The Disturbing Charm Part 53

Professor Howel-Jones had just returned, after various wanderings, to find a big mail awaiting him. He sighed, as he opened the letters, for his little niece and secretary. (Olwen had not been replaced.)

Then he knit his brows over the letter in his hand.

It said:

"DEAR SIR,

"The writer of this letter has reproached himself more than once over the rather stupid practical joke that he elected to play upon a man of your attainments by sending to you what was alleged to be the discovery of a love-germ, or Disturbing Charm----"

"Dear me! What and when was that?" pondered the Professor. "Ah, yes. I have it. Some lunatic that wrote to me in France.

Something about '_half the trouble in the world arising from people falling in Love--with the wrong people_.' Yes, yes. And what was this 'Charm' supposed to do?... Ah, it says now that the Charm was spoof...." He went on reading the letter; the belated apology of some pupil at some University where he had once lectured....

He took it in, half thinking of the next letter as he read....

Fern seed, it appeared, was all that the "magic" packet had contained....

The Professor scarcely remembered that there had been a packet!

What had he done with it now, and with the letter? Burnt them, he thought, before that little Olwen got hold of that nonsense....

It would have been just like a very young, imaginative girl like that to have believed in it!

Well, this last letter would have to shatter that belief!

thought her Uncle, as he crumpled the practical joker's apology into a ball and tossed it on to the fire.

At the moment when her Uncle's thoughts were turning to her, his niece, young Mrs. Ross, was watching rather a pretty scene.

She stood at the window of her husband's rooms in Victoria Street, his old bachelor rooms into which she had brought the new element of her girlish belongings, her love, herself....

Behind her on the table, above a pile of his books on "Reconstruction,"

there trailed a dainty litter of her sewing: the lacy whiteness of a garment that was being reconstructed, feminine-fas.h.i.+on, into some other garment.

Beside her stood another war-bride of but a few more weeks' standing, young Mrs. Awdas.

Both of them were looking down into the street, where a crowd lined the pavement to right and left, waiting, watching to see a company of American soldiers march past on their way to Victoria Station.

Ah! Here it was, the stream of clean khaki cleaving the motley of the crowd. Here they came, the boys, tall, fit, and splendid, drilled to the minute; the pick and cream of the new belligerent country.... Here they came, spare and useful looking and ah, how faultless in kit and accoutrements, from straight-brimmed hats to spotlessly-polished boots.

And as they swung past with the unison of a machine in which every part is perfect, there hove into sight, straggling, slouching towards them out of the station, a knot of British just back from the firing line. An officer walked along beside the men.

Over these there brooded the spectre of three years and more of War.

Their eyes were heavy with lack of sleep as they lurched heavily along, blinking around them at London once again; they were dirty and loaded down with gear, they were strung about with mess-tins and water-bottles and boots and brown-paper parcels and battered shrapnel helmets. One or two of them had Hun helmets tied to their knapsacks. They wore greasy remnants of caps, disreputable goatskin coats. All over them was thickly caked the foul mud of the trenches.

What a contrast....

The mob of straggling scarecrows turned to give a friendly stare, a "Cheerio" to their smart American comrades as they swung past in their immaculate fours.

"See you in ten days!" shouted a Tommy.

Olwen Ross, up at the window, thrust out her little black head to watch the Americans.

"Oh, they are magnificent," she breathed excitedly. "Aren't you proud of them, Golden?"

"Am I _proud_ of them!" laughed her friend.

But while the Welsh girl was all eyes for these new troops, the American girl's wide gaze turned upon the others with whom they must soon be standing shoulder to shoulder; the war-worn soldiers, muddy, tattered, scarred, exhausted, cheery still....

"_They_ are magnificent, Olwen, I guess," said she.

And her opinion seemed to be shared by a countryman. A quick and graceful thought struck the officer in charge of those Americans.

Suddenly and clearly, above the buzz of the street, the rhythmic tramp of feet, there snapped out his order:

"Company----eyes----RIGHT!"

Every head under the straight-brimmed hat turned sharply towards those heroic scallywags their allies.

Perhaps that young American company officer would have explained, diplomatically, that the word of command had been for his men to give the Eyes Right to that British subaltern who was pa.s.sing with the leave-men; a white-faced, hollow-eyed stripling with two gold stripes on his cuff and the black "flash" of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers fluttering at his nape. But if it were ostensibly for him, it was also for his men.

The new Allies, equipped for Victory, saluted the old, all but broken, but carrying on....

And the bright eyes of the two girls at the windows above shone suddenly, mistily brighter at the sight.

As they watched the two bodies of men disappear----those marching towards Victoria and the boat-train, these straggling towards a soldiers' hostel in Buckingham Palace Road, Golden said softly, "My people, Olwen, honouring yours."

Olwen said, "Yes; but mine are yours now, and yours are mine."

She turned from the window and into the little sitting-room with her guest's arm in hers.

"What's the time?" asked young Mrs. Awdas. "I'm due to sing at the hospital at four. We'll have to hurry----"

She lifted, on Olwen's blouse, the tiny pin-on watch which was one of her friend's wedding presents. Then she exclaimed, "What have you got tied around here?"

Golden did not recognize any similarity between this sachet of pink-and-mauve and the sun-faded ribbon trifle she had picked up on Biscay beach. But Olwen smiled as she tucked into the place the mascot that she wore and always would wear, even had she read that letter which her Uncle held would shatter any belief in that "magic." The old scientist summed her up as faultily as if he, too, had set out to be the finest judge, etc....

"Golden," she said, "if I tell you about this, will you promise not to laugh?"

And as they walked along to the hospital, she gave to her friend the outlines of the story which you have just read ... so far as she knew them herself.

Golden, listening, smiled above her leopard-skins. "Do you think all these things would not have happened just as they did happen without the wearing of a Charm?"

Olwen, with happy dreams in her eyes, did not reply.

After a pause her friend went on, softly, "When I look at you," she said, "and when I look at your Fergus, and at my Jack, and at any one else who is lovely and loving ... why, of course I believe there's a Charm really, though it just can't be anything you could make up out of a pinch of powder and a bit of ribbon. A Charm? Why, the world's full of it! Didn't it send me over the sea to my Bird-boy? Didn't it bring your men from Canada and France to you? Didn't it let us all meet in a country that was sweet and friendly, though none of ours? Didn't it work----why, all the time?"

"Sometimes----Often--Half the time," suggested Olwen, "it is supposed to make such mistakes. It takes the wrong people...."

"We hear of those, just because they're the exceptions, I guess," smiled her buoyant friend. "We aren't so talked about, we with the happy love stories, that the Charm has worked!... Olwen, it's making stories now for each of those splendid boys we saw go marching by, and for each of the pretty girls who wishes them Luck. It never stops!... But you can't see it. You can't hold it. You can only feel it is----"

"But then what is it?" Olwen asked. "What is it in itself?"