The Light Heart (50 page)

Rosalind was back at the Chelsea house herself, having said firmly that Charles or no Charles she could not sit down comfortably in the country and fold her hands in the middle of a war. She could play to the men by the hour, and they loved it because she always gave them what they asked for, from Bach to
Tipperary,
and encouraged them to sing, and everyone knew that a good ringing song, with everybody joining in, was wonderful for keeping the spirits up. She sent Phoebe her love by Virginia, and hoped to get down to Farthingale herself for a few days later on, but a new batch of men had just come in, some of them in bad shape, and she was needed.

As for the war, which Phoebe had somewhat lost track of, the German situation on the Somme was now so desperate that they had begun to loose whole flocks of Zeppelins on London, though very few of them got through. Royal Flying
Corps boys who had mastered the difficult business of taking off and landing in darkness went up to meet them, and
Zeppelins
were being brought down in flames all over the place, with their German crews roasted, Virginia reported callously, beyond recognition. In Belgium the invaders had resorted to slave raids on the conquered population for labour at home, and were conscripting men in Poland for the army. The British Coalition Government was in what Bracken tactfully termed disesteem, and people said Mr. Asquith would resign soon, and that man Lloyd George, was always making trouble. And on the other side of the Atlantic, President Wilson was running for a second term.

Mention of Mr. Wilson always aroused Aunt Sally to caustic comment. His behaviour since the Lusitania went down was in her eyes both indefensible and humiliating, for Aunt Sally considered herself still an American even though she gave it the French pronunciation in the feminine. His unfortunate remark that America was not concerned with the causes of the war had earned for him her violent enmity, and there was a similar reaction in more official quarters, the difference being that Aunt Sally said what she thought, and perpetually apologized to Sosthène for the affront to his countrymen which was implicit in the President’s intimation that one side was no better than the other—his total inability to comprehend the issues at stake.

Sosthène, it was now known, had been barred in his youth from doing his military service by a constitutional delicacy which made it impossible for him to ride or climb or dance or attempt anything which taxed his endurance, and therefore he was useless in an army where men much older than he were doggedly holding out in the trenches—and since an operation a year ago he had been compelled to the life of a semi-invalid.

No one had any idea how long the association between him and Aunt Sally had been going on, but it was very evidently based on mutual devotion, in his case expressed by a touching tenderness of manner and countless small, watchful services,
and on hers by a fierce protectiveness and an anxious attention to his diet and peace of
mind and the danger of draughts. She plainly regarded President Wilson as a blot on Sosthène’s personal landscape, and never failed to knife him at every opportunity for not throwing America’s fresh strength and conclusive weight into the struggle which had ravished France and was claiming all the best men in England.

“This Meester Weelson,” Aunt Sally would say, scorn exaggerating the French twist to his name. “He is a village schoolmaster, who reads copy-book nothings from a
blackboard
—out of date—out of contact—out of his brains! We shall never redeem ourselves as a democracy. George
Washington
must revolve without doubt in his grave! Lafayette—has this Weelson ever heard of Lafayette, do you think? Your Grandmother Tabitha Day, Phoebe, was a protegée of
Lafayette
, do you remember?”

“Well, yes, Aunt Sally, but she was a little girl at the time—”

“Have I said she was not? My great grandmother, it was, as a matter of fact, your great-great. How time slips away when one is happy as I have been. Gran adored Lafayette, that I remember well—he came second after the man she married, who was his friend. What Gran would say to this Weelson I dare not think! Jefferson she had no fear of speaking up to—and the Randolphs when they quizzed her. Gran was not afraid of anything, not even the Yankees when they came to
Williamsburg.
I am glad she did not live to meet a Boche.” She brooded a moment, looking back, her fine, veined hand loaded with rings tapping the arm of her chair. “How is it that such an imbecile as this Weelson should be born in the State of
Virginia
, the cradle of all our liberties? A man without
statesmanship
—without even tact, or usual international good manners!—without bowels of compassion! What is he made of, and he a Virginian like the rest of us! He belongs better in Berlin, where they breed boors, and I should like to see him sent there!”

Sosthène reached out and stilled with his own gentle hand the restless fingers on the arm of her chair. A long look passed between them, naked with love and understanding. She smiled.

“I know. You do not like me to break my heart. But it is for the State of Virginia I have pity—one hangs one’s head in shame—so long a tradition of great men, and now
this!
Ah, well, it is soon over—he will not be re-elected.”

“But, darling, Hughes doesn’t say anything about putting us into the war either,” Virginia reminded her. “And it has to be either Wilson or Hughes, they say.”

Aunt Sally clenched small white jewelled fists.

“Where are our
men?”
she cried. “What have we stood for, all these years, but what the Allies are fighting for now! Freedom from tyranny—freedom from
bullies
—it is the
Germans
again, just as it was when Gran was a little girl and we fought a German who happened to be King of England! It is always the Germans who cause the trouble, what is it about Germans that they must molest and oppress? Why are not Germans
people?”

“They have never been civilized,” said Sosthène, who so rarely spoke. “They were never conquered by Rome. They remained barbarians.”

Phoebe stared at him. It was a viewpoint.

“Say that again,” she commanded.

“It surprises you?” he asked with his courteous, underisive smile.

“Well, yes—I hadn’t thought of it like that.”

“One is perhaps inclined to forget that even here in Britain there were four hundred years of the Pax Romana,” he said gently. “In Germany, no—only the Vandals and the Goths. Every so often they burst out. It is in the breed.”

“May I use that?” Phoebe asked, the professional in her stirring. “May I quote you?”

He gave his small, amiable shrug, his quiet hand still covering Sally’s.

“It is not original,” he said, amused.

Bracken had put his foot down on any more of what he called Phoebe’s Belgian nonsense, as though he had not suggested it in the first place, and was arranging for her to go to a hospital near Paris, where the life would be a little less murderous and he hoped she would have time and strength to do some writing on the side. She was not fully recovered when the summons from there came late in the year, but she insisted on starting for France immediately for fear someone else would get her job, she said naïvely—bitter fighting was still going on in the Ancre valley and the French were starting an attack at Verdun.

She spent several days in London, and the last evening before her departure she went round to Chelsea to say Good-bye to Rosalind. As she stepped out of the taxi in front of the house she heard the drone of
motors overhead and the guns in the north of the city had already begun. The driver cocked an eye upwards.

“Jerry’s back,” he said cheerfully. “You’d think they’d get tired of it, wouldn’t you, all the good it does ’em.” And then, as the Whitehall guns took up the tale, “Better skip inside, miss—what goes up must come down!” And he was off towards the Embankment with a reckless scrape of gears.

Phoebe ran up the steps and rang the bell, and the maid took her to a sitting-room two flights up where Rosalind was expecting her. The ground defence was getting noisier and the first dull crunch of a falling bomb shook the windows as they greeted each other.

“Just in time,” said Rosalind in relief. “I was afraid you might have to take shelter somewhere on the way, and our evening would be gone. I suppose these little London shows look pretty feeble to you after being in Belgium.”

“We were never actually bombed at the hospital,” Phoebe said. “There were German planes over us a good deal of the time, but they never made any serious effort to flatten us. It was always much worse on the road coming and going than while you were there.”

“The men say it seems worse here in London,” Rosalind told her. “Just because it’s not the front. Some of them who stood up to anything that came along in France are inclined to go to pieces here, because it’s
London
and ought to be safe. And of course not being able to see makes everything more
frightening
.” She paused a moment, listening to the din inside. “Would you mind going downstairs while this is on?”

“No, but I’m not really nervous—” Phoebe began in some surprise.

“Oh, it isn’t that, it’s the men,” Rosalind explained. “You see—this is Maia’s night on duty—she’s supposed to be reading to them, but she can’t be heard above this row, and anyway—”

“Anyway, what?” Phoebe demanded, following Rosalind out into the upper passage.

“Anyway, she’s no good in a raid,” said Rosalind flatly, and the words were drowned by the loudest crash of all, and Phoebe saw from above that the great crystal chandelier which hung over the staircase was swinging as though in an earthquake.

