Part 2

"What do people marry for?" Margot regarded him indignantly over the neglected pyramid of luscious, tempting strawberries, "To--to be happy together--to have a clinking time!" Her voice shook. "And this is to be a gorgeous season. Balls--balls! right on from now to the end of July--then from the autumn all through winter. Period Costume Balls, reviving the modes, music, and manners of Ancient Civilisations--Carthagenian, Assyrian, Babylonian, Gothic--got up and arranged by the Committees of the Cercle Moderne, here in Paris, and in London by the New Style Club.... Tony Guisseguignol and Paul Peigault and their set are busy designing the dresses and decorations--nothing like them will ever have been seen! And--Peigault says--Tango and the Maxixe are to be chucked to the little cabbages. A new dance is coming from Sao Paulo that will simply wipe them out.... And now--just when I was looking forward--when everything was to have been so splendid----"

The shaking voice choked upon a note of anguish. Franky had picked up the melon, quite unconsciously, and was balancing it. At this juncture he gripped the green globe with both hands, and said, summoning all his courage to meet the agonised appeal of Margot's tear-drenched eyes:

"Look here. This is--strict Bridge.... Do you loathe 'em--the kiddies--so horribly that the idea of having any is hateful to you? Or is it--not only the--the veto it puts on larking and kickabout and--the temporary disfigurement--you're afraid of--but the--the--the inevitable pain?" He glanced round cautiously and looked back again at his wife, saying in a low voice: "Nobody's listening.... Tell me frankly...." He waited an instant, and then said in an urgent whisper. "Answer me! ... For God's sake, tell the frozen truth, Margot!"

*CHAPTER III*

*FAIR ROSAMOND'S CHOICE*

The terrace under Nadier's roses--dotted with little tables covered with napery, silver, crystal, and china, surrounded with laughing, chattering feasters--the terrace was no longer a scene out of a comedy of the lighter side of Parisian life.... Tragedy, pale and awe-inspiring in her ink-black mantle and purple chiton, had stepped across the gravel in her gold-buckled leather buskins, to offer to the girlish bride--a piece of human porcelain, prinked in the height of the fashion, and lovely--with her wild-rose cheeks and little uptilted nose, her floss-silk hair and wide, dark, lustrous deer-eyes--Fair Rosamond's choice, the dagger or the bowl....

"Yes--yes.... It is the ugliness of the thing! ..." The little mouth was pulled awry as though it had sipped of verjuice. The tiny hands knotted themselves convulsively, and the colour fled in terror from her face. "The grotesque ugliness.... And the"--the last two words came as though a pang had wrung them from the pale lips--"the pain--the awful pain! And besides--my mother died when I was born!" Margot's voice was a fluttering, appealing whisper; her great eyes were dilated and wild with terror. "Perhaps that is why I am so deadly afraid"--she caught her breath--"but there are heaps, heaps, _heaps_ of married women who fear--_that_--equally! And they arrange to escape it--I don't know how! ... For I knew--nothing--when I married you! ..." She lifted her great eyes to Franky's, and he realised that it had been so, actually. "I've been ashamed ever to confess that I was--ignorant about these things! ... I've talked a language--amongst other women--that I didn't understand! ..."

There are moments when even the shallow-brained become clairvoyant. Franky's love for her made him see clear. He looked back down the vista of Margot's twenty years of existence, and saw her the motherless daughter of a self-absorbed, cultivated, Art-loving valetudinarian, who habitually spent the chillier part of each year in ranging from French to Italian health-resorts, occupying the spring with Art in Paris--returning to London for June and July, generally spending August and September in Devonshire--to take flight Southwards before the migrating swallows, at the first chill breath of October frosts.

Margot had been educated at home, down in Devonshire, by a series of certificated female tutors. The spinster aunt, the younger sister of her father, extended to her niece for a liberal remuneration a nominal protection and an indifferent care.... And Mr. Mountjohn had died when the girl was sixteen, leaving her unconditionally heiress to his considerable fortune, and the aunt had let Margot have her head in every imaginable way. She had allowed her to take up her residence at the "Ladies' Social" Club three years subsequently, on the sole condition that a responsible chaperon accompanied Margot to Society functions. Hence, Mrs. Ponsonby Rewes, the irreproachable widow of a late King's Messenger, was evoked from Kensington Tower Mansions upon these occasions--by telephone--to vanish when no longer wanted, in the discreetest and most obliging way.

