Telling the story a fortnight later, Norah said that this evening offered her the last peace and contentment she was to know. I fancy one must have youth as well as a good digestion on one's side to feel peaceful and content a few weeks after deserting a devoted husband. But scruples, if women ever have them, lapse in love, and more fully I imagine when the game is played with so splendid a partner in so romantic a scene.
All her life, Norah had taken to romance, as other folk take to drink, or politics. The cure, you shall see, was drastic.
As a child, she had run wild. Her mother had died at her birth, and her father was interminably engaged in a series of unsuccessful operations on the markets, the turf, or the tables. A succession of governesses threw in their hands after a brief attempt, unbacked by any parental authority, to control her. From them, however, she learned to read and write, and from the coachman, to swear. Otherwise, she had little regular education.
She made up for it in the great dilapidated library where she browsed, uncontrolled, among the great debris of the past. Poetry, drama, novels, history, it did not matter, so long as it had a story and a swing. Not a very high criterion, perhaps, but it led her to Shakespeare, and the Arabian Nights, Marlowe and Webster, Froissart and Hakluyt, Chaucer, Drayton, Otway, Defoe, Byron. There seemed to be a wonderful world waiting for her, wonderful lands to visit, wonderful deeds to dare, wonderful men to meet.
The outbreak of war swung her from this world of books into life and a phase of life then strange enough to any of us.
She was seventeen when she started work as a V.A.D. and eighteen when she received her eventual discharge with the infraction of every rule to her discredit. In her first round with discipline that unimaginative force had won. She spent a night of tears and abasement, feeling that to have her way, she had failed her country and her class.
But the votaries of Romance are not easily, if indeed they are ever, discouraged. The next morning she joined a volunteer Red Cross column, which a wealthy humanitarian was raising for service with the Russian Armies.
In those days we still believed, if not in the great steam roller, at least in the great soul of Russia. Our stale, materialistic civilisation was to be quickened with an air blowing cold from the steppes. The way had been shown us, our enthusiasts instanced, by the Muscovite abnegation of vodka; forgetting that a Russian is only worth listening to when he is drunk. Regeneration was dawning, convincingly enough, in the east; they little knew how red that dawn.
Norah eagerly seized the chance of reinstating herself in her own esteem. And no doubt the glamour of the country of the Tsars called her. During her months with the V.A.D. her stout heart, quick wits, and clever fingers had picked up something of war-time nursing. It is not difficult to believe that her beauty, if not her skill, was welcome to the overworked, ill-equipped French and Russian doctors, who laboured day and night behind the Russian front at the first dressing station where worked the column."
Ross hesitated.
"She told me," he said, "a good many interesting things about this experience of hers—of operations by candle-light on the kitchen tables of abandoned farms, of a long-haired pope attached to the column whom horror drove mad one night in a shattered tavern; but the story will be long enough without any picturesque extras, and we'll go straight on to the day that the Sisters, for a joke, I suppose, crossed Norah's thread with Archie's.
Archie Sinclair was not, of course, in the least like Dick Ward.
In his adventures, the male unconsciously pursues one chosen type, finding in his mates, if only for a moment, an approximation to his dreams. Just as, in a palpable desert, it is the mirage of water that men follow, ignoring other less desired deception.
Deception it is. Alone the hermits of the Thebaid attained to the achievement of temptation without realisation. Less fortunate men find in possession the denial of the dream.
Women never follow this ideal of monotony. Their husbands, their lovers, are the glasses through which they survey the world. Sometimes one wants spectacles, sometimes lorgnettes, sometimes field-glasses.
Dick was successful, splendid, heroically moulded. He took the eye and filled the stage. Archie was small and unremarkable. He hated emotion, gestures in any degree. Expression made him uncomfortable; and any display of generous sentiment, noble aspiration or lofty ideal he met with embarrassed silence. But he lacked the self-confidence that would have qualified him for the slightly unfashionable ranks of Strong Silent Men. Meeting him casually, he struck you as irresolute. 'Cautious' was really a truer diagnosis.
Like Dick, he was a Celt. But while Dick was the type that fills parliaments and places where they talk, Archie was the dark, inconspicuous sort that is only dragged from its holes in the hills into public by outside force.
His father and grandfather had practised at the Scottish Bar; he was himself destined for the same career, but circumstances, in the obscure shape of a handful of Serbian assassins, landed him in a gun-pit in a picturesque valley at the foot of the Carpathian Mountains.
As an earnest young Liberal at the Union Debating Society, Oxford, Archie had repeatedly proved the impossibility of war under modern conditions. In August, 1914, however, when Europe had failed to realise this impossibility, Archie, after two days of more than usual reticence, announced that he was off next day to Glasgow. Pressed to give his motives, he muttered that he supposed it was up to one to join. As he didn't think he'd make much of an officer, he'd enlisted.
