“How could I have forgotten—Bawne?”: *chapter Xix*

*BAWNE*

As so often happens, the thought of the beloved heralded his well-known thump upon the door-panel. When had the Dop Doctor ever cried, “Come in!” with such a leaden sinking of the heart?

The boy who came in was alert, upright, slim, and strong for his twelve years. You saw him attired in the dress with which we are all familiar—the loose shirt of khaki-brown, with its knotted silk neckerchief of dark blue, the lanyards ending in clasp-knife and whistle, the roomy shorts upheld by a brown leather pouch-belt supporting a serviceable axe, the dark blue stockings turned over at the knee, fitting close to the slim muscular legs, the light strong shoes, the brown smasher hat with the chin-strap, completed the picture of a Scout of whom no patrol need be ashamed. He carried his light staff at the trail, and entering, brought it to an upright position, and saluted smartly. The salute formally acknowledged, he came straight to the table and stood at his father’s elbow, waiting, as Saxham feigned to blot a written line. Outwardly composed, the drumming of the man’s heart deafened him, and a mist before his eyes blurred the page they were bent upon. Fatherhood gripped him by the throat as in the first moment of his son’s separate existence. A thing we prize is never so poignantly precious as when we contemplate the possibility of its ruin or loss.

“Father, you aren’t generally pleased when I come bothering you in consulting hours, but this time it is really serious business, no kid, and Honour bright!”

Saxham answered with equal gravity:

“If you have a reasonable excuse for coming, I have said that you may come.”

The boy was like him. You saw it as he stood waiting. The vivid gentian-blue eyes were Saxham’s, as were the thick throat and prominent under-jaw and the square facial outline. But the plume of hair that swept over the broad forehead was red-brown like Lynette’s. The delicate, irregular profile and a sensitive sweetness about the lips were gifts from his mother. The directness of his look, and the tinge of brusqueness in his speech were unconsciously modelled on the father’s, as he said, sacrificing sufficient of manly independence to come within the curve of the Doctor’s strong arm:

“First, I wanted to show you my new badge.”

Saxham’s left hand squeezed the arm most distant from him, where a familiar device was displayed upon the sleeve, midway, between the shoulder and elbow, below the six-inch length of colours distinctive of this Scout’s Patrol.

“Turn round and show it, then!”

“Father, you’re larking. That’s my General Scout Badge. I’ve had it ever since I passed my Second Class tests. Before then, you know, when I was a Tenderfoot, I’d only the top-part—the fleur-de-lis without the motto, and you wear that in your left pocket button-hole. But this is something special, don’t you see?”

Saxham eyed the row of little enamelled circles on the sleeve next him with respectful gravity. The boy went on, trying to control the gleeful tremor in his voice:

“I’ve got the Ambulance Badge!—look at the Geneva Cross!—and the Signaller’s Badge—this is it—with the crossed flags—and the Interpreter’s Badge—the one with the two hands holding. But this is the very latest. Our Scoutmaster gave it to me after parade to-day. It’s the Airman’s Badge—“ He caught his breath, the secret was coming in a moment… He went on: “To get it you must have made a model aeroplane. Not a flying-stick, any kid of nine can make one—but a model that will really fly. That’s my special reason for coming. Mother was out—and—and next to her I wanted to tell you!”

“And next after me?”

The boy considered a moment before he looked up to answer:

“Cousin Pat, because she can keep a secret so tightly.”

Saxham patted the sturdy square shoulders.

“You are fond of Cousin Patrine, aren’t you?”

“Rather!”

“Just tell me why?”

“Because”—the young brows were puckered—“because she’s so big and so—beautiful. And she’d just die for you and Mother… She comes in my prayers next after you two.”

“And—the Chief Scout?”

“Father, wouldn’t it be—a bit cheeky to go and pray for a man like that?”

A spark of laughter wakened in Saxham’s sombre eyes.

“Not quite respectful, you think? Is that it? Why so, when you’re taught to pray for the Holy Father, Mother Church, and the King and Queen?”

The boy’s puckered brows smoothed. The question was settled.

“Of course. I forgot. Then the Chief Scout must come in after Cousin Patrine. Because a gentleman must always give place to a lady. That’s what Mother says.”

“Suppose Cousin Patrine never came to see you any more, what would you do then?”

Bawne straightened the sturdy body and proclaimed:

“I would go and find her and bring her back!”

“Suppose she did not want to come?”

Bawne said instantly:

“I would tell her Mother was wanting her. For Mother would be, you know. And Cousin Pat wouldn’t keep her waiting. Not much, sir, she wouldn’t!”

“She cares so?”

“Doesn’t she! Why, have you forgotten when I was a little shaver and Mother was so ill?”

Saxham, with a certain tightening of the muscles of the throat, recalled the wan, red-eyed spectre that had haunted the landing outside the guarded bedroom where Lynette lay, white and strengthless, while her husband fought for her with Death.

