Joy in the Morning Part 20

I interrupted, breathless. "It's so," I whispered. "I felt it, only I'd not have dared--" and I choked.

Old General Cochrane frowned thoughtfully. "Curious," was what he said.

"It's psychology of course, but I'm hanged if I know the explanation.

However, since it's so, my child, I'm glad. A man as old as I makes few new friends. And a beautiful young woman--with a brain--and charm--and innocent eyes--and French clothes!"

One may guess if I tried to stop this description. I could have listened all night. With that:

"'Did I know Kitchener!' the child asked," reflected the General, and threw back his splendid head and laughed. I stared up, my heart pumping.

Then, "Well, rather. Why, little Miss Fox--" and he stopped. "I've a mind to tell the child a fairy-story," he said. "A true fairy-story which is so extraordinary that few have been found to believe it, even of those who saw it happen."

He halted again.

"Tell me!"

General Coehrane looked about the roomful of people and tossed out his hand. "In this mob?" he objected. "It's too long a story in any case.

But why shouldn't you and I have a seance, to let a garrulous old fellow talk about his youth?" he demanded in his lordly way. "Why not come out on the river in my boat? They'll let you play about with an octogenarian, won't they?"

"I'll come," I answered the General eagerly.

"Very good. Tomorrow. Oh, by George, no. That confounded Prime Minister comes down to me tomorrow. I detest old men," said General Cochrane.

"Well, then, the day after?"

The Thames was a picture-book river that day, gay with row-boats and punts and launches, yet serene for all its gaiety; slipping between gra.s.sy banks under immemorial trees with the air of a private stream wandering, protected, through an estate. The English have the gift above other nations of producing an atmosphere of leisure and seclusion, and surely there is no little river on earth so used and so unabused as the Thames. Of all the craft abroad that bright afternoon, General Cochrane's white launch with its gold line above the water and its gleaming bra.s.s tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs was far and away the prettiest, and I was bursting with pride as we pa.s.sed the rank and file on the stream and they looked at us admiringly. To be alive on such a day in England was something; to be afloat on the silvery Thames was enchantment; to be in that lovely boat with General Cochrane, the boy Donald Cochrane, was a rapture not to be believed without one's head reeling. Yet here it was happening, the thing I should look back upon fifty, sixty years from now, an old gray woman, and tell my grandchildren as the most interesting event of my life. It was happening, and I was enjoying every second, and not in the least awed into misery, as is often the case with great moments. For the old officer was as perfect a playmate as any good-for-nothing young subaltern in England, and that is putting it strongly.

"Wouldn't it be nicer to land at Sonning and have our tea there?" he suggested. We were dropping through the lock just higher than the village; the wet, mossy walls were rising above us on both sides and the tops of the lock-keeper's gorgeous pink snapdragons were rapidly going out of sight. My host went on: "There's rather a nice rose-garden, and it's on the river, and the plum-cake's good. What do you think, that or on board?"

"The rose-garden," I decided.

Sonning is a village cut out of a book and pasted on the earth. It can't be true, it's so pretty. And the little White Hart Inn is adorable.

"Is it really three hundred years old?" I asked. "The standard roses look like an ill.u.s.tration out of 'Alice in Wonderland.' Yes, please--tea in the White Hart garden."

The old General heaved a sigh. "Thank Heaven," he said. "I was most awfully anxious for fear you'd say on the boat, and I didn't order any."

We slipped under an arch of the ancient red bridge and were at the landing. I remember the scene as we stood on sh.o.r.e and looked down the shining way of the river, the tall gra.s.ses bending on either side like green fur stroked by the breeze; I remember the trim sea-wall and velvet lawn, and the low, long house with leaded windows of the place next the inn. A house-boat was moored to the sh.o.r.e below, white, with scarlet geraniums flowing the length of the upper deck, and willow chairs and tables; people were having tea up there; muslin curtains blew from the portholes below. Some Americans went past with two enormous Scotch deer-hound puppies on leash. "Be quiet, Jock," one of them said, and the big, gentle-faced beast turned on her with a giant, caressing bound, the last touch of beauty in the beautiful, quiet scene.

