Читать книгу The Outrage - Annie Vivanti - Страница 5

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The next day's sun rose hot and angry. It was the 30th of July. By ten o'clock Frieda had packed everything. Amour had been put into his picnic-basket and his humped-up back coaxed and patted and finally forcibly pressed down, and the lid shut over him. Then they awaited the carriage ordered by telephone from Ostend the night before.

But no carriage arrived. At eleven Chérie ran across to the telephone-office and spoke in her sternest tones to the livery stable in Ostend.

"Eh bien? Is this carriage coming? We ordered it for ten o'clock."

"No, Madame, it is not coming," replied a gruff voice from the other end.

"Not coming?"

"No, Madame." Then in lower, almost confidential tones, "It has been requisitioned."

"What is that? Then send another one," said Chérie. But Ostend had cut off the communication and Chérie returned crestfallen and wondering to the glum Frieda and the doleful Mireille sitting on the trunks in Madame Guillaume's narrow hall.

"No carriage," she said.

"What?" exclaimed Frieda.

"Why not?" asked Mireille.

"I don't know; something is being done to it," Chérie said vaguely. "I did not understand. Perhaps it is being re—re—covered, or something."

At noon Madame Guillaume found a porter for them who wheeled the luggage on a hand-cart to the Westende tramway station. And the tramway carried them and their luggage and Amour in his basket to Ostend, where another man with a hand-cart was found to wheel the luggage and the basket to the railway station.

They noticed at once that Ostend wore a strange and novel air. Crowds filled the town, crowds that were not the customary sauntering demi-mondaines and lounging viveurs. No; the streets were full of hurrying people, of soldiers on foot and on horseback; long lines of motor-cars, motor-cycles, carts and wagons blocked the roadways, and behind them came peasants leading strings of unharnessed horses. Down the rue Albert came, marching rapidly, a little band of Gardes Civiques in their long coats and incongruous bowler-hats with straps under their chins. Groups of officers, who had arrived a few days before for the international tennis tournament, were assembled on the Avenue Leopold and talked together in low, eager tones.

"What is the matter with everybody?" asked Mireille, as they hurried through the Place St. Joseph and across the bridge after the man with the luggage, who was already vanishing into the crowded station.

As if in answer to her question a couple of newspaper boys came rushing past with shrill cries. "Supplément ... supplément de 'l'Indépendance' ..., Mobilization Générale...."

"Frieda, is there really going to be war?" asked Chérie, looking anxiously at Frieda's sulky profile.

"Yes, I believe so," said Frieda. "Between Russia and Germany."

"Oh well; that is far away," said young Chérie, with a little laugh of relief, and she ran to rescue the picnic-basket from the porter's roughly swinging hand.

"Amour is whining," whispered Mireille, as they stood in the crush waiting to pass the ticket-collector on the quai.

"Oh! he mustn't," said Chérie. "Officially he is sandwiches."

So Mireille thumped the basket with her small gloved hand and murmured, "Couche-toi, tais-toi, vilian scélérat." And the official sandwiches subsided in the basket and were silent.

They never had such a journey. The train was crowded to suffocation; the whole world seemed to be going to Brussels; every few minutes their train stopped to let other even more crowded trains dash past them towards the capital.

"I have never seen so many soldiers," said Mireille. "I did not think there were so many in the world."

Frieda Rothenstein smiled disdainfully with the corners of her mouth turned down. "There are a few more than this in my country," she said.

"What? In Germany? But not such beautiful ones," cried Mireille, hanging out of the window and waving her handkerchief as many others did to a little company of Lancers cantering past on the winding road with lances fixed and pennants fluttering.

Frieda glanced at them superciliously. "You should see our Uhlans," she said. And added under her breath, "Who knows? Perhaps one day you may."

But the girls were not listening. The train was running into Brussels at last. The journey had taken five hours instead of two.

An hour later they still sat in the motionless train in the Brussels station.

"At this rate we shall never reach Bomal," said Chérie drearily, as they watched train after train packed with soldiers leave the station before theirs in the direction of Liège. Here all the world seemed to be rushing out of Brussels towards the eastern frontier.

But all things end; and finally their train started too, panting and puffing out of the Gare du Nord towards Louvain, Tirlemont, and Liège.

It was utterly dark by the time they reached Liège; and when they left the Gare Guillemin the soft summer night had swathed the valley of the Ourthe with tenebrous draperies. Little Mireille fell asleep with a pale smudgy face resting against Frieda's arm. Chérie lay back in her corner dozing and dreaming of Westende's blue sea; but Frieda's eyes were wide open staring out into the darkness as the train rumbled in and out of the tunnels, clattered over bridges following the gleaming blackness of the river.

