Part 136

"Are you all right, dear?"

She read his lips, nodded, tried to smile, fell to trembling with both hands still convulsively crushed over her ears.

Current and pole had already swept the punt out past the banlieu, past the suburban cottages, past the farms and the cattle and the clotheslines where the wash hung drying.

Behind them lay the town, amid a hell of exploding shells; the hills and woods reechoed the infernal crash; and, high overhead, above the dreadful diapason of the guns, rose the crazy treble hooting of incoming projectiles, dominating the awful roar on earth with a yelling bedlam in the sky.

Again and again he looked aloft, fearfully attempting to trace and trail and forestall some whistling screech growing louder and louder and nearer and nearer, until the shattering crash of the explosion in the town behind them relaxed the nerve-breaking tension.

Farther out in the green countryside he no longer looked up and back. Philippa still lay huddled at his feet, looking up out of grey eyes that quivered and winced sometimes, but always opened again, steady and clear with faith.

On the Ausone road fugitives from every farm and hamlet were afoot again, but he could not see them very distinctly through the dust that hung there. Also clouds now obscured the declining sun; the world had turned grey around them; and the Recollette flowed away ahead with scarcely a glimmer on its tarnished flood, save where a dull and leaden sparkle came and went along the water weeds inshore.

It was as though the subtle poison of war itself had polluted material things, killing out brightness and health and life, staining sky and water and earth with its hell-distilled essence.

Then a more concretely sinister omen took shape, floating under the trees in a deep, still cove--a dead cavalry horse, saddled and bridled, stranded there, barely awash; and a hooded crow already walking busily about over the level gravel of the shoal.

As they neared Sais, the quarry road across the river became visible. Dust eddied and drifted there, and he could distinguish the slanted lances of cavalry in rapid motion and catch the muffled roar of hoofs.

They were galloping north, a dusty, interminable column enveloped in an endless grey cloud of their own making in the thickening evening mist already hanging palely over land and water.

There was scarcely a tint of color left in the east, and that vague hue died out under clotted clouds as he looked.

And after a while he was aware of a vague rumor in the air, which seemed to come from the east--a vibration, low, indefinite, almost inaudible, yet always there to challenge his attention.

The Vosges lay beyond; and the Barrier Forts.

Duller and duller grew the twilight. He drove the punt forward into dusky reaches shrouded in mist, where not a ripple glimmered, and the trees and river reeds stood motionless in the fog.

There were no stars, no lights ashore. On his left he could hear the unbroken trample of cavalry riding north; far beyond, the air was heavily unsteady with the dull rumor beyond the hills; behind him the shriller tumult had died away and the deadened booming of the guns sounded like the heavy thunder of surf on sand.

Philippa had risen to a sitting position, and now she was lying back comfortably extended among the cushions.

They exchanged a few words; her voice was calm, cheerful, untroubled. She offered to take the punt pole; said that at first she had felt more bewildered and dazed than frightened; explained that real fear had first possessed her when the dead and bloody swan floated past, and that then she had been horribly afraid of the sky noises--the shrieking, hooting, whistling approach of the unseen.

He had been under fire in the Balkans; Lule Bourgas had blunted for him the keener edge of terror. And now, still thoroughly stirred, only the excitement of the past hour remained and stimulated him.

"It's war all around us now," he said, driving his punting pole steadily and straining his keen eyes into the shadows beyond. "There are stirring days ahead for France in this region, I fear; the Barrier Forts are far away and there is nothing in the north to hold the deluge breaking over Luxembourg into Belgium.

"A great war is beginning, Philippa; the greatest that the earth has ever faced.... I never supposed that I should live to see such a war--the greatest of all wars--the last great war, I think.

"If I were anything except a useless painter, I'd go into it.... I don't know what good I'd be to anybody. But if anybody wants me----"

"We both can offer ourselves," said Philippa.

"Dear child! I'd like to catch you wandering into this sort of----"

"I shall volunteer if you do!"

"You shall not! You'll go to Paris with Madame de Moidrey--that's what you'll do!"

"Jim, that is absurd. If I'm wanted I shall volunteer for hospital service, anyway. And if you offer yourself I shall wait until I find out where you are to be sent, and then I shall beg them to take me at the nearest field ambulance."

"No good, Philippa. They do that sort of thing in romances, but in real life a course of hospital training is required of volunteers."