“Could that thing come down?” she asked casually, and a turn in the staircase brought them level with it, and then beneath it, as they descended, and Rosalind glanced up.

“Well, it never
has,”
she remarked wryly, and laid a quick hand on Phoebe’s arm as they reached the floor above the street level, where the big front drawing-room had been turned into the soldiers’ recreation room.

Through the wide, arching doorway they could see the men sitting about in comfortable chairs with their canes beside them, in the patient immobility of the blind. Some of them still wore their bandages, others looked quite normal except for their attitude of waiting, their lack of free movement, for they were all still new to the business of finding their way about in the dark.

Just coming out of the door was Maia, wearing her nursing dress, with an open book still in her hand. She halted when she saw them, and backed up against the door-casing. She was white to the lips and there was an odd glitter in her eyes.

“They can’t—can’t hear me in this noise,” she gasped, on the defensive. “It’s no good my staying here, I can’t shout above this!”

“Go down to the shelter,” said Rosalind curtly. “Well stay with them.”

“But I couldn’t make myself
heard
,” Maia repeated
breathlessly
, and Phoebe saw that her teeth were inclined to chatter and that her fingers gripped the book till the tips were white. Another bomb shook the windows and the whole house seemed to shiver and settle, and Maia dropped the book and ducked against the wall, flattening herself to it. “It’s the
noise!
” she cried, and began to babble. “Even with a thunderstorm, I can’t stand the noise, you know I’ve always been afraid of thunderstorms, even when I was a child—you think I’m a coward, but I’ve always had bad nerves, and there’s nothing I can do for the men while this is on, they won’t even know whether I’m there or not—”

“Get down to the shelter,” said Rosalind through her teeth. “Go on down where you belong, and sit with the kitchen maids and be
safe!
”

Maia fled, sobbing, her hands over her ears, towards the lower flight of stairs which led to the main hall and the entrance through a green baize door to the servants’ quarters and the cellar refuge where the maids gathered during the raids.

Rosalind turned in the doorway, facing the tense immobility of the helpless, waiting men, and she crossed swiftly to the piano, calling out, “How about a song, boys, let’s drown them out, we can make more noise than that if we try!”

The piano banged gaily into

while Rosalind’s trained voice rose steady and true, and the men’s voices followed. And then the world rocked round them
with a mighty concussion and the long windows above the street blew inwards and shattered behind their heavy velour curtains with a lingering tinkle of glass, and the air was full of plaster dust and the smell of explosive, and all the lights went out except a pair of candles on the mantelpiece.

Once more they all heard Rosalind’s confident voice: “That was a close one, but we’re all right here! Sit still, everybody, there’s glass all over the place. Wait till we can get some more light and brush things off a bit. Don’t anybody move!” And she added to Phoebe, who was beside her at the piano, “There are candles in the wall-brackets. Hurry and light them from the ones on
the mantel.” And as they each snatched up a candlestick she whispered, “I’ll bet that one
shook her up! She must have been still in the lower hall when it hit!”

Phoebe carried her candle to the door and stopped there, staring into the darkness where the staircase had been. The great chandelier had broken away from the ceiling four storeys up and struck the steps, carrying them down with it as the staircase wall buckled inward in a mass of masonry which had fallen straight through the lower hall to the basement. Even the floor of the upper passage where she stood sloped precariously towards the chasm, and plaster fragments were still sifting down from the jagged hole above.

Slowly she turned back into the room, where Rosalind was moving briskly about with her candle, dusting off with her handkerchief the heads and shoulders of the men who had been near the window, in case of glass splinters, requiring them all to sit still and not cut themselves, making light of the smashed room which they could not see, and the lack of illumination. Soon the rescue squad would arrive and begin to dig in the wreckage below, where it seemed impossible that there could be anything living, and somehow the men must be led out to new quarters for the rest of the night and many days to come. Silent, composed, with her serene hospital mask as firmly in place as though the men she tended still had their eyes, Phoebe set down her candle on a small table and bent to run her fingers lightly over the collar and hair of the nearest man, feeling for glass. He snatched at her hand and held on tightly.