"Poor little Margot! .... Poor little woman!..." Franky could see how it all had happened by the wild light of the great deer-eyes, so like those in the portrait of the girl's dead mother--half Irish, half Greek by birth.

While Franky reflected, the tables had been emptying. People were hurrying away to hear the band of the Jardin d'Acclimatation or to fulfil other engagements of a seasonable kind. Some remained to smoke and gossip over liqueurs and coffee. The light blue wreaths of cigar and cigarette smoke curled up towards the awning overhead. Franky mechanically produced his own case and lighted up. And Margot, stretching a slender arm across the table, was saying:

"Give me one!--I've forgotten mine! ..."

"Ought you? ... Is it wise? ..." Franky was on the point of asking, but his good Angel must have clapped a hand before his mouth. He silently gave Margot a thick, masculine Sobranie and supplied a light; and as their young faces neared and the red spark glowed, and the first smoke-wreath rose between the approximating tubes of delicate tobacco-filled paper, his wife whispered as their eyes met:

"You're hurt! But now you know--you're sorry for me, aren't you?" It was a dragging, plaintive undertone, not at all like Margot's voice.

"Frightfully! All the more because"--Franky drew so hard at his cigarette that it burned one-sidedly--"I can't help being thundering--glad!"

"I--see! ..."

She breathed out the words with a thin stream of fragrant Turkish vapour crawling over her scarlet under-lip, it seemed to Franky, like a pale blue worm. And he bit through his Sobranie and threw it on his dessert-plate, saying desperately:

"Not yet. Will you listen quietly to what I've got to say?"

She nodded. Franky launched himself upon the tide of revelation. Nearly everybody who had been eating when he had come into Nadier's with Margot had got up and gone away. And the Cuirassiers band was playing the love-music from _Samson et Dalila_ on the terrace of the Jardin d'Acclimatation, as melodiously as only a French military band can play.

"It's got to do with the Peerage. Only a Second Afghan War-Earldom dating from 1879--tacked on to the Viscounty they gave my great-grandfather after Badajos--but worth having in its way, or the Dad wouldn't have accepted it. And, naturally enough--I want a boy to take the Viscounty when I succeed my father, and have the Earldom when I've absquatulated, just as the kiddy'll want one when his own time comes."

Margot was burning a strawberry-leaf on her plate with her cigarette-end. She asked, impressing another little yellow scorched circle on the surface of rough green:

"Would it matter so very much if there wasn't any boy?"

Franky jumped and turned red to the white, unsunned circle left by the field-cap on the summit of his high forehead.

"It would matter--lots! For my Uncle Sherbrand, a younger brother of my father's, would come in for the Viscounty when I succeeded the dear old Dad. And my Uncle Sherbrand is a blackguard! Got cashiered in 1900, when he was an Artillery officer in a gun-testing billet at Wanwich. Kicked out of the Army--in War-time, mind you!--for not backing up his C.O. And the brute has got a son, too, an apprentice in an engine-shop, if he isn't actually a chauffeur. Probably the young fellow's respectable, and of course it ain't the pup's fault he's got such a sire. But my Dad would turn in his grave at the idea of being succeeded by the brother who disgraced him--and as for _his_ grandfather--the jolly old cock 'ud bally well get up and dance, I should say.... So, you see, I can't--sympathise with you as you want me to do in this, darling! I want you to buck up and be cheerful, and face the music like a brick.... As for what you've told me--about your mother----" In spite of himself, Franky gulped, and little shiny beads of sweat stood upon his cheeks and temples. "That sort of thing doesn't run in families, like rheumatism"--he was getting idiotic--"or Roman noses! Be plucky--and everything will turn out all right. Can't possibly go wrong if we call in Saxham ... Saxham of 000, Harley Street--man my sister Trix simply swears by. Brought her boy Ronald into the world thirteen years ago, and successfully operated on him for appendicitis only the other day! ..."

Margot looked at Franky attentively and bent her head slightly. Had she understood? She must have.... Had she tacitly agreed? Of course....

