The Old Blood Part 26

War or no war, people must eat. Her business was to cook and she went about her business, French fashion. The result of being up all night and under fire, as the General or any other old campaigner could have told them, was that the three cousins were ravenously hungry. They had a surprising sense of security, though guns and rifle-fire could be heard around them. In a few hours they had become habituated to war.

Helen was silent, thinking in pictures, the mult.i.tude of pictures that she had seen that morning. It seemed to her that she had enough material to keep her drawing for a lifetime.

"That black hole is the place where we sat beside the road," said Henriette, looking across to Phil with a grateful smile. Then she referred to the scene in the gully and spoke of how brave and cheery the wounded soldier had been, even as blood was dropping from his cheeks.

"Don't!" exclaimed Helen, with a shudder.

"Sorry, dear!" said Henriette, and changed the subject.

After exhaustion and hunger, food; and after food nature, even within sound of the guns, will a.s.sert itself on an August day. If one of the sh.e.l.ls bursting half a mile away had burst in the garden, then nature would have yielded to nervous excitement, which may manifest itself in outward calm or in chattering teeth. In either instance, the strain is there.

"I confess to feeling sleepy," said Henriette, nodding, her long lashes drooping after the meal.

"And you, Helen?"

"Perhaps. I'd like to try."

"Then do try, both of you," said Phil. "There's no telling how much we shall be kept awake when the Germans come. And I am going to exact a promise from you," he added, as they rose from the table, "that you do not leave the house or run any further risk to-day."

"And you?" the girls exclaimed together. There was something more than the usual start of surprise on the part of both when two people find that they have the same thought and have given utterance to it. Helen slipped out of the room, leaving the scene to Henriette.

"There is no dodging those big sh.e.l.ls," she said, "so you must agree to take care, too. You see," she lowered her lashes thoughtfully and then looked up at him with a world of frank solicitude, "as you saved my life I feel an interest in yours."

"Not to mention that I have an interest in yours!" he interjected.

"I'm glad if you feel that way," she said; then added, as he bent toward her, under the spell of her beauty, "I promise! You promise!"

She gave him her hand in sealing the bargain, but drew it away before his closed too tightly and smiled over her shoulder, saying, "I'm really sleepy," as she withdrew.

Phil was left with this vision of her to compare with that of her as she rested in his arms while he carried her from the roadside to the gully. Then he marvelled once more at the situation. How long should he be here with these two cousins? What was going on out there amidst the sound of the guns? With all the world around in action, it was not in his nature to remain still.

"Jacqueline, if any more sh.e.l.ls come," he said, putting his head in at the kitchen door, "will you see that those two girls go into the cellar and stay?"

"I'll take a saucepan to them if they don't!" Jacqueline replied. "As for you, I suppose you are going out to try to be killed, like all the other foolish men in the world," she added, without any effort to restrain him.

On reaching the terrace Phil found himself with the last line of the French. In wait as for game, dust-laden figures were lying behind trees and in the open behind little banks of earth which they had spaded. They were firing and the rattle of rifles and the penetrating rat-tat of a French machine-gun from the woods at the other side of the village joined in the refrain. A thousand yards away he saw something as green as the fields, but visible on the grey ribbon of the road, melt into the earth under this burst of bullets. These must be the Germans. Sharp whistles and cracks about his ears--the answer from the rifles of the German skirmish line--made him leap to the cover of the largest tree-trunk in sight.

"We forced them to deploy!" he heard an officer say.

Then commands were given and the Frenchmen slipped backward on all fours till they were below the skyline, when they became running red legs under humped backs of blue as they hurried away according to plan--and just in time. For now the German guns, which had the signal, loosed their wrath on the village and the neighbouring woodland, where it was thought that the French infantry meant to make a stand in force.

Phil stuck to his tree-trunk. But it did not seem of much use when he saw another tree cut in half as by a lumberman's axe with a curling black burst of smoke; and bark and limbs in all directions were being gashed by sh.e.l.l-fragments and shrapnel bullets.

Were the girls in the cellar? He had a sense of deserting his post of duty. He did not care to make the run to the house, but felt that he must; when his honest desire was to drop into the centre of the earth and close an armoured door behind him. So he started, having in mind that he had been second in the hundred-yard dash at college, but might have been first if he had had the incentive of the present moment.

