Part 11

It drew on to the luncheon hour. The last patient a very young, very little, very pretty married woman, was summoned by the neat maid from the waiting-room, in a remote corner of which a husband of military type and ordinarily cheerful countenance, remained, maintaining with obvious effort a fictitious interest in the pages of a remote issue of _Punch_.

The dainty little lady bore a name well known to Saxham. The fact that a title was attached to it did not interest him, nor had it shortened her term of waiting by a second of the clock. But her youth smote him with a sense of pity as she took the chair upon his left hand facing the window, and without overmuch embarrassment made clear her case.

She was going to have a baby. Franky, her husband, earnestly desired the kiddie for family reasons, yet its advent was unwelcome to him, in that it must inevitably involve physical pain and mental anxiety for the little lady, Franky's wife.

The little lady had been frightfully downed by the prospect. She rather cottoned to kiddies, she explained, than otherwise. It was the bother of having them that didn't appeal. It put everything in the cart as regarded the Autumn Season. Besides--there were family reasons on her side, why the prospect should not be too rosy. She stated the reasons, and Saxham's listening face grew grave. He realised the danger of a Preconceived Idea.

He said nothing. Margot went on talking. Her beautiful deer-eyes were alternately wistful and coaxing. They entreated sympathy. They begged for gentleness. They grew brilliant with enthusiasm as she explained that after a lot of chinning, she and Franky had hit upon a perfectly ripping plan.

A friend, recently encountered in Paris, had thrown a ray of hope upon the doubtful prospect. No doubt Dr. Saxham was in sympathy with the pioneers of the New Crusade against Unnecessary Pain.... Of course, Dr. Saxham knew all about the wonderful experiments of German gynaewhatdoyoucall'ems. The right term was frightfully crack-jaw. Perhaps Dr. Saxham knew what was meant?

Saxham reassured the little lady.

"You refer of course to the experiments of Professors von Wolfenbuchel of Vienna, and Krauss of the Berlin _Fraueenklinik_, resulting in the method of treatment now known throughout the Continent as 'Purple Dreams.' Wolfenbuchel and Krauss have published a pamphlet on the subject. Perhaps you have read the pamphlet?"

"Yes--I've read it. A wonderful book that has been translated into every language. A German officer, friend of a friend I met in Paris, told her about it. His sister had tried the treatment, and found it A1. So I bought a French translation of the book in Paris, and an English one at a shop in the Haymarket. It's bound in rose-coloured vellum stamped with a rising sun in gold. 'Weep No More, Mothers!' it's called. Isn't that a charming title? And the subject is: 'Pangless Childbirth, Produced through Purple Dreams.'"

In a sweet, coaxing voice that trembled a little, she began to tell the Doctor about the wonderful results obtained by hypodermics of Krauss and Wolfenbuechel's marvellous combination of drugs. And Saxham hearkened with stern patience, while the table-clock ticked and the luncheon hour drew near, and Franky chewed the cud of suspense in the Doctor's waiting-room.

Thousands of peasant women, and others of the lower middle-class in Germany had become mothers under the Purple Dreams treatment. Maternity Hospitals in Paris, Brussels, and New York had adopted the method after controversy and hesitation. It had triumphed over every doubt. An American woman whose brother's wife had had a "Purple Dreams" baby at the Berlin Institute had told the little narrator only yesterday how quite too wonderful was the discovery of the enlightened Krauss and the gifted Wolfenbuchel. Everything was made easy. When your ordeal drew near you simply went to the place, and signed your name in a book, and put yourself in the hands of skilled persons. You felt no pain--not a twinge. Only the prick and throb of the hypodermic needle-syringe, and most people were used to the _pique_ nowadays--administering the first subcutaneous injections of the wonderful new drug.... Under its mild sedative influence you dozed off to sleep presently. And when you woke up--there was the baby--beautifully dressed, and lying on a lace pillow in the arms of a smartly dressed, fresh-cheeked nurse.

This had been the experience of the sister of the German officer, as of the wife of the brother of the American lady. The same thing happening to thousands everywhere. The philanthropic Wolfenbuchel and the benevolent Krauss had made of the stony Via Dolorosa by which Womanhood attains maternity--a path of soft green turf bordered with fragrant lilies and bestrewn with the perfumed petals of the rose.

