*chapter Lxxi*
*LIVING AND DEAD*
“PATHETIC ECHO OF AIR-TRAGEDY. SHERBRAND, R.F.C., NOT DEAD OR PRISONER. RESCUED BY AMERICAN RED CROSS AMBULANCE. IN HOSPITAL NEAR YPRES. WILL RECOVER, BUT BLIND FOR LIFE.”
The clamorous headlines had followed close on a telephone from Sir Roland. Patrine had learned what it means to cry for joy—an unforgettable experience. She had discovered that one who kneels down to thank God for a boon so marvellous, has no words left to offer Him, nor even tears and sighs.
She had written again and again to Sherbrand, saying only “Let me come to you!” Passionate, pitiful, tender letters, answered after weeks of delay by one page in the stiff, neat handwriting of the American Red Cross Nursing Sister who acted as amanuensis for the blind man.
“April, 1915.
“You have said that you wish to visit me in my blindness. I thank you for the expressed desire, but I cannot receive you here! I have never been the kind of man who bid for pity from women, and the ties that you broke, voluntarily, six months ago, I do not wish to renew. My mother has been here to bring me some things”—the French and Belgian decorations, guessed Patrine—“and has gone away again. She understands that it is best for me to remain here, because, although the War is over as far as I am actively concerned, I can hear the guns and breathe the breath of battle, and know when the ‘planes pass overhead, and follow them in thought. There is little else a blind man can do, except make toys or baskets! Do not think me bitter or discontented—I am neither—quite O.K. I wish people had been told I brought down the Zepp., that’s all! With gratitude for your kind and friendly remembrance,
A formal letter, but between the cold, stiff lines Patrine had read reproach, and love, and yearning. An unkind letter—but could she judge him harshly, her poor blind eagle, sitting in darkness never to be lifted, listening to the guns, and the battle-song of the Birds of War, drifting down out of “his sky”?
There was Mass in the Convent chapel at seven next morning. A military chaplain offered the Divine Sacrifice, and the rush-bottomed chairs were occupied by soldiers, French Chasseurs and Zouaves, Senegalese and Negroes, English Guards and Irish Fusiliers, Highlanders and a German or two,—all patients from the Hospital under the management of the Ursuline Sisters—a big building next door to the Convent, that had been a young ladies’ boarding school in the days before the War.
The chapel was a dusky place. So dusky that though the red carnations and white Eucharis lilies in the Altar vases struck vivid notes of colour in the light of the Altar candles, the ruby spark of the Sanctuary lamp and the bright flame of the Paschal candle were barely visible in the brooding gloom. You could only tell the place to be crowded, by the deep-toned chorus of masculine voices joining fervently in the Confiteor and Credo. Pale green flashes momentarily lit up the crimson and purple and tawny tracery of the round east window, and the distant thudding of the guns at the Front made an accompaniment to the sacred rite.
The French priest officiating was a lean, short, elderly personage with brilliant eyes set in a mask of walnut-brown wrinkles and a resonant voice that was illustrated by beautiful, illuminating gestures as he preached.
“Let none say in your hearing, unrebuked, that this War is an unrelieved misfortune,” he said to his hearers. “Recognize with me, my French compatriots, the Divine Mercy as extended particularly to France in this fiery ordeal! Her towns and villages have been destroyed,—her buildings have been shattered, her sons in countless thousands slain, but her national character has been purified—the soul of her people has been raised from the mire. If there is one here present among you—whatever may be his nationality,—who is conscious of loving Virtue better and loathing Vice more intensely, since the beginning of this War—then the War has been a blessing—to him—and not a curse! Acts have been performed—and are repeated hourly—acts of a sublime and touching selflessness and an almost Divine tenderness,—not only by men and women who are mild and gentle, but by the roughest and the most abandoned of either sex. The good seed was sown in time of peace—ah yes, my children! but it might have perished. And now Our Lord, who loves flowers, has caused these pure and exquisite blossoms to spring for Him from the field of War.”
