Part 12

"You don't suppose I could go shooting when you were--facing what you've got to face?" he asked her, and added, in a tone and with a look that she had once before encountered from him: "When you go to Berlin in October, Kittums, I go with you; take that as straight from Headquarters, old child! Unless--something happens to prevent our going there at all!"

He added, answering the mute question in her eyes:

"Something that's been on the cards since the Anglo-French Agreement of 1904. It cropped up again in 1905, when the German Kaiser's feelings were so upset by John Bull's carryings-on with the pretty lady in the tricolour petticoat and Cap of Liberty, that he called on the Sultan of Morocco at Tangier to ask his Sublimity to interfere. And again in 1908 we were up against it ... when Austria annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Russia took the needle, and William ordered out his best suit of shining armour in readiness for a scrap.... If there's anything in the Triple Entente, the fat was nearly in the fire then.... And again in 1911, over the French occupation of Morocco, when the German gunboat _Panther_ and the German cruiser _Berlin_ were sent to the closed Fort of Agadir near the mouth of the smelly River Sus. That piffed out after a good deal of what they call 'acute tension between the Powers.' To the Services acute tension means the stoppin' of leave. And I'd fixed things up for spendin' the July fortnight before Henley with some jolly people at Baden-Baden, and if the trip had come off, the chances are I'd have come back engaged to another girl!"

"Are you sorry?"

"Do I look sorry?" was the quick _riposte_. He went on: "France and Germany went in for 'precautionary measures' that time. Precautionary measures mean concentration of troops on both frontiers, and General Manoeuvres on the biggest scale. Dress-rehearsal for a general mobilisation, you tumble? While our Home Fleet quietly concentrated on our north-east coast. And just when the lid seemed on the point of being taken off, Billiam the Bumptious climbed down, and withdrew from Agadir. The squabble was patched up. France got a free hand in Morocco in return for the open door and 100,000 square miles of the Congo Basin. French and German troops left off mugging at one another across the frontiers. Whitehall Wireless, Nordeich Station, and the Eiffel Tower emitted radios reversin' the weather-signals from 10 to 0, which means a dead calm. And the British Fleet gave up all hope and went home to bed.

"But--and don't you swipe in, Kittums, for I'm gettin' to the thrillin' part--the bigwigs who manage Foreign Affairs weren't taken in so easily. They knew the bad blood had got to break out somewhere, and it did. Italy and Turkey went to war in November, 1911, and the Balkan Rumpus broke out ten months later. Turkey didn't win, though her Army has had German instructors ever since von Moltke licked it into shape in 1835, and Germany'd naturally expected her to finish as top-dog. So the concessions Germany wanted from Turkey were lost. I rather think the Prussian Eagle had its eye on Adrianople on the Black Sea coast, and the Gallipoli Peninsula, for the furtherin' of her views on the Near East--and Austria had a fancy for the Sanjak of Novibazar--and wanted Salonika as a base for operations on the Mediterranean. Anyhow, both of 'em were wiped on the jaw. And William the All Too Knowing, as Courtley calls him--Courtley's going in strong for Nietzsche just now--says his works are a slogging attack on Teutonism!--William has got to the end of his patience. The shining armour's been hanging up all these years, getting too tight for an Emperor inclined to run to tummy. The shining sword was getting rusty in its regulation sheath. And then in the nick of time--happens the Affair of Sarajevo. The news came through that Sunday in Paris. I remember how Spitz's Restaurant boiled over, and the people were shouting 'Sarajevo' on the boulevards. By George! I forgot you were in bed and asleep while we were dining."

Margot, between waking and sleeping, had got some inkling of the tragedy of that night. She asked, as Franky took off his hat and proceeded to mop his non-intellectual forehead:

"And is Sarajevo likely to stop me from going to Berlin?"

Franky left off mopping and said, looking at her squarely:

"If Austria's Note to Serbia is--what the Kaiser would like it to be--you may take it we're on the giddy verge of a General All-Round Scrap."

"You mean--a war?"

"I mean _the_ War that'll dwarf all others by comparison. The War of Nations, that the prophet wrote of in Revelations. Armageddon.... The Last Battle. The Big Bust Up that comes before the end."

"Darling old boy, what rot!"