*CHAPTER IV*

*RAYMOND OF THE S. AE. F.*

The Masculine Will had conquered. You had only to be firm with women--bless their hearts! and they caved directly.... Couldn't hold out.... Not built that way.... Franky's sternly-clamped upper-lip relaxed. He beamed as he proposed a noonday stroll in the Bois. In the direction of the bigger Lake, by one of the narrower avenues, or if Margot preferred a look-in at the Polo Club, another avenue, intersecting the Allee de Longchamps and skirting the enclosure of the Gun Club, would take them there in a jiffy, _via_ Bagatelle.

Margot assented to the latter proposition, and, with a little flutter of the lips Franky accepted as a smile, reached for her egret stole, a filmy feathery thing she had removed on entering Nadier's, and drew on her long mousquetaire gloves and pulled down her veil of sunset _chiffon_, half shaded red, merging into jonquil yellow matching the shade of her marvellous gown. And Franky paid the bill in plump English sovereigns (invariably exchanged as good for louis of twenty francs by the suave and smiling waiter) and tipped the said waiter extravagantly, and took his hat from the second waiter (who invariably starts up by the side of the first when you are going) and tipped him, and got his stick from the third waiter (who came forward with this, and the _en tout cas_ of Madame--a lovely thing in the latest dome-shape, of black net over jonquil colour, with a flounce, and an ivory stick, upon the top of which sat a green monkey in olivines, eating a ruby fruit), and lighted another cigarette, and returned the elaborate bow of the manager with a nod of the cheerful patronising order as he followed Margot through the Rambler-wreathed archway leading by a flight of shallow steps from Nadier's terrace to the wide carriage-sweep that links the broad Allee de Longchamps with the narrower Route de Madrid. And the towering plume of her astonishing hat brought down a shower of red rose-petals as she passed out before him--and Franky, with some of these on his top-hat-brim and others nestling in the front of his waistcoat, was irresistibly reminded of their wedding-day.

Unconsciously, Franky and Margot quitted the broader, more frequented avenue, crowded with people in carriages, people in automobiles, people on motor-bicycles and bicyclettes, and followed narrower pathways, stretching between green lawns adorned with shrubberies and clumps of stately forest trees, and chiefly patronised by sweethearting couples, nursemaids in charge of children, children in domineering but affectionate charge of white-haired ladies, while venerable gentlemen dozed on rustic benches over the columns of _Figaro_ or _Paris Midi_.

When even these figures became rare, it was borne in upon Franky that he and Margot were not upon a path that led to the Grounds of the Polo Club. Reluctantly, he admitted himself lost.

"Does it matter? ..." Margot's voice was weary. "If you're absolutely set on it, we could ask one of those men in cocked hats and waxed moustaches and red-and-yellow shoulder-cords to give us the straight tip. But I don't feel the least bit keen about the Polo Club any more than the Lakes. These alleys are quiet, and the grass is nice and green. I vote we go on."

"Madame cannot pass this way. It is not open for strangers."

A Republican Guard, a good-looking _sous-officier_, had spoken, comprehending the tone rather than the English words.

"Why not?" Margot's eyes suddenly brightened. She eagerly sniffed the air of the forbidden avenue. The corporal, indicating with his white-gloved hand other Republican Guards posted at equal distances down the prohibited alley, and at its intersection with another some two hundred yards distant, brought his eyes back to Margot to answer:

"Madame, for the reason that certain military operations are taking place here to-day."

"But my husband is an English officer--" Margot was beginning, when Franky, reddening to his hat-brim, exhorted her to be quiet, and the Republican Guard, civilly saluting, stepped upon the grass and moved away.

"All the same, you are an English officer," Margot persisted, "and what use is the Entente if that doesn't count?"