After his tiny sermon, delivered in French, and repeated in English, he hesitated a moment before turning to the Altar and said, with emotion in his mobile face and quick utterance:
“I have to ask a favour of you this morning. It is that at the Commemoration of the Departed you will unite with me in a mental act of prayer. Prayer for the soul of one to whom the gift of Faith, not being sought, was not given. A soul that has passed forth in darkness into the presence of Him who is the Light.”
He turned away and began the Credo. As the deep chorus of male voices followed, Patrine found herself agreeing with the preacher’s discourse.
“What was it,” she asked herself, “that led me out from overheated, crowded rooms, oppressive with the scent of flowers and perfumes of triple extract—where the Tango and the Turkey Trot were being danced by half-clad, painted women and effeminate young men—and set my feet upon a mountain-slope with the free winds of heaven blowing upon me? I must answer—It was the War!”
As the great waves of the Credo surged and beat against the old brown rafters she went on thinking:
“What has made me quicken to the call of Humanity—awakened me to the knowledge of my sisterhood with my fellow-women? What has taught me how to live without dissipation and do without useless luxuries? Again—the War! And oh! what has taught me the meaning of Love in all its fulness, and set within the shrine of my heart this great sacred sorrow, and kindled in my soul the pure altar-flame of Faith? The War, the terrible War!”
She prayed for Sherbrand at the Commemoration of the Living! A somewhat incoherent petition that her Flying Man might be helped to bear his blindness, and find some happiness in her unchanged love. And the thought of the dead Agnostic haunted her. Who was the man, and what had brought about his ending? Was he a patient in the Ursuline Hospital?
A French, an English, or a German soldier? By a subtle change in her mental purview, recollections of von Herrnung began to occupy her mind.
“I will not think of him!—I will not!” she said to herself desperately. Then the obsession assumed an acute form. All that she most wished to forget in her relations with the Kaiser’s Flying Man was being revived in her memory. Scene by scene, sentence by sentence, she was forced to live over the hated Past again.
She must have risen from her knees and left the chapel, so unbearable became the torment, but that the sacring bell rang its triples, the deep tones of the Sanctus answered from the turret, and the Host was lifted up. Then her tense nerves relaxed. The almost tangible presence of evil withdrew itself. She breathed more freely, and peace flowed in balmy waves upon her stormy soul. In prayer for herself and those who were most dear to her, she lost the sense of the unseen hands plucking at her garments and the soundless voice whispering at her ear. And presently at the Ipsis Domine, when supplication is made by priests and people for the departed, she prayed for the soul of the Denier—that the Divine Mercy might reach and enfold him, and lead him yet into the Way of Peace.
“Christ is risen who created all things, and who hath had pity upon mankind… Purchased people, declare His virtues, alleluia! Who hath called you out of darkness into His admirable light.”
To Patrine the Call had come.
It was Easter Week and there were many communicants. The nuns and the French and English Red Cross nurses helped the lame to reach the Altar-rails and guided the blind. When a tall, blond young English Officer with bandaged eyes and an empty sleeve was led up to his Master’s Table, Patrine was grateful that the chapel was so dusk.
She was to meet the Chaplain of the Pophereele Stationary Hospital after Mass, the Mother Superioress had said. Thus, guided by an Ursuline Sister, she passed from the chapel into a long, whitewashed cloister looking on the garden, its open arches facing the doors of what had been class-rooms, and now were wards. Another Ursuline, the Sister Superintendent of the Hospital, with a young, gentle face framed in her close white guimpe and flowing black veil, sat writing in a big book at a plain deal table. Near her were some shelves with rows of bottles and a chest of drawers with measuring-glasses upon it, and a pestle and mortar and druggists’ scales. Above the table a black wooden Crucifix hung against the whitewashed wall.
“This is Soeur Catherine, who keeps the Hospital accounts and dispenses the medicines, and posts the register in which we set down the names of all the wounded received and discharged. Take care, Mademoiselle! That paint is new and comes off!” cried the chaperoning Sister, snatching aside the skirt of Patrine’s long blue V.A.D. coat.
She had brushed, in passing, against a wooden tablet that leaned against the wall near the door through which she had come. A big square of black-painted deal surmounted by a gabled and eaved Cross of German pattern, and bearing an inscription in white Gothic lettering: