Chapter 9
CHAPTER II
They were a weary, half-starved and travel-stained quartette when the Red Guards stopped them for the last time in Russia and pa.s.sed them through, warning them that the White Guards would surely do murder if they caught them.
The next day the White Guards halted them, but finally pa.s.sed them through, counselling them to keep out of the way of the Red Guards if they wished to escape being shot at sight.
In the neat, s.h.i.+ny, carefully scrubbed little city of Helsingfors they avoided the huns by some miracle--one of Brisson's customary miracles--but another little company of Americans and English was halted and detained, and one harmless Yankee among them was arrested and packed off to a hun prison.
Also, a large and nervous party of fugitives of mixed nationalities and professions--consuls, charges, attaches, and innocent, agitated citizens--was summarily grabbed and ordered into indefinite limbo.
But Brisson's daily miracles continued to materialise, even in the land of the Finn. By train, by sleigh, by boat, his quartette floundered along toward safety, and finally emerged from the white h.e.l.l of the Red people into the sub-arctic sun--Estridge with painfully scanty luggage, Palla Dumont with none at all, Ilse Westgard carrying only her Cossack saddle-bags, and Brisson with his d.a.m.ning papers still sewed inside his clothes, and owing Estridge ten dollars for not getting murdered.
They all had become excellent comrades during those anxious days of hunger, fatigue and common peril, but they were also a little tired of one another, as becomes all friends when subjected to compulsory companions.h.i.+p for an unreasonable period.
And even when one is beginning to fall in love, one can become surfeited with the beloved under such circ.u.mstances.
Besides, Estridge's budding sentiment for Ilse Westgard, and her wholesome and girlish inclination for him, suffered an early chill.
For the poor child had acquired trench pets from the Cossacks, and had pa.s.sed on a few to Estridge, with whom she had been constantly seated on the front seat.
Being the frankest thing in Russia, she told him with tears in her blue eyes; and they had a most horrid time of it before they came finally to a sanitary plant erected to attend to such matters.
Episodes of that sort discourage sentiment; so does cold, hunger and discomfort incident on sardine-like promiscuousness.
n.o.body in the party desired to know more than they already knew concerning anybody else. In fact, there was little more to know, privacy being impossible. And the ever instinctive hostility of the two s.e.xes, always and irrevocably latent, became vaguely apparent at moments.
Common danger swept it away at times; but reaction gradually revealed again what is born under the human skin--the paradox called s.e.x-antipathy. And yet the men in the party would not have hesitated to sacrifice their lives in defence of these women, nor would the women have faltered under the same test.
Brisson was the philosophical stoic of the quartette. Estridge groused sometimes. Palla, when she thought herself unnoticed, camouflaged her face in her furs and cried now and then. And occasionally Ilse Westgard tried the patience of the others by her healthy capacity for unfeigned laughter--sometimes during danger-laden and inopportune moments, and once in the shocking imminence of death itself.
As, for example, in a vile little village, full of vermin and typhus, some hunger-crazed peasants, armed with stolen rifles and ammunition, awoke them where they lay on the straw of a stable, cursed them for aristocrats, and marched them outside to a convenient wall, at the foot of which sprawled half a dozen blood-soaked, bayoneted and bullet-riddled landlords and land
And things had a.s.sumed a terribly serious aspect when, to their foolish consternation, the peasants discovered that their purloined cartridges did not fit their guns.
Then, in the very teeth of death, Ilse threw back her blond head and laughed. And there was no mistaking the genuineness of the girl's laughter.
Some of their would-be executioners laughed too;--the hilarity spread.
It was all over; they couldn't shoot a girl who laughed that way. So somebody brought a samovar; tea was boiled; and they all went back to the barn and sat there drinking tea and swapping gossip and singing until nearly morning.
That was a sample of their narrow escapes. But Brisson's only comment before he went to sleep was that Estridge would probably owe him a dollar within the next twenty-four hours.
They had a hair-raising time in Helsingfors. On one occasion, German officers forced Palla's door at night, and the girl became ill with fear while soldiers searched the room, ordering her out of bed and pus.h.i.+ng her into a corner while they ripped up carpets and tore the place to pieces in a swinishly ferocious search for "information."
