Part 15

The “Dog Election” which had shaken the country in the second half of April had its origin, he recalled, in Frank Dickin’s, on a previous evening, as he was hurrying to keep an appointment with Lord Ottercove, slipping on the pavement and, in his indignation, recommending to his host the wholesale extermination of the breed of dogs. Lord Ottercove, who had made a note of it at the time, caused it to be described in his newspapers as a public nuisance which the government should put a speedy end to, and when, a week later, a prominent member of Parliament slipped and broke his leg, Lord Ottercove’s newspapers rose _en masse_ against dogs. In a hundred years’ time, one of his papers affirmed, historians would note with horror that in the first half of the twentieth century dogs were allowed complete license of behaviour in the public thoroughfares. An altogether unexpected outburst of support from readers, thousands of whom had apparently been storing up for many years a somewhat unmanly resentment against the dog race, emboldened Lord Ottercove to push the matter to extremities. DOGS MUST GO--his posters cried in unison. Now the Prime Minister, a man of inconspicuous curiosity, and an overwhelming sense of right and wrong, read these articles. A country squire, who had been persuaded to shoulder the burden of government much against his inclination, he was a confirmed dog lover. The thought of exterminating our dumb and loyal friends was repugnant to him. But his conscience told him that pavements erected with the taxpayers’ money were being abused by caninity; accidents were accumulating, deaths might ensue any day. The dogs were in the wrong; yes, the dogs must go. It was his duty to carry out the policy however unpopular, if he thought it a matter of duty that the policy should be carried out. And he was a man of duty. “Exterminate the dog breed!” became the slogan and policy (though largely against the advice of the older statesmen) of the Conservative Party. The Liberal Party, it would seem, had only been waiting for that. Assisted and advised by Lord Ottercove, they made “The Preservation and Protection of Our Friend the Dog” the chief item of their party programme. “Joe,” (as he was called by his intimates) the Liberal leader, temperamentally repelled by dogs, had been photographed sitting in a basket chair, a grave-eyed poodle with his front legs across the Liberal leader’s knees. “The heart of England is sound,” they said, stealing the Tory touch, “so long as she remains a dog-loving Nation.” And again: “Do away with the dogs: and the country will assuredly go with them!”

“Where will it go?” from a heckler (put there by the Liberal candidate himself).

“To the dogs, sir!” blandly and crushingly.

Loud laughter.

The Labour Party unfortunately split itself over the issue. The more responsible section sympathised with the socialising efforts of the Conservative Prime Minister; the other half resented the adoption on the part of the reactionaries of what by the look and sound of it should have been a Socialist programme, and they were helped by the lovers of whippets and rabbit coursing and the gamblers who flocked to the dog races. The controversy grew in passion; something not unlike a civil war loomed behind this sinister antagonism; a St. Bartholomew Night threatened from day to day, a pogrom with extensive dog massacres having been organised by the more energetic Die-hard section of the Tory Party who did not believe in half measures, distrusted the Prime Minister’s tendency to conciliation and compromise and were anxious to check his retreat and by forcing his hand oblige him to take a firm stand. Till _The Nation_, commenting in a leading article upon the situation that had arisen over the “Right of Dog” question, pointed out with characteristic pertinence and good sense that in the heat of passion the main issue had been overlooked, as usual, namely, whether there was not a possibility of doing away with the indubitable nuisance caused by dogs who are wrongly granted the freedom of the pavement, without necessarily doing away with the dogs themselves. _The New Statesman_ and _The Spectator_ raised the same question in their individual voice. But nobody cared to listen to them. The Conservative Government resigned on a vote of confidence, and in the General Election which ensued the Liberals carried everything before them.

In America, Lord de Jones read, there was a growing feud between Fundamentalists and Evolutionists. An Evolutionist had declared that he was ready to appear at a Fundamentalist meeting and “dare” God to smite him dead. An ardent Fundamentalist disciple, believing that he was serving his cause, connected the steel platform on which the Evolutionist was speaking by a wire with the main electric current of the premises, thereby electrocuting the Evolutionist in the very act of his challenge. Details, however, leaked out by and by, resulting in what threatened to become a religious war between the two faiths hardly to be paralleled since the Wars of the Crusades, if then. The Fundamentalist declared at his trial that in so far as God Himself had put the idea into his head, it was the hand of God that had struck down the blasphemer; and in his summing-up the judge directed the jury to determine just how far it was God and how far devilry. The jury were reluctant to pass a verdict of “guilty” against so almighty a being, and Counsel at a subsequent trial conceded so much to the scientific bias of the day as to declare that the electrocution of the Evolutionist was in the nature of a miracle intended to create and sustain faith, elevating an otherwise unimportant mechanical trick into the realms of the supernatural. The Fundamentalist was acquitted; and in the ensuing riots directed by outraged Free Thinkers and Revolutionaries against the headquarters of the Fundamentalists in Massachusetts, the responsible leaders of the faith, though admitting the uncalled-for action and excessive zeal of their feather-brained disciple who, while wishing to assist their cause, had unwittingly damaged it, yet claimed that a little trick like that could not implicate the essential wisdom of their faith nor undermine the foundations of Fundamentalism.

All over the world, Lord de Jones knew, and particularly in England, the struggle between capital and labour grew more bitter and, as time went on, threatened to develop into a general revolution; to side-track which the respective Governments agreed to have a war. A _casus belli_ was looked for; and was found. A Russian Tsarist “Government” living in exile in Paris had published its claims on Eastern Prussia which once upon a time was Slav; inasmuch as Petrograd (though this they were reluctant to admit) had once been Finnish soil, and was now being claimed by a Fascist Government in Helsingfors whose motto was “A Greater Finland!” Germany, while admitting the justice of the Finnish claims, disputed those of Russia; and Russia, while disputing the Finnish claim to Petrograd, insisted on its own to Eastern Prussia. The new war was broadly (and amicably) conceived on these lines, and the British Government, declaring that it could not countenance another war in Europe, plunged into it--so as to stop it.

Lord Ottercove hailed the prospect of war (in lieu of revolution) with mixed feelings of journalistic felicity and human discomfiture. As the probability--and later the unavoidability--of war became more certain, the humane resistance in him yielded to the _force majeure_ of patriotic excitement, and he wrote himself the leading article, heading it: “The Nation Demands--.” And the nation, reading it at breakfast next morning, felt that, yes, it was in them to demand, and they demanded and would not sheathe the sword until they had fought to utter exhaustion. And young men from the public schools were already training in bayonet drill on the lawns of Kensington Gardens under sergeants whose dictum, oft repeated, was that the war was to be won by saluting by numbers. Grey haired City men were forming fours everywhere, and, as a relaxation from it, forming two deep. Once again there was “A Cause.”

When, to forget the war, Lord de Jones turned in to a music hall matinée, a comedian was singing:

“_I joined the Army yesterday,_ _So the Army of to-day_ _’S all right;_

and a stoutish prima donna replied in mezzo soprano:

“_I didn’t like you, John,_ _Before you joined the Army, John;_ _I like you now_ _You’ve got your khaki on!_”

and displayed her fat legs in a whirl.

XXXV.

One afternoon in early spring, when the streets of London resounded with bugles and drums calling the manhood of Britain to rise in arms in defense of Russia’s menaced right to Petrograd and Germany’s ownership of Eastern Prussia, a dark curled, hazel-eyed girl rang the bell of Stonedge House and asked for Lady Ottercove, who a moment later greeted the visitor with astonished delight.

“Baby!” she exclaimed and threw her arms around her neck. She dragged Baby by the hand into the drawing-room, and from the drawing-room into the second drawing-room, and from the second drawing-room into the ball-room, and then up to her beautiful bedroom; and in all the rooms Baby displayed astonishment and rapture. “I have another house,” Eva said, “in the country, and Rex has another small house in town where we go when we wish to be alone with nobody to bother us, and I have a villa near Nice and a Rolls and lots of servants and everything, and more money than I know what to do with.”

“Not really!”

“Oh, yes! And Rex is very pleased with me, he says, and very proud.”

And indeed, every one of Lord Ottercove’s friends could testify that Eva proved an admirable hostess. She seemed to carry out her duties with ease and without self-consciousness; she had learnt the essentials of the game by hearsay; and there was something so fresh, naïve, spontaneous about her nature that men found her irresistible. And women she did not bother about.

