Part 28

"Lynette is not, for the present, to be told. I asked that. It seems so cruel to be happy when she is so broken-hearted."

"Umps! Then--Irma and your gay and giddy mater? How do they take it?"

"They haven't been asked to take it any way."

"Oh well! Love is good while it lasts," Kittums said from the summit of a pedestal of experience, "but if I could change back to Margot St. John again----"

"You wouldn't!"

"Wouldn't I, that's all! This horror that November brings--that's coming every day closer! ... Pat--I haven't told Franky yet, that's to be got over! But I've definitely settled to go to that Institute in Berlin where women can have babies without knowing anything about it--under--Bother! I never can remember the name of that drug!"

Patrine sat up. Her face was curiously expressionless. She said, crushing out the last spark of her cigarette-end against the face of a Chinaman on the lacquer ash-tray that occupied a little stand beside the sofa with the silver Sobranie box:

"You told me something--you showed me the pink book with the pretty title, 'WEEP NO MORE MOTHERS'--wasn't that the name? You've made up your mind? Does it cost the earth?"

"Two hundred for patients of the superior class--_wohlgeboren_ clients. Half paid in advance! Stiff!--but to make sure of not suffering I'd plank a thou'! It's a nightmare, and a Day-mare, that haunts me all the clock round. That's why I'd change--and be Margot St. John again! That's why I can't whoop with joy when my friends tell me they're going to be spliced!"

Patrine got up.

"Oh!--well! Perhaps I shall escape. After all--it's a lottery!"

"Not for big, splendid women like you. You were made to be a mother, Pat!"

"_Don't!_"

She kissed Margot hastily and went to the door.

"Stop!" Margot scrambled off the sofa. "You've forgotten the most important thing of all. Hasn't 'Alan' got a surname by any chance?"

Patrine looked back over her shoulder with something of the old smile.

"Rather! What do you think of Sherbrand?"

"What do I think of Sherbrand? How odd! It's Franky's family name!"

"Queer coincidence. But _my_ Sherbrand hasn't any relatives in the Peerage!--or if he has, he hasn't told me! I'll butt you wise when I know him well enough to ask him about them. You see, the whole thing has been beautifully sudden!"

"Bring him to lunch at the Club to-morrow. You're not in mourning, and if you were it wouldn't matter. It's simply a family affair, if he's really Franky's cousin. So, say yes."

"Very well, if he'll come!"

*CHAPTER XLIX*

*THE WAR CLOUD BREAKS*

Patrine kissed her friend again, and went, leaving Kittums in a whirl of astonishment. To Franky, presently returning from the conjectural region known as Headquarters she announced:

"Here's something like news! Pat Saxham--the girl with the Nile sunrise hair that you don't like!--is going to marry a Flying Man. And his name is--the same as yours!"

"By the Great Snipe! you don't say so!"

Franky, slim and dapper in the scarlet Guards' tunic and crimson sash, divested himself of his sword, dropped his immaculate buckskin gloves into his forage-cap, and sighed with undisguised relief as the attentive Jobling, who had been hovering in the background, disappeared with these articles. Then he proceeded carefully to choose a cigarette from the silver box of Sobranies, lighted it up, bundled Fits out of her master's corner of the sofa, and dropped into it with a sigh of relief.

"Sherbrand.... Must be the aviator-fellow we met in Paris. The chap whose hoverer was bein' tested by the swells of the French S. Ae! Saved your life and snubbed me for askin' him to dine with us! Well, that's what I call a cannon off the cush for the Saxham girl!" His dislike of her betrayed itself in his tone. "Must be the same man! supposin' him short of a father! Hilton of Ours showed me an advertisement in the B.M.D. column of _The Banner_ this afternoon briefly announcin' my Uncle Sherbrand's death. Never read _The Banner_--that's how I missed it. Can't say I feel much like puttin' crape on my sleeve in any quantity," went on Franky. "My Uncle Noel has been the Family Skeleton, poor old chap! since that affair in 1900. No doubt his son's cut up--wouldn't be decent of him not to! But at any rate it brings him nearer these--" Franky stuck out a beautifully-cut pair of red-striped auxiliaries ending in dazzling patent-leather Number Eights, and craning over Fits, who had jumped upon his knees, regarded them critically, ending after a pause--"By one life out of the three that stand between. Don't be so gushin', old girl!" The rebuke was for Fits, who had taken advantage of her master's attitude to lick him on the chin.