But they did nothing worse to her, and, for some reason, left the hotel without disturbing Brisson, whose room adjoined and who sat on the edge of his bed with an automatic in each hand--a dangerous opportunist awaiting events and calmly determined to do some recruiting for h.e.l.l if the huns harmed Palla.
She never knew that. And the worst was over now, and the Scandinavian border not far away. And in twenty-four hours they were over--Brisson impatient to get his papers to Was.h.i.+ngton and planning to start for England on a wretched little packet-boat, in utter contempt of mines, U-boats, and the icy menace of the North Sea.
As for the others, Estridge decided to cable and await orders in Copenhagen; Palla, to sail for home on the first available Danish steamer; Ilse, to go to Stockholm and eventually decide whether to volunteer once more as a soldier of the proletariat or to turn propagandist and carry the true gospel to America, where, she had heard, the ancient liberties of the great Democracy were becoming imperilled.
The day before they parted company, these four people, so oddly thrown together out of the boiling cauldron of the Russian Terror, arranged to dine together for the last time.
Theirs were the appet.i.tes of healthy wolves; theirs was the thirst of the marooned on waterless islands; and theirs, too, was the feverish gaiety of those who had escaped great peril by land and sea; and who were still physically and morally demoralized by the glare and the roar of the h.e.l.lish conflagration which was still burning up the world around them.
So they met in a private dining room of the hotel for dinner on the eve of separation.
Brisson and Estridge had resurrected from their luggage the remains of their evening attire; Ilse and Palla had shopped; and they now included in a limited wardrobe two simple dinner gowns, among more vital purchases.
There were flowers on the table, no great variety of food but plenty of champagne to make up--a singular innovation in apology for short rations conceived by the hotel proprietor.
There was a victrola in the corner, too, and this they kept going to stimulate their nerves, which already were sufficiently on edge without the added fillip of music and champagne.
"As for me," said Brisson, "I'm in sight of nervous dissolution already;--I'm going back to my wife and children, thank G.o.d--" he smiled at Palla. "I'm grateful to the G.o.d you don't believe in, dear little lady. And if He is willing, I'll report for duty in two weeks."
He turned to Estridge:
"What about you?"
"I've cabled for orders but I have none yet. If they're through with me I shall go back to New York and back to the medical school I came from. I hate the idea, too. Lord, how I detest it!"
"Why?" asked Palla nervously.
"I've had too much excitement. You have too--and so have Ilse and Brisson. I'm not keen for the usual again. It bores me to contemplate it. The thought of Fifth Avenue--the very idea of going back to all that familiar routine, social and business, makes me positively ill.
What a dull place this world will be when we're all at peace again!"
"We won't be at peace for a long, long while," said Ilse, smiling. She lifted a goblet in her big, beautifully shaped hand and drained it with the vigorous grace of a Viking's daughter.
"You think the war is going to last for years?" asked Estridge.
"Oh, no; not this war. But the other," she explained cheerfully.
"What other?"
"Why, the greatest conflict in the world; the social war. It's going to take many years and many battles. I shall enlist."
"Nonsense," said Brisson, "you're not a Red!"
The girl laughed and showed her snowy teeth: "I'm one kind of Red--not the kind that sold Russia to the boche--but I'm very, very red."
"Everybody with a brain and a heart is more or less red in these days," nodded Palla. "Everybody knows that the old order is ended--done for. Without liberty and equal opportunity civilisation is a farce. Everybody knows it except the stupid. And they'll have to be instructed."
"Very well," said Brisson briskly, "here's to the universal but bloodless revolution! An acre for everybody and a mule to plough it!
Back to the soil and to h.e.l.l with the counting house!"
They all laughed, but their br.i.m.m.i.n.g gla.s.ses went up; then Estridge rose to re-wind the victrola. Palla's slim foot tapped the parquet in time with the American fox-trot; she glanced across the table at Estridge, lifted her head interrogatively, then sprang up and slid into his arms, delighted.
While they danced he said: "Better go light on that champagne, Miss Dumont."
"Don't you think I can keep my head?" she demanded derisively.