The Girl Philippa

"It's plain enough that the Germans are pretty close," said Warner carelessly. "If you're ready, Philippa, I think we'd better get back to Saïs."

"And your beautiful pictures! Oh, Jim, I can't bear to have them left here – "

"Which do you imagine I consider the more valuable, Philippa, you or those daubs of mine? Come, dear; let's clear out if we can before that fort begins to converse again with Germans."

He paid his reckoning at the desk, where patron, gerant, caissière, and staff had gathered in calm consultation concerning eventualities. Nobody seemed excited; everybody was polite, even smiling; servants were already busy with dusters, brooms, and pans; the porter carried down luggage for departing guests.

"Monsieur Warner, are you leaving us?" inquired François smilingly. "Perhaps it is better; they say that the Germans are now in range of the fort. Saïs is likely to be more peaceful than Ausone tonight. If the Bosches don't bombard us, I think your pictures will be quite safe with us."

He bowed them to the door; Philippa, clinging to Warner's arm, went out into the stony street, which was now crowded with hurrying people, all preparing for flight.

As they set foot on the pavement, a frightful detonation shook the town, another, another; and on the heels of the thunderous shock the first German shell fell in Ausone, plunged through the roof and exploded in the transept of the Church of Sainte Cassilda, blowing the altar and choir stalls to dust and splinters.

Before Philippa and Warner could make their way to the river, three more shells came plunging into the town, one exploding with a deafening din in the empty market, another stripping a shop open from roof to basement and literally disemboweling it, and a third blowing up the eastern end of the rue d'Auros, where its whistling fragments tore right and left through a huddled group of women and children.

Then, as they ran toward the quay, the soldiers on guard there came hastening toward them, warning them back. For a few moments the Place d'Ausone streamed with terrified people in confused and purposeless flight, forced back from the river by line soldiers who kept shouting something which Warner could not understand.

But in another moment he understood, for the old stone bridge across the Récollette split in two, vomiting great masses of stone into the air, and the earth rocked with the roar of dynamite.

Half stunned, balked, hesitating, Warner stood in the market place with his arm around Philippa, looking about him for a chance; while shell after shell fell into the town, and the racket of their detonations resounded from the railroad station to the boulevard.

"The river," he said; "it's the best way out of this, I think!"

She nodded, clasped his arm, and they started once more toward the quay.

Below the parapet their punt, still tied fast, lay tossing and rocking on the agitated river. Down the stone stairs they ran; Philippa sprang on board, and the next moment Warner cast off and drove the punt swiftly out into the current of midstream.

Then, directly ahead of them, parallel to the Impasse d'Alcyon, a shell fell with the whistling screech of a steamer's siren; there came a deadened roar; a geyser of water and gravel rose in mid-river, hurling rocks, planks from the landing, and splintered rowboats in every direction.

Great limbs from the willow trees hurtled earthward, a muddy maelstrom of foam whirled their punt, caught it on a comb of seething water, flung it from wave to wave.

Warner, beaten from his balance, had fallen to his knees. As the plunging punt swept downstream, he continued to use his pole mechanically. Around them debris still rained into the discolored river, branches, fragments of sod; the surface of the water was covered with floating boards, sticks, green leaves, uprooted reeds and rushes; a mangled and bloody swan floated near, its snowy neck and head under water.

Philippa crouched on the bottom of the punt, deadly pale, her hands over her ears, her grey eyes riveted on Warner.

When his voice was under control, he said:

"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 reëchoed 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 Récollette 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 Saïs, 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."

"I can scrub floors and sew and cook," she said serenely. "Do they not need such people?"

"There's no use discussing it," he said. "Only trained women will be wanted – tolerated; and I suppose only trained men. The amateur nurse and warrior were utterly and definitely discredited in South Africa. There'll be no more of that. There's no room for us, Philippa; the firing line would reject me with derision, and the base hospital would politely bow you out." He laughed rather mirthlessly. "There remains for us," he said, "the admirable, but somewhat monotonous thinking-rôles of respectable citizens – items in the world-wide chorus which marches harmlessly hither and thither during the impending drama, and forms pleasing backgrounds for the principals when they take their curtain calls."

She felt the undertone of slight bitterness in his voice; understood it, perhaps, for, when the punt was turned and driven gently ashore among the foggy rushes, she retained the supporting arm he offered, clung to it almost caressingly.