Margot crinkled her slender eyebrows and moved restlessly among her big bright, muslin-covered cushions as she asked:

"Is this Volapuk or Esperanto? For mercy's sake don't be obscure! Why is this Flying Sherbrand nearer your shoes by one life out of three? What has he got to do with your shoes at all?"

"Don't you switch on?" He lifted his sleek brown head and turned his neck in the setting of the gold-encrusted collar badged with the Scottish Thistle, and stared at Margot with the brown eyes that had seemed so beautiful under the awnings of the Nile _dahabeyah_, and were only stupid now.

"Have you forgotten? Don't you twig, best child? Suppose--for the joke of it--there's War, and I get wiped out tryin' to keep up the fightin' traditions of my family and get a bit of gun-metal to hang on a ribbon here." He glanced down at the left breast of the red coat, guiltless of anything in the decoration line. "Then--unless the child"--his tone grew gentle--"our kiddy that's coming, happens to be a boy--my Cousin Sherbrand steps into my billet. He's the next heir to the Norwater Viscounty. Look in Burke or Whittaker if you don't believe me! Get down, old lady, you're coverin' me with white hairs!" He bundled Fits off his knees, got up and rang. "A man ought to be here from Armer's," he told the servant who responded. "Armer and Co., Pall Mall, Military Tailors. Send him up to my room and tell Jobling to help him with all those cases and things. No! don't send Jobling!--send Dowd!"

The said Dowd being Franky's soldier servant, between whom and the civilian Jobling reigned a profound mutual contempt.

"What is Dowd going to do?"

"Oh! only goin' to help overhaul my Service kit and so on," Franky responded lightly. "What with gettin' leave and bein' married I've hardly sported kharks since last Autumn Slogs. Wouldn't do to find myself too potty to get into the regulation tea-leaves in case my country called."

"What rot! ..."

But Franky had swung out of the room and clattered upstairs with Fits close upon his heels. Fits, who, ordinarily unwilling to be out of sight and sound of her master, now adhered to him like a leech, or his shadow; whining and fidgeting in his absence, as though her feminine mind were beset by haunting apprehensions of some sudden parting, or impending loss.... Long afterwards Margot wondered: "If I had loved him as Fits loves him--should I not also have felt that foreshadowing dread?"

But she was conscious only of her own physical discomfort and the increasing weariness that movement brought her. Sharp discontent peaked and pinched the tiny features. She caught a reflection of them in a screen-mirror and shuddered. With every day that dawned now, their wild-rose prettiness faded. By-and-by--

"If I were as good to look at as I used to be in June--or even a month ago!" she wondered--"would _he_ leave me as he is leaving me to-night--to go down to the House? Don't I know that the House means the Club, or the music-hall, or a card-party! Why do men get the best of everything and never have to pay the bill?"

She dined in a tea-gown, and when Franky, still in that strange mood of suppressed excitement, attired to four pins in the magpie evening garb of civilized life, had kissed her and said: "So-long, Kittums, little woman! I'm going down to the Big Talk Shop for a bit. Expect me back on the doormat when the Mouthpieces of the Nation have done swoppin' hot air!" she tucked up her feet on the big sofa in her charming drawing-room and read "WEEP NO MORE, MOTHERS," until the pink pamphlet with the gilt sunrise stamped upon it grew heavy in the tiny hand. Then she rang for Pauline and betook herself to bed.

The bedroom was blue-green as a starling's egg, its painted walls adorned with delicate lines of black and silver. Perhaps you can see Kittums, under her Brittany lace coverlet amongst the big frilled pillows in one of the narrow black oak bedsteads standing side by side on a carpet of deep rose. A silver night-lamp burned under a dome of sapphire glass on her night-table, and an electric clock noiselessly marked the hours. Lying thus, wrapped about with all the swaddlings of Civilisation, this dainty daughter of the Twentieth Century strove in blind revolt against Nature, the huge relentless Force that was slowly grinding her down. The ant that gets fed into the mill-hopper with the grain might resent the millstone after the same fashion. Ridiculous, but infinitely pathetic, the tragedy of an infinitesimal thing.