“Aren’t you terribly, _terribly_ happy?” Baby asked.

Eva suddenly looked a little grave and sad. “Can you,” she said, “keep a secret?”

Baby said she could.

“If you can,” said Eva, “I will do something for you.”

“Really? What?”

“Save your life.”

“No?”

“Yes. I will tell you if you promise never, _never_ to say a word of it to anyone. It’s about Christopher de Jones. All these years he has been wanting to blow up the earth with all the people, etcetera, on it, and when we were in Greece and he descended into a deep, deep crater which he said was the deepest crater of them all, going right down into the bowels of the earth, he said to me that he had only to disintegrate one single atom in it to blow up all the earth with all the people on it into smithereens. But I said that this was very, very wicked of him, so he said that suffering humanity had suffered long enough and that if he blew it up it would no longer suffer pain, and so on, but that as he loved me more than anything else on earth he wished to spend the last few hours with me, holding hands, etcetera, and one day he came to me all radiant in the face and happy, and said he’d done it. ‘Done what?’ I said. ‘Disintegerated the atom,’ he said, and that we were all doomed and done for. ‘But, Chris,’ I said, ‘how could you have done such a thing!’

“‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘You needn’t worry; it’s all quite respectable, and there is no noise or explosion. I have only disintegrated the atom, and now all matter, the whole of the world is slowly disintegrating, too, peeling away into nothing. Soon nothing will be left of our planet.’

“‘But oh, Chris!’ I said.

“‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘There is no pain, no suffering, no inconvenience or discomfort. People just soften, disintegrate atom by atom, turn into whiffs of steam, a sort of mist, and vanish like smoke up the chimney. All is over in a few seconds.’

“‘Chris,’ I said, ‘I don’t understand.’

“‘It’s--how shall I say?--as if people ate themselves up,’ he said.

“‘But they can’t quite, Chris. There’ll be crumbs left after them.’

“‘No, crumbs and all.’

“‘But the mouth will be left, Chris; when the mouth has eaten everything there will still be the mouth left to eat.’

“‘And the mouth will eat it,’ he said.

“‘I see. Chris, I want to tell you something,’ I said.

“‘What?’ he said.

“‘I am going to have a baby,’ I said.

“‘Oh!’ he said. ‘Whose baby?’

“How could I know? But I looked soft and tender, as if it might be his. ‘Chris,’ I said, ‘Can you not save yourself and your baby--and me too, perhaps?’

“‘I would do anything,’ he said, ‘to save you and the baby, but I’ve laddered the world. You know what happens when you’ve laddered a silk stocking.’

“‘You’ve got to buy a new pair,’ I said.

“‘Exactly,’ he said.

“‘Can’t you buy a ... a new world?’ I said.

“‘I’ll have to see if I can mend the old one,’ he said.

“‘Can’t you?’

“He said he didn’t know. He said he would have to look into it, think about it. He might be able, he said, to isolate a bit of earth somewhere--a mountain-top or something, where we three could be saved.

“‘Yes, yes!’ I said. ‘We three and all our friends. Just a little house-party!’

“‘No house-parties, by God!’ he said. ‘Just you and I and the baby--you and I and the baby.’”

Eva paused. Baby looked at her long and sadly, modestly, too, as if reluctant to press her own claims to survival.

“But if you keep quiet about it,” said Eva, “I will tell you where to go to. You will just hide in the cellar or somewhere, lie low for a day or two, and then creep out when I tell you to. I will make it all right with Chris.”

For a long while the two cousins chattered together of matters irrelevant to the coming apocalypse; but presently they were back in the future. “And Rex, and Ferdinand, and one or two others,” said Eva. “I will manage it so that Chris doesn’t know.’

“And your mother, and Zita, and Pilling, I suppose?”

“No, no! We mustn’t have a crowd. You see, there will be very little to eat on the top of a hill. But we’ll have a good time all the same.”

XXXVI.

THE LAST SUPPER

Thursday was the opening night of the _New Babylon_, Pilling’s new night club. The butler had been announcing arrivals:

“Lord and Lady de Jones.

“The Honourable Raymond and Mrs. Mosquito.

“Mrs. Frank Dickin.”

Then, flinging open the doors, the butler made a last belated appearance: “Mr. Kerr, m’lord.”

