The Light Heart (47 page)

At Munich, where the train stopped a long time, they knew they were still five hours from Lindau, and Rosalind sat tensely quiet while their compartment filled up again. But at last the wheels began to turn, and they looked at each other. The last lap.

P
HOEBE
, kicking her heels at Zurich, had no idea when to expect word from Johnny or in what form it would come. Probably he would have to travel all the way back to Zurich in order to speak freely and give her the real facts about
Rosalind
’s silence. If Rosalind was all right—but she wasn’t. She couldn’t be. And if there was something fishy it might take him a while to find out. If she was dead—he wouldn’t just send a telegram about that either. He’d come and tell how and when.

Meanwhile Phoebe reminded herself that it was an excellent opportunity to learn all about Zurich, which might come in handy some time, remembering what a nuisance it was to have to write scenes laid in Berlin when she had never been there, though no one had ever guessed it—but she found the band concerts in the Stadhaus-Platz and the views from the Quais and promenades and the Botanical Gardens and the museums palled very soon when all her mind was concentrated
elsewhere
, on the news which would come out of Germany.

And then one afternoon when she had returned to the hotel to freshen up for dinner and was writing out some postcards for the children at home, there was a knock on her
sitting-room
door, and as it was probably the chambermaid with
fresh towels she only said Come in, without looking up. And Rosalind herself opened the door.

Johnny was there behind her, of course, pretty well pleased with himself, and Phoebe warmly congratulated him on so Graustarkian an exploit as the abduction of a Prussian Princess, however willing, in broad daylight, and it was some time before they all stopped talking at once and Rosalind’s happy tears were dried, and they remembered they were dying for dinner. Johnny went away for a bath and a shave, and while Phoebe’s clothes were all too big for Rosalind a tea-gown wouldn’t matter and they would have the meal served here in Phoebe’s sitting-room.

There was silence in the bathroom while Rosalind lay in a hot tub and Phoebe pottered about the bedroom laying out fresh things for her to wear, until finally Rosalind’s voice came out through the open door between—

“Phoebe, are you there?”

“Yes, honey, I’m here.”

“Phoebe, I saw Charles.” The words were cautiously low, a little breathless.

“Saw—
Charles!
” Phoebe dropped everything and started for the bathroom door.
“Where?”

“I saw him twice, as a matter of fact. He’s a prisoner.”
Rosalind
swished up out of the water and wrapped herself in a towel. “You can come in if you like, and hand me that dressing-gown.”

“But this is
news,
” said Phoebe, handing the dressing-gown. “He was reported missing.”

“He’s still missing,” said Rosalind grimly, and told about the scene at the station at Halkenwitz, and about the other station at Dresden where Charles went limping away from her, towards Holland—and how Conrad had said Charles was a secret agent, and how one could therefore hope that he knew of ways to get across the frontier—but her eyes were anxious and her teeth were set on her lower lip as she began to dress in Phoebe’s things.

“He’ll turn up safe,” Phoebe reassured her. “They’re nearly crazy in England because his uncle’s sons have both been killed and Charles is the heir now.”

“The heir to
Cleeve?”
cried Rosalind in dismay. “Charles a
marquis?
He’ll hate that, won’t he!”

“Don’t see why, it’s not one of the most impoverished titles,” said Phoebe sensibly. “The tenants all love him, Virginia says, and he’ll add tone to any coronation wearing four guards of ermine on his robe and a coronet with pearls and strawberry leaves.”

“You always know the oddest things,” said Rosalind, bending over her stockings.

“Well, I had to read up on
coronations, don’t forget!”

“Doesn’t it seem a long time ago!” said Rosalind dreamily.

After she was safely tucked up in bed that night in a room next door to Phoebe’s at the Hotel Baur au Lac, she went on thinking about Charles and the responsibilities of his
inheritance
. But it’s nothing to do with me, really, she told herself firmly, for tired as she was, she couldn’t go to sleep. Charles will be just the same, the title won’t change him. Only now he’ll have to marry, on account of the succession. I’ve forgotten who comes next after Charles, but it can’t be anybody much. Charles will have to have children now, for Cleeve Place. But that’s nothing to do with me, because even if Conrad divorced me I don’t—don’t ever want to marry again, not even Charles, and Victor is all the children I’ll ever have. Anyway, I want to belong to myself now, and not to any man….