What did Franky comprehend of her terrors, her forebodings? Even Saxham's counsels were a man's counsels, his advice a man's advice. "_Face your ordeal! do not flee it, lest you encounter something even more terrible!_" Not more terrible for oneself, mind you! but for that unknown, conjectural being, referred to by Franky with such foolish tenderness.

The child always! Never Margot! She set her little teeth, staring out into the blue-green dusk from among her pillows. What if it were to be always so? "My boy," "My son," for ever, instead of "My wife."

It was a breathless night. A hush of suspense brooded over the huge, hot city, such as prevails before the breaking of a storm. Sentences from the Secretary's letter came back to her as she tossed under the cool light coverings:

"_Wiser not to delay, lest travelling should become difficult. It will be advisable indeed for the gracious lady to start as soon as may be. English bank-notes are negotiable here to some extent. A sum in gold is most convenient to bring._"

Why hang back? Why hesitate because one expected opposition from Franky? Why not slip off on the quiet without a hint to him? What a perfectly tophole idea! One could pack secretly, get funds from one's Bank, and skip with Pauline via Ostend to-morrow! Berlin was a dull place, but anyhow one had got to be dull for some months yet. The thing could be arranged while Franky was absent on duty at the Tower, or on one of his mysterious errands to Headquarters. One could cable to him afterwards from the _Fraueenklinik_ at Berlin.

An electrical thrill of energy and purpose volted through the humming-bird brain under the silken brown waves. Margot tossed back her coverings and sat up suddenly in bed. Her great eyes gleamed like a lemur's in the light of the night-globe. She would steal that march on Franky, she told herself, to-morrow, or at the latest, the day after. Wouldn't it be A1?

The small face dimpled into mischievous smiles. She caught a glimpse of it in a mirror on the opposite wall and kissed her little hand to Margot with saucy gaiety. If Franky, down at Westminster, could only know what Kittums was planning! She had a vision of the Houses of Parliament under the white-hot August moonlight, outlined in bluish-green and dazzling silver against a background of glittering black. Like a Limoges enamel, she told herself. The long lines of electric arc-lights stretching over the bridge, up Whitehall and down Victoria Street--all along the Thames Embankment--strings of diamonds--crowds and crowds of people ... talking bosh about War when there wouldn't----She was asleep.

Asleep, while packed thousands waited under the blue glare of the arc-lights for the rising of the Curtain on the World Tragedy, of which four yearlong Acts have been played out. For the tag of which Humanity is waiting with held breath, too weary even to cry out: "_How long, O Lord?--how long?_"

Prone to assume strange, angular attitudes when speaking, the Foreign Secretary hung over and clutched at the dispatch-box before him, as though it literally contained that most malignant of all the swarm of Evils that issued from the Box of Pandora, as he told his hearers of the rejection of the German bribe and warned them of the imminence of a Declaration of War. Then, amidst increasing, deepening excitement, the Prime Minister read the appeal of the King of the Belgians, and told of Great Britain's ultimatum to Germany....

No wonder those close-packed crowds of sturdy Britons waited under the blue glare of the arc-lamps to hear Big Ben bell the midnight hour. As the great voice boomed Twelve from the illuminated square of the dial amidst the striking of the countless clocks of London, a tremendous roar of cheers acclaimed the pipping of the egg of Fate and Destiny, echoed by other crowds in distant thoroughfares, spreading in waves to the unseen horizon, whose East was pregnant with the Kaiser's Day.

That Fourth of August; Eve of the Feast of British Oswald, King, soldier and Saint, whose Address to his Northumbrian warriors before the battle of Denisburn, fought against Pagan Cadwalla in 633, the Catholic Church enshrines in Her Chronicles:

"_Let us all kneel and jointly beseech the true and living GOD ALMIGHTY in His Mercy to defend us from the doughty and fierce enemy. For He knoweth that we have undertaken a just War...._"

"Whereupon," says the Venerable Bede, "all did as the King commanded. And advancing towards the enemy with the first dawn of day, they won the victory their Faith deserved."

And before midnight of this pregnant Fourth of August, from the great Wireless Station of Eilvise in Hanover, Germany flung round the world this vital message to all her mercantile Marine:

"War declared on England! Make as quickly as you can for a neutral port!"

On the outbreak of War the British Navy cut the All German cables. One by one the German Colonial Wireless Stations were dismantled. When the great station at Kamina in Togoland fell, the only remaining link in the system was between the Fatherland and the United States.

