The High Heart Part 58

As I have already said, I had almost forgotten Sarajevo. The ill.u.s.trated papers had shown us a large coffin raised high and a small one set low, telling us of unequal rank, even at the Great White Throne. I had a thought for that from time to time; but otherwise Franz Ferdinand and Sophie Chotek were less to me than Csar or Napoleon.

But toward the end of July there was a sudden rumbling. It was like that first disquieting low note of the "Rheingold," rising from elemental depths, presaging love and adventure and war and death and defeat and triumph, and the end of the old G.o.ds and the burning of their Valhalla.

I cannot say that any of us knew its significance; but it was arresting.

"What does it mean?"

I think Cissie Boscobel was the first to ask me that question, to which I could only reply by asking it in my own turn. What did it mean--this ultimatum from Vienna to Belgrade? Did it mean anything? Could it possibly mean what dinner-table diplomats hinted at between a laugh and a look of terror?

Hugh and I were descending the Rossiter lawn on a bright afternoon near the end of July. Cissie, who was pa.s.sing with some of the Burkes, ran over the gra.s.s toward us. Had we seen the papers? Had we read the Austrian note? Could we make anything out of it?

I recall her as an extraordinarily vivid picture against the background of blue sea, in white, with a green-silk tunic embroidered in peac.o.c.k's feathers, with long jade ear-rings and big jade beads, and a jade-colored plume in a black-lace hat c.o.c.ked on her flaming hair as she alone knew how to c.o.c.k it. I merely want to point out here that to Cissie Boscobel and me the questions she asked already possessed a measure of life-and-death importance; while to Hugh they had none at all.

I remember him as he stood aloof from us, strong and stocky and summer-like in his white flannels, a type of that safe and separated America which could afford to look on at Old World tragedies and feel them of no personal concern. To him Cissie Boscobel and I, with anxiety in our eyes and something worse already clutching at our hearts, were but two girls talking of things they didn't understand and of no great interest, anyway.

"Come along, little Alix!" he interrupted, gaily. "Cissie will excuse us. The madam is waiting to motor us over to South Portsmouth, and I don't want to keep her waiting. You know," he explained, proudly, "she thinks this little girl is a peach!"

Cissie ran back to join the Burkes and we continued our way along the Cliff Walk to Mr. Brokenshire's. Hugh had come for me in order that we might have the stroll together.

I gave him my view of the situation as we went along, though in it there was nothing original.

"You see, if Austria attacks Serbia, then Russia must attack Austria; in which case Germany will attack Russia, and France will attack Germany.

Then England will certainly have to pitch in."

"But we won't. We shall be out of it."

The complacency of his tone nettled me.

"But I sha'n't be out of it, Hugh."

He laughed.

"You? What could you do, little lightweight?"

"I don't know; but whatever it was I should want to be doing it."

This joke might have been characterized as a screamer. He threw back his head with a loud guffaw.

"Well, of all the little spitfires!" Catching me by the arm, he hugged me to him, as we were hidden in a rocky nook of the path. "Why, you're a regular Amazon! A soldier in your way would be no more than a ninepin in a bowling-alley."

I didn't enter into the spirit of this pleasantry. On the contrary, I concealed my anger in endeavoring to speak with dignity.

"And, what's more, Hugh, than not being out of it myself, I don't see how I could marry a man who was. Of course, no such war will come to pa.s.s. It couldn't! The world has gone beyond that sort of madness. We know too well the advantages of peace. But if it should break out--"

"I'll buy you a popgun with the very first shot that's fired."

But in August, when the impossible had happened, when Germany had invaded Belgium, and France had moved to her eastern frontier, and Russia was pouring into Prussia, and English troops were on foreign continental soil for the first time in fifty years, Hugh's indifference grew painful. He was perhaps not more indifferent than any one else with whom I was thrown, but to me he seemed so because he was so near me. He read the papers; he took a sporting interest in the daily events; but it resembled--to my mind at least--the interest of an eighteenth-century farmer's lad excited at a c.o.c.kfight. It was somewhat in the spirit of "Go it, old boy!" to each side indifferently.

If he took sides at all it was rather on that to which Cissie Boscobel and I were nationally opposed; but this, we agreed, was to tease us. So far as opinions of his own were concerned, he was neutral. He meant by that that he didn't care a jot who lost or who won, so long as America was out of the fray and could eat its bread in safety.