She ended. Saxham had kept his keen blue eyes steadily upon her during the eloquent recital. Not a hair of his black brows had twitched, not a muscle of his pale face had moved--betraying his urgent inclination to smile. His fine hand, lying upon the blotter near the small black case-book, might have been carved out of ancient Spanish ivory, or yellow-white lava. Now he said:

"There is nothing new nor marvellous about the 'Dreams' method. It is--persistent narcosis obtained from the subcutaneous injections of morphine with the hydrobromide of hyoscine, another alkaloid obtained from henbane. I have visited not only the Institute at Berlin, but the Rottburg Fraueenklinik--and an establishment of the same type in Paris, and another in Brussels. It is a fact that when a patient awakens from the anaesthesia there is no recollection of anything that has taken place subsequently to the injection of the drug."

"There has been no pain. Absolutely--none whatever!" She spoke with a little, joyful catch in her breath.

"Pardon me," said Saxham. "You labour under a delusion which the rose-coloured pamphlet was not written to dispel. There must have been pain--if there has been childbirth. Perhaps there has been overwhelming pain. Pain manifested by outcries and convulsions--violent struggles--subdued by the attendants and nurses--for the friends and relatives of the patient are rigidly excluded--the patient enters and leaves the Home alone. Two or three days may have vanished in that vacuum which has been created in her memory. Days in which she has been lying--it may be--strapped to the bed in the private ward of the nursing home--her purple, congested face and staring eyes concealed by a mask of wetted linen--her agonies only witnessed by paid attendants whose interests are best served by denial or concealment--supposing anything to have gone wrong?"

The relentless surgeon's hand had torn away the painted curtain. Margot contemplated the grim truth in silence for a moment. Then she found words:

"But nothing ever _does_ go wrong. The pink pamphlet says so. My American friend's sister-in-law says so.... Thousands of women have had children under scopolo--what's its name? And none of them felt pain--not the slightest. And in every case--in _every_ case--there was the baby when they woke up!"

The sweet bird-voice quivered. She had entered the room so full of hope and enthusiasm, and this man with the piercing eyes and the brusque, direct manner was putting things before her in a way that dashed and damped. Hear him now:

"Yes, there is generally a baby--when it is necessary there should be one. Though the patients who are treated in the free wards of German and Austrian _Kliniks_ may not always be scrupulous upon this point. Still, if the treatment can be carried out without undue peril for the mother--and I do not allow this for a single moment--have you not considered the risk for the child?"

Margot had pulled off one long glove. Now she murmured, setting the tip of a little bare, jewelled finger near the corner of a distracting little mouth:

"You consider that it's handicapping the start for--the kiddie?"

The avalanche fell; shocking and freezing and stunning her.

"Ask yourself, Lady Norwater, and do not forget to ask your husband: Will a healthy or a degenerate type of man or woman be eventually reared from an infant in whom the springs of Life have been deliberately poisoned with henbane and morphia--before its entrance into the world?"

She gasped:

"Then it's all U.P.?" She was slangy even in her tragic misery. She sought in her gold vanity-bag and produced the envelope that held the cheque, but Saxham waved it away.

"Pray put that back.... Neither from rich nor poor do I accept unearned money. You have not really consulted me. You have asked my opinion upon a course of treatment. And I have given it, for what it is worth. You will go home, and tell your husband that I have talked tosh, and consult another physician."

"No, I won't!" She said it bravely. "I want you to prescribe!"

"If I prescribe," Saxham told her, "you shall certainly fee me. But you do not need treatment." His eyes smiled though his mouth did not relax its grimness, as he added: "You strike me as being in excellent health."

She owned to feeling "top-hole," first-class, and simply awfully beany! Though, and her dimple faded as she owned it, the thought of what must happen in November took "the gilt off the gingerbread."

"Do not think of what is going to happen in November," Saxham advised her. "Or teach yourself to think of it in the right way." The sense of her childishness and inexperience went home to the sensitive quick beneath the man's hard exterior, as she said to him with an unconsciously appealing accent:

"But how am I to find out what is the right way?"

