Part 32

"The operation took place--she was jolly careful to keep it out of the papers--I doubt if even Clithy knew anything till it was well over. He was travelling in Russia to study the Russian theatres and their arrangements about scenery.... After she recovered the doctors sent her to Aix and then to St. Tropez on the Riviera.... Clithy joined her there. I sent her the telegram about ... about ... Lucy's death. I dare say you noticed the perfectly magnificent wreaths they both sent for the funeral. Clithy's came down from some place in Regent Street and had a card on it 'To my dear Aunt Lucy.' ... Only human touch about him ... awfully fond of your wife ... always said he liked her much more than his mother.... But he needn't have said it so often, though Sibyl only used to laugh. Her wreath was made here from the very best things we had got in the hot-houses ... only because Sibyl wrote that Lucy so loved to walk in these houses and fancy she was back in Africa.... However, I had a letter from her three days ago...." (Takes it out and reads: "Tell Roger not to dream of coming out here, because I am just going away. I am writing him in a few days.") "There! Now she'll soon tell you everything about herself...."

"What about _you_? Have you made any plans as yet?"

_Roger_: "Lucy's death has cut my life in two; I shall have to alter all the programme we used, to plan out together, she and I and Maud. Of course there are the children to think about.... Where are the matches? I'll light a pipe and tell you my ideas...." (A silence ... puffs ...) ... "I've not done badly out of this Happy Valley Concession. I've sold my shares in it--all but five hundred, kept _them_ just to retain an interest, don't you know, get the Company's reports from time to time--I've sold my shares at two pounds a share to the Schraeders' group. That brings me in close upon L75,000. I haven't saved much besides ... purposely lived well out there and entertained a good deal, and gave ... Lucy ... and Maud all they wanted, and had to pay for the little 'uns' schooling at home. However, there I am at this moment with about L75,000 at my bank on deposit and twelve hundred or so outstanding to my current account.... I'm going first of all to give ten thousand pounds _down_ to Maud. I consider she has _earned_ it.

"And then I must make a new will ... and I want to ask you, old chap, to be one of the executors. Will you? And p'raps Geoff the other. After all, it isn't Geoff we dislike, it's that confounded, pious doe-rabbit of a wife of his. However....

"Well then, about my plans. I suppose I ought to stay at home at Farleigh--I shall look out for a decent flat in London--and get to know my children. Somehow it's _that_ I can't take to. They have grown up so outside all my thoughts and schemes and interests. They don't care a hang about Africa. John has been making a young fool of himself at Sandhurst ... been betting and borrowing and getting into debt. I'm glad his mother didn't know.... Well, I shall square up all that, but I shall insist on his going in for the Indian Army--Staff Corps--same as I did.... A man if he's got ability couldn't have a better education.... He's a good-looking boy, John--I expect he thinks me an old fogey from the backwoods.... India's the school for him. And as to Ambrose, he must go to Cambridge, when he leaves Harrow, and I shall try and get him a nomination for the Consular Service.... That's the other good school for a British citizen. You'll think me jolly conceited, just because those are the two careers _I've_ followed. But..." (smokes and puffs).

"Well then, there are the two girls. Fat Maud--she was furious because I revived the old name--says long ago 'Aunt Sibyl' agreed it should be compromised by her being called Fatima.... Fatima, I gather, is eighteen, and young Sibyl is fourteen.... For the present Maud will look after them, and I shall have 'em up to London every now and then for a few weeks. In course of time I suppose they'll want to be presented. Dare say old Sibyl will do that, or if she's away, Lady Dewburn. By the bye, _she_ wrote me an awfully sweet letter about Lucy..." (ponders and smokes).

"In due time the girls'll marry, and if they pick up the right kind of husband I shall give 'em each a portion of my ill-gotten wealth. There! That's what I've planned out, and I dare say it 'ud ha' been quite different if my darling Luce had lived. I should have been reconciled then to settling down at home. As it is--I shall travel a bit--Go to Germany and try to find out what the Germans are up to.... Go back to Africa p'raps ... _I_ don't know...."

A few days after this conversation, Roger received a letter from Sibyl:

Villa les Pins, Grimaud, pres St. Tropez, Var, June 12, 1909.

DEAR ROGER,--

Maurice will have given you all the news there is about me, except what I am going to add in this letter.

I am not going to attempt any sympathy at present over your loss. Maud's telegram from Naples was forwarded on to me here and it gave me a horrid turn. I often used to tease Lucy: I am cat-scratchy to every one, I fear. Why? _I_ don't know: something to do with my internal organs, I dare say. But I became sincerely fond of her, after being perfectly horrid to her when we first met. She seemed to grow on one. I should have liked her always to stay at Englefield.