“Now this is very, very nice. Come right in, Mr. Kerr!” from Lord Ottercove.

At the long table presided over by Ottercove, Frank found himself seated by the side of his own wife. After the long absence, she seemed beautiful and enchanting, and her presence, new yet familiar, broke the crust of ice in his heart and released rivers of rapture; and outside it was spring, full of desires, and here was she, his lovely mate....

And yet? And yet? Looked at objectively, enquired into dispassionately, was marriage a solution of one’s terrestrial difficulties? Be honest now, he said to himself. One wife was both too much and not enough. Fifty wives, renewable like water in a swimming pool, would be better. He would sit there then, all lust gone, among them, a man of action turned philosopher, and pass his hand dispassionately over this or that wife’s hair, seeking solace in intellectual intercourse with some other man who agreed that life was wanting! “What?” He was roused from his reverie, and, not hearing the question, replied: “Rather!”

Indisputably, Cynthia was enchanting, and even Lord Ottercove singled her out after dinner. “Are you the prettiest girl in London, Cynthia?” He kissed her thoroughly on the mouth.

“No, Rex, no!”

An actress, jealous of Cynthia’s success, flung her champagne over her. Cynthia, shocked beyond words, and followed by all her admirers, retired to another room, where she was presently joined by the actress, who lavished profuse apologies on her: “I am so frightfully sorry, darling!”

“It’s quite all right, darling.”

And all the women who hated each other, called one another thus: “darling.”

It was, to all appearance, a brilliant party. Vernon Sprott was there--Vernon Sprott, the foreman of British fiction, whose novel entitled _The New Babylon Hotel & Restaurant_ had provided the designation of Pilling’s night club, in consideration of which Mr. Sprott received a royalty on the gross profits of the New Babylon Club of 0.0000002 per cent. free of income tax and payable to him after deduction of a commission of ten per cent. by Mr. Sprott’s Literary Agent. And both he and his literary agent (who was there) could not take their eyes off Cynthia, by common consent the special, the most distinctive ornament of the evening. She looked a little pale, dream-like, ravishing, romantic; and as she danced her eyes seemed to say: “Do you remember?” and Frank could scarcely wait for the end of the party to elope with his wife, to carry her away ... away.... She said what Juliet had said before her: that it was too sudden!

Only Christopher de Jones seemed glum. He sat and watched how Eva danced with an intent young man whose cleverness was in his feet; danced confidentially, _giving_ him her pliable young body, every movement of which seemed to say: “I am thine, thine....” For such is the melody of the dance. He could see, it seemed to him, through all the souls of the men and women, guests, musicians, waiters, and divine what the headwaiter, the orchestra men, each individual thought to himself: how each only suffered. Another little while, he thought, and it would all be over....

XXXVII.

A PAIR OF BARE LEGS

Baby, who had been sent out by her cousin to ascertain the local conditions in the Austrian Alps, having only reported, after a lapse of two weeks, that dogs were not allowed in the public parks of Innsbruck and that persons doing damage to the flower beds would be prosecuted, Frank, the next candidate scheduled by Eva for salvation, was despatched in Baby’s wake.

He found her at the top of a mountain towering above the Inn valley, playing chess with a handsome young bank clerk from Vienna, on his annual holiday in the Tyrol. Neither knew a word of the other’s language, and made love with the aid of a dictionary. He found the words and passed her the dictionary. Love. Bliss. Desire. She read the English equivalent and purred. It was exquisite.

Frank deemed the _pension_ and the hill in every way an adequate _pied à terre_, worthy of preservation and, so far as he could judge, eminently suitable for isolation from the atomic disintegration about to overtake the world; and he gave Eva all the available information as to victuals, trains, etc, warning her, among other things, not to pull the communication cord while the train was in motion unless there was genuine need for it; and even gave the Italian of it: “_Tirare lamaniglia solo in caso di pericolo. Ogni abuso verrà punito!_”