He had gained upon her confidence. The admission proved it. With infinite tact he began to win yet another woman to drain out her chalice of Motherhood, untinctured with the druggist's nepenthe,--to gain for the race yet another babe unmarred before its birth. For this end no labour was too great for Saxham. A crank you may call him, but that cranks of this type are the leaven of the world, you know.

It is typical of the human butterfly Saxham dealt with, that his clothes pleased Margot. She liked their characteristic mingling of elegance with simplicity. Some fashionable doctors got themselves up like elderly bloods, others affected garments dating from the year One. There was neither perfume upon Saxham's handkerchief nor flue upon his coat-sleeve. His shirt of soft white cashmere, his slightly starched linen cuffs and narrow double collar were fastened with plain buttons of mother o' pearl, the black silk necktie was blameless of pin or ring. The handsome gold chronometer he carried because it had been presented to him by the Staff and patients of St. Teresa and St. Stanislaus. The chain attached to it--rather worn and shabby now--was of woven red-brown hair.

The hair of his wife. A creamy-pale Niphetos rose stood where her hands had placed it near his writing-pad, in a tall, slender beaker of green-and-gold Venetian glass. His eyes drank at the beauty of the lovely scarce-unfolded blossom. Perhaps the resemblance of the fair flower to the beloved giver softened the lines of the stern square face into the smile that Margot liked, as he found her eyes again, saying:

"Perhaps I could better answer your question by telling you how another patient bore herself in--circumstances akin to yours. Will it tire you? I promise not to be unduly prolix. And to listen commits you to no course of action. Now, shall I go on?"

"I'd love you to go on!"

Always in extremes, the little wayward creature. She flushed and sparkled at the Doctor as he took from its place on his writing-table a triptych photograph-frame in gold-mounted mother-o'-pearl, folded the leaves so as to reveal but one of the portraits, and held under Margot's eyes the delicately-tinted photograph of a girl of twenty. The portrait had been taken the year following Saxham's return from South Africa with his young wife.

"How beautiful!" Margot exclaimed.

"Beautiful, as you say, but does she look happy?"

Margot wrinkled her dainty eyebrows, puzzling out the question. Did she look happy, the girl of the portrait, whose face and figure might have served one of the old Greek masters as model for an Artemis to be carved upon a gem? Well, perhaps not quite happy, now one came to look again.

The black-lashed eyes of golden hazel were full of wistful sadness, there was a faintly indicated fold between the fine arched eyebrows, much darker than the rippling red-brown hair, whose luxuriance seemed to weigh down the little Greek head. The closely-folded, deeply-cut lips spoke dumbly of sorrow, the nymph-like bosom seemed rising on a breath of weariness. Something was lacking to complete her beauty. So much was plain even to Margot. But not until the Doctor showed by the side of the first, the second portrait, did she realise what that Something was.

In the first portrait both face and figure were shown in profile. In the second, bearing a date of two years later, the beautiful, sensitive face of the young woman was turned towards you. Still rather grave than smiling, she held in her arms a sturdy baby boy of some twelve months, upon whose downy head her chin lightly rested. The clasp of her slender arms about her child, the poise of her still nymph-like figure, expressed fulness of life, buoyant energy, and happiness in fullest measure. What was previously lacking was now made clear.

"Lovely, quite lovely!" trilled the sweet little voice. "And what an exquie kiddy!"

"Then you do not dislike children?" Saxham asked, as his visitor's husband had done not long ago.

"On the contrary," the little lady assured him, "I rather cotton to them. But"--she shrugged her little shoulders prettily and quoted boldly from another woman--"but the fag of having them doesn't--appeal!"

The Doctor replaced the threefold frame and turned his regard back upon his visitor.

"These photographs speak for themselves ..." he said quietly. "She--the mother of the boy you see, was, when she first knew that she was to be a mother, fragile and delicate in body, and in mind highly-strung and sensitive. As a child she had known neglect and unkind usage. Twice she had sustained an overwhelming shock, physical and mental; she had rallied, passed through a crisis and regained lost ground. But the possibility of a relapse was not to be blinked at. It was a lion in the path!"

