The Pretty Lady Part 29

"Won't you catch a chill?"

"I'm never cold," said Queen. It was true. "I shall always come up here for raids in future."

"You seem to be enjoying it."

"I love it. I love it. I only thought of it to-night. It's the next best thing to being a man and being at the Front. It _is_ being at the Front."

Her face was little more than a pale, featureless oval to him in the gloom, but he could divine from the vibrations of her voice that she was as ecstatic as a young maid at her first dance.

"And what about that business interview that you've just asked for on the 'phone?" G.J. acidly demanded.

"Oh, we'll come to that later. We wanted a man here--not to save us, only to save us from ourselves--and you were the best we could think of, wasn't he, Con? But you've not heard about my next bazaar, G.J., have you?"

"I thought it was a Pageant."

"I mean after that. A bazaar. I don't know yet what it will be for, but I've got lots of the most topping ideas for it. For instance, I'm going to have a First-Aid Station."

"What for? Air-raid casualties?"

Queen scorned his obtuseness, pouring out a cataract of swift sentences.

"No. First-Aid to lovely complexions. Help for Distressed Beauties.

I shall get Roger Fry to design the Station and the costumes of my attendants. It will be marvellous, and I tell you there'll always be a queue waiting for admittance. I shall have all the latest dodges in the sublime and fatal art of make-up, and if any of the Bond Street gang refuse to help me I'll d.a.m.n well ruin them. But they won't refuse because they know what I'll do. Gontran is coming in with his new steaming process for waving. Con, you must try that. It's a miracle.

Waving's no good for my style of coiffure, but it would suit you. You always wouldn't wave, but you've got to now, my seraph. The electric heater works in sections. No danger. No inconvenience to the poor old scalp. The waves will last for six months or more. It has to be seen to be believed, and even then you can't believe it. Its only fault is that it's too natural to be natural. But who wants to be natural? This modern craze for naturalness seems to me to be rather unwholesome, not to say perverted. What?"

She seized G.J.'s arm convulsively.

Concepcion had said nothing. G.J. sought her eyes in the darkness, but did not find them.

"So much for the bazaar!" he said.

Queen suddenly cried aloud:

"What is it, Robin? Has Captain Brickly telephoned?"

"Yes, my lady," came a voice faintly across the gloom from the region of the ladder-shaft.

"They're coming! They'll be here directly!" exclaimed Queen, loosing G.J. and clapping her hands.

G.J. thought of Robin affixed to the telephone, and some scarlet-shouldered officer at the War Office quitting duty for the telephone, in order to keep the capricious girl informed of military movements simply because she had taken the trouble to be her father's daughter, and in so doing had acquired the right to treat the imperial machine as one of her nursery toys. And he became unreasonably annoyed.

"I suppose you were cowering in your Club during the first Act?" she said, with vivacity.

"Yes," G.J. briefly answered. Once more he was aware of a strong instinctive disinclination to relate what had happened to him. He was too proud to explain, and perhaps too tired.

"You ought to have been up here. They dropped two bombs close to the National Gallery; pity they couldn't have destroyed a Landseer or two while they were so near! There were either seven or eight killed and eighteen wounded, so far as is known. But there were probably more.

There was quite a fire, too, but that was soon got under. We saw it all except the explosion of the bombs. We weren't looking in the right place--no luck! However, we saw the Zepp. What a shame the moon's disappeared again! Listen! Listen!... Can't you hear the engines?"

G.J. shrugged his shoulders. Nothing could be heard above the faint hum of Piccadilly. The wind seemed to have diminished to a chill, fitful zephyr.

Concepcion had sat down on a coping.

"Look!" she exclaimed in a startled whisper, and sprang erect.

To the south, down among the trees, a red light flashed and was gone.

The faint, irregular hum of Piccadilly persisted for a couple of seconds, and then was drowned in the loud report, which seemed to linger and wander in the great open s.p.a.ces. G.J.'s flesh crept. He comprehended the mad ecstasy of Queen, and because he comprehended it his anger against her increased.

"Can you see the Zepp?" murmured Queen, as it were ferociously. "It must be within range, or they wouldn't have fired. Look along the lines of the searchlights. One of them, at any rate, must have got on to it. We saw it before. Can't you see it? I can hear the engines, I think."

Another flash was followed by another resounding report. More guns spoke in the distance. Then a glare arose on the southern horizon.

"Incendiary bomb!" muttered Queen. She stood stock-still, with her mouth open, entranced.

The Zeppelin or the Zeppelins remained invisible and inaudible.

Yet they must be aloft there, somewhere amid the criss-cross of the unresting searchlights. G.J. waited, powerfully impressed, incapable of any direct action, gazing blankly now at the women and now at the huge undecipherable heaven and earth, and receiving the chill zephyr on his face. The nearmost gun had ceased to fire. Occasionally there was perfect silence--for no faintest hum came from Piccadilly, and nothing seemed to move there. The further guns recommenced, and then the group heard a new sound, rather like the sound of a worn-out taxi accelerating before changing gear. It grew gradually louder. It grew very loud. It seemed to be ripping the envelope of the air. It seemed as if it would last for ever--till it finished with a gigantic and intimidating _plop_ quite near the front of Lechford House. Queen said:

"Shrapnel--and a big lump!"

G.J. could see the quick heave of her bosom imprisoned in the black.

She was breathing through her nostrils.

"Come downstairs into the house," he said sharply--more than sharply, brutally. "Where in the name of G.o.d is the sense of stopping up here?

Are you both mad?"

Queen laughed lightly.

"Oh, G.J.! How funny you are! I'm really surprised you haven't left London for good before now. By rights you ought to belong to the Hook-it Brigade. Do you know what they do? They take a ticket to any station north or west, and when they get out of the train they run to the nearest house and interview the tenant. Has he any accommodation to let? Will he take them in as boarders? Will he take them as paying guests? Will he let the house furnished? Will he let it unfurnished?

Will he allow them to camp out in the stables? Will he sell the blooming house? So there isn't a house to be had on the North Western nearer than Leighton Buzzard."

"Are you going? Because I am," said G.J.

Concepcion murmured:

"Don't go."

"I shall go--and so will you, both of you."

"G.J.," Queen mocked him, "you're in a funk."

"I've got courage enough to go, anyhow," said he. "And that's more than you have."

"You're losing your temper."

As a fact he was. He grabbed at Queen, but she easily escaped him.

He saw the whiteness of her skirt in the distance of the roof, dimly rising. She was climbing the ladder up the side of the chimney. She stood on the top of the chimney, and laughed again. A gun sounded.

G.J. said no more. Using his flash-lamp he found his way to the ladder-shaft and descended. He was in the warm and sheltered interior of the house; he was in another and a saner world. Robin was at the foot of the ladder; she blinked under his lamp.