There seemed an end of the outburst--probably an airman had signalled that the French were out of the woods--when one belated, harrowing scream seemed to have the pit of his stomach as a target just as he saw the white of a woman's gown, the wearer's face hidden by a branch.

Then the crash came in front of him. Black smoke and a fountain of earth and shivered tree-roots hid the approaching figure and enveloped it, for it was nearer to the burst than he. Stunned, half thrown off his feet, as he regained them and realised that he was alive it was with the dagger thrust of horrible foreboding.

The thing which he might have prevented must have happened. He rushed into the smoke, stumbled into the sh.e.l.l-crater and clambered wildly out of it, to see Helen rising unhurt and shaking the fresh, moist loam and splinters from her gown. Her hair had been blown almost free of its fastenings by the blast. She threw back her head at sight of him, her startled eyes glowing with the wonder of her escape and the supple figure drawn up as if testing the unscathed existence of muscle and nerve. She might be unnerved at the sight of blood, but she was not afraid of sh.e.l.ls.

"Thank heaven!" gasped Phil, and admiringly. "But what are you doing here?" he demanded, in the reaction of anger over her folly.

"You--I came to see what you were doing--yes, what you were doing here!" she said, between deep breaths. "Why not?" She broke into laughter, that of the challenge across the table at Truckleford, that of even a more reckless humour.

"And your promise to stay in?" he asked.

"I made none!"

"And Henriette?"

"In the cellar."

"Thank heaven! But why are we talking here?" he added.

"Yes, why?" she said, turning to go.

Sh.e.l.ls were still screaming far over the tree-tops.

"I think we are safe enough, for the German guns are firing over our heads at the French infantry," he said. "We are between the lines."

Helen said nothing, but walked on rapidly.

"We were very lucky," he continued. "I had a glimpse of you before the burst. It was an awful moment of suspense."

"If we had been a few yards further along or had started a few seconds sooner--how simple!" she added. "I mean, some more people would have been killed in this war--I mean--well, here we are!" and she looked up, smiling.

"None came near the house?" he asked.

"One burst outside the dining-room just as I was leaving," she answered, "but it couldn't have hurt anybody in the cellar. You see the house is quite intact," she added, as they came in sight of it.

"I'm sure that Henriette is safe--and I must add another cartoon to the history of the surviving Sanford, how he dodged the sh.e.l.ls!"

She gave him a full look this time which was all mischief. How could any woman be so cool after such a shock? But women can be cool even when their underlips are trembling, as Helen's was. In danger or out of danger, they keep to their parts. Phil could only feel that he had two wonderful cousins and that it was useless to speculate about anybody or anything. Splinters from the branches slashed by sh.e.l.ls still clung to Helen's hair; they were a kind of crown of glory for her.

"Now for Henriette!" he said as they entered the house.

A moaning sob from below ceased when he called, and the answer came back, "All right!" an answer that was thick but genuine in its relief.

Henriette met him at the foot of the cellar stairs trembling.

"It was awful being here alone!" she said convulsively. "One does like company. Do you think it's all over? And I was worried about Helen when that one burst so close and shook the whole house."

"Helen had a close call, but here she is," said Phil.

Jacqueline was in the dining-room. The wreckage of doors blown from their hinges by the explosion she had piled against the walls and was now engaged in sweeping up the earth and plaster.

"This is what a woman has to do when men go away to make war instead of staying at home and getting in the harvest!" she grumbled. "Nice mess they have made. So there you are, you foolish girls! I have about lost patience with you both. As I told Mademoiselle Henriette when she was moaning so, she might have been in Paris if she hadn't----"

"I was not moaning!" said Henriette sharply.

"No, _ma chere_, you were not. Thank G.o.d, you are alive! Though I don't know but we'd all be better dead than having our homes beaten down about our ears. Look at that!" as the broom disclosed a gash in the oak from a sh.e.l.l-fragment. "This floor I've been polishing for years. And you," she turned on Phil, "I thought that you were going to look after these young ladies and keep them from showing off! But like all men you had to go out and make war and show how brave you were."

"I give my word," said Phil, "that they will not escape again. If necessary I'll arm myself with one of your saucepans."