Where the Ourthe meets its younger brother the Aisne, the train slowed down, trembled, hissed, and stopped.

"Bomal," announced the guard.

"Here we are! Mireille, wake up!" cried Chérie, looking out of the window. Then she put Mireille's bergère hat very crookedly on the child's towzled head, while Frieda hurriedly collected the books, the tennis-rackets and the parasols.

"Ah! there he is," and Chérie waved her hand out of the window to a tall figure on the platform. "Claude! Claude! Nous voici."

Claude Brandès, a handsome man, fifteen years older than his sister Chérie, opened the carriage door with an exclamation of relief. "Thank goodness you are here," he said, lifting his dazed, weary little daughter in his arms as if she were a baby and hoisting her on to his shoulder. "Are you all right? Have you got everything? Come along!" And he started down the platform, Chérie and Frieda trotting quickly after him. "Mademoiselle," he said, turning to Frieda, "give the check for your trunks to Fritz."

"Oui, Monsieur le Docteur," she replied, fumbling for it in her hand-bag. Then she looked round for the man-servant, whom she had as yet not caught sight of. Fritz Hollander ("Hollander by name and Hollander by nationality," he always said of himself when making new acquaintances) stepped out of the shadow and took the paper from Frieda's hand. She murmured a greeting to him, but he did not reply nor did he seem to notice her questioning glance. He turned on his heel, and his massive figure was soon swallowed up in the shadows at the end of the station.

The little party had just reached the exit and the train, with a parting whistle, was curving away into the darkness, when Mireille suddenly raised her face from her father's shoulder and gave a shriek. "Amour! We have forgotten Amour!"

It was true. Amour, cramped and disgusted in his creaky luncheon basket, was travelling away in the darkness to the heart of the Ardennes.

After the first moment of dismay everybody was cross with everybody else.

"It's all his own fault," said Chérie, who was tired and hungry. "He might have barked. He knew perfectly well that we were getting out."

"Haven't we taught him to pretend he is sandwiches when we're travelling?" sobbed Mireille indignantly. "How can you be so unjust?"

"Never mind, Mirette," said her father; "don't cry. We will telegraph to Marché to have him stopped and sent back. You will see him turn up safe and tail-wagging in the morning."

And the telegram was sent.

As they walked through the silent, sleeping village of Bomal Chérie inquired, "Why is Loulou not here? She might have come in the motor."

Her brother hesitated a moment. "I have sent away the car," he said.

"Sent it away? What for?" exclaimed Chérie.

"I have ... I have lent it," said Dr. Brandès.

"To whom?" inquired Mireille, trotting beside her father and hanging on to his arm.

He gave a little laugh. "To the King," he said.

"Oh!" cried Mireille. "Not much of a car to lend to a king! Surely he has better ones himself."

"We all give what we have in time of war," said her father. "Come, I will carry you, my little bird," he said, and lifted her up again.

"What is the matter? Why are you so affectionate?" asked Mireille, nestling comfortably in his arms and patting his broad back with her small hand.

Chérie laughed and looked up adoringly at her big brother. "Is he not always affectionate?" she asked.

"Not so dreadfully," replied Mireille, in her matter-of-fact tones; and then they all three laughed.

Frieda, hurrying behind them in the dark with the books, the parasols, and the tennis-rackets, hated them for their laughter.

Louise Brandès, a slim white figure in the moonlight, awaited them at the door. She kissed Mireille and Chérie and greeted Frieda kindly; then she made them all drink hot milk and sent them to bed.

"But I want to tell papa about how I can almost swim and nearly ride a bicycle," said Mireille, sidling up to her father.

"You shall tell him tomorrow, my darling," said Louise.

But the morrow was not as they dreamed it.

When early next morning Frieda and the girls came down to the breakfast-room they found Louise, still in her white dress of the evening before, sitting on the sofa with red eyes and a pale face. In answer to their anxious questioning she told them that Claude had been called away. Two officers had come for him close upon midnight; he had scarcely had time to pack a few things. He had taken his surgical outfit; then they had hurried him away with short words and anxious faces.

"But where—where has he gone to?" asked Chérie.

"I don't know," said her sister-in-law, and the tears gathered in her dark eyes. "They said something about his being sent to a field ambulance, or to ... to the Dépôt Central...."

"What is that?" asked Mireille; but as nobody knew, nobody answered.