"There are more important things than safety," I said to him, scornfully, one day.

"Such as--"

But when I gave him what seemed to me the truisms of life he was contented to laugh in my face.

Cissie Boscobel was more patient with him than I was. I have always admired in the English that splendid tolerance which allows to others the same liberty of thinking they claim for themselves; but in this instance I had none of it. Hugh was too much a part of myself. When he said, as he was fond of saying, "If Germany gets at poor degenerate old England she'll crumple her up," Lady Cissie could fling him a pitying, confident smile, with no venom in it whatever, while I became bitter or furious.

Fortunately, Mr. Brokenshire was called to New York on business connected with the war, so that his dear Alexandra was delivered for a while from his daily condescensions. Though Hugh didn't say so in actual words, I inferred that the struggle would further enrich the house of Meek & Brokenshire. Of the vast sums it would handle a commission would stick to its fingers, and if the business grew too heavy for the usual staff to deal with Hugh's own energies were to be called into play. His father, he told me, had said so. It would be an eye-opener to Cousin Andrew Brew, he crowed, to see him helping to finance the European War within a year after that slow-witted nut had had the hardihood to refuse him!

In the Brokenshire villa the animation was comparable to a suppressed fever. Mr. Brokenshire came back as often as he could. Thereupon there followed whispered conferences between him and Jack, between him and Jim Rossiter, between him and kindred magnates, between three and four and six and eight of them together, with a ceaseless stream of telegrams, of the purport of which we women knew nothing. We gave dinners and lunches, and bathed at Bailey's, and played tennis at the Casino, and lived in our own little lady-like Paradise, shut out from the interests convulsing the world. Knitting had not yet begun. The Red Cross had barely issued its appeals. America, with the speed of the Franco-Prussian War in mind, was still under the impression that it could hardly give its philanthropic aid before the need for it would be over.

Of all our little coterie Lady Cissie and I alone perhaps took the sense of things to heart. Even with us, it was the heart that acted rather than the intelligence. So far as intelligence went, we were convinced that, once Great Britain lifted her hand, all hostile nations would tremble. That was a matter of course. It amazed us that people round us should talk of our enemy's efficiency. The word was just coming into use, always with the implication that the English were inefficient and unprepared.

That would have made us laugh if those who said such things hadn't said them like Hugh, with detached, undisturbed deliberation, as a matter that was nothing to them. Many of them hoped, and hoped ardently, that the side represented by England, Russia, and France would be victorious; but if it wasn't, America would still be able to sit down to eat and drink, and rise up to play, as we were doing at the moment, while nothing could shake her from her ease.

Owing to our kinship in sentiment, Lady Cissie and I drew closer together. We gave each other bits of information in which no one else would have had an interest. She was getting letters from England; I from England and Canada. Her brother Leatherhead had been ordered to France with his regiment--was probably there. Her brother Rowan, who had been at Sandhurst, had got his commission. The young man her sister Janet was engaged to had sailed with the Rangers for Ma.r.s.eilles and would go at once to the front instead of coming home. If he could get leave the young couple would be married hastily, after which he would return to his duty. My sister Louise wrote that her husband's ship was in the North Sea and that her news of him was meager. The husband of my sister Victoria, who had had a staff appointment at Gibraltar, had been ordered to rejoin his regiment; and he, too, would soon be in Belgium.

From Canada I heard of that impulse toward recruiting which was thrilling the land from the Island of Vancouver, in the Pacific, to that of Cape Breton, in the Atlantic, and in which the mult.i.tudes were of one heart and one soul. Men came from farms, factories, and fisheries; they came from banks and shops and mines. They tramped hundreds of miles, from the Yukon, from Ungava, and from Hudson Bay. They arrived in troops or singly, impelled by nothing but that love which pa.s.ses the love of women--the love of race, the love of country, the love of honor, the love of something vast and intangible and inexplicable, that comes as near as possible to that love of man which is almost the love of G.o.d.

I can proudly say that among my countrymen it was this, and it was nothing short of this. They were as far from the fray as their neighbors to the south, and as safe. Belgium and Serbia meant less to most of them than to the people of San Francisco, Chicago, and New York; but a great cause, almost indefinable to thought, meant everything. To that cause they gave themselves--not sparingly or grudgingly, but like Araunah the Jebusite to David the son of Jesse, "as a king gives unto a king."