It was early, so that we took the table which pleased us, one set a bit aside against a ten-foot hedge, and guarded by a tall bush of tea-roses.

A plump maid hurried across the lawn and spread a cloth on our table and waited, smiling, as if seeing us had simply made her day perfect. And the General gave the orders.

"The plum-cake is going to be wonderful," I said then, "and I'm hungry as a bear for tea. But the best thing I've been promised this afternoon is a fairy-story."

The shrapnel look flashed, keen and bright and afire, but I looked back steadily, not afraid. I knew what sunlight was going to break; and it broke.

"D'you know," said he, "I'm really quite mad to talk about myself. Men always are. You've heard the little tale of the man who said, 'Let's have a garden-party. Let's go out on the lawn and talk about me'? One becomes a frightful bore quite easily. So that I've made rules--I don't hector people about--about things I've been concerned with. As to the incident I said I'd tell you, that would be quite impossible to tell to--well, practically anyone."

My circulatory system did a prance; he could tell it practically to no one, yet he was going to tell it to me! I instantly said that. "But you're going to tell it to me?" I was anxious.

"Child, you flatter well," said the Marvelous Person, who had brought me picnicking. "It's the American touch; there's a way with American women quite irresistible."

"Oh--American women!" I remonstrated.

"Yes, indeed. They're delightful--you're witches, every mother's daughter of you. But you--ah--that's different, now. You and I, as we decided long ago, on day before yesterday, have a bond. I can't help the conviction that you're the hundred-thousandth person. You have understanding eyes. If I were a young man--And yet it's not just that; it's something a bit rarer. Moreover, they tell me there's a chap back in America."

"Yes," I owned. "There is a chap." And I persisted: "I'm to have a fairy-story?"

The black-lashed gaze narrowed as it traveled across the velvet turf and the tall roses, down the path of the quiet river. He had a fine head, thick-thatched and grizzled, not white; his nose was of the straight, short English type, slightly chopped up at the end--a good-looking nose; his mouth was wide and not chiseled, yet sensitive as well as strong; the jaw was powerful and the chin square with a marked dimple in it; there was also color, the claret and honey of English tanned complexions. Of course his eyes, with the exaggeratedly thick and long black lashes, were the wonderful part of him, but there is no describing the eyes. It was the look from them, probably, which made General Cochrane's face remarkable. I suppose it was partly that compelling look which had brought about his career. He was six feet four, lean and military, full of presence, altogether a conspicuously beautiful old lion in a land where every third man is beautiful.

"What are you looking munitions-of-war at, General, down the innocent little Thames River? You must be seeing around corners, past Wargrave, as far as Henley."

"I didn't see the Thames River," he shot at me in his masterful way. "I was looking at things past, and people dead and gone. We ancients do that. I saw London streets and crowds; I read the posters which told that Kitchener was drowned at sea, and then I saw, a year later, England in panic; I saw an almighty meeting in Trafalgar Square and I heard speeches which burned my ears--men urging Englishmen to surrender England and make terms with the Huns. Good G.o.d!" His fist came down on the rattling little iron table.

"My blood boils now when I remember. Child," he demanded, "I can't see why your alluring ways should have set me talking. Fancy, I've never told this tale but twice, and I'm holding forth to a little alien whom I haven't known two days, a young ne'er-do-well not born till forty years after the tale happened!"

"What difference does that make?" I asked. "Age means nothing to real people. And we've known each other since--since we hunted pterodactyls together, pre-historically. Only--I hate bats," I objected to my own arrangement. I went on: "If you knew how I want to hear! It's the most wonderful thing in my life, this afternoon--you."

"I know you are honest," he said. "Different from the ruck. I knew that the moment I saw you."

"Then," I prodded, "do begin with the posters about Lord Kitchener."

"But that's not the beginning," he protested. "You'll spoil it all," he said.

"Oh, no, then! Begin at the beginning. I didn't know. I wanted to get you started."

The gray eyes dreamed down the placid river water.