“Well, well. Go on loving Patrine and praying for her! Now tell me of your model.”

The boy said, controlling his exultation:

“It has to be left at our District Headquarters until to-morrow. You see—it’s rather a special affair. It’s not a flying stick, like the things I used to make when I was a shaver, nor a glider—you see men in spectacles flying those every day to please the kids on Hampstead Heath and in Kensington Gardens, but a model of a Bristol monoplane with a span of thirty inches, and a main-plane-area of a hundred and fifty”—he caught his breath and with difficulty kept his eager words from tumbling over one another as he reached the thrilling climax—“and I built up her fuselage with cardboard and sticking-plaster out of the First Aid case you gave me to carry in my belt-pouch, and cut the propeller out of a tin toy engine I’ve had ever since I was a kid—and made the planes of big sheets of stiff foolscap strengthened with thin strips of glued wood, and her spars, sir!—the upright ones are quills, and her stays and struts I made of copper wire and she’s weighted with lead ribbon like what you wrap about the gut when you’re bottom-fishing for tench or barbel—and her motor-power is eighteen inches of square elastic twisted—and father”—he broke into a war-dance of ecstasy unrestrained—“when Roddy Wrynche and me went on a secret expedition to Primrose Hill to test her—she flew, sir! First go-off—by George!”

“Really flew? … You are certain?”

“Upon my life, sir, and that’s my Honour. Scout’s Honour and life are the same thing. That’s what the Oath rubs into us.” He squared his shoulders and lowered his voice as a boy speaking of high matters that must be dealt with reverently. “I think it’s—ripping. I can say it. Would you like me to?”

Saxham nodded without speaking, because of that choking something sticking in his throat. That something Lear called “the mother.” And, dammed away behind his eyes, were scalding tears that only men may shed. As the young voice said:

“On my Honour I promise that I will do my best to be loyal to God and the King.

“On my Honour I promise that I will do my best to Help other people at all times.

“On my Honour I promise that I will do my best to obey the Scout Law… You see”—the boyish arm was on Saxham’s shoulder now, the ruddy-fair cheek pressed against the pale, close-shaven face—“you see, Father, when a Scout says ‘On my Honour’ it’s just as if he swore on the Crucifix!”

Saxham said, crushing down the fierce emotion that had almost mastered him:

“It is—just the same! For the man who breaks a promise will never keep an oath… I have a friend of whom I have told you… I think he would like to hear about your model aeroplane… May I tell him, or would you prefer to tell him yourself?”

Bawne’s fair face glowed. He gasped in ecstasy:

“Father… You mean Mr. Sherbrand—your Flying Man who’s in the Hospital?”

“My Flying Man—but he is well again and back at work at Hendon. There was not much the matter with him; a slight obstruction in one of the nasal passages that prevented him from breathing with his mouth shut as he should. Now he has asked me—this afternoon if I am at leisure—to bring my little son to the aerodrome and see him make a flight.”

“And go up in his aeroplane with him? Father, say Yes! Do, please do!”

As the little figure bobbed up and down beside him in joyous excitement, Saxham answered, not without an inward tug:

“If your mother says ‘Yes’ I shall not say No! Now off with you, my son!”

The boy saluted and went. Even his bright obedience wrung his father’s heart. The man looked haggard and old. He hid his careworn face in his hands for a minute. His lips were still moving when he looked up and made the Sign so well known to many of us upon his forehead and breast. Prayer, that most powerful of all therapeutic agents, so often prescribed by Saxham for his patients, was his own tonic and sedative in moments of bodily exhaustion and mental overstrain.

He had prayed, he, the sceptic, on that unforgettable night at Gueldersdorp, when he wrestled with his possessing fiend… Lynette had taught him the habit of prayer. And even as she, a friendless, neglected waif, had learned to look up and see the shining Faces of our Divine Redeemer and His Virgin Mother through the features of a pure and tender woman; so her husband, looking in the eyes of Lynette, had found the gift of Faith lost years before.

“Oh! … Prayer!” you say—“Faith!” … and I see you shrug and sneer a little, you who are intellectual and highly educated, and have ceased to believe in what you term the Hebraic myth or the Christian legend—since you learned to point out the weak places in the First Book of Genesis, and sneer at the discrepancies between the statements of the Gospel narrators—though you will hear such testimonies sworn to in good faith, wherever witnesses are examined in a Court of Law.

But no! you tell me, you are not an Agnostic. You credit the existence of Almighty God, but prayer is the parson’s affair. Well, because a man wears a straight black coat, will you abandon to him so inestimable a privilege? Is it not a marvellous thing that you or I should lift up our earth-made, earth-begrimed hands, and that He who set this tiny planet to spin out its aeons of cycles amidst the innumerable millions of systems wheeling through His Universe should stoop to hear the words we utter? Feeble cries, drowned by the orchestras of the winds, and the chorus of the Spheres revolving in their orbits, or silent utterances imperceptible to any Ear save His alone.