The Outrage. Annie Vivanti

Dinner is going to be like a picnic with nothing much to eat; but there are cakes and sweets and little curly sandwiches, all beautifully arranged with flowers, on the long table for this evening; and we shall drink orangeade and grenadine. We were to have had ices as well, but the pâtissier has joined the army and his wife has too many children and is so miserable that she will not make ices. She told us that her husband and other soldiers were digging ditches all round Belgium to prevent the Germans from coming in.

      Now I am going to dress. I shall wear pink, and Chérie will be all in white like a bride. She will have her hair up for the first time, done all in curls and whirligigs, to look like that cake Frieda calls Kugelhopf.

      Maman is going to make herself pretty too. She has promised not to think of war or of the Germans until tomorrow morning because, as Chérie said, one is eighteen only once in one's life. Now I come to think of it, one is also eleven only once in one's life. I shall remember to say that when my next birthday comes....

      While Mireille sat in the little study writing her diary with exceeding care, her head very much on one side and the tip of her tongue moving slowly from one side of her half-open mouth to the other, the door was opened and Fritz looked into the room. He shut the door again, and having listened for a moment on the landing to the soft-murmuring voices of Louise and Chérie, he went upstairs to the second floor and turned the handle of Frieda's door. It was locked.

      "Open the door," he said.

      Frieda obeyed. It was not the first time that she opened her door to Fritz.

      "How loud you speak," she murmured, locking and bolting the door again, "they may hear you."

      "I don't care if they do," said Fritz, sitting down and lighting a cigarette. "For two years I have played the servant. Tomorrow I shall be the master."

      "Tomorrow!" gasped Frieda. "Is it—as near as all that?"

      "Nearer, perhaps," murmured Fritz looking out of the window at the crimsoning western sky. The round red August sun had set, but the day still lingered, as if loth to end. Where the sky was lightest it bore on its breast the colourless crescent of the moon, like a pale wound by which the day must die.

      "Nearer, perhaps," repeated Fritz. "Be ready to leave."

      That day the storm had already broken over Europe. The Grey Wolves were pouring into Belgium from the south-east. At Dohain, at Francorchamps, at Stavelot the grey line rolled in, wave on wave, and in their wake came violence and death.

      But the guns were not speaking yet. In the village of Bomal, a bare twenty miles away, nobody knew of it; and Louise, fastening a rose in Chérie's shining tresses said, "We will think of the war tomorrow."

      Chérie kissed her and smiled. She smiled somewhat wistfully, and gazed at her own lovely reflection in the mirror. The hot blue day had faded into a gentle blue evening and Florian Audet had not kept his promise. Perhaps, thought Chérie, his regiment has received orders to leave their encampment on the Meuse; perhaps he has been sent to the frontier, but still—and she sighed—she would have loved to have seen him and bidden him good-bye....

      But now little Mireille in her pink frock, looking like a blossom blown from a peach-tree, came running in to call her. The door-bell had rung and there was no one to answer it, since Marie and Mariette had gone and Frieda was locked in her room and Fritz had vanished. So the two ran lightly downstairs and opened the door to Lucile and Cri-cri, radiant in pale blue muslin; and soon Cécile and Jeannette and Verveine arrived too, and they all tripped into the drawing-room with light skirts swinging and buoyant curls afloat.

      Verveine sat at the piano and the others danced and sang.