The Light Heart (51 page)

“Where did it land?” he asked, turning up his bandaged face to her anxiously. “It
was
close, wasn’t it! Were we hit?”

“Oh, no, nothing as bad as that,” she reassured him gently. “It must have landed somewhere further along the
Embankment
. All we got was the blast. The chandelier in the hall came down all over the staircase, and we’ll have to stay here till they clear it away, there’s a lot of plaster down.”

“Lucky we were all in here when it happened,” he said. “I remember that chandelier, I used to see it often. Lucky there was no one under it.”

5.
France
Spring,
1917

P
HOEBE
left London on the following day, and slept exhaustedly in the train all the way to Folkestone, after being up most of the night. She knew they had sent for Oliver, but before he arrived she had gone with a motor full of blinded men who were to be put up temporarily at Clare’s house in Belgrave Square. By the time she had got them settled in there, Rosalind came round to say that everyone had left the house in Chelsea.

Two maids had been got out of the basement alive and taken to the hospital. Maia, who had not reached the shelter, must have been instantly killed. Phoebe wondered if anyone had told Oliver that Maia had left her post during the raid, was in the act of leaving it before Rosalind and herself had offered to stay with the men in her care. Knowing Rosalind and Virginia, she thought he was pretty sure to find out sometime, but hoped he needn’t know.

The French hospital to which she was now assigned was a small chateau on the Versailles side of Paris, which was owned
by a member of the old
noblesse
who some years ago had married an American woman. Widowed during the first fighting on the Marne, the American
comtesse
had turned the chateau into a convalescent home for soldiers, and Phoebe found its gilded salons full of cots in rows beneath shrouded oil portraits and tapestries and chandeliers, and its extensive
gardens
peopled, even in winter, with muffled figures in
wheelchairs
and on crutches, taking the air.

The routine was comparatively easy after life at the Belgian front, and although she was lacking a typewriter she began to keep her notebooks again. Most of the women with whom she worked were Americans who had married in France, and when soon after her arrival news came that Mr. Wilson had been re-elected Phoebe heard a lively echo of Aunt Sally’s angry bewilderment and humiliation that America, champion of liberty, should stand smugly by, wrapped in aphorism, while other men fought and died for the cause she had always been so ready to defend.

“We went galloping off half-cocked to Cuba to rescue a lot of unwashed niggers from Spain,” said the Comtesse, who was Charleston-born, “but France and England, who are our own kind, can bleed to death and we don’t lift a finger! What Germany has done makes Spain look like a guardian angel! Where’s Roosevelt? Surely
he
hasn’t gone soft like all the rest of them! If that man Hughes, whoever he is, had come straight out and said he’d lead us into war instead of writing Notes he’d be President now, or my name’s not Mary Rutledge!”

When Bracken looked in at Christmas time Phoebe showed him her notebooks and he groaned. It was good, he said, it was great stuff, but they couldn’t print it, it would have to wait a bit. Mr. Wilson in his latest speech, still wearing the mental white robes of the Great Peacemaker he considered himself to be, had called upon both sides to state their aims and explain what they were fighting for—thus, said Bracken, grinding his teeth, suggesting that the Allied aims had not all along been public property, thus implying all over again that
he saw little to choose between Germany’s ruthless aggression and the defence by France and Britain of martyred Belgium and their treaty obligations, which the German Chancellor had named scraps of paper. Mr. Wilson argued for an immediate “peace without victory” and no hard feelings, thus proving that there was no
substitute for commonsense, said Bracken, who was shackled and gagged by the tight Allied censorship which prevented even correspondents from reporting the general reaction, or their own, to the latest Wilsonian
bétise,
for fear of worsening his opinion until he might begin to side openly with Germany. Instead, the Allies issued a clear and patient list of
their terms, and Germany returned vague blusterings about “negotiations.”