"Best child, don't be a giddy goose!" Franky implored her. "You don't suppose the Authorities care a bad tomato for an English Loot--what they'd cotton to would have to be a British Brass Hat of the very biggest kind. Look there!--more to your left, little battums!" He indicated yet other Republican cocked hats strung at equal distances down the length of a neighbouring alley, precisely outlining the farther border of the sandwich-shaped halfacre of greensward by which their particular avenue ran. "And there!" His professional eye had noted a big, grey-painted military motor-lorry, numbered, and lettered "S. Ae. F." Behind the driver's seat towered the slender T-shaped steel mast of a Field wireless, whose spidery aerials, pegged to the turf, were in charge of men in _kepis_ and blue overalls, while a non-commissioned officer, wearing the telephone head-band of the operator, leaned on the elbow-rest of the tripod supporting the apparatus, his finger on the buzzer-key. Near him his clerk squatted, pencil and pad in readiness, while at a respectful distance from two oblong patches of white in the middle of the green plat of turf, several active upright figures in dark uniforms stood conversing, or walking to and fro.

"_Officiers Aviateurs_, telegraphists and mechanics of the French _Service Aeronautique_"--you are listening to Franky--"tremendously well-organised compared with our little footling Flying Corps, tinkered fourteen months ago out of the old Air Battalion of the R. E. These chaps are Engineers--goin' by the dark red double stripes on their overalls and their dark blue _kepis_. Some of their machines'll be out for practice. Despatch-droppin' or bombs. Here's a man with brass on his hat, coming our way.... Takes me for a German soger-orficer I shouldn't wonder!--lots of 'em get their clothes cut in Bond Street. But though you can hide Allemand legs in English trousers"--Franky was recovering his customary cheeriness--"and some of 'em do it uncommon cleverly--you can't deodorise an accent that hails from Berlin."

The officer approaching--a youthful, upright figure walking quickly, with the short, springy steps of a man much in the saddle--proved to be grey-haired and grey-moustached. The double-winged badge of his Service was embroidered in gold upon the right sleeve of his tunic, and upon the collar, a single wing in this case, ending in a star. He carried binoculars suspended from his neck by a rolled-leather thong, and a revolver in a black-leather case was attached to the belt about his middle. There was thick white dust upon the legs and uppers of his high polished black boots, which the grass had scoured from the toes and soles. His bright blue-grey eyes ran over Franky as the slight soldierly salute was exchanged. He said, speaking in excellent English:

"If Monsieur, the English officer, will obligingly mention his name, rank, and regiment, it might be possible to allow him to continue his promenade with Madame, the invention we are testing being the patent of his countryman, and already familiar to the Authorities at the British War Office."

Thus coerced, Franky produced his card, Margot dimpled into smiles, the polite officer saluted again, introduced himself as Raymond, Capitaine-Commandant pilot of the --th _escadrille_, wheeled and walked away. But he returned to say, this time directly addressing Margot:

"Should Madame la Vicomtesse desire to witness the test of her countryman's--apparatus, there can be no objection to her doing so. But that Madame should keep clear of the vicinity of the"--he pointed to the two oblong strips of white canvas adorning the middle of the expanse of green,--"the signal, intended for the guidance of the aviator, is of absolute necessity, Madame must understand!"

"There won't be any...?" Margot was beginning, nervously.

"_Mais non, Madame_. _Pas d'explosion_," the officer assured her, and stiffened to attention facing eastwards, and scanning the sky with eyes that blinked in the dazzling glare of early noon. For the droning whirr of a plane just then reached them, drowning the sign of the hot south breeze that rustled in the tops of the acacias and oaks, ilexes and poplars, that rose about the arena of open ground....

*CHAPTER V*

*THE BIRD OF WAR*

"The _avion_ comes from Drancy." The speaker looked back at Margot as he focussed his binoculars. "It is not one of our Army machines, but a British monoplane built by your countryman and fitted with the invention whose usefulness we are here to test." He continued: "Should the _officier-pilote_ in charge of the--apparatus--and who for the time being represents an enemy--succeed in poising"--he hesitated a bare instant--"for a stipulated number of moments over the target--those two lengths of white canvas approximating on the grass represent the target--he scores a bull's-eye."

He blinked a little, and before Franky's mental vision rose the aggregation of Government buildings near the _Carrefour des Cascades_, marked "_Magazins et depots_" on Baedeker's maps.