Before very long Gunner Sinclair was drafted out to Flanders to replace casualties. He spent an evil winter in the mud of the Salient where endurance found more scope than dash. When Spring came to the desolate scene, he was sent home to receive a commission and to train with a Kitchener division.
At that time things were going badly in Russia. Sukomlinov, the war minister, was suspected not merely of the incompetence that is demanded of a war minister, or of the corruption which is expected of any Russian official, but of an active intelligence with the enemy, not tolerable in the early stages of a war.
It was found impossible to supply rifles and small arms ammunition, let alone artillery and shells, to the hitherto victorious army of the Grand Duke in the Carpathians; and it became necessary for the infantry—rude, unpolished fellows for the most part—to troop over the top without rifles or artillery support, against a well-equipped and entrenched enemy.
To limit the retreat which unexpectedly became necessary, the Russian Government applied to England for guns and munitions.
The War Office and the politicians, realising the seriousness of the position, and standing on the well-proved maxim that, 'if a thing is worth doing at all, it is worth doing half,' fitted out several batteries of more or less obsolete twelve pounders—old Horse Artillery ware—and embarked them to the aid of their allies. Second Lieutenant Sinclair was a section commander in one of these units.
Archie, never communicative, told me little of his share in that disastrous campaign—disastrous, but not inglorious, if death and sacrifice can dignify. But for my story's sake, from the bald and insufficient facts he let fall, I must try to outline the last evening's fighting, that contrived the confluence of his and Norah's lives.
The scene, he said, was a gun-pit at the side of a muddy road, which led through a ransacked Galician village. Its wretched hovels had been gutted by the retiring troops, and from a window of the only two-storied house, the black-robed body of a Jew swung by the neck. A playful habit of the retreating Muscovite, designed to discourage espionage. By now the shadow of the mountain, under whose flank the village lay, mercifully obscured his features.
On the road that passed the gun-pit, bodies of men and horses lay like burst sacks to show where a direct hit had exploded the ammunition limber of Archie's second gun as the team was hooking in.
His section had been left to cover the brigade's withdrawal to a fresh position down the valley. When their unmolested retreat had been secured, his first gun, successfully extricated, had followed on down the hill.
The Austrian fire was ill-aimed, and spasmodic. The crash and dust of falling masonry at the far end of the straggling village, or spouts of black earth from the fields beyond, showed where the shells were falling. But the God of Battles decided that the moment selected by Archie to limber up his second gun should be chosen by the number 4 of an Austrian 120 mm. somewhere up the valley to insert a defective round. The shell dropped a quarter of a mile short of its fellows to score the direct hit on the limber.
When the smoke of the explosion had cleared, only Archie, his sergeant, one driver and one horse of the team were able to pick themselves up from the ground.
Archie's brain worked quicker than its wont. There were not many alternatives.
'Driver Evans,' he said, 'are you all right to ride?'
'Yessir!'
'Have a look at Dossie, and see if she will carry you.'
With his hand pressed to his side, where a piece of flying metal had caught him, he examined the damage done to the gun. The sergeant was at work with Archie's revolver among the wounded horses.
The driver reported that, bar a bit of skin gone, the off-leader would do.
'Good,' said Archie. 'Then mount and follow the battery hell for blast. If they have gone to their new positions, find them. Tell the major what has happened. Say the gun is worth saving, if he can get a team up in the night. There are no Austrians in sight; if they are not here before dark, they will probably wait till dawn. Tell him none of us can walk except Sergeant Yates and myself. Understand?'
Evans saluted, and swung round on his heel. Archie and the sergeant busied themselves with first-aid dressings and fetching water for the wounded. Whenever the stoicism of his kind let a sufferer ask what was happening:—
'Driver Evans is finding the Major,' said Archie. 'When it's dark, he'll send up to pull the gun and us out.'
It was not, he knew, as simple as that. The battery had a long start, and would by now be concealed in a new position. In a strange country and with a foreign tongue, the driver would be very lucky if he found it. But there seemed no better plan.
To look for civilian transport in the scarred desert that the retreating army left in its wake was to waste time. Time that was all too short, even if the Austrian advance guard, accustomed to the almost defenceless condition of the Russian rear at that date, and misled by the English expenditure of ammunition, advanced with unjustified caution.
The hours passed. Archie watched the shadow of the western hills, as it spread across the valley, and still no attack came.
I tactlessly asked him what he felt like as he waited.
He stared at me.
'Felt like?' he repeated. 'I didn't register feelings. I was talking to the men.'
'What did you talk about?'
'I forget. Football, I think. And boxing. One of the men had been Army Welter Champion in India. Poor devil. I don't suppose he boxed again.'
All the same, I can't help thinking that in such a situation the alternatives of sudden death, prison or salvation must have danced their round in the brain of even the least imaginative of men.
At last darkness fell, and the enemy's fire ceased. Archie stood up and strained his ears for any sound that might betray an advance, but all he heard was the painful breathing of his wounded men, or a groan from the layer, who was hit in the stomach, and unlikely to live the night.