Men are wonderful to me--all men of all races. They face hardship so cheerfully and dangers so gaily, and death so serenely. This is true of men not only in war, but in peace--of men not only as saints, but as sinners. And among men it seems to me that our Colonial men are in the first rank of the manliest. Frenchman, German, Austrian, Italian, Russian, Englishman, and Turk had each some visible end to gain. They couldn't help going. They couldn't help fighting. Our men had nothing to gain that mortal eyes could see. They have endured, "as seeing Him who is invisible."

They have come from the far ends of the earth, and are still coming--turning their backs on families and business and pleasure and profit and hope. They have counted the world well lost for love--for a true love--a man's love--a redemptive love if ever there was one; for "greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends."

But when, with my heart flaming, I spoke of this to Lady Cecilia, she was cold. "Fancy!" was the only comment she ever made on the subject.

Toward my own intensity of feeling she was courteous; but she plainly felt that in a war in which the honors would be to the professional soldier, and to the English professional soldier first of all, Colonials were out of place. It was somewhat presumptuous of them to volunteer.

She was a splendid character--with British limitations. Among those limitations her att.i.tude toward Colonials was, as I saw things, the first. She rarely spoke of Canadians or Australians; it was always of Colonials, with a delicately disdainful accent on the word impossible to transcribe. Geography, either physical or ethnic, was no more her strong point than it is that of other women; and I think she took Colonials to be a kind of race of aborigines, like the Maoris or the Hottentots--only that by some freak of nature they were white. So, whenever my heart was so hot that I could contain myself no longer, and I poured out my foolish tales of the big things we hoped to do for the empire and the world, the dear thing would merely utter her dazed, "Fancy!" and strike me dumb.

And it all threw me back on the thought of Larry Strangways. Reader, if you suppose that I had forgotten him you are making a mistake.

Everything made my heart cry out for him--Hugh's inanity; his father's lumbering dignity; Mildred's sepulchral apothegms, which were deeper than I could fathom and higher than I could scale; Cissie Boscobel's stolid scorn of my country; and Newport's whole att.i.tude of taking no notice of me or mine. Whenever I had minutes of rebellion or stress it was on Larry Strangways I called, with an agonized appeal to him to come to me. It was a purely rhetorical appeal, let me say in pa.s.sing. As it would never reach him, he could not respond to it; but it relieved my repressed emotions to send it out on the wings of the spirit. It was the only vehicle I could trust; and even that betrayed me--for he came.

He came one hot afternoon about the 20th of August. His card was brought to me by the rosebud Thomas as I was taking a siesta up-stairs.

"Tell Mr. Strangways I shall come down at once," I said to my footman knight; but after he had gone I sat still.

I sat still to estimate my strength. If Larry Strangways made such an appeal to me as I had made to him, should I have the will-power to resist him? I could only reply that I must have it! There was no other way. When Hugh had been so true to me it was impossible to be other than true to him. It was no longer a question of love, but of right: and I couldn't forsake my maxim.

Nevertheless, when I threw off my dressing-gown instinct compelled me to dress at my prettiest. To be sure, my prettiest was only a flowered muslin and a Leghorn hat, in which I resembled the vicar's daughter in a Royal Academy picture; but if I was never to see Larry Strangways again I wanted the vision in his heart to be the most decent possible. As I dressed I owned to myself that I loved him. I had never done so before, because I had never known it--or rather, I had known it from that evening on the train when I had seen nothing but his traveling-cap; only I had strangled the knowledge in my heart. I meant to strangle it again.

I should strangle it the minute I went down-stairs. But for this little interval, just while I was fastening my gown and pinning on my hat, it seemed to me of no great harm to let the unfortunate pa.s.sion come out for a breath in the sunlight.

And yet, after having rehea.r.s.ed all the romantic speeches I should make in giving him up forever, he never mentioned love to me at all. On the contrary, he had on that gleaming smile which, from the beginning of our acquaintance, was like the flash of a sword held up between him and me.

When he came forward from a corner of the long, dim drawing-room all the embarra.s.sment was on my side.

"I suppose you wonder what brings me," were the words he uttered when shaking hands.