"He scores a bull's eye," resumed the speaker. "He has already paid one visit of the requisite duration to an address near the Porte d'Aubervilliers." Franky had a mental vision of the array of big, bloated gasometers pertaining to the Strasbourg Railway Yards. "He has made a similar call at a point indicated between the station of the Batignolles and the station of the Avenue de Clichy"--the well-preserved teeth of the officer showed under the grey moustache as he smiled, and Franky had another vision of the huge _Gare aux Marchandises_ tucked in the angle between the Railway of the Geinture and the Western Railway lines, as the speaker went on suavely "and the target succeeding this will be the last. It is situated on the Champ de Manoeuvres at Issy. The wireless-telegraph operator of my _escadrille_ informs me that two bull's eyes have already been registered--which for your countryman's invention presages well."

Franky, with British plumpness, queried:

"And the invention? Some new bomb-dropping device--planned to get rid of the way the engine always puts on 'em? If the English inventor-fellow has done that, his goods are worth buying, I should say!"

Raymond, _Capitaine-Commandant_, answered as the droning song from the sky grew louder:

"Of certainty, Monsieur, if his invention prove worth buying, my Government will undoubtedly purchase what has already been unavailingly offered to yours. It is our custom to examine and test, closely and exhaustively, new things that are offered. But what would you? We seek the best for France."

"He isn't flying his aeroplane himself, is he? Or working his own invention, whatever it may be?"

"But no, Madame! One of our* Officiers-Aviateurs* is acting as pilot, a skilled mechanic of our Service occupies the observer's place. Despite the Entente Cordiale--the happy relations prevailing between my country and England--it would hardly be _convenable_ or discreet to permit even an Englishman"--the tone of graceful, subtle irony cannot be conveyed by pen or type--"_even_ an Englishman to fly over Paris, or any other fortified city of France. But see! In the sky to the north-east--above that silvery puff of vapour--arrives now the _avion_ built and christened by your countryman."

Margot asked, narrowing her beautiful eyes as she searched out the darkish speck upon the hot blue background:

"The plane, you mean. What does he call it?"

Raymond answered without removing his eyes from his binoculars:

"Madame, he calls it 'The Bird of War.'"

The tuff-tuff of a motor-cycle sounded faintly in the distance, as the resonant vibrating noise of the aeroplane came more triumphantly out of the hot blue sky. Save for a scintillating white reflection to the north that might have been the crystal dome of the great big Palm House in the Jardin d'Acclimatation, and that unavoidable, useful ugliness, the gilded lantern of the Tour Eiffel, thrusting up into the middle distance over the delicately-rounded masses of new foliage upon the right-hand looking east, the glory and shame and magnificence and squalor of the Queen City of Cities might have lain a hundred leagues away, so ringed-in by delicate austere brown of serried tree-trunks, rising above rich clumps of blossoming lilac, syringa, yellow azalea, and pink, mauve, and snowy rhododendron, was the spacious green arena wherein Franky and Margot were destined to play their part.

Now, followed by the wide-winged shadow that the sun of high noon threw almost directly beneath her, darkening drifting cloud, and open city spaces, passing over breasting tree-tops and wide stretches of municipal greensward, the Bird of War drew nearer and more near.... And glancing up as the portentous flying shadow suddenly blotted out the sunlight, Franky realised that the two-seater monoplane was hovering, and buzzing as she hovered, like a Brobdingnagian combination of kite-hawk, dragon-fly, and bumblebee.

He pulled out a pair of vest-pocket field-glasses and scanned her as she hung there, gleaming in the sunlight, at a height of perhaps five hundred feet above the white cloths on the grass. He could make out the Union Jack on her underwings, the huge black raking capitals of her name BIRD OF WAR painted on the side of the tapering canvas-covered fuselage, the diamond-shaped tail swaying between the pendant flaps of the huge triangular elevators, clearly as though these features had been filmed upon the screen. In a curious misty circle, spinning under the fuselage, he suspected lay the secret of her kite-like poise and hover, and behind his immaculate waistcoat he was sensible of a thrill.

If the English inventor had not solved the baffling Problem of Stability, he had come uncommonly near it, by the Great Brass Hat! And the dud-heads at Whitehall had shown the door to him and his invention. "Good Christmas!--how like 'em!" reflected Franky, lowering the glasses to chuckle, and looking round for Margot.

There she was, some twenty yards distant, planted right in the middle of the avenue, lost to the wide in rapt contemplation of the hovering aeroplane.