The slight form of the listener was convulsed by a shudder. The pretty face lost its wild-rose tint. The lion in the path ... Margot saw him crouching, his tawny eyes aflame, his great jaws slavering, his tail lashing the dust, his great muscles tightening for the fearful spring. And Saxham went on:

"She maintained from the first a sweet, sane mental standpoint. She tamed her lion by sheer force of will. Her courage was her own: she did not owe it to the physician and surgeon. But he advised as he knew best, and she followed his advice implicitly, as to wholesome diet and regular exercise, thus keeping her body in health. She surrounded herself with objects that were beautiful in form and colour. She made a point of hearing great music and of re-reading the works of great poets, essayists, and novelists. She wished her child to owe much to pre-natal influences. For that these----"

The speaker faltered for a moment, before he resumed the thread of his discourse.

"--That these form character for good or evil no physiologist can deny. Therefore while she did not flee from, she avoided the sight of deformity or ugliness, as she shunned active infection, or tainted air. It was desirable that her child should be healthy, strong, and beautiful. But the love of loveliness, though one of the dominants of her character, scales lowest of the triad. Human love, the love of mother, husband, and friend rank above it, and first of all stands the love of God."

"How awfully good she must be!"

"She took the child, first and last, as a gift from God to her. If she lived or died, and she longed inexpressibly to live--Death, like Life, would be the fulfilment of the Divine Will. Fortified by the Sacraments of her Church she lay down upon her bed of pain as though it were an altar. She suffered intensely----"

His voice broke.

"She suffered inexpressibly. Not until the actual crisis did I have recourse to chloroform. When I was about to use it she said to me: '_Not yet! ... I will wear it a little longer... this mother's crown of thorns._' To-day the crown is one of roses. Does not this appeal to you?"

The Doctor's supple hand displayed the third portrait in the triptych, and Margot saw the same assured joy, rounded with a richer and more deep content. The exquisite face was fuller, the outlines of the form displayed the ripeness of early maturity, the slender palm was now a stately tree. The girl of twenty was merged in the woman of thirty, rich in all feminine graces, beautiful exceedingly, with the beauty that is not only of line and proportion, form and colour, but shines from within, irradiating the perishable living clay with the immortal radiance of the soul. Her boy stood at her side, a manly square-headed young British twelve-year-old, wearing a simple, distinctive dress; familiar to us all.

"Y-yes. But I'm afraid you have forgotten: I told you at the beginning, or I meant to.... My--my own mother died when I was born!"

"And that sad fact increases your natural fear and repugnance. Naturally. It will strike you as a curious point of resemblance between your case and that of the--patient whose portrait I have shown you, when I tell you that her mother did not survive the birth of a later child. May I tell you further that the possibility of some inherited weakness does not render you more promising--regarded as a subject for the treatment of Wolfenbuchel and Krauss."

Margot was beginning to hate this stern-faced man who set forth things so clearly. He had bored her almost to weeping. Why on earth had she come? The fact that Franky's sister Trix's boy Ronald had been helped into the world by Saxham thirteen years ago and recently operated on for the removal of the appendix, was no reason that Franky's wife should regard him as infallible. She glanced at her tiny jewelled wrist-watch. Ten whole minutes had gone. She rose.

"You have been so kind, and I have been so much interested. But I must go now!" she said, like a weary child pleading to be let out of school. "Franky--my husband--will be waiting. I have promised to lunch with him at the Club."

"If he is here, perhaps Lord Norwater would like to speak to me," Saxham suggested.

Margot lied badly. She reddened as she answered:

"Oh, what a pity that he did not come!"

*CHAPTER XXII*

*MARGOT IS SQUARE*

She was in what she would have termed "a blue funk" for fear that Saxham would accompany her to the threshold. But he merely bowed her out of the consulting-room and smartly shut his door. Then she tripped to the waiting-room and beckoned forth Franky with an air of buoyant, fictitious cheerfulness. Her eyes were radiant, her little face was dressed in artful smiles....