And then, for the first time since Johnny had come to Heidersdorf, she thought,
But
what
shall
I
live
on?
She had run away, burnt her bridges, hopelessly cut herself off, without a penny. Mamma wouldn’t be pleased, she had only enough for herself. The idea of escape from Germany had excluded
everything
else. With a fine gesture of disdain she had left even her jewels behind. Everything had been so lavishly provided for so long she had actually forgotten it had to be paid for by somebody.

Well, I’ve got four languages, she thought. I can go as a governess. People like Virginia will let me teach their children French and Italian—I don’t suppose anyone will want their children to learn German nowadays, and anyway my German still isn’t as good as my Spanish, even, after all these years. Perhaps I can teach music too. I shall have to earn my living. That will be something new….

But her mind kept on going back to Charles and his
impending
marquisate. Some woman will snap him up now, she thought. He’s such a lamb…. She buried her face in the pillow. It’s too late, I’m no good to him. But I can still see him sometimes. And that’s all I ever really hoped for or wanted. I can see him sometimes….

3.
Farthingale
Christmas,
1915

Z
EPPELINS
had begun to get through to London now, working in from Kent and Suffolk, and on
the night in September that Rosalind and Phoebe arrived a great deal of damage was done in the City, and casualties were heavy. They had reached St. James’s Square before the raid began, and were having a cup of tea with Virginia in the upstairs sitting-room reserved for the family when the pom-poms started and the big Hyde Park guns began to speak. Virginia asked at once if they wanted to go down to the shelter in the basement, but Phoebe said No, she meant to get used to it, and anyway that was guns on the ground they heard and not bombs—so far.

“How clever of you to be able to tell the difference,” said Maia, who had just come off duty in the ward below and was still in uniform.

Phoebe saw that she looked pinched and white and terrified, and discovered with humiliation that her own hands were
shaking, and her heart had begun to knock about in her chest the way it had done on the Lusitania
.
She’s frightened out of her wits, Phoebe thought contemptuously—so am I—but I won’t show it—I’ll die first—Virginia’s all right—one must get used to it—

“Let’s open the window and see if we can’t see it,” said
Rosalind
. “I think I hear a Zcpp motor over us this minute.”

“And if you do see it be sure to say that it looks exactly like a big silver cigar, won’t you,” Maia suggested tartly. “
Everyone
does. I’m for the shelter, myself, there’s no point in
showing
off when there’s no one to see.” The door snapped behind her crisp skirts, and Virginia made a face.

“Funk,” she said briefly. “She’s wonderful with dressings, and has the lightest touch of any of us, so they can use her for burns and bleeding wounds—she can stand anything like that, things that would turn me inside out. The surgeons prefer her, and the men ask for her. I only hope there’s never a raid when she’s on duty!”

The door opened again and Winifred came in briskly settling her cuffs for her turn in the ward.

“What a row outside,” she remarked, and kissed Rosalind warmly. “Welcome to England, darling, we’re doing this in your honour. You might have been safer where you were!”

“Don’t you think we could
see
it?” Rosalind entreated.

“It’s right over our heads by the sound of it,” Winifred said unconcernedly, going towards the heavy curtains which masked the window. “Put out the lights, somebody.”

The switch clicked under Virginia’s hand, and the curtains rattled back on their brass rings. Winifred threw up the window and leaned out.

“There it is! Two of ’em, b’God!” she said. “Why
can’t
we shoot them down more often, you’d think they were big enough for our gunners to hit, wouldn’t you!”

Phoebe forced herself to go to the window and lean out with the rest, her arm around Rosalind’s waist. The sky over London was criss-crossed with searchlights, and the Zeppelins
hung in the stabbing beams of light, one of them quite near, perhaps directly over Trafalgar Square. It
was
cigar-shaped, she thought wryly, and the lights turned it silver.