Mariette the maid brought in the breakfast, followed by her mother, Marie the cook; and they both had red eyes and were weeping. Marie said that her two sons had come to the house at dawn to bid her and Mariette good-bye; the eldest, Toinot, belonged to the 9th line regiment and had been sent off to Stavelot; and Charles, the youngest, had volunteered and was being sent off heaven knows where.

"Of course there is nothing to cry about," added Marie, with large round tears rolling down her ruddy face. "There is no danger for our country. But still—to see one's boys—going away like that—s-s-singing the B-b-brabançonne—" she broke into sobs.

"Of course, my good Marie," echoed Louise, "there is nothing to cry about...."

And then they all wept bitterly. Even Frieda, with her face in her handkerchief, sobbed—on general principles, and also because Weltschmerz gnawed at her treacherous, sentimental German heart.

At breakfast every one felt a little better. As nearly all the men had left Bomal or were about to leave, it was a comfort to reflect that Fritz Hollander, the doctor's confidential servant, being a Dutchman, was not obliged to go. True, he was a somewhat sulky, taciturn person, but he had been with them two years and, as Loulou remarked while she poured out the coffee, one felt that one could trust him.

"I always trust people who are silent and look straight at you when you speak," said the wise Louise, who was twenty-eight years old, and admired Georges Ohnet.

"I don't like Fritz," remarked Mireille. "I hate the shape of his head—and especially his ears," she added.

"Don't be silly," said Chérie.

Frieda, who was just dipping a fresh roll into her coffee, looked up. "He has the ears God gave him," she remarked, with pinched and somewhat tremulous lips.

Every one looked at her wonderingly, and she flushed scarlet as she bent her head and dipped her roll into her cup again.

After breakfast Louise went to rest for a few hours; Frieda said she had some letters to write, and the two girls went out to call on their friends and make plans as to what they would do on Chérie's birthday, the 4th of August.

They went to Madame Doré's house in the Place du Marché and found their friends Cécile and Jeannette busy with their boy-scout brother, André; they were sewing a band with S.M. on it, on the right sleeve of his green shirt.

"What is S.M.?" inquired Mireille.

"That means Service Militaire," replied André proudly.

"Fancy!" exclaimed Mireille. "And you only fifteen!"

André passed his left hand carelessly over his fair hair. "Oh yes," he said, with very superior nonchalance. "There are four thousand of us. We shall have to take care of you women," he glanced with raised eyebrows at the small, admiring Mireille, "now that the other men have gone."

"Keep your arm quiet," said Cécile, "or I shall prick you."

"Where is your father?" asked Chérie. "Has he left, too?"

"Yes," said André. "He has been called out for duty in the Garde Civique. He is stationed on the Chaussée de Louvain, not far from Brussels."

"Isn't it all exciting?" cried Jeannette, jumping up and down.

"But against whom are we going to fight?" asked Mireille.

"We don't know yet," declared André. "Perhaps against the French; perhaps against the Germans."

"Perhaps against nobody," said Cécile, biting off the thread and patting the neatly-sewn armlet on her brother's sleeve.

"Perhaps against nobody," echoed André, with a boyish touch of ruefulness. "Nobody will dare to invade our land."

"Come, let us go into the garden," said Jeannette.

Thus it was in Belgium on the eve of her impending doom. Doubtless in high places—in the Palais de la Nation and the Place Royale—there were hearts filled with racking anxiety and feverish excitement; but throughout the country there was merely a sense of resolute expectancy, of not altogether unpleasant excitement. Every one knew that the sacrosanct rights of the land would be respected, but it was just as good, they said, to be ready for every event.

Nobody on that summer evening, from the remotest corner of Belgian Luxembourg to the farthest homestead in Flanders, as they watched that last July sun go down over the peaceful fields of grain, dreamed that the Grey Wolves of War were already snarling at the gates, straining to be let loose and overrun the world, panting to get to their work of slaughter and destruction. No one dreamed that four days later massacre and outrage and frenzied ferocity would rage through the shuddering valleys of the Ardennes.

Thus while Chérie and Cécile, Jeannette and Mireille ran out into their sunshiny garden, at that same hour, far away in the Wilhelmstrasse a man with a grey beard stood on a balcony and spoke to a surging crowd—promising blood to the wolves.

Thus while the four fair girls planned what they would do on the 4th of August, on that balcony in Berlin their fate and the fate of Europe was being pronounced.

"We shall invite Lucile, Cri-cri, and Verveine," said Chérie.

"We shall dash those aside who stand in our way," said the man on the balcony.

"We shall dance," said Mireille.

"We shall grind our heel upon their necks," said von Bethmann-Hollweg.

And the Grey Wolves roared.