They went to a great deal of trouble about Christmas at the chateau, and each wounded man had a little pile of presents, each wrapped separately—cigarettes or chocolate, a pipe, or a penknife, a packet of note-paper, a fountain pen, or a
photograph
frame, a linen handkerchief, a nail file, or a new
toothbrush
—the ingenuity of the Comtesse was boundless, and everything pleased them, for wounded men are strangely like children, uncritical and grateful for little things, and the wards were full of laughter and festivity.

Bracken had brought Phoebe some bonbons from Paris and some silk stockings, for which he received an extravagant hug, and Oliver sent her a gold-mounted fountain pen from Asprey’s done up with a box of notepaper. The card said simply
With love from Oliver
. The gift spoke for itself, and Phoebe took the hint, feeling a little self-conscious as she sat down to write the second letter she had ever sent him in their lives, for it was impossible not to recall the first, and its disastrous consequences. With Phoebe Sprague, the authoress, looking over her shoulder she tore up two false starts which sounded exactly like an authoress not writing a love letter—and on the third attempt succeeded in saying how delicious it was to have a present from him, and in telling something of her surroundings and duties without committing
belles
lettres.

Early in the year the Germans, taking heart from the prospect of another four years of Wilson, and in need of whatever
consolation
they could find, overplayed their hands as usual, by an announcement that unrestricted submarine warfare would now be resumed without regard to the pledges extracted from them by former Notes from Washington. They justified their action by saying that their peace offers had been rejected and that the Allied Blockade was illegal, for Germany was feeling the pinch of the British Navy.

And then to everyone’s surprise, perhaps Germany’s most of all, Mr. Wilson gave the German Ambassador his passports. It was a diplomatic break only, and not a declaration of war, as was hastily pointed out. But it was a sign that some glimmer of enlightenment was at last beginning to penetrate the President’s self-isolation from realities. Perhaps it resulted from an aroused public opinion, as the sinkings without warning piled up in the public conscience and the curtailment of American overseas trade skimped the American pocketbook, and people realized that they were being dictated to by a foreign Power which took upon itself to say where American ships could go and where they couldn’t, and what about this freedom of the seas which the Barbary pirates had once attempted to interfere with? And perhaps in part it was the result of Ambassador Page’s tireless efforts to open his old friend’s reluctant mind to the facts as he saw them at his London post. But—

“We should have done as much when the Lusitania went down,” said the Comtesse.

M
EANWHILE
, Phoebe’s correspondence with Oliver remained entirely unpolitical and concerned itself more than once with the weather. He had replied at once to her Christmas letter, on his club notepaper. She tried to imagine him at a desk in the silent writing-room, his greying head bent above the lean
brown hand which guided the pen in its small, tidy script which was so amazingly hard to read, its
m’s
and
n’
s
and
u’
s and
i’
s and
e’
s
all alike with an occasional tail or
t
for a clue. Sometimes it took half an hour to decipher his brief letters, and then, she would ask herself rather hollowly, what had she got? For Oliver was not one of those people who had the knack of getting himself down on paper. Born of a large, letter-writing family scattered all over the map, who described voluminously everything that happened to them or entered their delightful heads, always with the happy suspicion that it would be read aloud amid gales of laughter, and with an eye to that effect, and herself wielding a free and racy pen, Phoebe felt a schoolgirlish disappointment with Oliver’s letters. All the sparkle and vitality of his presence escaped on its way to the page, all the warmth and wit of his love dwindled into
inarticulateness
.
I’m just a thick-headed soldier
, he had said in the only other letter she had ever had from him, all those years ago,
and I don’t know how to write letters
. He hadn’t learned, in the interim. He began with
My dearest Phoebe,
and ended with
Yours, Oliver
. In between, she would decide petulantly, was practically nothing.

So that, longing to let herself go and escape for a bit from the chateau and its load of pain and grief, she must suppress the impulse to Do-you-remember and I’ve-always-wanted-
you-to
-know, and write in the same matter-of-fact vein that he did. And as a consequence Oliver at the other end felt always a little dashed, without knowing why, for he had never been really sure of her except while he held her in his arms, and he was inclined to assume still less in his replies. Until finally Phoebe heard herself thinking, Maybe it’s been too long—maybe by now there’s somebody else….