Heigh ho! I am very much inclined to whimper about myself. I have, been through a _ghastly_ time.... Some day, if I live, I will tell you. Meantime, though I am _aching_ to see you I am going to postpone that happiness, and instead am going round the world with Vicky Masham.

The doctors seem to think--I dare say it is only because they have nothing else to suggest--that if I went on a long sea voyage for about a year--I mean, kept constantly travelling on the sea--I should get quite strong again. Perhaps I shall. I want to give myself every chance--it seems _so stupid_ to die before you're seventy. Also it occurred to me the other day that for a woman to have raved for twenty years about the British Empire and yet never to have seen any part of it outside Great Britain, except Cape Town and Stellenbosch, and once when we went to Jersey from Dinant--was rather silly. So Vicky and I are starting from Marseilles next Sunday in a P. and O., bound for Ceylon, and after that Japan. Not that Japan is British--I believe--but of course we aren't going to be pedantic. Then I suppose we shall "do" Australia and New Zealand--only I'm afraid New Zealand is rather muttony, isn't it? Excessively worthy and all that, but lives chiefly on mutton and stewed tea. However, there are geysers and pink terraces, if you look for them. Then there will be a lovely cruise across the Pacific, and beach-combers and impossibly large oysters that would dine a family of six, and brown people with no morals and beautiful sinuous forms, and finally San Francisco and California. After that--however, sufficient for the day is the evil thereof. Vicky or I will bombard you with picture post-cards recording our progress, and when--and when I'm _quite_ well and look less like a doomed woman--I will let you know, and, dearest Roger, we will pass the rest of our lives together, or at least not far away from one another. Your children shall be the children of my old age....

Clithy is here, but as soon as I leave for Marseilles he is off again to Russia. He has promised me to look you up when he returns. You will find him now definitely fixed as to appearance. People of his stamp are like that. Between nineteen and twenty-one, they quite quickly assume the figure, face, style by which they are ever after going to be known. He will remind you most of Lord R----, though I assure you there is no innuendo in this. I dare say the L----'s are distant cousins of the Mallards. But Clithy is essentially the aristocratic young peer who may be a fount of wisdom or a hollow fraud with nothing inside an irreproachable exterior. He is a mystery to me. And I am of little interest to him. The only woman I ever heard him mention with anything like a kind look in his eyes was Lucy. The Anne of Denmark nose is still there, undulating and with a bump in the middle; but the rest of the face has grown up more and his hair is a nice dark chestnut brown.--Well, you will see him later, so why waste time in describing him?

As to Vicky Masham.... Of course you want to know why, etc.

Well: Vicky, at the death of her patron saint, Victoria the Good, was left with little more than her pension of L500 a year. She ought to have had ten thousand pounds of her own, but--I dare say you saw the scandal in the papers? She and her sisters gave up much of their means to save their shockingly bad brother from going to prison over some swindle that ... Again why waste words? Maurice could tell you all about it. Well, when I came to the South of France after Aix, last December, I was _dreadfully_ hipped, fighting a certain Terror--a much _worse_ terror than the one you used to write to me about who lived in a Red Crater (rather a distinguished address: "The Red Crater, Iraku"), and who went to Hell by the direct route. I came to Monte Carlo amongst other places and thought if I kept on a veil and wore blue glasses no one would recognize me. In the Rooms I saw Victoria Masham, looking very melancholy--and oh, so old--and quite alone. My heart was touched, I spoke to her and we went to sit on the terrace. I told her my troubles and she told me hers. Result: I struck a bargain. She is to live with me till we have our first quarrel; I am to board her, lodge her, wash her, pay all possible expenses, and give her a little pocket money, over and above. And d'you know, I think it's going to be quite a success! We haven't had a quarrel yet! I've had her teeth beautifully done by an American dentist at Cannes, so my nickname only applies a little--he was too clever not to give the new set a soupcon of horsiness. And I've made her buy a quite wonderful "transformation"--chez Nicole--reddish-brown, streaked with grey.--You'd never guess. She has plumped out a good deal, for although I've a wretched appetite myself I keep a good table, and upon my word when we get to the Colonies I shouldn't wonder if she had shoals of proposals. She never talks about anything but Queen Victoria, but I find that--somehow--awfully soothing--takes me back to the happy old time when I was a care-free girl, proud of my secret engagement to you.

* * * * *

_Dear_ Roger. I have lost _all_ my good looks. That's why I don't want you to see me till I recover them--a little. Meantime, dearest of friends and cousins, if you believe in _Anything_ with a power to save--alas! _I_ don't--pray to it to save me from this terror that hangs over me--especially in the silent watches of the night--and bring me back safe from my world-tour, with at least another ten years of life before me.

Whilst I am away, remember Engledene is entirely at your children's disposal. I have written to the head gardener to see that fresh flowers are sent every now and again to Lucy's grave. You will tell him when? Lucy was a _real good sort_ and I think she came to understand me and forgive....