"The beginning was before I was born. It began when Kitchener, a young general, picked up a marauding party of black rascals on his way to Khartoum. They had a captive, a white girl, a lady. They had murdered her father and mother and young brother. The father was newly appointed Colonel of a regiment, traveling to his post with his family. The Arabs were saving the girl for their devilish head chieftain. Kitchener had the lot executed, and sent for the girl. She was--"

The old man's hand lifted to his head and he took off his hat and laid it on the ground.

"I cannot speak of that girl without uncovering," he said, quietly. "She was my mother." There was an electrical silence. I knew enough to know that no words fitted here. The old officer went on: "She was one of the wonderful people. What she seemed to think of, after the horrors she had gone through, was not herself or her suffering, but only to show her grat.i.tude. It was a long journey--weeks--through that land of h.e.l.l, while she was in Kitchener's hands, and not once did she lose courage.

The Sirdar told me that it was having an angel in camp--she held that rough soldiery in the hollow of her hand. She told Kitchener her story, and after that she would not talk of herself. You've heard that he never had a love affair? That's wrong. He was in love then, and for the rest of his life, with my mother."

I gasped. The shrapnel eyes menaced me.

"She could not speak of herself, d'you see? It was salvation to think only of others, so that she'd not told him that she was engaged to my father. Love from any other was the last thing she was thinking of.

After what had happened she was living from one breath to another and she dared not consider her own affairs. The night before they reached Cairo, Kitchener asked her to marry him. He was over forty then; she was nineteen. She told him of her engagement, of course--told him also that it might be she would never marry at all; a life of her own and happiness seemed impossible now. She might go into a sisterhood. Work for others was what she must have. Then, unexpectedly, my father was at Cairo to meet her, and Kitchener went to him and told him. From that on the two men were close friends. My people were not married till five years later, and when I came to be baptized General Kitchener was G.o.dfather. All my young days I was used to seeing him about the house at intervals, as if he belonged to us. I remember his eyes following my mother. Tall and slight she was, with a haunted look, from what she'd seen; she moved softly, spoke softly. It was no secret from the two, my father and mother, that he loved her always. Yet, so loyal, so crystal he was that my father had never one moment of jealousy. On the contrary they were like brothers. Then they died--my father and mother. The two almost together. I came into Kitchener's hands, Lord Kitchener by then.

When he met me in London, a long lad of seventeen, he held my fingers a second and looked hard at me.

"'You're very like her, Donald,' he said. And held on. And said it again. 'Your mother's double. I'd know you for her boy if I caught one look of your eyes, anywhere,' he said. 'Her boy.'--Well--what? Do I want more tea? Of course, I do."

For the smiling plump maid had long ago brought the steaming stuff, the bread and b.u.t.ter and jam and plum cake, I had officiated and General Cochrane had been absorbing his tea as an Englishman does, automatically, while he talked.

About us the tables were filling up, all over the rose-garden. The Americans were there with the beautiful long-legged giant deer-hound puppy, Jock, and were having trouble with his table manners. People came in by twos and threes and more, from the river, with the glow of exercise on their faces; an elderly country parson sat near, black-coated, white-collared, with his elderly daughter and their dog, a well-behaved Scottie this one, big-headed, with an age-old, wise, black face. And a group of three pretty girls with their pretty pink-cheeked mother and a young man or so were having a gay time with soft-voiced laughter and jokes, not far away. The breeze lifted the long purple and rose-colored motor veils of mother and daughters. The whole place was full of bright colors and low-toned cheerful talk, yet so English was the atmosphere, that it was as if the General and I were shut into an enchanted forest. No one looked at us, no one seemed to know we were there. The General began to talk again, unconscious as the rest of anything or anybody not his affair.

"I got my commission in 1915 in K-1, Kitchener's first hundred thousand, and I went off to the front in the second year of the war. I had a scratch and was slightly ga.s.sed once, but nothing much happened for a long time. And in 1916, in May, came the news that my G.o.dfather, the person closest to me on earth, was drowned at sea. I was in London, just out of the hospital and about to go back to France."

The old General stopped and stared down at the graveled path with its trim turf border lying at his feet.