The Pension Kogl stood alone on the mountain-top, and gazing down from his balcony in the morning Frank saw an old Habsburg Schloss stretched out beneath him, which looked like the Regent Palace Hotel, London. Breakfast, perhaps, was a little on the short side, and on the bedside-table on which it was laid there was a little tablecloth with the words: “_Wenig aber von Herzen_” embroidered in red Gothic letters. Below, under Frank’s windows, the proprietress’ husband, the Wirt, looking very like Gogol’s Taras Boulba, paced the yard in a skull cap as early as five-thirty. He was a bad sleeper, and thus was essentially fitted to see to it that the sleepy servant girls did not oversleep themselves. He was up and on the look-out for defaulters, like a sergeant-major waiting in the barrack yard. In a bungalow annex across lived an old apoplectic little baron who, early each morning, about the time of mine host’s appearance, popped out his head through the window, whereon the ensuing conversation could be overheard:

“Good morning, Herr Baron! Have you slept well? The weather--well, I think--or at least, it seems to me--that the sky might clear up, in which case it is possible--I say, it is _possible_--possible that we may have good weather to-day. Yes, yes, I am hopeful, Herr Baron.”

Herr Kogl stood close to the Baron’s window and spat on the ground. The Herr Baron, out of a feeling of fellowship, spat out of the window: “Kh-kh-kh--Kh-hhrrr--Khhh!” they spat.

“Hey! Where you off to!” the host would suddenly yell to the young farm hand, who was setting out for town in the milk cart.

“To town.”

“Off you go at once!” he would shout after him angrily. “Hurry up! You’ve overslept yourself again, you lazy bounder! Off you go, young scoundrel, you!---- Youth,” he would add tenderly, turning back to the Baron.

Thus till nine o’clock in the morning he would stroll up and down the yard, his hands behind his back, and then serve himself his first Schnaps.

Herr Kogl’s distinction was that he was supposed to have a particularly strong will. Frau Kogl’s mother, who had bought the present _pension_ on her Alsacian savings, had had just such a man in view for her daughter, whom she did not consult in the matter, though once, in an unusually tender and communicative mood, she did ask her: “What sort of a man would you like for a husband, Anny?” Anny had lowered her lashes and said: “With a strong will.” Herr Kogl was chosen without hesitation as the sort of man with a strong will who would take care of his wife’s property; and now, living up to his reputation, he would bawl at her from time to time: “Hey, there! Anna!--I have called: ‘_Anna_!’”--and she obeyed.

Their son, who had a smooth voice, quiet manners, and a cast in one of his eyes, knew on which side his bread was buttered, and though a little fearful of his father, clung to his moneyed mother, and disdained his Pa’s assumed authority, who, to bear out his own reputation, bawled at him occasionally: “Hey, there! Herbert! I said: ‘_Herbert_!’” when his son half turned a reluctant ear to him. Frau Kogl herself had moods when she liked to assert her authority; but they were intermittent and brief. She could never decide anything. Her mother was right in choosing for her a husband who bawled at her. Frau Kogl had no illusions about his utility, and secretly thought him a vagabond. But she needed someone to bawl at her. When he bawled, his authority in her eyes was restored; and she loved him.

The briskness in the air of an early mountain spring morning! Old forgotten feelings flooded his heart. As Frank went down the stairs, he passed the bare-legged scullery maid who was washing the steps. He looked round, and she smiled. And when later in the morning she helped carry up his large trunk, he could not take away his gaze from those healthy white legs.

“Good morning, Herr Dickin,” the host greeted him. “I am hoping that if the clouds disperse--I am hoping, I say, that if they disperse, we may be having--we may be having, I say--having fine weather to--day. But I regret to say it is Saint Peter”--he pointed to the skies--“who is in charge of the winds, and our petition--our petition, I say, must be addressed to him up there in the heavens, oh yes.”

Dickin laughed amiably, and on passing the bar he heard Frau Kogl upbraiding her husband:

“You shouldn’t tell such silly jokes to the foreign guests; they will think you’re quite silly.”

“It may be a silly joke,” Herr Kogl agreed, “or it may not be a silly joke, but he laughs; so anything seems good enough for him.”

“Why, no, he is a clever man, a poet,” retorted Frau Kogl.

“I am a poet myself,” answered Herr Kogl.

“You’re a fat dotty old man, that’s what you are,” said Frau Kogl. “What have you done with the glasses? Don’t stand there like that....”

“Shut up, will you!” he bawled, and banged his fist on the counter.

She quailed before the man with the strong will.