'Sergeant,' whispered Archie, 'time you were off.'
'Beg pardon, sir?'
'One of us is enough to stay with these chaps till help comes.'
'You don't mean me to go, sir?'
'Yes, sergeant! Get back to the battery. Besides, you can hurry them up.'
Reluctantly, Sergeant Yates disappeared and Archie was left in the dark with his disabled gun and his dead and dying men. His side hurt him, and his heart ached for his companions. He calculated and re-calculated how soon help could come, till, as the long hours passed, doubt became certainty that his message had miscarried.
He could hardly guess that his destiny had been crossed by the fortunes of Private Pyotr Pavlovitch of the Seventh Siberian Rifles. Pyotr had been holding remarkable hands at 'vint' that morning in the trenches before he and his battalion had been withdrawn under the cover of the British guns. He had won a shirt from Ivan Ilyitch, and ten (pre-revolution) roubles from Dmitri Kalkanov. Can it be wondered that having traversed the cheaper stages of loquacity and truculence, he now lay in deep slumber across the road?
Observe, moreover, the careful dispositions of Providence. Had he held a trump less, and won a kopeck fewer, he would have fallen a moment sooner into the ditch at the side of the road. In that case his prostrate body would not have brought, poor, tired, off-leader Dossie down in a heap, nor sent Driver Evans with a broken leg and concussion to Norah's first dressing station. Neither would the board have been set for the game which was to be played five years later on Lake Tanganyika.
Norah's hand was on her compatriot's head when his eyes opened, and her ear close to his lips that demanded feebly to continue his search for the battery. She shook her head and pointed to his leg. Driver Evans persisted and explained his persistence.
She invoked the aid of the chief doctor of the column, a celebrated French surgeon.
'I will do all I can for your compatriots, Lady Norah,' he said, 'but I'm afraid it isn't much.'
Norah's foot tapped the floor while he scribbled a note and gave it to his orderly.
'Nobody here would know where the battery is; Peter will carry this note to the brigadier. However...' he shrugged his shoulders and turned to the case he was dressing.
Norah heard him murmur to his assistant: 'A cette heure-ci le Russe sera certainement couché avec une poule quelconque. Pas moyen de l'y déranger pour une telle bagatelle que les vies de ses soldats.'
Norah bit her lip and went back to Driver Evans. How masculine it all was! Discipline and routine and inefficiency. While the surgeon shrugged his shoulders and the General slept with his woman, her men were dying.
She made up her mind, and, bending over Evans, plied him with as many questions as he could answer. Then, with her comic little air of decision, she crammed a round grey astrachan hat on her head, swung a black Caucasian cloak of pony skin on to her shoulders and made for the stables.
The sleepy transport sergeant was dragged out of his bed and set to start the Ford box-car, which carried the personal baggage of the column. Grumbling, but obedient to her English air of certainty, he swung the engine into life."
"I've spent too long on this episode introducing to your notice Norah Cleverly, and Archie Sinclair," said Ross with a yawn, "to allow me to describe to you her ride. On horseback, it would have claimed a poet's pen. As the mount was a Ford car, I can only say the road was abominable, scored into deep ruts, strewn with boulders, and, without lights, invisible. How the car kept together and the girl's strength held out and how they escaped total wreck, I can't imagine. A stoutish bit of work. Eventually—about the time that Archie's layer died in his arms—the Ford came to a full stop in the sand with its wheels spinning round tyre-deep.
Norah jumped out and pushed. The car did not stir. She looked for stones to put under the wheels to give them grip. She saw nothing but sand and immovable boulders. She sat on the step, the tears hot in her eyes. Not from fear at her position in the route of the victorious Austrian army, but from anger at her failure, and from pity for the men she had failed to rescue.
After a time she heard a voice raised in song. Russians, she knew, sing about the Volga, Teutons about the 'Heimat.' When, therefore, she heard the words:—
'And when I die, don't bury me at all,
Just pickle my bones in al-co-hol...'
she recognised a compatriot.
'God bless my soul,' said Sergeant Yates, a minute later.
* * * * * * *
'Listen,' said Archie to the survivors of his party, a little before dawn, 'isn't that a Ford?'
'Then they 'ave them in 'ell too,' groaned a cockney driver, who was sure he would die of his wounds before the morning. The rattle ceased behind the shattered cottages. A pause interminable to Archie ensued. He stood fingering his revolver. Had the Austrians got round behind them? Were they preparing the rush which would end all? Two figures visible against the crumbling white walls detached themselves from the dark. He wondered whether to challenge them or trust to the cover of darkness. They loomed closer, picking their way slowly over the battle-torn ground. Archie waited till they were at arm's length, before he pressed the button of his torch.
The white circle of light framed a young girl's face: yellow mud was smeared on her cheek, and she shook a tumble of curls out of her eyes.”