"Rot if you like. You wait and see what happens. D'you pipe me tipping you the gag Asquithian?" He grinned at the idea.

"Franky, you've set me asking myself something."

"Why you've married an idiot? ... Is that it?" He turned upon her a rueful face from which the grin had been wiped away.

Margot said, as the car turned smoothly into Short Street and stopped before the Club portico:

"No, but--How is it you know--all the things you know, when I've always known you knew nothing about anything?"

He shook his head.

"Give it up! ... No, I don't! The answer is--I'm one of those fellows--and the Services are simply stiff with 'em, who are absolute asses till it's necessary for 'em to be something else."

*CHAPTER XXIII*

*A MODERN CLUB*

Perhaps in those prehistoric days before the War, you knew the big, cool, ground-floor dining-room of the "Ladies' Social" Club. They lunched excellently at Margot's pet table in the corner near the conservatory, between whose rows of well-tended pot-plants you pass to the smoke-room, celebrated for its Persian divan, and green-and-rose-coloured glass dome.

Soon the Club would be abandoned to sweeps, painters, charwomen, and window-cleaners. Just now everything was in full swing. As the little tables became vacant, the drawing-rooms and lounges filled up. The smoke-room was a crush of well got-up men and extravagantly-caparisoned women, chattering nineteen to the dozen under a thick blue canopy of Turkish, Egyptian, and Virginian. The tang of Kuemmel and Benedictine and Creme de Menthe came to you with the fragrance of the Club's especial coffee and the reek of innumerable illusion perfumes.

People were having a cigarette and a gossip before going on to Lord's to see the tennis-singles between Oxford and Cambridge; or the Inter-Regimental Polo Finals at Hurlingham. Others had just motored back from witnessing the rowing-matches at Henley, between Eton and Darley, and the Eton second Eight and Montbeau College, and were recuperating before dropping in for a whiff of the new comedy at the Ambassador's, or the latest revue at the Fleur de Lis. To be followed by Tango Tea at the Rocroy, or Unlimited Bridge at the house of an accommodating friend.

Perhaps you can recall them--those men and women of the best and bluest blood in Britain, strenuously spending their days in doing nothing as expensively as ever it could be done. Light, frivolous, shallow, dry-hearted; restlessly seeking new things on which to waste their barren energies, they seemed, and bore out their seeming in all thoroughness; the degenerate sons and daughters of a once great and splendid race.

Save Vanity and the Pride of Life there seemed but little in Eve or Adam. Not overmuch grey brain-matter appeared to be contained within their small neat skulls. Though in comparison with the modern Eve, slangy, loud, extravagantly attired in every tint of the Teutonic dye-chemist's chromatic register, topped with feathers that missed the ceiling by a bare half-foot, Adam in his neutral greys, and buffs and browns, and umbers, struck you as a being of mild demeanour and uncostly apparel, until looking closer, you found him out.

His nice hair was gummed about his head as sleekly as a golliwog's. He sported stays, for the preservation of his silhouette. His gossamer cambric exhaled perfumes like a Georgian dandy's. Fashionable complexion-creams lent his tanned and well-shaved cheek a tempting peachiness. His socks were all too lovely for description by this feeble pen of mine. The uppers of his boots were of every imaginable material and substance, ranging from silk brocade, green lizard, and ivory-white shark skin, to sandy-pink armadillo-belly, or the tender grey of the African gazelle.

The results of the Olympic Games of 1912 must have made dour reading for the fathers of these youthful Britons, remembering their own triumphs in the early eighties. A bitter pill for those stark old men, their grandfathers, makers of 'Varsity records in '61 and '67, whose faith in the superiority of British lungs and muscles had been bequeathed them by their own sires. Yet their juniors took it calmly. They carried the stigma of inferiority with cheerful indifference. Even while holding it the thing best worth living for--they placidly submitted to be outclassed in sport.

And both the man and the woman of this era were possessed by strange crazes and pleased with vivid contrasts. The musical jig-saw puzzles of Lertes, Hein, and de Blonc vied in their favour with the weird Oriental Operas of the Russian Rimsky-Korsakov and the delicate rhapsodies of Delius, and the sylvan nymphs and fauns of Russian Ballet shared their plaudits with Senora Panchita and Herr Maxi Zuchs, the celebrated exponents of the Tango.

