The Disturbing Charm

by Berta Ruck

  CHAPTER X

  HER BRIDAL NIGHT

  "An airy devil hovers in the sky And pours down mischief."

  Shakespeare.

  Presently the growling of the guns began to reverberate over London.

  First came the far-off rumbling that is felt rather than heard; the hintwhereat the mothers of households drop book or work to exclaim,"Hush!... It _is_!..."

  "Don't think so, dear," return the men folk; to retract a couple ofminutes later with an "Ah, yes; blast 'em. Here they are. I'll bring thekids down."

  Then came the long, nerve-irritating pause.

  In Mrs. Cartwright's Westminster flat there were no children to causethose anxieties with which the enemy had made himself more detested thanby any legitimate act of war. Her son, as he would have wished you tonote, was hardly a kid to be roused from his sleep. As he strolled backfrom the staircase window, hands in pockets, his manner was nonchalantin the extreme. He was no callow scout, either, to wait in apolice-station for that thrilling moment when he should be allowed outto sound the bugle-call.

  "Like the gramophone on again?" he suggested (luckily in the more manlyof his two voices). "It would drown that boring noise for you."

  "I don't think so, darling, thanks," said his mother. A pause; silence."They may not get through after all. Won't you go to bed, Keith?"

  "Oh, I don't know"--the over-grown lad was already dropping with sleep."Wouldn't you women rather I stopped up with you?"

  Golden and Mrs. Cartwright exchanged a tiny smile before the mothersaid, "Do you know, I don't think we'll stop up. I am going to show Mrs.Awdas to her room now. You do as you like."

  The Master of the House moved from the traditional attitude, flat backagainst the sitting-room mantelpiece, feet wide apart on the Persianrug. "Oh, well, I don't see why I should hang about, waiting up forthose wretched Huns, either," he pronounced, his pink mouth twistingsidewards as he strangled his yawns. "I'll turn in too, if you're sureyou don't mind."

  And he walked across the sitting-room to hold the door open for hismother and her guest to precede him.

  Golden, who considered this English schoolboy "perfectly lovely," gavehim a smiling good night over her shoulder.

  "Good night, Precious," whispered his mother.

  Very prettily the boy returned her kiss as he responded, "Good night,old Bean."

  He turned out the lights behind him and betook himself to his room onthe left of the corridor that skirted the flat. On the right wereReggie's room and his mother's; her old Belgian _femme de menage_ camein by the day. Her younger son's room was unoccupied tonight, but it washer own bedroom that Mrs. Cartwright gave up to Golden Awdas. Here sheleft her to undress, promising to come back.

  She did not think that Golden would sleep at once.

  She wandered back to turn up the lights again in the sitting-room, stillfull of cigarette smoke, and with its atmosphere still vibrant as ifwith young voices and laughter. And as she set chairs into their places,plumped up cushions, and, putting her hand carefully through thecurtains, set a window open and wheeled her standing-desk back ready forher morning's work tomorrow, she thought smilingly of those guests ofhers; all so many years behind her, in age, in emotion, in experience.She delighted in them, these young men who felt themselves masters ofall wisdom, these girls on the right side of a barrier.... The passingof it had been an agony to Claudia Cartwright.

  It did not take all women in the same way, she reflected. Many wentthrough life so entirely satisfied with inessentials; so half-awake.

  Most had never been lovers or had lovers. But those who had----!

  No death of a sweetheart in early youth, no cruel jilting, no bittermatrimonial experience, nothing, nothing! could compare with thepoignant, crushing, rending pain of those years when Youth and Love slipaway from the woman. It is a long black tunnel of misery from which sheemerges (having lost much but accepted, bowed her head, folded herhands) into the grey afternoon of Life.

  And then----Heaven's blessing on the maternal sense that is rich in anyreal woman's character, even if she never has a child at all! For it isthis that comes to her aid; and she spreads it out over the girls andthe men she knows; caring, helping, sympathizing with all their loveemotions (or lack or them).

  Henceforward everything must be vicariously felt by her. She must livein the lives of her children; in their professions and interests; shemust love through her young friends ... Little Olwen ... Golden.... Asshe thought of these Untried, their friend smiled over a tag of versethat came into her mind with the image that seemed its illustration.

  "Oh, tarnish late on Wenlock Edge, Gold that I never see! Lie long, high snowdrifts on the hedge, That will not shower on me."

  Prayer, she thought, can take odd forms----well, this was hers for thehappiness of her girl-friends.

  Golden, she thought, would be in bed by now.

  A nearer growling of guns, from the north, she judged, sounded as shetapped at the door.

  "Come!" called the charming un-English voice.

  Mrs. Cartwright entered her own familiar room with its known mingling ofkuss-kuss, rose, and orris scent. The toilet silver, the Indian numnahon the floor, her husband's sword and sash over the bookshelf, and theenlarged photograph of him laughing under the black, semi-lune shadow ofhis solar-topi----these things were Claudia's background. Her eyesopened upon them each morning. Tonight they all seemed suddenly new toher....

  It was because they were now a background to this radiant stranger inher room. Out of that cloud of loosened gold on her pillow there lookedthe face of a beauty as rare as any that had ever been kissed awake by afairy prince.

  "Oh, my dear," exclaimed Mrs. Cartwright, involuntarily. "How lovely youare, Golden; how lovely!"

  Paradoxical enough it might seem to some women, but this woman thankedHeaven it was a girl so beautiful who had supplanted her, or rather, towhom she had relinquished that beautiful boy. She could not have enduredto see Jack choose a bride unworthy in body or mind, least of all onewho might be as the ordinary "nice" pretty girl often is, a bundle ofmere sentiment and frigidity. To Golden she could give him. Actually shehad brought them together. And now it was to his best woman-friend thatthe young flier confided his sweetheart.

  On this, of all nights! Their bridal night!

  Mrs. Cartwright could have laughed outright at the strangeness of it.Jack's wedding-night!

  She remembered that other night, months ago, when in a French hotelbedroom she had outwatched the hours with a nightmare-haunted man. Inthe very attitude that she had taken then, she sat down now on the edgeof this other bed, tucking the eider-down about her as she beganchatting, quietly and cheerfully, with his bride. Through speech andpause alike the elder woman's mind was echoing with memories. It wasJack Awdas's husky voice that she heard, clearly as when it was his faceupon a pillow that she watched. How feverishly he had muttered, "That'swhy I always shout in my dream.... I was falling, falling, and callingout to my observer.... We _were_ pals!... I don't think it could ever beexactly like that with a girl."

  She, Claudia, had told him, "The girl is more to you or less to you, butnot the same."

  And now she lay in her beauty, the girl; that worshipped "girl" ofJack's. And this----_This!_--was her bridal night.

  Guns! The nearer guns were uttering now. Bark after vicious bark setwindows rattling. The racket died away only to break out afresh....

  In an interval, Golden said suddenly. "Jack told me what a really finefriend you'd always been to him. And, d'you know? I've always known Ishould be friends with you."

  "Have you?"

  "Why, yes. I said so before we left Les Pins.... D'you remember, I sawyou for a moment that very first evening, sitting with him in thelounge? But who would have thought where we should all be tonight?"mused the girl, lifting the throat that rose so pillar-wise and whiteabove the silken edge of a night-dress of her hostess's. "In London, andme married to the Bird-boy, and an air raid going on outside. B
ut do Ihave to keep you up this way? You're all dressed and everything: I'm soafraid you'll be dead tired."

  "Not I. I shouldn't be able to sleep if I did undress. There'll beanother hullabaloo on in another minute, I expect," said Mrs.Cartwright, cheerfully. The sound of the guns had died down for amoment. "And--well, it won't be the first time, Golden, that I've stayedup with somebody who could not sleep.... Ah, they're starting again."

  Yes, they were starting again....

  Throughout London, nurses in hospitals set their teeth angrily overpatients whom they had hoped to drag back to life, out of the horrorsof shock. Other nurses, in maternity homes, could have wrung dismayedhands over this terror added to Nature's ordeal. And in operating roomsthe white-coated surgeons cursed below their breath the hellishinterruption that might cause a slip of the hand or the instrument andleave all care, all science vain. These things were the danger and thedamage; not merely the bomb dropped at random; the crumbling masonry.These, and the mischief to countless little children, disturbed pastsoothing now, with tender nerves a-fret, heads gathered to theirparents' shoulders. Little heads! They ought never to have been visitedby such questions as punctuated the din in homes where baby voicesasked, _"Was that a gun or a bomb, daddy?" ... "Where was that firingfrom?" ... "If a raid came right on Billy's cot, mamsie, what would youdo?"_

  Then there came to their ears a new sound--the gutteral, syncopateddrone of twin engines--beating over the roofs.