This went on till April, while more and more ships carrying Americans were sunk without warning, and at long last, rising suddenly to heights of righteous indignation, President Wilson made his eloquent declaration of war. Paris and London put out the Stars and Stripes on their balconies, and the Comtesse
said with satisfaction that she never knew he had it in him, and the following day a letter came from Oliver, written in Paris where he had just arrived with his General for a conference at Headquarters.

And that didn’t sound, did it, as though there was anyone else?

All that day Phoebe was especially kind to the men in her charge, with a more than customary touch of gaiety which twice brought Gallic compliments on the brightness of her eyes. It was the old Oliver-feeling, the excitement, the
giddiness
, the
lift.
She recognized it with relief, for she had had time to outgrow it by now. The Comtesse, suspecting something more than a visit from an old friend, obligingly lent the privacy of her own sitting-room where Phoebe was waiting, wearing her Red Cross uniform with her hair nunnishly hidden by the white veil, when Oliver was brought to the door and left there.

He stood a moment, still holding his cap with the red Staff band, his gloves and stick, just looking at her. Then he dropped them on the nearest chair and came towards her.

“I never know what to say when I see you again,” he
confessed
, and his arms went round her, hard and possessive. “Must I say anything?” He bent and kissed her, and after a moment’s surprise she answered him as she had done before, going all of halfway. “That’s better,” he murmured, and his lips moved on across her cheek and eyes.

“It’s—disconcerting,” she got out shakily. “I mean I wasn’t—couldn’t be sure—”

“What?”
His arms tightened masterfully in the way she had never forgotten, till she gasped with the pressure on her ribs and flinched closer to him, laughing with what breath she had left. “What weren’t you sure of?” he demanded, looking down at her, half amused, half angry, his face only inches from hers so that she could see the dancing amber flecks of light in his eyes and curve of his upper lip beneath the small moustache.

“Well, I mean—in your letters you d-didn’t—”

“You know I can’t write letters,” he said reasonably. “That’s why all this has got to stop now. Your country’s in it, you don’t have to fight your own war any longer, I know how you’ve felt about it, but now you can rest a bit. We’ll find someone to take your place here and bring you home where you belong, where I can see something of you. I’m such an old crock now I’m stuck at the War Office, I’ll not get back into the fighting at this rate. And you are going to marry me, aren’t you, say, sometime this summer?”

It was not a question, or at least he knew the answer, but he waited for her assent, for a girl should always have the chance to say No. While the transparent thought ran through her mind that it wouldn’t be a year this summer, and the equally luminous idea that she didn’t really care if it wasn’t, he smiled ruefully and said, “It’s war time, my dear—and soldiers are always in a hurry.” He laid his hard, cool cheek against hers, with his lips at her ear, and whispered, “Must I wait
for
ever?
”

“No!” she cried quickly, and felt her knees dissolve. “I didn’t mean—oh,
Oliver!”

Lovely Phoebe Sprague, of Williamsburg, Virginia, became engaged to her childhood sweetheart just before she set sail for England—where she fell headlong in love with
Captain
Oliver Campion. But in 1902 a betrothal was almost as binding as marriage, and Phoebe, who meant to abide by her promise, changed her mind too late.

There was nothing that either Phoebe or Oliver could do about it;
separated initially by convention, they were soon to be whirled apart by the tumultuous events of history itself.

In telling this fascinating story of two great loves, Miss Thane presents the reader with a brilliant and crowded panorama of the
carefree
days in England and Europe before 1914. The saga which she unfolded in
Ever
After
,
Yankee
Stranger
and
Dawn
’
s
Early
Light
is here carried forward more ably than ever in the re-creation of a glowing, unforgettable era, when Europe still danced, society was still glamorous, and tragedy wore a smiling mask.