Ah, yes, it was an extraordinary era. Slips from that old, old Tree that bore the Forbidden Fruit had been successfully grafted upon so many old-world stocks in British orchards, that you caught a tang of its exotic flavour in almost everything. Play ran high. Luxury ran riot. Period Balls and Upas Club Cabaret Suppers were IT--absolutely IT. Morality was at lowest ebb--Religion a forgotten formulary. And as the Christian virtues cheapened, so the prices of dress, jewellery, motor-cars, and other indispensables of modern existence climbed to still more amazing altitudes. The marvel was, because nobody seemed to have any money--where the money came from to pay for these things? What we are yet to pay for the wholesale levelling of moral barriers, and the abolition of old-world modesty and good taste, that distinguished the years of ill-fame 1913 and 1914, only Heaven knows.

Even more comprehensively pervasive than the illusion perfumes extracted from coal-tar by German chemists, and supplied us by German manufacturers; even more striking than the dazzling, vivid aniline dyes, procured from the same source, even more potent than the vast array of by-product drugs which represent as it were the scum of the insulated vats wherein the Teuton chemist macerates and mingles his high explosives--was the strange, mysteriously pervasive flavour, the seductively-suggestive tang of evil in the social atmosphere. You caught the look of secret, intimate, half-cynical knowledge in the faces not only of the merest youths, but of the youngest, freshest, prettiest girls. Subjects held unmentionable a few years ago were openly discussed in English drawing-rooms. Curious lore in strange things old and new was much sought after at this period, when Cubism and Futurism governed design, not only in dress and stage scenery, but in Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture; and dances known in the voodoo-houses of East Africa and the West Indies, and the hells of Central America and the Argentine were seen in the ball-rooms as in the brothels, of Paris and London, Petrograd and Brussels, Vienna, New York, and Berlin.

Novelty was so much the rage, that if the Arch-Enemy of Mankind had appeared among the exclusive patrons of a fashionable night-club in any one of these cities, a hearty welcome would have been extended to him, and his ripe experience would have been laid under contribution with a view to imparting to the latest Cabaret entertainment some exotic novelty from Hell.

Franky with obtrusive care selected a comfortable corner of the Persian divan for Margot, and while she signed for coffee and Kuemmel, established himself at her side.

They were isolated, it seemed to Kittums. Friends nodded and smiled cordially, but did not attempt to join them. Was it because Franky's too-possessive manner had told secrets? ... She shivered and glanced at her lord. He said, as the light-footed button-boys scoured about with coffee and liqueur-trays, while the electric fans purred, the blue smoke-canopy thickened under the green and rose glass dome, and the clamour of many feminine voices, in combination with the gaudy feathers of the clamourers, suggested the South American macaw-house at the Zoo:

"My eye! you're pretty thick in here. Might be a fog in mid-Channel." He mounted a square monocle recently purchased in Paris and the pride of his bosom, threw back his head and stared up into the famous green and rose dome. "Swagger affair. How much did it tot up to?"

"Seventeen hundred, clear, with the carpet and the divan."

"Pretty stiff!" His doleful whistle set Margot's teeth on edge. She added:

"And rattling cheap at the price! And--if it wasn't, I was spending my own money.... There was nobody--then--to interfere!"

He conceded:

"Of course I don't suggest that you were done in the eye. Probably you got the value of your dibs. But you'll have something better to spend cash on presently. Me, too! We must both draw in our horns now, Kittums. For the sake of--you know who! ... Hullo! Is anything wrong?"

She had winced, but she gritted her little teeth, and fought back the rising hysteria. She could have shrieked, or thrown the little coffee-pot at his head. He went on, recognising friends through the smoke-haze:

"There's Lady Beau with that German aviator-chap we met in Paris. Big red-headed brute. You remember him? And--who's the girl? But for her hair, I'd say it was Miss Saxham. By the Great Brass Hat, it is! With a wig, or dyed...."

"Dyed. It was done in Paris--done most beautifully." Margot's eyes had lighted up with interest. "I must have forgotten to tell you. I've known it three or four days. Don't you like it?"

"Like it?" Franky had reached for his little glass and gulped the contents hurriedly. "My stars, I never saw such a transformation. Order another Kuemmel, please, to give me a buck-up."