  "Ah! There's one got through, then," said Mrs. Cartwright.Following on her words came the outburst of nearer gunnery,to which the whole house seemed to shake; in twos andthrees--"_Brroum--brrroum!--brrroum!--brroum!--brrrroum!_"then a more ponderous crash than all.

  Then, a light tap at the door and a voice in two keys, calling withzest, "Mums! Are you all right? Is Mrs. Awdas? There's nothing to befrightened at really."

  "No; all right, Keith darling. You're all right, aren't you?"

  "Top-hole. I say, did you hear that last? I'm sure it was a dud shelljust outside on the pavement, so----"

  "Keith, you're to _promise_ you won't go outside until they've gone,"called his mother, starting up. "Go to your room!"

  "Oh ... all right, then. I'll nip out as soon as the all-clear goesthough." The Master of the House pattered off down the corridor to hisroom.

  "I wonder if any others will get through tonight," said Mrs. Cartwright,listening.

  Golden, who had not yet lost any of her kin or seen them broken in thisWar, suggested that these German flyers were, anyway, brave.

  "So are other beasts of prey," returned the Englishwoman.

  Again the firing rolled away in the distance, following the raiders'course....

  But a thoughtfulness seemed to have fallen upon the wakeful girl. Forthe first time she had given a little shiver at the sound of thatreceding turmoil.

  "Now I hope it isn't too cowardly of me, what I'm going to say," shebegan, suddenly, turning on her rounded elbow. "But I can't helpthinking of boys flying up there in the dark, in the teeth of guns likethat.... _He_ was doing it, of course, until he crashed. My Bird-boy!...He's always glad when he goes up; he was grousing to me, as you call it,yesterday, because he hadn't been off the ground for a week ... but, oh,Mrs. Cartwright! do you know, _I'm_ real glad, just for tonight, thatJack can't be up."

  Mrs. Cartwright smiled at her, answering her in two words that seemedordinary enough.

  "I know."

  But they meant, to the elder woman, something very different from thegentle agreement that they conveyed to the girl.

  Claudia Cartwright heard again the hasty whisper with which Jack hadtaken leave of her those hours ago. "I want _Her_ to stay here," he toldher. "I'd want you to take care of her."

  At the time Mrs. Cartwright had been paralyzed with surprise. GoldenAwdas to stay with her? Why?

  Why on earth should Jack leave her----tonight of all nights? She, thebride, had seemed to see nothing stupefying in his action in going offwith Captain Ross when the warning came through.

  But Mrs. Cartwright knew that Captain Ross had his own duty, notanything in which Jack must help him. Jack was free, she'd heard, untilten o'clock tomorrow morning. It was not Jack's pidgin to do anythinguntil then.... Therefore why in the name of all that was extraordinaryhadn't he taken his bride away when the others all went? Why hadn't hetaken her off home with him, or to the hotel where he put up, orwherever it was?

  Then, very quickly, she'd seen why.

  One of the cleverest soldiers of her acquaintance had already toldClaudia that, could the true history of these campaigns ever be written,it would read not merely like _another version_ of the War, but like_another War_. She guessed how many things planned never happen and howmany things happen that were never planned, and how few of either getinto the papers. Oh, the difference between the published account andthe story of the man who was there! Tomorrow would see a report of thisraid, which would say nothing at all of the men whose duty ... it had_not_ been to beat back the raiders. It was _not_ Jack's duty to go upthat night. It was his duty not to go.

  But----

  Up there he was now, she knew it. Up there, in the darkness and the din!Perhaps over the house now, the joyous eaglet-boy, fighting thosecircling hawks ... now, at this moment!...

  She knew it in her heart.

  And, thinking of that, she sat there smiling at the white and goldenbride who was glad to think of her boy safe from this danger atleast.... There was no reason why Golden should know it too.

  The woman he had loved continued to watch with the girl he loved, duringher bridal night.