“It’s not dropping anything now,” said Winifred, watching intently. “We’re making all the noise, here below. Why can’t our
aeroplanes
get it, if the pom-poms can’t? There must be some answer to them, England can’t just sit down under this!”

“Why not bomb Berlin?” Rosalind remarked, gazing quietly up at the humming monsters.

“Yes, why not!” cried Winifred, and pulled them in and slammed down the window. “Would you mind if they did?” she asked over her shoulder as the lights came on
again and she stood rearranging the curtains.

“Mind? Me?” Rosalind looked bewildered. “It’s the ugliest city I ever saw, full of the ugliest people! And it’s no good fighting this war with our gloves on, you know,” she added matter-of-factly. “
They
won’t!”

“Well, I’m glad to see somebody else as bloodthirsty as I am!” grinned Winifred. “Whenever I say something like that people raise their eyebrows as though I had forgotten my manners!”

“You don’t want manners with Germans,” said Rosalind. “
They
haven’t any. If you’re polite to a German he thinks you’re afraid of him—which you usually are. But if you’re ruder than he is, he thinks you’re Somebody, and tries to be polite himself. And when a German is polite he licks your boots.”

“Good Lord,” said Winifred. “Well, you ought to know!” And she went away to the ward, her skirt crackling.

T
HE
air raid made up Phoebe’s mind for her. She was not going to leave England just yet. She wrote to Dinah asking her if she would keep Jeff over Christmas time, so that she could
stay and be of real use at the St. James’s Square hospital, and enrolled for V.A.D. training. Rosalind, who was judged too delicate for nursing, went to Lady Shadwell’s house in Chelsea, which had been turned over to the care of convalescent blinded men. She read to them, played the piano to them, and made them sing with her, and they loved it.

And day after hopeful day slid by without news of Charles.

It was October when he turned up at last—telegraphed from Dover and then just walked into his old commanding officer’s room at the War Office, leaning rather heavily on his cane and wearing the mussy suit of German civilian clothes which looked as though it had been slept in more than once. His General, warned by an almost-excited subaltern of Charles’s arrival, looked up from his desk as Charles entered and said, “Well, you
have
been a time. Who’s your tailor nowadays?” But he rose as he spoke, and their handclasp said the rest.

Charles’s leg was found to be in very bad shape, with a damaged kneecap and joint which two operations failed to put right. Rosalind went to see him in hospital as soon as it was allowed, and except that he wasn’t tanned found him looking much as usual. When she told him about working with the German Red Cross at the Halkenwitz railway station he said, “Then it
was
you, bending over me! I thought for days I must be clean off my rocker!” And when she told him about the ticket window at Dresden he said, “By Jove, yes, I did step on someone there at the wicket—was that
you
again?” And they laughed together, and their eyes held, and he said, “Not going back to Germany again—ever?” She shook her head. “God be praised,” Charles sighed, very flat in his hospital bed. “Now I can put my mind on the war,” he said.

But Charles was through with the war, for his right knee would be stiff as a board for the rest of his life, and his Uncle Cleeve died a few weeks before Christmas. Charles was given honourable discharge from the Army and advised to go down to Gloucestershire and be a big land-owner and help win the war with his acres and his timber and his livestock and his farms.

Bracken was coming back from France to spend Christmas at Farthingale, and Archie got unexpected leave, so Winifred made Virginia take Christmas week for herself in the country. And with Phoebe and Rosalind, and Aunt Sally’s troupe, they were quite a family reunion. It was understood that Charles would drive over from Cleeve Place for Christmas Day, and Clare was to bring the children from the Hall because
Mortimer
was somewhere in the North on his remount job—all the children except Hermione, who was being sent up to London with her governess to spend Christmas with Oliver and Maia there, and Hubert, Winifred’s eldest, who was at Eton and would also go to London for Christmas.

It was the second Christmas of the war, but the shops were still full or presents and Phoebe’s American dollars were lavishly drawn upon. They had convinced Rosalind that she needn’t start her governessing quite yet, not so long as she was so useful at Lady Shadwell’s, and Phoebe had insisted on putting a hundred pounds to her credit at the bank, for pin money, as Mrs. Norton-Leigh had behaved rather badly.