"Did I seem long? Were you getting the hump?" she asked of Franky, who rose and hurried to meet her, dropping _Punches_ all over the place. His smooth hair was almost rumpled and his brown eyes begged like a retriever's. He asked in the kind of whisper that travels miles:

"Yes--no! Did you pull off the interview? What does the Doctor----"

"S-sh!" She glanced anxiously towards the one remaining patient. "Tell you when we get out. Impossible here!"

He urged: "But is it all right?"

"As right as rain!"

"Good egg!" She had got him out of the room and as far as the hall door. "Stop! ... Wait! Oughtn't I to go and thank----"

"No--no!" The door was open, the neat little landau-limousine that had brought them was waiting by the kerb-stone. Before Franky knew it, Margot had plucked him down the steps, pulled him into the car, and given the chauffeur the signal. They were in Hanover Square before he recovered his breath.

"Oh come, I say, Kittums! That sort of Sandow business can't be good for you. Why you're in such a thundering hurry to get me away, I'd rather like to know?"

Her heart shook her, but she lied again bravely.

"Didn't you want to hear what the Doctor told me about the 'Purple Dreams' treatment?"

"More than anything in the world. That drug with the freak name! ... Can it do any harm--to you and----"

"Not a scrap!"

She planted a flying kiss between his ear and his collar. He greatly appreciated the attention, though it tickled him horribly.

"Dr. Saxham said it was a frightfully clever, practicable method. Absolutely harmless, and the patient doesn't suffer--not that much!" She measured off an infinitesimal bit of finger-nail and showed him, and went on as he caught the little hand and gratefully mumbled it: "You don't know a thing that happens. You simply go to bye-bye. And--there's always the baby when you wake up!"

"A first-class baby?" His harping maddened her. "A healthy little buffer to send to Eton and represent us in the Regiment, and inherit the title presently when his poor old Pater pops? Just look me in the face like the little sport you are, Margot, and tell me that you're playing square with me. For this--for this is the game of Life!"

He had both her hands. He made her look at him. She met his eager stare with limpid eyes. And all the while that sentence of Saxham's about the pre-natal poisoning of the springs of existence, drummed, drummed at the back of her brain. "_What a little beast I am!_" she mentally commented, hearing her own voice answering:

"I've told you No, and that I am playing square with you!" She grasped the fact that Franky had suffered, by the grunt of relief with which he loosed her hands. "And so it's settled I go to Berlin about the middle of--September, say?"

"Wow-wow! It's us for the gay life! Just when the beastly hole's as dusty as the Sahara and as hot as hell!"

"You won't be in the beastly hole, and perhaps I needn't go before the beginning of October. You can go down to Brakehills and slay away at the pheasants, and run over when I cable, to bring me back----"

"With my boy! Our boy, Kittums!"

His simple, kind face was quivering. He put out a strong brown hand and laid it on hers, and she gave the hand a little affectionate nip:

"Hullo!" Perhaps he talked on to cover up the momentary lapse into sentiment. "Pipe old St. George's, where we did the deed! Hardly seems close on six months since we got spliced, does it? And there's the Bijou Cottage...." Franky thus irreverently designated the large, drab, stucco-faced, eminently respectable if mousey mansion on the Square's east side, where Margot's bachelor Uncle Derek lived with his collection of moths and beetles. "Shall we stop and give the old gentleman a cheero? Is he at all likely to be in?"

His hand was on the silk-netted rubber bulb of the chauffeur's whistle, when Margot caught it back.

"No, don't stop! Of course he's in. He never goes out, unless it is to a meeting of the Entomological Society, or the Museum of Natural History, or some other place equally stuffy and scientific. Besides, Uncle Derek is a vegetarian--and there wouldn't be anything but tomato soup, and pea-flour cutlets, and Lepidoptera for lunch!"

"Poor little woman, was she peckish, then? All lity, we'll chuff along and fill up tanks at the Club. Bally odd bill of fare, pea-flour cutlets and Lepidop--what's-their-names? But we'll get things nearly as rummy served up to us in Berlin. Pork chops with sweet gooseberry sauce, and pink sausages with lilac cabbage and dumplings. Why do you look so scared?"

She forced a laugh.

"Not scared, but you said '_we_' ..."