Dawn outlining the silken blinds, vied with the blue glimmer of the night-lamp as Margot wakened, to hear, in the hush that precedes the Brocken-hunt of Sloane Street motor-traffic, Franky's low, urgent appeal:

"_Kittums_! Kittums, best child!"

"What on earth did you wake me for?" said a sleepy and distinctly cross voice.

"Couldn't help it! I simply had to tell you!" Franky began.

The little hand touched the electric clock-button and on the ceiling wavered a gigantic dial of yellow brightness.

"_Had_ to! At three o'clock in the morning! When I was having such a tophole dream! Thought I was back at the Club in my three dear rooms with the Adams doors and chimney-pieces--and Pauline came in with a huge basket of white flowers--and I asked: '_Who are they for?_' And she said: 'For Mademoiselle!' And I was Margot St. John--and had never been married!" There was infinite wistfulness in the little voice.

"White flowers mean death, don't they, when you dream of 'em? And I'm sorry your dip in the Bran Tub of Matrimony has turned out such a bad investment. What I came to tell you should revive your hopes of making a better one, my child!"

That jarring note of mingled resentment and irony, how new and strange it sounded to Margot! Until this moment Franky's voice had never been anything but gentle. It was gentle now as he said, at his dressing-room door:

"Finish your sleep. I was rather a brute to wake you!" He was going without a backward glance.

"Come back! Come off it! Don't be dignified!" Margot called after the retreating figure. "I'm quite awake now, so you'd better tell. What's on?"

He came back to the bedside, looking tall and shadowy in the blue dimness. Margot put up a little hand and patted his cheek. There were wet drops upon the smooth, warm skin.... Perhaps he had walked home, and it had been raining. Or--

"_Franky_! You're not----"

He captured the little hand and took it in both his own, and squeezed it. He said in a cheerful but rather choky voice:

"Of course not! And--the news could have waited. Only--since midnight England and Germany have been at War. The Big Scrap is three hours old. First battalion of Ours is under orders for the Front--I've exchanged out of the Second with Ackroyd--too sick a man for fightin' just now, luckily for me. You know Ackroyd. Used to flirt with him frightfully--to give me beans when I'd vexed you when we were first engaged. When do we go, did you ask? Liable to be off at any old minute. By-bye, little woman. Too late to go to bed--heaps of things to attend to. God bless you! See you at brekker--or lunch, if I've luck."

*CHAPTER L*

*THE EVE OF ARMAGEDDON*

Kittums, upon that fateful morning, coming down to breakfast and finding no Franky, was annoyed. One might just as well have had breakfast in bed. She didn't want any, but Cook would be hurt if the chowder and eggs, and croquettes of chicken weren't eaten. Therefore Margot ate--to avoid wounding the cook. The daily papers she left untouched, knowing that War would leap out from the huge capitals heading the columns and strike her in the eyes.

She had herself dressed and 'phoned for the car. The house did not seem a place to stay in, somehow. Dowd was busy in his master's room, ordering Jobling about in loud authoritative tones and being waited upon by the maids. Even Pauline, ordinarily scornful, referred to him as "Monsieur Dowd" instead of "_zat man Dow!_"

Once in Sloane Street, the War rushed at you. Groups of men, young, old or middle-aged, stood talking at every street-corner, newspapers rustled in every hand. You couldn't escape the papers. Huge flaring headlines shrieked from the broad-sheets in the gutters and on the railings: "WAR DECLARED! ULTIMATUM EXPIRED. BRITISH FLEET READY FOR BATTLE. INVASION OF BELGIUM BY GERMAN ARMY CORPS!" The drapery salesman who was to win the Victoria Cross, called from the top of a Knightsbridge motor-bus to the grocer's assistant who was to receive the Medaille Militaire at the doughty hands of Joffre.... The budding airman who was to bring down a Zeppelin single-handed chuffed past on a motor-cycle--the girls who were to make shells for British guns, or pack made ones with T.N.T. and kindred explosives, tripped along in their transparent hobble-skirts, to meet Alf and Ted at the Tube. And neither Alf, who subsequently took five Huns prisoner by the single hand, shepherding them back to the British lines with dunts of the gun-butt and sarcasms more pointed, nor Ted, who threw himself down over the exploding bomb, dying that his comrades in the trench might live, dreamed what kind of chick would pip Fate's egg for him or her presently. Yet the dullest face wore a new expression, in the tamest eyes burned the light of battle! Unquenched it burns in them still, after four dreadful years of War.

