straight on to England and landed them at Folkestone, pretty much done up, not having had anything to eat since the Lord knows when, and having lost every scrap of luggage except Cousin Sally’s jewel-case, which Elvire managed to hold on to through everything. When our people at Folkestone began to ask Cousin Sally the usual rude questions about her resources and if she had any friends in England, she showed them the jewels—a king’s ransom, I should think—and mentioned me as her nearest relative. And I was only ten minutes away from where she stood!
You can imagine the scene. I took them all back to my one bedroom at the hotel, which is packed out, and wangled a little cubby-hole on the top floor which the mysterious Sosthène could call his own, and left them to wash up and tidy themselves while I wheedled a decent meal for them in the dining-room, it being long after the usual hours for hot food. And now I have sent them all down to Farthingale to recover, while I get on with things
here, rather wondering what the next boat will bring! Fabrice can wear the clothes I left at home, and no doubt will, and I’ve written Clare to help provide extras for the rest of them, until we can see where we are.
I can hear you shrieking, “But what’s she
like!
” Well, she’s exactly like what we have always imagined Cousin Sally would be. She must be getting on for seventy, but her figure and carriage are still young, and her hair is still red—very well done, too. And she does speak English with a French accent, just as Bracken told us she did, years ago. Of course her
maquillage
had run a bit, and her marcel had come loose, and she was tired and tragic and bewildered, but not at all confused, and never without dignity. If I had not happened to be there she would have taken them all to London and put them up at Claridge’s and refurnished in Bond Street without delay. Tell Cousin Sedgwick he need have no anxiety, she’s tough, and she’s come through with her colours flying. What’s more, I am convinced that the silent Sosthène is her property and not Fabrice’s. The tenderness in his manner towards her is beyond words, and his concern for her comfort is like a lover’s.
Bracken was at Brussels and Antwerp too, as you must already know, but in that mob they never saw each other—lucky for him! He left Antwerp in a motor car through Bruges to Ostend with a couple of British correspondents who simply had to keep one jump ahead of the Germans, and came on by boat to Dover. He had two days in London, most of the time asleep, though I believe he did something about a courier service as well, and has now gone back to Boulogne where our wounded are coming out.
The St. James’s Square house is being turned into a hospital for wounded officers, and Dinah is doing
whatever
she can there, as I shall later on. Winifred is simply wonderful, and Clare has gone down to Gloucestershire to superintend turning the Hall into a convalescent home for
soldiers. We do wish you were here, we could use you! I don’t say anything about the sheer crowding horror of these days in England because you can read that anywhere and we keep too busy to think much about it. Archie is up in the Midlands somewhere doing I don’t know what—
Captain
the Hon. Archie Campion, if you please!—and I haven’t seen him for days and don’t expect to for days more. London is pretty grim, with almost no light in the streets at night except for searchlights hunting for Zeppelins—everyone says we are bound to get them here before long, especially if we should lose the French Channel ports.
Do you still hear from Rosalind? She can’t reach anybody in England now, so you are the last link. One daren’t think what she may be up against these days, though Conrad’s position will protect her to some degree. English people were roughly treated in Berlin when war was declared, and the Embassy windows were all smashed with rocks brought along by the mob for that purpose—you don’t just pick up brickbats loose in the Wilhelmstrasse!—and a crowd stormed the Adlon Hotel looking for British newspaper correspondents, who had to get out the back way. Some Americans were mistaken for English and had a very lively time in the streets, and the Ambassador has been splendid. I keep wondering about Johnny Malone in Berlin—of course he is having the time of his life, though how he’ll get his copy out nobody knows—there is no Western Union cable-landing in Germany, crazy as that seems, only one line which runs through the Azores.
Bracken saw the German Army pouring through Brussels for three days and three nights without stopping, like a mechanized caterpillar, with a dreadful mechanized
singing
in time to their feet—he saw the ruins of Louvain while they were still smoking—he saw the women’s faces and the children—he talked to German officers and men—
and he says it’s nonsense to hope for a short war or an easy one. He says the Germans are a separate race, not quite human, with no margin for error. He says nothing will save us but being tougher and better trained and equipped and more determined than they are—and not getting rattled. He says they count on our getting rattled, and do everything they can to make us lose our heads and let each other down. He says there aren’t any rules any more, the Germans always hit below the belt. He says sportsmanship isn’t any good with Germans, they only think you are a fool. He says Britain has got to throw the book out of the window and start slugging. And he says America has got to come in.
So heaven knows when we shall all be together again in the old way. But we’ve been sitting on the lid of this volcano so long it’s almost a relief to find it has blown off at last, so that we can really get down to it. We shall win, of course, and teach Germany a lesson, but at what cost. I will do my best to keep track of things and let you hear often. Maia wanted to do her share, naturally, and they have taken her on at St. James’s Square, but she’s just as hard to get along with as she ever was—Winifred tells her off like a drill sergeant, but darling Dinah tries to be polite and I frankly avoid Maia, and it’s all frightfully awkward and unnecessary and not at all the sort of thing one wants in a hospital where people ought all to pull together. At least Oliver will get a change!…