"Take mine. I simply loathe the sticky stuff." She added, as Franky obliged: "_I_ think that Pat looks ripping."

"All too ripping. That's where the trouble comes in." He went on: "When her hair was black, you knew where it was you'd seen her. Makin' one in an endless procession of women--all with long eyes and big busts and curving hips, walkin'--like pussy-cats along a roof-ridge, on the walls of those old Egyptian temples we did together--that November when I got such spoons on you--going up with the Gillinghams from Cairo to Philae--a flat-bottomed Nile tug towin' the whole crowd in a string of dahabeahs. You remember those ochre-coloured Nile sunrises? When a dust-storm had been blowin' over the Desert, and the River was all wrinkly white, like curdled milk."

"How killingly poetic!"

"Am I poetic? Good egg! Never thought I'd live to be called that."

"Live and learn!" Margot's laugh was a hard little silvery tinkle. She too was remembering the sunrises and sunsets of Egypt, and the long days under the green canvas awnings. How beautiful she had thought the brown eyes that seemed only vacuous now. She, Margot, would be ugly very soon now, she told herself. Already her small face showed lines and hollows. Soon beauty-loving men and women would turn their eyes away.... Her cheval-glass would tell her why, and shop-windows when she passed them would reveal her shapelessness. She would only possess interest for three people. For the doctor, as a patient. For the certificated nurse, as a Case. For her husband, as the potential mother of the boy he longed for. And--what price Margot?

"Should you like me to take you to see some polo, or wouldn't a chuff-chuff in the country be best?" Franky's eyes were full of hungry solicitude as they rested on the small, pinched features. "You look a bit fagged, it strikes me!"

She nipped her little lower lip, stung by the tone of sympathetic proprietorship. "Oh! very well. A drive!" she told him, and they passed together from the smoking-room. The sheath-skirt revealed, as she moved, what she would have hidden. Von Herrnung smiled, following the little figure with bold, curious glances. Other men stared, if more discreetly. Towering feathers nodded to each other as their feminine wearers commented:

"Poor little Margot, how quite too rough on her!"

Said Lady Beauvayse, assuming the rip-saw Yankee accent in which it pleased her to deliver her witticisms:

"Say now! if we women could pick babies right away off the strawberry-vines, it would save a deal of trouble, and a considerable pile of self-respect."

Everybody laughed. A slender white and golden woman with a string of sapphires very much the colour of her own eyes, picked up a toy Pekingese that squatted near her, and said, cuddling the goggling morsel under her chin:

"I agree. When I look at my two precious duckies I say to myself: 'You little dears, for each of your sweet sakes I became a plain woman with a shapeless silhouette and saucer-eyes. Now that I've done my duty to your pappy and Posterity, this is the only kind of baby I'll indulge in." She kissed the Pekingese on the end of its black snub-nose. "And when I want a new one--I'll buy it at the shop!"

"_Noch besser_. Why not hire one? ..." suggested von Herrnung.

Mrs. Charterhouse laughed and gave him the Pekingese to hold. But it snapped at him furiously and she took the little beast back again.

"Dogs do not like me," said the big German. "You will read perhaps in novels that that is a bad sign, yes?"

"I never read novels," returned Mrs. Charterhouse, with her famous manner, "nor any books, only bits of the papers for the Sporting and Society news. And Reports of Divorce Proceedings, and the Notices in Bankruptcy. One likes to know what one's friends are doing, and where they are to be found. Don't you, Count? Not that there is any great difficulty in ascertaining your whereabouts, just now, I fancy.... Why, what has become of Patrine?"

"Miss Saxham went in there just now to write a letter," said the smiling von Herrnung, pointing to the leather-covered swing-doors communicating with the writing-room. "She comes now, I think! Yes, it is she!" He rose with his air of exaggerated courtesy as the tall figure of Patrine Saxham returned through the swing-doors and re-crossed the room. She carried her head high, and had a letter in her hand. The alteration in the colour of her hair made her whiteness almost startling. There were bluish shadows about her long eyes, and her rounded cheeks had lost a little of their fulness, but her beauty had never been more apparent than now.

"She has dyed, therefore she is dead to me!" groaned Courtley, who was, as usual, in attendance on Lady Beauvayse. He added, plaintively: "It's like--white-washing the Sphinx, or enamelling a first-class battle-cruiser in some fashionable colour. Why did you let her do it, my lady fair?"

