“I’ll send him a telegram,” said Gerard de Montignac.
Now this was in the spring of autumn, 1916, when Bartels was in the full bloom of power. His camp was full, for the danger was small, the pay high, and the discipline easy. The Moor brought his horse and his rifle, was paid so many dollars a day, and could go home if the pay failed or his harvest called him. But in the autumn Bartels in his turn began to suffer annoyance. Thus, on one occasion a strange humming filled the air, and a most alarming thing swooped out of the sky with a roar and dropped a bomb in the middle of the camp.
Bartels ran out of his hut with an oath. “They’ve located us at last,” he growled. Not one of his soldiers had ever seen an aeroplane before, except perhaps the man who was cowering down on the ground close to him with every expression of terror. Bartels jerked him up to his feet.
“What’s your name?”
“Ahmed Ben Larti.”
“They make a great noise, but they hurt no one,” Bartels declared. “Tell the others!”
The others were running for their lives to any sort of shelter. For, indeed, this sort of thing was worse than cannon. And unfortunately for Bartel’s encouragements, the aeroplane was coming back. It dropped its whole load of bombs in and around that camp, breaching the walls and destroying the huts and causing not a few casualties into the bargain. There was an exodus of some size from that camp under cover of the night, and Bartels the next morning thought it prudent to move.
He moved westwards into the country of the Braue’s, and there his second misfortune befell him. His month’s instalment of money did not come to hand. It should have travelled upon mules from Tetuan, and a rumour spread that the English had got hold of it. Nothing, of course, could be said; Bartels had just to put up with the loss and see a still further diminution of his army. Within a month the new camp was raided by aeroplanes, and Bartels had to move again. From a harrier of others he had sadly fallen to being harried himself.
“There is a traitor in the camp,” he said, and he consulted Abd-el-Malek and stray German visitors from Tetuan and Melilla. They suspected everybody who went away before the raids and came back afterwards. They never suspected men like Ahmed Ben Larti, who was always present in the camp on these occasions of danger, not overconspicuously present, but just noticeably present, running for shelter, for instance, or discharging his rifle at the aeroplane in a panic of terror. Bartels, however, carried on with constantly diminishing forces until the crops were ripening in the following year. Then the aeroplanes dealt with him finally.
Wherever he pitched his camp, there very quickly they found him out and burnt the crops for a mile around. The villages would no longer supply him with food; his army melted to a useless handful of men; he became negligible, a bandit on the move. Ahmed Ben Larti called off the little train of runners which had passed in his messages to French agents in Tetuan, and one dark evening slipped away himself. His work was done, and almost immediately his luck gave out.
A telegram reached Gerard de Montignac at Rabat a week later from the French consul in Tetuan, which, being decoded, read: “Larti brought in here this morning. He was attacked two miles from here and left for dead. Recovery doubtful.”
The last of Ahmed’s messengers had been lured into a house in Tetuan, and upon him Larti’s final message announcing the date of his own arrival had been discovered. Further telegrams came to Rabat from Tetuan. Larti had lost his left arm just below the shoulder, and his condition was precarious. He began to mend, however, in a week, but three months passed before a French steamer brought to Casablanca a haggard thin man in mufti with a sleeve pinned to his breast, who had once been Captain Paul Ravenel of the Tirailleurs.
Gerard de Montignac met him on the quay and walked up with him to the cantonment at Ain-Bourdja.
“We have got quarters for you here,” said Gerard. “There’s nobody you know any longer here.”
“Yes!” said Paul.
“We can rig you out with a uniform. The General will want to see you.”
“Yes?” said Paul.
“You know that you have been on secret service the whole time. The troubles at Fez were the opportunity needed to make your disappearance natural.”
Paul sat down on the camp bed.
“That was arranged in Paris before you went to Bartels,” said Gerard. “Oh, by the way, I have something of yours.”
He opened a drawer of the one table in the tiny matchboard room and, unfolding a cloth, handed to Paul the row of medals which he had taken from Paul’s tunic when he had searched the house of Si Ahmed Driss in Fez.
Paul sat gazing at the medals for a long while with his head bowed.
“I have got another to add to these, you know — the medaille militaire,” he said, with a laugh, and his voice broke. “I shall turn woman if I hold them any longer,” he cried, and, rising, he put them back in the drawer. Gerard de Montignac turned to a window which looked out across the plain of the Chaiouïa. He pointed towards the northwest and said:
“Years ago, Paul, you saved me from mutilation and death over there. I forgot that in Mulai Idris, and you didn’t remind me.”
“I, too, had forgotten it,” said Paul. He looked about the cabin, he drew a long breath as though he could hardly believe the fact that he was there. Then he said abruptly:
“I must send a telegram to Marseilles!”
Gerard de Montignac stared at him.
“Marseilles?”
“Yes, Marguerite has been living there all this time.”
“But you were in hospital there, and no one visited you, I know. The nurse told me.”
Paul Ravenel smiled.
“Marguerite never knew I was there. I was always afraid that she would come there by chance. Fortunately, she was driving a car. I was just Ahmed Ben Larti. The time had not come.” He looked at Gerard and nodded his head. “But I can tell you it was difficult not to send for her. There she was, just a few streets and just a few house-walls between us. There were sleepless nights, with the light shining down on all those beds of wounded men when I could have screamed for Marguerite aloud.”
He sent off his telegram from the Cantonment Post Office and then strolled into the town with Gerard de Montignac. The Villa Iris was closed; Madame Delagrange had vanished. Petras Tetarnis was no doubt driving his Delaunay-Belleville through the streets of Paris. Paul looked at his watch and put it back into his pocket with impatience. It was out in the palm of his hand again. He was counting the minutes until a telegram could be delivered in Marseilles. He was wondering whether she was already aware — as she had been aware when he had stood behind her on the first night that they met.
A fortnight later Mr. Ferguson, the lawyer, received a telegram which put him into a fluster. He was an old gentleman nowadays and liable to excitement. He sent for his head clerk, not that pertinacious servant, Mr. Gregory — he had long since gone into retirement — but another, from whom Mr. Ferguson was not inclined to stand any nonsense.
“I shall want to-morrow all the necessary forms for securing English nationality,” he said, “and please get me Colonel Vanderfelt on the trunk line.”
The clerk went out of the office. The old man sat in a muse, looking out of the window upon the plane trees in the Square. So here was Virginia Ravenel’s son coming home, invalided, with a wife. How the years did fly, to be sure! Yet though the plane trees were a little dim to his eyes, he heard a voice, fresh as the morning, through that dusty room, and saw the Opera House at Covent Garden with people wearing the strange dress of thirty years ago.
THE END
The Dean’s Elbow (1930)
CONTENTS
I. WHERE ENGLAND BEGINS
II. AT THE LILY POND
III. AT FRASCATI’S
IV. THE RACE
V. THE RING
VI. THE SHUTTER CLOSES
VII. GETTING ON
VIII. ACCORDING TO PLAN
IX. ANGELA IS NOT DISAPPOINTED
X. THE COUNTRY HOUSE
XI. MARK VISITS HIS LAWYER
XII. MR. WYATT APPEARS
XIII. THE PERRITON HOUSEHOLD
XIV. LOIS GROWS UP
XV. THE HOLIDAY
XVI. THE GREAT EXPERIMENT
XVII. STARTLING NEWS
XVIII. DIFFICULTIES — AND NATURE’S WAY OUT
XIX. THE COMPLICATION OF OLIVIA
XX. MR. HOYLE TALKS A GOOD DEAL
XXI. OLIVIA MAKES AN OFFER
XXII. THE NEW CLERK
XXIII. THE HIATUS
XXIV. EXIT MR. WYATT
XXV. THE BALL AT UPPER THEIGN
XXVI. DEREK MAKES A GESTURE
XXVII. FATHER AND DAUGHTER
XXVIII. AND THE TERTIUM QUID
XXIX. THE ANTHEM
XXX. THE LAST CRUISE
The first edition
I. WHERE ENGLAND BEGINS
THE MIRACLE OF yesterday! Incredible — yet proved true now by every sound and sight and physical sensation. Mona Lightfoot uttered a little crow of delight; took her hands from the tiller to clap them together, and the small cutter slipped up into the wind and hung, her great sail flapping and all the life gone out of her.
The young man in the bows, who was fishing his spinnaker out of the sail-locker, hooted his derision and, running over the crown of the cabin roof, sprang down into the cockpit.
“Have I done wrong?” Mona asked with a penitence which was more than half mockery.
“So much wrong that if this ship carried a yard arm we should be making at once for the three-mile limit.”
He brought the cutter on her course again with the sails full and bye.
“Keep her so with the leach of the sail just quiver ing and between the buoys and the beacon.” The young man was very nautical in his talk on this first morning of his holiday, and Mona Lightfoot laughed with pleasure. He had the boyishness of other young men; and for every sign that he was really like other young men her mind was eagerly alert.
The cutter slid down the long channel of Poole Harbour; the dingy little yellow tavern, “The Margate Hoy,” was no longer distinguishable upon the quay, and the cluster of deserted buildings which in those far-off days of the early nineties was Poole, dwindled over the counter into a blur. It was seven o’clock on a cool, silver morning in the first week of September, England’s month. In a gap of land on the western side Corfe Castle black upon its pyramid stood out from the wall of the Purbeck Hills; on the east the pine trees and white sand of Canford Cliffs struck a milder and more modern note of history. The smooth lagoon of the harbour had the soft gleam of a mirror and split before the stem of the cutter with the tinkle of breaking glass. The sky spread dappled overhead, and the earth still very silent below it; and the air, fresh and lively, held the sure promise of a mellow sunlit day.
The fairway curved in the midst of a little fleet of fishing boats and pleasure yachts towards the narrows between the big hotel upon the point and Brownsea Island. It seemed to Mona Lightfoot that she was passing through a gateway into a new and magical world. The kick of the tiller in her unpractised hands was a sheer delight.
“I have the loveliest feeling that I am playing truant,” she cried to the young man, who was now polishing the shining brass of his little ship with the care of a good groom for his horse. He looked at her with a quick smile of appreciation, which lit up a face of quite commonplace looks with a surprising grace.
“I, too,” he answered, and gazed about him, smell ing the sea. The yellow sand cliffs of Bournemouth, and a steamer smoking alongside the pier, dropped away upon their left. Studland’s prettiness, the chalk arches and Old Harry, the chalk pillar, were deployed upon their right. And, white calling to white, in a diagonal line with Old Harry, the towering chalk down of the Isle of Wight caught the first of the sun light, spilt some of it upon the jagged Needles at its feet and tossed the rest across the bay to warm Old Harry.
“Keep her straight, Mona, now between the striped buoys and the black cones,” he cried. “I’ll have finished in a minute or two. Then I’ll relieve you at the tiller and you can cook our breakfasts.”
The Sea Flower was at once treasure and romance to young Mark Thewliss. Each increase in a steadily rising salary had been set aside for years against her building; the enthralling library of small boats and their adventures and their equipment had been studied as though each one of them was a classic, so that the exquisite creature might have no tiny omission or faulty taste to reproach him with; and when she at last took the sea from a slip at Salcombe in Devonshire, Thewliss passed his examination as master-mariner rather that she might be fitly commanded than to gratify any aspiration of his own. Sea Flower was now in her second year, a cutter of nine tons by Thames measurement, built of oak, coppered below the water line, with a teak deck, a lead keel — nothing but lead would satisfy Mark Thewliss, though the expense of it cramped him for a whole year of his working life — and a set of sails dainty enough for any racer in the Solent. He had had her built with a spoon bow, a broad beam and a long counter so that she might be safe in a heavy sea with a strong following wind; and since she was meant for single-handed cruising, every sheet was brought aft to the cockpit. She was painted black with a gold line, and she answered to her tiller as a polo pony to a touch of the snaffle.
Sea Flower had this great merit too. Being built for single-handed work, she had no forecastle. She could afford an unexpectedly spacious saloon with a cambered roof and two little doors at the forward end of it, that on the left opening into a tiny kitchen and pan try, that on the right into a lavatory. There was even a bath under the floor. Two steps led down from the cockpit, giving thus six feet of headroom in the saloon; and the mahogany doors were edged with rubber and watertight. She had a small tank of drinking water at the back of one side of the cockpit, and she carried a couple of beakers besides in rockers on her deck. Her larder for fresh meat was arranged after the fashion of the North Sea fishing trawlers — a cask with a lid, screwed to the deck behind the main-mast and ventilated with holes made by a large auger. But on the Sea Flower, the cask was a super-cask — a barrel of ripe oak bound with hoops of brass.
Thewliss stowed his spinnaker sail ready to his hand before he came aft to the cockpit. He was still, indeed, on the camber of the cabin roof when he stopped suddenly with a look of surprise upon his face.
“Have I done wrong again?” Mona Lightfoot asked.
“No,” he answered, and again his smile gave life and illumination to his face. “I was remembering that last year I sailed to Cherbourg and Guernsey and the Scilly Isles. And I never realised to this moment what a lonely business it must have been.”
He sprang down into the cockpit as he spoke, and so did not see the colour spread over the girl’s face and the sudden blossom of tenderness in her eyes.
“That’s Durlstone Head,” he said with the broad accent of all the longshoremen who had ever lived. He pointed to the great promontory beyond Swanage Bay where a huge stone ball hung poised upon a green shoulder. He told her the legend of that stone ball as it is known to all hands in coasting craft; how the owner of the house upon the head had spent his life having the map of the world and its oceans carved in an exact proportion upon it, and how he had blown out his brains in despair when the work was done, because a tiny islet in the Red Sea was half an inch out of its proper place. “Now cook the breakfast, Mona, or we shall find ourselves in the Race before it’s ready. Crisp bacon and coffee hot enough to scald the mouth. You’ll find fresh rolls and butter in the cupboard by the settee.” He took the tiller from her and added with a laugh:
“We have got the best wind we could wish for. I put it all down to your yachting cap. Run along!”
Mona Lightfoot took a look at herself in the mirror of the saloon before she set about preparing breakfast. She was a tall girl with copper coloured hair and big dark eyes clear as the morning set wide apart under a low broad forehead. She had a straight delicately chiselled nose, a mouth rather large
, a short upper lip and a rounded chin. There was too much of character in her face for prettiness; but there were moments when it was lovely; and always it had a curiously appealing look as of one destined somehow for great unhappiness. Even now, as her eyes danced and she set the yachting cap still more jauntily to the thick waves of hair, it was there for those who had eyes to see. A moment later and the blind could almost have seen it. For she caught her breath and stood with her lips parted and a hand upon her heart, like someone on the edge of a perilous dive into dark and unknown waters.
She had planned to sit quietly down somewhere apart — forward for choice, above the hiss and sparkle of the water at the bows — and fix each instant of the miraculous yesterday, with its burnish still upon it, for ever in her memories. A golden pattern which must throw some glimmer of light ahead of her even if the thread of her life led her deep into the catacombs. But there was too much to do. Breakfast had to be cooked — and such a breakfast as would make one sorry for the angels. It had to be eaten and cleared away, and the plates washed and stored safely in their racks — all before some mysterious and hostile thing called “The Race” enveloped them.
Sea Flower was full of gadgets. A small folding table could be set into slots in the floor of the cockpit, and upon this, covered with a fine white cloth, break fast was laid. Coffee of a fragrance unknown within the four walls of a room; bacon in thin crisp slices fried in its fat with eggs, just tinged with brown, lolling on the top of them; hot rolls and fresh butter in a big wedge instead of mean little meagre pats; marmalade with thick cubes of brown peel; and honey in the comb, with Ribston Pippins from Hereford and Cape plums for dessert.
Mona Lightfoot was to see in use now another contrivance of which Mark Thewliss was inordinately vain. From the combing of the cockpit underneath the tiller a long curved steel bar hung down with a hinge at each end. Thewliss lifted the bar until it stood out horizontally, a segment of a circle where springs at the hinges caught it and held it firm. On the inside of this segment there was a steel plate, shaped and fixed to the curve of the bar and notched like the parapet of a castle wall. Thewliss raised this plate until it stood perpendicularly on the bar and clamped it in that position with a couple of strong screws.
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 586