The Club, already deserted by August holiday-makers, would be utterly abandoned to chimney-sweeps, charwomen and window-cleaners, and yet Margot told the chauffeur to drive to the Club.

Turning out of Piccadilly she discovered Short Street to be blocked by taxi-cabs. An endless procession of telegraph-boys plunged in and out between the thudding swing-doors of the vestibule. The vestibule was congested with battered, dusty ladies, ladies' maids even dustier and more battered, and travelling bags battered and dusty to the _nth_ degree.

Some of the bags were bursting, not a few of the maids were hysterical. All the returned travellers were telling their adventures at once. The air was thick with exclamations, explanations, cries and ejaculations. Unfed, unslept, baggageless and penniless in many instances, the members of the Ladies' Social--seeking health, or novelty, in half the pleasure-resorts upon the map of Europe--had come hurtling back to Short Street like leaves driven before the furious blast of War.

"Has anything happened?"

Lady Norwater addressed this query to the Club hall-porter, a bald person of habitually slow movements and singularly bland address. The man gnashed his teeth at her, uttering a sound between a groan and a snarl--made as though to tear non-existent hair,--leaped with astonishing nimbleness over a pile of luggage, and vanished. Margot would have made a note of his conduct in the Complaints register, but that the hall-table was obliterated by heaps of rugs, dust-cloaks and waterproofs. Wondering, she made her way into the big General Room on the ground-floor.

Here travel-creased, dust-smeared members sat in voluble rows on the comfortable sofas, or reclined speechless in the capacious armchairs. Medical men, hastily summoned by 'phone, moved noiselessly from patient to patient. Husbands and male friends listened not unmoved, to piteous recitals of adverse experiences undergone on enemy ground.

Kittums, snatched into the whirl, moved from friend to friend, gathering experiences. Mrs. Charterhouse, with her Pekinese pug and her maid, had just arrived at Homburg to undergo treatment for a twenty-two-inch waist when the War Cloud gathered monstrous on the horizon. Had not her Swiss doctor written a warning instead of a prescription the white and golden Cynthia, Mademoiselle Mariette and Chin-Chin, would at this moment have been languishing on rye bread and bean coffee in a Teutonic jail.

"As it is, we've spent a whole week, and every sou we had on us making the journey!" said Cynthia, in her plaintive tones. "They held us up at Frankfurt, Basel, and Geneva! What inquisitions, what scowling suspicious looks! To be hunted and suspect makes you wicked, I've found out! When we got to Paris at four yesterday morning and took a rickety _fiacre_ to the Palais--all the taxis have vanished!--I could have _prayed_ for a cup of tea and a roll! But at the Palais all was confusion. The hotel was shutting up--every male servant called to the Reserve. We got to the 'Spitz'--the same experience there! Exhausted, I sat on something in the vestibule--it moved, groaned, and I found it to be the wreck of Sir Thomas Brayham. He and Lady Wathe, his man and her maid, who have been all through July at Franzenbad in the Egerland,--reaching Paris after awful adventures, had all four been hurled out in the same way. One of those jiggety motor-omnibuses took all of us to the Couronne. They were full to the roofs and cellars, but they wedged us in, somehow! Then, for two days Sir Thomas tore round Paris trying to get _laissez-passers_." She turned her lovely eyes upon a large, stertorously-breathing but otherwise inert object reclining with closed eyes and folded hands in the biggest of the Club armchairs. "Didn't you, Sir Thomas?"

"Beparr?"

Brayham, waking with a bewildered stare, regarded the charming Cynthia uncomprehendingly until the Goblin, sitting opposite, centre of a knot of bosom friends, repeated the query:

"Didn't you run about Paris for passes for two days?"

"No!" bounced out Brayham, now aroused, and purpling under the coal-dust that begrimed his large, judicial visage. He added, with a vestige of his King's Bench manner, as the Goblin stared at him in concern for his mental state: "I retain the use of my reason, dear friend! But I WILL NOT consent that the varied tortures of the abominable ordeal I have undergone could possibly be packed within the nutshell limits of forty-eight hours! Mph!"