Lady Beauvayse retorted:

"Am I Miss Saxham's mother that I should meddle in her love-affairs?"

"If I was acquainted with her mother," said Courtley, below his breath, "and thought the good lady would take my tip seriously, I'd step in and nip this affair in the bud. It's no go, even if Miss Saxham thinks it is. It's a dud. That German flying-chap is booked to marry a cousin; a Baroness Something von Wolfensbragen-Hirschenbuttel. I've seen it in the Berlin _Lokal Anzeiger_, and that's inspired, a sort of Imperial Court Almanac. And even if it wasn't true, there are reasons--" His kind grey eyes were worried, he tugged at his pointed black beard in a vexed way. "Take me seriously, Miladi, tell her what I've told you, before it's too late!"

"And bring on myself the fate of the interferer.... Couldn't you--since you're so anxious?" Lady Beauvayse began.

"Not possible," said Courtley. "Too crushed with responsibilities. Got to brush up my seamanship, while my junior executive swots away in Docks at Chatham, fillin' in the watch-bill and making out commissioning-cards."

"You've got a ship, do you mean?"

Courtley nodded.

"They call her one at the Admiralty just by way of being funny. When they've scraped off the dirt enough to get at her, she may turn out to be a first-class protected cruiser. Twenty months out of commission--and mobilised for the Spithead Naval Review."

"Ought one to be glad? ... Does it mean that we're to congratulate you on promotion?" asked puzzled Lady Beauvayse.

"Well," Courtley admitted cautiously, "when I've got my full-dress frock-coat and sword out of pawn, and hoisted my pennant and called on the post Commander-in-Chief--I shall be something between a Rear-Admiral and a Post Captain--or they'll have told me wrong."

"And the Review--what do you call it?" persisted Lady Beauvayse. "Can one go and see it--whenever it comes off?"

"It'll be big enough to see--with a stiffish pair of binkies," admitted Courtley in his gentlest manner; "and the newspapers seem to have arranged it for somewhere in the middle of the month. As to what you're to call it--if you called it an Object Lesson on the biggest scale for the use of German Kultur Classes, perhaps you wouldn't be very wide of the bull."

He got up before Lady Beauvayse could rejoin, and had met Patrine, and engineered her into his vacated seat next her friend upon the divan almost before she knew. She lowered her tall person upon the cushions, studiously avoiding von Herrnung's glances. She wore a white embroidered gown of cobwebby material and extreme scantiness, a stole of black cock's feathers was looped about her shoulders, and on her dead beech-leaf-coloured hair sat a curious little hat of glittering silver spangles, from which sprang a single black cock's plume.

"What have you all been talking about?" she asked, looking about her.

Lady Wastwood, who sat near, answered, balancing her long, slim, fragile personality on the fender-stool before the hearth that was filled with tall ferns and flowering plants in pots:

"We were saying--what a wretched pity the process of racial reproduction is so abominably unbecoming. It really points to a loose style of reasoning on the part of Nature--or whoever it is who arranges these things!"

Who does not know Lady Wastwood. She affected, at this period, a skull-cap of gold-green hair and a triangular chalk-white face, with a V-shaped mouth, painted scarlet as a Pierrot's. Her eyebrows were black and resembled musical slurs. Through her few diaphanous garments you could have counted every bone of her frail person, so light that it was a favourite vacation joke with her eldest boy--who was now at Sandhurst qualifying for a Cavalry Commission--to sprint with his widowed mother on his shoulder up and down corridors and stairs.

Listen to Trixie:

"I suppose--Nature. She's so unreasonable--that must be why she's a she, in literature. She implanted in us poor women the raging desire to be pretty under all imaginable circumstances.... At the same time she says to us: 'You're immoral, unnatural, and selfish, if you don't replenish the Race. Go and do it!' Consequently, when one is ordered in that bullying way to choose between immorality and ugliness, one calls out: 'Oh! do let me be pretty, please!'"

A soldierly, good-looking man, sitting with a charming girl in a particularly smoky corner, lazily propounded:

"Why do women covet prettiness beyond everything?"

"To please men, I rather surmise," said Lady Beauvayse, turning her Romney head in the direction of the speaker, who queried: