That Which Hath Wings 5That Which Hath Wings (part 5)
18
Literature · Romance
That Which Hath Wings 5
That Which Hath Wings (part 5)
DehanEnglish
The relentless surgeon's hand had torn away the painted curtain. Margot contemplated the grim truth in silence for a moment. Then she found words:
"But nothing ever does go wrong. The pink pamphlet says so. My American friend's sister-in-law says so.... Thousands of women have had children under scopolo--what's its name? And none of them felt pain--not the slightest. And in every case--in every case--there was the baby when they woke up!"
The sweet bird-voice quivered. She had entered the room so full of hope and enthusiasm, and this man with the piercing eyes and the brusque, direct manner was putting things before her in a way that dashed and damped. Hear him now:
"Yes, there is generally a baby--when it is necessary there should be one. Though the patients who are treated in the free wards of German and Austrian Kliniks may not always be scrupulous upon this point. Still, if the treatment can be carried out without undue peril for the mother--and I do not allow this for a single moment--have you not considered the risk for the child?"
Margot had pulled off one long glove. Now she murmured, setting the tip of a little bare, jewelled finger near the corner of a distracting little mouth:
"You consider that it's handicapping the start for--the kiddie?"
The avalanche fell; shocking and freezing and stunning her.
"Ask yourself, Lady Norwater, and do not forget to ask your husband: Will a healthy or a degenerate type of man or woman be eventually reared from an infant in whom the springs of Life have been deliberately poisoned with henbane and morphia--before its entrance into the world?"
She gasped:
"Then it's all U.P.?" She was slangy even in her tragic misery. She sought in her gold vanity-bag and produced the envelope that held the cheque, but Saxham waved it away.
"Pray put that back.... Neither from rich nor poor do I accept unearned money. You have not really consulted me. You have asked my opinion upon a course of treatment. And I have given it, for what it is worth. You will go home, and tell your husband that I have talked tosh, and consult another physician."
"No, I won't!" She said it bravely. "I want you to prescribe!"
"If I prescribe," Saxham told her, "you shall certainly fee me. But you do not need treatment." His eyes smiled though his mouth did not relax its grimness, as he added: "You strike me as being in excellent health."
She owned to feeling "top-hole," first-class, and simply awfully beany! Though, and her dimple faded as she owned it, the thought of what must happen in November took "the gilt off the gingerbread."
"Do not think of what is going to happen in November," Saxham advised her. "Or teach yourself to think of it in the right way." The sense of her childishness and inexperience went home to the sensitive quick beneath the man's hard exterior, as she said to him with an unconsciously appealing accent:
"But how am I to find out what is the right way?"
He had gained upon her confidence. The admission proved it. With infinite tact he began to win yet another woman to drain out her chalice of Motherhood, untinctured with the druggist's nepenthe,--to gain for the race yet another babe unmarred before its birth. For this end no labour was too great for Saxham. A crank you may call him, but that cranks of this type are the leaven of the world, you know.
It is typical of the human butterfly Saxham dealt with, that his clothes pleased Margot. She liked their characteristic mingling of elegance with simplicity. Some fashionable doctors got themselves up like elderly bloods, others affected garments dating from the year One. There was neither perfume upon Saxham's handkerchief nor flue upon his coat-sleeve. His shirt of soft white cashmere, his slightly starched linen cuffs and narrow double collar were fastened with plain buttons of mother o' pearl, the black silk necktie was blameless of pin or ring. The handsome gold chronometer he carried because it had been presented to him by the Staff and patients of St. Teresa and St. Stanislaus. The chain attached to it--rather worn and shabby now--was of woven red-brown hair.
The hair of his wife. A creamy-pale Niphetos rose stood where her hands had placed it near his writing-pad, in a tall, slender beaker of green-and-gold Venetian glass. His eyes drank at the beauty of the lovely scarce-unfolded blossom. Perhaps the resemblance of the fair flower to the beloved giver softened the lines of the stern square face into the smile that Margot liked, as he found her eyes again, saying:
"Perhaps I could better answer your question by telling you how another patient bore herself in--circumstances akin to yours. Will it tire you? I promise not to be unduly prolix. And to listen commits you to no course of action. Now, shall I go on?"
"I'd love you to go on!"
Always in extremes, the little wayward creature. She flushed and sparkled at the Doctor as he took from its place on his writing-table a triptych photograph-frame in gold-mounted mother-o'-pearl, folded the leaves so as to reveal but one of the portraits, and held under Margot's eyes the delicately-tinted photograph of a girl of twenty. The portrait had been taken the year following Saxham's return from South Africa with his young wife.
"How beautiful!" Margot exclaimed.
"Beautiful, as you say, but does she look happy?"
Margot wrinkled her dainty eyebrows, puzzling out the question. Did she look happy, the girl of the portrait, whose face and figure might have served one of the old Greek masters as model for an Artemis to be carved upon a gem? Well, perhaps not quite happy, now one came to look again.
The black-lashed eyes of golden hazel were full of wistful sadness, there was a faintly indicated fold between the fine arched eyebrows, much darker than the rippling red-brown hair, whose luxuriance seemed to weigh down the little Greek head. The closely-folded, deeply-cut lips spoke dumbly of sorrow, the nymph-like bosom seemed rising on a breath of weariness. Something was lacking to complete her beauty. So much was plain even to Margot. But not until the Doctor showed by the side of the first, the second portrait, did she realise what that Something was.
In the first portrait both face and figure were shown in profile. In the second, bearing a date of two years later, the beautiful, sensitive face of the young woman was turned towards you. Still rather grave than smiling, she held in her arms a sturdy baby boy of some twelve months, upon whose downy head her chin lightly rested. The clasp of her slender arms about her child, the poise of her still nymph-like figure, expressed fulness of life, buoyant energy, and happiness in fullest measure. What was previously lacking was now made clear.
"Lovely, quite lovely!" trilled the sweet little voice. "And what an exquie kiddy!"
"Then you do not dislike children?" Saxham asked, as his visitor's husband had done not long ago.
"On the contrary," the little lady assured him, "I rather cotton to them. But"--she shrugged her little shoulders prettily and quoted boldly from another woman--"but the fag of having them doesn't--appeal!"
The Doctor replaced the threefold frame and turned his regard back upon his visitor.
"These photographs speak for themselves ..." he said quietly. "She--the mother of the boy you see, was, when she first knew that she was to be a mother, fragile and delicate in body, and in mind highly-strung and sensitive. As a child she had known neglect and unkind usage. Twice she had sustained an overwhelming shock, physical and mental; she had rallied, passed through a crisis and regained lost ground. But the possibility of a relapse was not to be blinked at. It was a lion in the path!"
The slight form of the listener was convulsed by a shudder. The pretty face lost its wild-rose tint. The lion in the path ... Margot saw him crouching, his tawny eyes aflame, his great jaws slavering, his tail lashing the dust, his great muscles tightening for the fearful spring. And Saxham went on:
"She maintained from the first a sweet, sane mental standpoint. She tamed her lion by sheer force of will. Her courage was her own: she did not owe it to the physician and surgeon. But he advised as he knew best, and she followed his advice implicitly, as to wholesome diet and regular exercise, thus keeping her body in health. She surrounded herself with objects that were beautiful in form and colour. She made a point of hearing great music and of re-reading the works of great poets, essayists, and novelists. She wished her child to owe much to pre-natal influences. For that these----"
The speaker faltered for a moment, before he resumed the thread of his discourse.
"--That these form character for good or evil no physiologist can deny. Therefore while she did not flee from, she avoided the sight of deformity or ugliness, as she shunned active infection, or tainted air. It was desirable that her child should be healthy, strong, and beautiful. But the love of loveliness, though one of the dominants of her character, scales lowest of the triad. Human love, the love of mother, husband, and friend rank above it, and first of all stands the love of God."
"How awfully good she must be!"
"She took the child, first and last, as a gift from God to her. If she lived or died, and she longed inexpressibly to live--Death, like Life, would be the fulfilment of the Divine Will. Fortified by the Sacraments of her Church she lay down upon her bed of pain as though it were an altar. She suffered intensely----"
His voice broke.
"She suffered inexpressibly. Not until the actual crisis did I have recourse to chloroform. When I was about to use it she said to me: 'Not yet! ... I will wear it a little longer... this mother's crown of thorns.' To-day the crown is one of roses. Does not this appeal to you?"
The Doctor's supple hand displayed the third portrait in the triptych, and Margot saw the same assured joy, rounded with a richer and more deep content. The exquisite face was fuller, the outlines of the form displayed the ripeness of early maturity, the slender palm was now a stately tree. The girl of twenty was merged in the woman of thirty, rich in all feminine graces, beautiful exceedingly, with the beauty that is not only of line and proportion, form and colour, but shines from within, irradiating the perishable living clay with the immortal radiance of the soul. Her boy stood at her side, a manly square-headed young British twelve-year-old, wearing a simple, distinctive dress; familiar to us all.
"Y-yes. But I'm afraid you have forgotten: I told you at the beginning, or I meant to.... My--my own mother died when I was born!"
"And that sad fact increases your natural fear and repugnance. Naturally. It will strike you as a curious point of resemblance between your case and that of the--patient whose portrait I have shown you, when I tell you that her mother did not survive the birth of a later child. May I tell you further that the possibility of some inherited weakness does not render you more promising--regarded as a subject for the treatment of Wolfenbuchel and Krauss."
Margot was beginning to hate this stern-faced man who set forth things so clearly. He had bored her almost to weeping. Why on earth had she come? The fact that Franky's sister Trix's boy Ronald had been helped into the world by Saxham thirteen years ago and recently operated on for the removal of the appendix, was no reason that Franky's wife should regard him as infallible. She glanced at her tiny jewelled wrist-watch. Ten whole minutes had gone. She rose.
"You have been so kind, and I have been so much interested. But I must go now!" she said, like a weary child pleading to be let out of school. "Franky--my husband--will be waiting. I have promised to lunch with him at the Club."
"If he is here, perhaps Lord Norwater would like to speak to me," Saxham suggested.
Margot lied badly. She reddened as she answered:
"Oh, what a pity that he did not come!"
*CHAPTER XXII*
*MARGOT IS SQUARE*
She was in what she would have termed "a blue funk" for fear that Saxham would accompany her to the threshold. But he merely bowed her out of the consulting-room and smartly shut his door. Then she tripped to the waiting-room and beckoned forth Franky with an air of buoyant, fictitious cheerfulness. Her eyes were radiant, her little face was dressed in artful smiles....
"Did I seem long? Were you getting the hump?" she asked of Franky, who rose and hurried to meet her, dropping Punches all over the place. His smooth hair was almost rumpled and his brown eyes begged like a retriever's. He asked in the kind of whisper that travels miles:
"Yes--no! Did you pull off the interview? What does the Doctor----"
"S-sh!" She glanced anxiously towards the one remaining patient. "Tell you when we get out. Impossible here!"
He urged: "But is it all right?"
"As right as rain!"
"Good egg!" She had got him out of the room and as far as the hall door. "Stop! ... Wait! Oughtn't I to go and thank----"
"No--no!" The door was open, the neat little landau-limousine that had brought them was waiting by the kerb-stone. Before Franky knew it, Margot had plucked him down the steps, pulled him into the car, and given the chauffeur the signal. They were in Hanover Square before he recovered his breath.
"Oh come, I say, Kittums! That sort of Sandow business can't be good for you. Why you're in such a thundering hurry to get me away, I'd rather like to know?"
Her heart shook her, but she lied again bravely.
"Didn't you want to hear what the Doctor told me about the 'Purple Dreams' treatment?"
"More than anything in the world. That drug with the freak name! ... Can it do any harm--to you and----"
"Not a scrap!"
She planted a flying kiss between his ear and his collar. He greatly appreciated the attention, though it tickled him horribly.
"Dr. Saxham said it was a frightfully clever, practicable method. Absolutely harmless, and the patient doesn't suffer--not that much!" She measured off an infinitesimal bit of finger-nail and showed him, and went on as he caught the little hand and gratefully mumbled it: "You don't know a thing that happens. You simply go to bye-bye. And--there's always the baby when you wake up!"
"A first-class baby?" His harping maddened her. "A healthy little buffer to send to Eton and represent us in the Regiment, and inherit the title presently when his poor old Pater pops? Just look me in the face like the little sport you are, Margot, and tell me that you're playing square with me. For this--for this is the game of Life!"
He had both her hands. He made her look at him. She met his eager stare with limpid eyes. And all the while that sentence of Saxham's about the pre-natal poisoning of the springs of existence, drummed, drummed at the back of her brain. "What a little beast I am!" she mentally commented, hearing her own voice answering:
"I've told you No, and that I am playing square with you!" She grasped the fact that Franky had suffered, by the grunt of relief with which he loosed her hands. "And so it's settled I go to Berlin about the middle of--September, say?"
"Wow-wow! It's us for the gay life! Just when the beastly hole's as dusty as the Sahara and as hot as hell!"
"You won't be in the beastly hole, and perhaps I needn't go before the beginning of October. You can go down to Brakehills and slay away at the pheasants, and run over when I cable, to bring me back----"
"With my boy! Our boy, Kittums!"
His simple, kind face was quivering. He put out a strong brown hand and laid it on hers, and she gave the hand a little affectionate nip:
"Hullo!" Perhaps he talked on to cover up the momentary lapse into sentiment. "Pipe old St. George's, where we did the deed! Hardly seems close on six months since we got spliced, does it? And there's the Bijou Cottage...." Franky thus irreverently designated the large, drab, stucco-faced, eminently respectable if mousey mansion on the Square's east side, where Margot's bachelor Uncle Derek lived with his collection of moths and beetles. "Shall we stop and give the old gentleman a cheero? Is he at all likely to be in?"
His hand was on the silk-netted rubber bulb of the chauffeur's whistle, when Margot caught it back.
"No, don't stop! Of course he's in. He never goes out, unless it is to a meeting of the Entomological Society, or the Museum of Natural History, or some other place equally stuffy and scientific. Besides, Uncle Derek is a vegetarian--and there wouldn't be anything but tomato soup, and pea-flour cutlets, and Lepidoptera for lunch!"
"Poor little woman, was she peckish, then? All lity, we'll chuff along and fill up tanks at the Club. Bally odd bill of fare, pea-flour cutlets and Lepidop--what's-their-names? But we'll get things nearly as rummy served up to us in Berlin. Pork chops with sweet gooseberry sauce, and pink sausages with lilac cabbage and dumplings. Why do you look so scared?"
She forced a laugh.
"Not scared, but you said 'we' ..."
"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:
"Ah! but why do women want to please men?"
"I can answer that," interrupted Mrs. Charterhouse. "Because she who pleases is perfectly sure of having a gorgeous time."
"It has been said by some inspired idiot," lisped Lady Wastwood "that women make themselves beautiful for the sake of their own sex. Give us your opinion on this question, Count von Herrnung. Did I put on this perfectly devey frock for Miss Saxham, or for you?"
"Gnaedige Graefin, for neither myself nor Miss Saxham. For your own pleasure," said von Herrnung, "have you joy in making yourself beautiful."
"You feel like that when your tailor has done you particularly well?" asked Lady Wastwood, wickedly, looking down her long, thin nose to hide the sparks of humour in her eyes. Half a dozen pairs of ears were cocked to catch the answer, in which von Herrnung's characteristic lack of humour showed.
"Gracious Countess, certainly. It is prachtvoll for a cultured man to study and develop his physical advantages. To please women," he made his little insolent bow, "who adore Beauty, and for the sake of ingratiating oneself with men. But above all for one's own sake. For ugliness is despicable," said von Herrnung. His florid face paled, his hard blue eyes dilated, he shivered as he spoke with uncontrollable disgust. "It is--niedrig! There is no other word! No longer to be beautiful and strong--that would be horrible! There are many ugly accidents in our German Flying Service. Thus far I have escaped disfigurement. But when my time comes I shall take care to be killed outright. Better to die than to be made hideous!"
"Did you hear?" said the man in the distant corner to the charming girl who shared it with him. "The fellow's dead in earnest. And he is uncommonly good-looking, though I don't care about the German Service type of man myself. Don't like their clothes, don't like their jewellery, don't like their tone when they're talking to women, and simply loathe it when they're talking to me!"
"It's a case of Doctor Fell," said his pretty friend. "Now I should admire him--if he admired himself a little less, and his valet or somebody with influence over him could persuade him to cut that awful thumb-nail. No, you can't see it now. He's wearing a glove on his left hand. But it can't be under two inches long."
"Queer kind of freak for a Twentieth Centurion," said the man contemptuously. "All very well for the Imperial Court of China, or a Stone Age make-up for a Covent Garden Fancy Ball. But for a London drawin'-room in the year 1914 it is a little off the bull. We must approach Miss Saxham in the matter of cutting it. She appears to be the Ruling Star."
His friend glanced across at the big knot of people gathered near the ferny fireplace.
"They go about together a good deal, and he does stare at her in rather a possessive style. She's so awfully good to look at, isn't she?"
"She is; but she isn't quite so good for you to know!"
"Why?"
"Could we drop the subject? I'll say why later. Let's scoot now! With luck, we could nip in for the end of the second act of 'The Filberts' at Ryley's Theatre, and see Jimmy Griggson do 'The Dance of the Varalette.'"
And they rose and sauntered away in search of entertainment, leaving Cynthia Charterhouse drawing out von Herrnung, who seemed in a particularly arrogant mood. Did he like England and London especially? Did he find English women as nice, generally, as the friends he had left at home?
ue
"Nice.... One is charmed with English ladies!" declared von Herrnung. "So tall, willowy, and elegant, so independent of manner, and so amiably ready to make a stranger feel at home! True, they have not the plumpness and repose of our German ladies ... at the theatres especially they are rather thin than otherwise.... But they have gehen and chic"--he showed his white teeth--"and change is a delightful thing!"
Patrine, silent in her settee-corner, wondered whether Trixie Wastwood and Cynthia Charterhouse knew that he was insulting them?
"Change from a fat woman to a thin one, is that what you mean?" asked Mrs. Charterhouse. She added: "I'm so glad we strike you as having lots of go. Perhaps it's a result of our being given to exercise, that general effect of slimness you mention. But if German women don't walk, or ride, or skate, or fence, or swim, they do dance a great deal."
"They dance a great deal, yes!" agreed von Herrnung. "One might say they are passionately devoted to it. Dancing is also one of the chief joys of a German officer's life--when he has handsome partners to choose amongst!" He added: "When one is young, and the blood runs hot in the veins, what more glowing pleasures can Life offer, than to ride a noble horse, to drink glorious wine, or to dance all night with a beautiful woman, to the sound of music voluptuous and exquisite!"
Patrine, behind the shelter of a copy of the Pall Mall Gazette, was shuddering uncontrollably. Her life seemed driven back from the extremities to centre about her heart. In that and in her brain were glowing cores of fire. All else was ice, rigid and heavy and cold.
"Dear me!" came plaintively from Mrs. Charterhouse. She signalled with her eyebrows to Lady Wastwood and continued, as the diaphanous Trixie came drifting to her assistance: "Really, I shall have to seek a delightful change by going to Germany. I'd quite forgotten how different you are! The way you talk about your blood, and all that. It's simply too awfully interesting! Trixie, you've got to listen to this!"
"I need no telling, I assure you. I have been drinking in Count von Herrnung's eloquence at every pore," affirmed Trixie. She added: "Like you I have been deeply intrigued by his descriptions of his countrymen. So, so different from our poor creatures, who don't drink glorious wine because they funk gouty complications, and leave their noble horses eating their heads off in loose-boxes while they're scorching about the country in racing-cars. And as for dancing all night--" She shrugged her frail shoulders, and elevated her Pierrot eyebrows beneath the veil that tightly swathed her white triangular face.
"Doesn't it fire you to go to Germany?" gushed Mrs. Charterhouse. "Why"--she demanded, raising her fine eyes to the genuine Adam ceiling--"why can't my husband get a post in the Berlin Diplomatic, instead of stupid old Petersburg? One never dreamed Germans could be so interesting before!"
"We are interesting, yes!" blandly agreed von Herrnung. He lighted a fresh cigarette, balanced his magnificent person upon an inlaid Oriental chess-stool, folded his huge arms upon his broad breast, and turned upon Trixie and the impressionable Cynthia the batteries of his superb blue eyes. "Es mag wohl sein--it may possibly be because the Englishman is a human machine--a cold and formal, if intelligent being; while the German is a child of Nature, whatever his calling may be. His bounding pulses throb under the official or military uniform as though it were a fawn-skin worn by a young satyr. He can sing. He can revel. He can enjoy. He can love----"
"He can love! Now you're getting really quite too interesting!" Mrs. Charterhouse exclaimed in seeming ecstasy: "Do go on, Count. Pray, pray tell us how German officers love!"
"Yet this exuberance, and seeming-careless child-likeness," pursued von Herrnung, "co-exists in the representative male of our glorious German nation with an energy which is pitilessly indomitable, and a hardness like that of diamond, or of the metal of the Hammer of Thor. Scratch the child, joyous and voluptuous"--the ladies nodded to each other delightedly at this second reference to voluptuousness--"you will find beneath its rosy skin the German Superman. Gnaedige Graefin, may I give you a cigarette?" He pulled out a massive silver-gilt case, and offered it to Lady Wastwood, who had thrown away the end of a tiny Pera.
"Thanks," said the lady, "but it might turn out a super-cigarette and disagree with me. How astonishingly well-informed you Germans are upon the subject of yourselves! I've met heaps of your countrymen whom the subject seemed perfectly to obsess. I suppose they begin to teach you at a very early age, don't they? Don't you suppose they would, Cynthia dear?"
Mrs. Charterhouse agreed.
"Of course. But I wonder if that sort of--might one call it--intensive culture?--can be good for you?" With her charming head on one side she regarded von Herrnung pensively. "Don't you sometimes get fed up with yourselves? One would somehow suppose you would! Like the East End Board School children whose mother had to write to the Fifth Standard teacher to ask her not to tell Hemma and 'Arriet any more nasty things about their insides."
Courtley and Lady Beauvayse, who under cover of a separate conversation had been listening, were seized with simultaneous attacks of coughing, rose and escaped from the smoking-room. Patrine Saxham remained, seeming to study the newspaper she had picked up. But only a confused jumble of letters, big and little, danced up and down the columns she held before her eyes.
And yet there were lines scattered here and there throughout the newspapers, that boded ill for the peace of the world. How little we dreamed of what was coming while crowded London audiences applauded Jimmy Greggson in the "Dance of the Varalette." The River was ablaze with multi-coloured sweaters, vast crowds planked their gate-money to witness cricket-matches, lawn-tennis and polo-matches, Flying contests, and bouts between International champions at the ancient game of fisticuffs.
Even while the handsome young French heavy-weight Carpentier was whacking the Yankee Smith at Olympia, white-faced, weary-eyed men of great affairs were spending the hot hours of the July days and nights--minus a stray half-hour for a meal and a snatched eyeful of sleep now and then--in reading reports in cipher sent by lesser men, agents of the Secret Intelligence Department--who were registered as numbers and owned no names.
These told of vast preparations long complete, and terrible designs perfect and perfecting. Poison-fruit, grown and matured in shade, now bursting-ripe and ready to kill. The aerials thrilled, the long waves travelled through invisible ether, carrying the despatches for the weary-eyed men.
The despatches were not all in cipher. Thus little polyglot employes, youthful radiotelegraphic operators in charge of ship-stations in Territorial or foreign waters, or Wireless posts quite recently established on foreign frontiers, found themselves sharers in the secret councils of Ambassadors, Emperors, Kings, and Presidents.
In their ear-pieces such words as "situation," "utmost gravity," "friction avoided," "Triple Alliance," and "Triple Entente," were repeated over and over. To them the tuned spark sang what the Tsar was saying to his Cousin of Great Britain and the Dominions overseas. They heard the British Foreign Secretary talking from Downing Street to the British Ambassador at Berlin, and the British Ambassador at Paris, and the French President, on a visit to Tsarskoe Selo, replying to communiques from the Quai d'Orsay. Also de Munsen from the Embassy at Vienna, confirming Whitehall views as to the extreme gravity of the Austro-Servian situation.
Last, but not least, the voice from a certain guarded sanctum in the Kaiserlicher Palais on the Schloss Platz, Berlin, saying in a cipher of grouped numbers, the secret language of Hohenzollern intrigue not understood of little operators--things that bleached the face of the listener in London to the yellow of old cheese.
"As Vicegerent of the World, charged by Almighty God with the supreme duty of maintaining peace among nations ... warn these silly devils of the danger in which they stand! Just for the word 'neutrality'--a word in War-time often disregarded--they risk annihilation of a dynasty by my conquering sword, and the inevitable blotting-out of the British race. Invasion Belgium indispensable.... Must strike the blow before Russia could get to the frontier. Life and death as regards the Success of my Plan. Delay by diplomacy. Promise anything for neutrality. Obtain an understanding of non-intervention. Bluff for all you are worth!"
Again in yet more groups of numbers, the vocal spark sang on and on:
"Attention. If the Secret Service agent who has managed to get into Lord Clanronald's service as under-librarian at Gwyll Castle can secure complete copies--or better still, the originals--of the old Lord's plans for construction of the secret War-machine that hypocritical England has kept up her sleeve out of so-called humanity since the days of the British Regency--strike a deal with him at once. To the menu that will presently be served to our enemies--beginning with Super-Explosive--explosive bullets, incendiary shells, lachrymatory shells serving as entrees--the bombardment of Dover from Calais--the destruction of London and the chief Naval Ports of Great Britain by our Zeppelin Fleet being the piece de resistance of the banquet--the Clanronald Death-engine will be added as fifth course! Thou wilt pay the rogue who has dared to stickle for higher terms ten thousand pounds in English banknotes on account of the sum of twelve million marks he presumptuously demands of us. The balance will be paid him on personal application at the Wilhelmstrasse--you understand! Warn Prince Henry and von Moltke not to risk bringing the Secret Plans personally. Should the loss of the documents be discovered, suspicion would instantly attach to one of these two. Trust not the thief; he may be tempted to betray us. Send the plans by Undersea Boat 18 now on coast-observation duty in Area 88--fathoms 50--44, east of Spurn Head. Annulled. Forward by air. Squadron-Captain-Pilot von Herrnung of my 10th Field Flight will be detailed for this duty, being now in London investigating the value of a new stabiliser--rejected by the English War Office--which the French Chiefs of the Service Ae are anxious to secure. Tell him to obtain a personal flying-test from the inventor. I say no further! As the Hohenzollern were noble robber-knights, so also were von Herrnung's ancestors. Let the eagle fly home to his Imperial master with booty from across the sea. England may suppose him drowned. France also.... We shall know better.... A hearty welcome awaits the proud bird-knight alighting on our German soil."
*CHAPTER XXIV*
*DISILLUSION*
Rhona Helvellyn came stalking in, looked round, recognised Patrine, came over and dropped down beside her on the divan, full to the brim of the invariable subject, and suffering to talk.
Through the good offices of a legal pal she had got in to hear the Suffragette Trial at the Old Bailey that day. Fan Braid and Kitty Neek had been frightfully plucky. Full of grit and vim, in spite of the six weeks' hunger-strike. Began shrieking like Jimmy O! the moment they were brought into the dock by the warders and wardresses. On being rebuked by the Judge, Fan had bunked a bundle of pamphlets at the head of his lordship, catching the Clerk of the Court, who was seated immediately underneath the Bench, no end of a biff in the eye.
"And then?"
Patrine heard a strange voice from her own stiff lips asking the question.
"Then both of 'em were removed from the Dock. It was done--in time!" Rhona's light eyes danced with enjoyment. "Such a scrimmage! Such a rumpus! Took three men and a woman to tackle each of 'em. We could hear 'em giving tongue all the way down to the cells. Then they had to go on with the Trial without 'em." She chuckled. "You may guess there were a lot of us at the back of the Court waiting--just for that! Perfect wadge all together. Hell and trimmings when we started. They had to eject us before they could jog on with their gay old summing-up!"
"But in the end they got through?" The weary voice was so unlike Patrine's that she wondered why Rhona did not jump and stare at her. But Rhona was mounted on her hobby-horse, and unobservant of other things.
"Through right enough! And Fan and Kitty--" Rhona screwed up her lips into the shape of a whistle, and winked away a tear that hung on one of her fair eyelashes; "It's too brutal! Three months each, and poor little Kitty dying of lung-trouble. They only brought her back from Davos in May. That riles me!" She clenched her hands fiercely and went on, cautiously lowering her tone: "So far I've taken no active share in any Militant Demonstration. Partly because I'd be wiped off the Club books if I got spouting in public, or was mixed up in any police-court business, partly because I'm funky--there's the word! But at last I'm wound up! It was Kitty's little peaky-white face did it! ... She--she broke a blood-vessel as the warders were carrying her down to the cells."
A sob choked Rhona's voice, and a spasm of misery wrenched her. She controlled herself. She was deadly in earnest--wound up to go, as she had said. She went on, talking rapidly, in a tone that only reached the ear it had been meant for. How many such secret disclosures the Club divan had known.
"I've thought.... A regular swarm of Distinguished French and Belgian Big Pots and Little Pots--Mayors--Prefects and Deputies, Judges, Press Representatives and Inspectors-General--are engaged in Discovering England this week as ever is. It's an echo of the Entente Cordiale. Behind the badge of the International Advancement Association--I've got one!--I might drop in at one of their farewell speechifications, I believe the next's on Friday at Leamington--and heckle 'em like one o'clock! Ask 'em why women don't have the Vote in France and Belgium----"
"Don't they?"
"Nix a bit! Not for all the fuss they make about the sex. Or--to fix the scene of my maiden effort nearer home--there's a Banquet of Archbishops, Bishops and their wives at the Mansion House to-morrow night. Music just after the flesh-pots and before the speeches or after--a select company of Concert Artistes, the gemmen in boiled shirts and the usual accompaniments; the ladies in white with black sashes and black gloves. And that's where I shall come in--in white with black trimmings. Land of Hope and Glory!--when I get up and ask the Archbishop of Canterbury to plump for Female Suffrage!--or shall it be the Lord Mayor? ... Won't my Uncle Gustavus burst the buttons off his episcopal waistcoat. You've seen him. He's Bishop of Dorminster--and they fasten 'em at the back."
"Let the Bishop keep his buttons on!" said Patrine, suddenly and savagely. "What the--devil does it matter whether women get the Vote? Would we keep it if we got it, or throw it away--oh! idiots--idiots!--to gratify some vulgar vanity, or some beastly sensual whim?"
"Gee-whillikins!" Rhona whistled shrilly in astonishment. "Why, I thought you were one of Us. Not actively militant, but a sympathiser, no end. Didn't you get our Committee in touch with Mrs. Saxham, when we'd set our hearts on having her speak at the Monster Meeting of Women we're going to have in October at the Grand Imperial Hall? She's promised to address us on Suffrage and we're all over ourselves to hear her. That last article of hers in The National Quarterly--'The Burden of Tyre,' has collared the literary cake. People tell me who've read it that she doesn't care a hang about the Vote for Women in any other sense than that it'd open a gateway to legislation on the Sex Question of a much more drastic kind. She'd bring in a Bill to have moral offences against children dealt with by a Jury of Mothers--a lot they'd leave of the offender once they'd their claws on him!--and make it a Life Sentence every time, for the fellow who seduces a girl."
