The Girl Philippa. Chambers Robert William

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ is mobilizing, Sister," he repeated meaningly.

      "What then?"

      "France must follow."

      "And then?"

      Warner shrugged his shoulders.

      Sister Eila came out, nodding to Sister Félicité, who usually presided at the lunch hour: and the latter went away with Warner toward the kitchen, still plying the American with questions. Sister Eila bent her head, inhaled the perfume of the flowers on her desk, and then looked up at Halkett.

      "Don't you ever lunch?" he asked.

      "Yes; I tasted the soup. You lunch at one at the inn."

      "I suppose so. What a charming country this is – this little hamlet of Saïs! Such exquisite peace and stillness I have seldom known."

      Sister Eila's eyes grew vague; she looked out through the sunny doorway across the fields towards a range of low hills. The quarries were there.

      "It is a tranquil country," she said pensively, "but there is misery, too. Life in the quarries is hard, and wages are not high."

      "Mr. Warner tells me they are a hard lot, these quarrymen."

      "There is intemperance among the quarrymen, and among the cement workers, too: and there is roughness and violence – and crime, sometimes. But it is a very hard métier, Mr. Halkett, and the lime dust blinds and sears and incites a raging thirst. God knows there is some excuse for the drunkenness there. We who are untempted must remain gentle in our judgments."

      "I could not imagine Sister Eila judging anybody harshly."

      Sister Eila looked up and laughed:

      "Oh, Mr. Halkett, I have confessed to impatience too many times to believe that I could ever acquire patience. Only today I scolded our children because they tore down a poster which had been pasted on the public wall at the crossroad. I said to them very severely, 'It is a sin to destroy what others have paid for to advertise their merchandise.'"

      "That was a terrible scolding," admitted Halkett, laughing.

      "I'll show you the poster," volunteered Sister Eila, going over to her desk. Raising the lid, she picked up and displayed an advertisement.

      CHAPTER VIII

      Halkett looked curiously at this specimen of a poster which was already very familiar to him. The dead walls of northern and eastern France and Belgium had been plastered with such advertisements for the last year or two, extolling the Savon de Calypso. But what had recently interested Halkett in these soap advertisements was that posters, apparently exactly similar, appeared to differ considerably in detail when examined minutely.

      The picture in this advertisement represented, as always, the nymph, Calypso, seated upon the grass, looking out over the sea where the sun shone in a cloudless sky upon a fleet of Grecian ships which were sailing away across the blue waves of the Ægean.

      Where details varied was in the number of ships in the fleet, the number and grouping of sails, sea birds flying, of waves, and of clouds – when there were any of the latter – the number of little white or blue or pink blossoms in the grass, the height of the sun above the horizon line and the number and size of its rays.

      There was always at least one ship – never more than a dozen; he had counted twenty white blossoms on some posters; varying numbers on others, of white, of blue, or of pink, but never less than three of any one color. Sometimes there were no sea birds.

      As for the sun, sometimes it hung well above the ocean, often its yellow circle dipped into it, and then again only the rays spread fanlike above the horizon line.

      And concerning the nymph, her pose and costume did not seem to vary at all in the various poster specimens which he had seen; the wind was always blowing her red hair and white, transparent scarf; she always sat gazing laughingly seaward, one hand resting on the grass, the other clutching a cake of soap to her bosom.

      Still examining the sheet of paper, he counted the white flowers scattered over the grass around the seated nymph. There were ten of them.

      "Sister Eila," he said carelessly, "how many kilometers is it to the next town south of us? I mean by the military road."

      "To Rosières-sous-Bois?"

      "Yes."

      "About ten kilometers by the military road."

      He nodded and counted the ships. There were three.

      "Is there more than one road which runs to Rosières-sous-Bois?" he asked.

      "Yes. One may go by this road, or cross the bridge by the quarries and go by the river road, or there is still a better and shorter highway which runs west of Saïs."

      "Then there are three main roads to Rosières-sous-Bois?"

      "Yes. The road to the west is shorter. It is not more than seven miles that way."

      Halkett casually counted the sea gulls. Seven gulls were flying around one of the ships; thirteen around another.

      "And the river road, Sister?" he inquired.

      "By the quarry bridge? Oh, that is longer – perhaps twelve or thirteen kilometers."

      "I see… Rosières-sous-Bois is not a garrison town?"

      "No. There are only a few gendarmes there."

      Halkett examined the picture attentively. The sun appeared to be about three hours high above the horizon.

      "The nearest military post must be about three hours' journey from here," he ventured.

      Sister Eila thought a moment, then nodded:

      "Yes, about three hours. You mean the fort above the Pass of the Falcons? That is the nearest."

      He counted the rays of the sun. There were three long ones and two short ones.

      "I suppose there are three or four battalions garrisoned there," he remarked.

      "Three, I think. And a company of engineers and one company of Alpine chasseurs."

      All the time, with a detached air, the young Englishman was examining the colored poster, searching it minutely for variations from other posters of the same sort which he had recently investigated.

      There remained in his mind little or no doubt that the number and position of the groups of pointed wavelets signified something important; that the number of sails set on the ships, which varied in every poster, contained further information; that the sky, cloudless in some posters, dotted with clouds in others, was destined to convey topographical particulars to somebody.

      These colored advertisements of a soap made in Cologne by Bauermann and Company, and plastered over the landscape of Northern and Eastern Belgium and France, concealed a wealth of secret information for anybody who possessed the key to the messages so clearly and craftily expressed in pictograph and cipher code.

      The sinister significance of the sheet in his hand was becoming more apparent every minute. He had made a study of these posters – was just beginning to find them interesting, when he had been ordered to СКАЧАТЬ