Ever yours, SIBYL.

Roger spent the remainder of 1909 as he had planned: looking after his boys and girls to some extent, trying to get interested in his children. The girls bored him with their chatter of surface things: school quarrels and rivalries, school friendships, school mistresses; their individual tastes in chocolate creams and caramels; their school sports; the actors whom they adored--at a distance--and whose photographs they collected; their disdain for those silly asses the Suffragettes--_they_ themselves would _never_ want a vote! The two boys were not much less shallow with their Sandhurst and school-boy slang--"top-hole, sir," "ripping," "ruddy," "rotters," "we rotted 'em a bit"--their school-boy games of such vast importance; their dislike of anything sincere, original, warm-hearted; their rash criticisms of great writers, frantic admiration for great sportsmen, religious reverence for cut and colour, style and form; enthusiasm in general for things that did not matter and contempt for things that did.

Was he like that at their age? Had Sibyl the elder at sixteen been such a goose as Sibyl the younger? Was it the hollow falsity of a classical education, the dreary sham of School Christianity which had made his boys so cynical, so coarse in their tastes? His children were good to look at, handsome, healthy, physically well-bred. But weren't they--weren't their contemporaries a bit heartless? These in particular had forgotten their mother completely. Yet surely they might have remembered Lucy's unceasing tenderness and the many sacrifices of health and convenience she had made for them?

In the press of that day and in the books and plays most in vogue you were supposed to make everything give way to the pleasures, needs, caprices, expectations of the young, of the coming generation. But why had no author the courage to point out the lack of interest which youth under twenty-one possessed for most persons of matured mind? Girls of eighteen wrote novels entirely without experience and direct observation of life, merely based on their wishy-washy recollections of books written by "grown-ups"; boys of eighteen published sardonic poems and green-cheese essays for which they ought to have been birched, not boomed. How infinitely preferable to Roger, when he put his secret thoughts into words, was the society of middle-aged friends and relations of his own period in life, who really had brain convolutions moulded by sad and joyous, sharp and unusual experience.

Aunt Maud said there was something evidently very wrong with his liver, and his sons and daughters in an interchange of eye-glances gave a tacit assent. They had felt (though they had never dared to say so in his hearing) a tiny bit ashamed of their ineffective mother. Wasn't it rather _infra dig._ to have been a school-teacher and a missionary? But of their father they all stood in awe, because he was considered in his time a handsome man, was now of distinguished appearance, and was respected in the best circles as an explorer, a big-game shot, a naturalist, and a man who had made some part of Africa pay. But if he stooped to their level and attempted to justify this eminence by talking technically on African subjects or on home problems they soon showed they thought him a bore.

Aunt Sibyl they spoke of warmly, and wailed over the illness which kept her absent from their circle. She was their ideal of a modern great lady. Her cynical speeches appealed to their own lack of convictions; there was nothing "soppy" about Aunt Sibyl.

So Roger escaped whenever he could from his home circle and travelled in Germany, France, Holland, Italy, in order to study the game of foreign politics, find out why in most people's light-hearted opinion a great war was "inevitable" as a solution of conflicting ambitions, and whether it might not be possible to avert it completely if only Britain, Germany, the United States and France could form a League for the maintenance of peace.

The Schraeders made much of him in Germany. Rather timidly they stood up against Potsdam, tried to create an opinion in the South German States--their Alsatian origin carried them in that direction--favourable to a Naval and Colonial understanding with Britain. At their instigation Roger gave a series of addresses in western and southern Germany in 1910 which were deemed a great success, though they were rather frowned on in Berlin. He promised to renew his visit and his lectures in the autumn of 1911.

Meanwhile, Sibyl had returned to London in the early autumn of 1910. It was of course the dead season, but it gradually dawned on Society that she intended to entertain no more. She was probably going to write a book about the British Empire; she had turned quite serious, others said, and was going in for religion. She had evidently lost her health and--no doubt--her appearance.

Roger had hastened to greet her in the much shut-up house in Carlton House Terrace. Here she sat, generally with her back to the light. He was prepared to find her greatly altered. What struck him most was the pathetic thinness of face and hands, and the shapelessness of the figure. The new fashions in dress--straight up and down, no waist, one of the greatest revolutions of our age--helped her here, but at the expense of womanly charm. For Roger had the old-fashioned man-mind which has for some twenty thousand years--did it not begin in Aurignacian times?--admired the incurve below the well-furnished female bust and the outcurve from waist to hip.

"I'm glad you came so promptly," said Sibyl, "because I'm turning out of this gloomy mansion and surrendering it to Clithy. I simply can't afford to keep it up _and_ Engledene too, and although he says of course he will pay for everything and I can have my own suite of rooms, I somehow fancy a cosy little flat which I could share with Maud, or Vicky Masham when she comes back from the States.... Yes, I left her at Washington, going to stay at the White House. I came back alone from there, but I had sulky Sophie to look after me. One thing that makes me think, Roger, that I am _really_ ill, really doomed, is that Sophie no longer gives me notice whenever any whim of mine displeases her. I am sure she is saying to herself now, 'The poor old gal won't be with us much longer: better hang on with her and then she may leave me something.' But about Vicky, for it really is a good story.... Only first I'm going to--or you might--ring for tea. Of course you'll stay? You couldn't in decency refuse.--Do you know, we haven't set eyes on one another for ... for ... _three years_? We are both swallowing pungent things we might say about one another's appearance, and both resolving to bite our tongues off rather than say them." ... (To servant: "Tea please; and ask Miss Mills to make the sandwiches, _my_ sandwiches, I mean.") ... "I have to take these frame-foods in the form of sandwiches, and Sophie has learnt the art of making them so seductive that I get them down without any difficulty....

"About Vicky.--Do draw up your chair; you needn't be so frigid with a moribund friend. Directly it became known in California that Vicky had been a maid of honour to the late Queen Victoria, my dear, the Americans nearly killed us with kindness! Our roles were reversed. _She_ was the lady of distinction and _I_ was her travelling companion. You know the Americans, especially in the west and east, have a _culte_ for Queen Victoria, and Vicky's stories of her home life held them spell-bound. She felt in her position it wouldn't be right to _lecture publicly_ on her late mistress, but the difficulty was got over.--D'you still drink tea without sugar? I'm told I _ought_ to take it--got over by drawing-room meetings, tickets subscribed for, and no charge at the door, a sumptuous tea--supposed to be modelled on the kind of tea the Queen took at Osborne--served in the middle of Vicky's talk. She refused to take any direct payment, so they sent her _thumping_ cheques for her travelling expenses. And now she's going to put her talks on Queen Victoria as Mother, Wife and Queen into a book.--One way and another, she'll make five or six thousand pounds out of the whole business. And I'm _jolly_ glad. It'll be some provision for her real old age, after I'm gone--for I shan't have much to leave, and most of that I must give to my sisters in the Colonies and to your Sibyl, and some of my servants....

"Now: you've got _endless_ things to tell _me_. Indeed I really can't see why we should be separated, now, except when we are put to bed. You must be a mental wreck, and I am a physical one.... I got frightfully tired in the States--it spoilt much of the good I derived from the long steamer voyages.... We are simply two imprisoned souls in very battered cages. All the gilding is off mine."

Roger saw as much of Lady Silchester as he could during the last months of 1910. He and Maud assisted her to find just the right sort of flat, where she would have no household worries, where, in fact, she need only keep Sophie to look after her. They all spent a reasonably merry Christmas at Engledene, where Lord Silchester joined them, and where Fatima--Maud junior--expressed and perhaps felt such an intense interest in his Keltic operas and reforms in stage scenery that a glint of the match-maker's eagerness came into Sibyl's tired eyes; she pressed Roger's hand and murmured, "_Wouldn't_ it be _too_ delightful...?"

During the first half of 1911 the Intelligence Division of the War Office discovered Major Brentham as a really great authority on African geography and African campaigns, and he worked there over maps, and gave them in addition much other information. As some return he was gazetted Colonel, and again there was talk of utilizing such an administrative capacity in our own dominions.

In June, 1911, Sibyl's physician and surgeon were not altogether satisfied as to her progress towards recovery, and suggested she might derive great benefit from the waters of Villette, a thermal station in the east of France near the Vosges. So she said to Roger: "_You look_ quite as ill as I _feel_. It's malaria. You never quite got rid of that blackwater fever. Come to Villette later on. Maud and the girls and Clithy could join us too. I'll have a month first of all, alone except for Vicky. I'll give the closest attention to the cure, and then perhaps when you arrive I may be able to sit up and take notice and even do a little motoring...."

Accordingly the scene of this dwindling story changes in Villette-es-Vosges, a _Ville d'eaux_ in eastern France, in the month of August and September, 1911. Germany has spoilt the summer for all statesmen, soldiers and sailors by challenging the French protectorate of Morocco at Agadir. It is supposed by the middle of August, after Mr. Lloyd George's speech in the City, and after a succession of "kraches" in German banking firms, that the Kaiser's Government is hesitating to go the full length of War: but Germany is growling horribly because she is realizing that her financial arrangements for a war of great dimensions are imperfect, and that she is unprepared with aircraft to cope with the French aeroplanes.

So she is consenting to _pourparlers_ for the purpose of ascertaining the terms on which she may be bought off, persuaded to leave Agadir, and withdraw a portion of the army she is crowding into Alsace-Lorraine.