Destiny seemed to be setting the stage for Armageddon, the last tragic
scene in the play of human life. Pandora’s box had been opened and every
mortal ill loosed to the bonds of hate. For more than three years, the
sword of War had maimed the body of civilisation. It was a time when the
vision of young men was carnage, and the dream of old men, despair.
Prussian frightfulness was still exacting dreadful tribute from Celt and
Anglo-Saxon battlefields that had lost all trace of old-time chivalry.
The virtue of sheer sacrifice was confined to the English-speaking
Dominions, the flower of whose youth had gone forth against a foe that
had not directly challenged them; gone forth with joy to build their
splendid bodies into ramparts that might be shattered but never stormed.
The Blond Beast was shaking the blood from his eyes and looking
anxiously across the Atlantic. But America had not yet decided to step
into the breach.
Thus with the men. Nor was the mettle of our women lacking in the hour
of trial. Spartan mothers never sent their sons into battle with finer
renunciation than did the mothers of the unconscripted youths who
crowded the transports in the first two years of conflict. Women stepped
into the gaping ranks of industry at home—into the farms and fields,
and into factories originally designed for making ploughshares and
pruning hooks, but now converted into plants for fashioning the
panoplies of war. Thousands of these women clad themselves in the
overalls of labour, and hundreds put on the uniform of the Red Cross.
Life so lived was hard but it was intense, and “Carry on”, came to
express one of the spiritual values of the ages.
This was one picture of the activities of women during the grim tourney
of Might against Right. There was another, not so inspiring. It revealed
the cocotte and the flapper. Birds of beautiful plumage, these, who
thronged London, Paris, Ostend—God knows where they were not—and sang
their siren songs into masculine ears echoing with the shriek of shot
and shell . . . songs that offered forgetfulness, Nirvana, to men who
came out of a stinking Hell where the form of Death stalked grinning at
their side. These were they who filled the theatres, cabarets, and tea
shops, providing fat profits for jewellers, modistes, motor liveries;
the hotels and inconspicuous road-houses.
How swiftly in our own land came the changes wrought by war! One grew
inured to bobbed hair, knee-length skirts, universal smoking, Einstein,
trousered women, camouflage, expensive economy and economical
extravagance, unashamed macquillage, weddings à la volée, War Babies,
and appetency for divorce.
The social limousine, as it sped on the road of Hysteria, was not alone
in its responsiveness to the influences of the time. The car of politics
was jolted from its accustomed track. Union Government was formed under
the leadership of Sir Robert Borden, and both the great parties lost
their distinctiveness, not so much from the deliberate fusion as from
the departure of the pick of capable men from each. To complete the
debacle of the Liberal Party, Sir Wilfrid Laurier—the thaumaturge of
Canada’s peaceful days of growth—passed away, stupefied by the alarms
of war. The nation lost its beautiful Parliament House by fire, set it
was generally thought, by the myrmidons of the Kaiser.
In the Dillings’ home, changes had also made their way. Marjorie found
the top floor convenient as a meeting place for the dozen and one
organisations over which she was asked to preside. Dilling had an office
on the ground floor as well as at the Victoria Museum—whither the
burnt-out Members of Parliament had been driven for refuge, and Azalea
practically lived at the house.
Mr. Sullivan was by no means an infrequent visitor and Lord Ronald
Melville, the A.D.C., found a curious respite from Society’s
kaleidoscopic demands upon him in the prim ugliness of Marjorie’s
drawing-room.
“I like him better than any man I ever knew,” she confided to Azalea,
one evening as they sat waiting for the children to return from a
masquerade at Government House. “He’s so old-fashioned.”
Azalea laughed. “In what way?”
“Ever so many ways! He doesn’t like women who smoke or swear, and he’s
so fond of children.”
“That _is_ old-fashioned!”
Marjorie nodded. “I don’t think he likes Ottawa very much. He said that
the Society here was like a blurred and microscopic reflection of London
life. Wasn’t that pretty strong, Azalea?”
“Well, it certainly is a definite view.”
“I find it easy to get on with him,” Marjorie continued. “All the things
I like to talk about seem interesting to him. With other people, no
matter what I say, it doesn’t sound quite right, but with Their
Excellencies and Lord Ronald, there is such a different feeling!”
She sighed. Long ago, she had observed that famous people whose names
she used to revere in Pinto Plains, neither talked nor acted like the
sons of God; gradually, she discovered that age was not to be confused
with sapience or high life with respectability. She realised that to
succeed she must say daring things to people from whom she shrunk, and
repeat the latest gossip freshened by a spraying of her own invention.
She divined that in being kind to men and allowing them to talk frankly
with her, she earned the enmity of their wives, and that if she held
herself aloof, these same women considered her a stick and a fool. She
could acquire neither the smart badinage of people of parts, nor the air
of those who used ponderosity to cloak their native insipidities.
“You should be very grateful for being clever,” Marjorie said. “If I
were only a little bit cleverer, I shouldn’t have found Ottawa half
so—so—difficult.” She blushed. “Do you know, Azalea, I used to think
that everybody here would be like Lord Ronald, good and kind and
friendly. I used to think Society was exactly like _that_!”
Azalea’s mouth grew hard. She knew, without being told, that some one
had inflicted a hurt upon Marjorie’s tender spirit, and all her love
rose up in revolt.
“Society!” she cried. “Can’t you see that what we dignify by that name
is merely a mechanism devised to give a certain class of climbers and
parasites the power to lead a comfortably otiose existence at the
expense of the shrinking and the credulous?”
“I’m afraid I don’t understand quite all of that,” confessed Marjorie.
“But I know it’s clever. There are so many clever people, here. That is
what makes me seem stupider than I really am, by comparison.”
“They are not clever,” contradicted Azalea. “They are simply experts in
the art of pretence. They succeed by bluff.”
“You have to be clever to do that,” argued Marjorie. Then suddenly, “I
hope you won’t mind my saying so, Azalea, but you know I’ve often
thought how much better everything would have been for everybody if you
had been married to Raymond!”
Azalea raised startled eyes to see Dilling standing in the doorway. That
he had overheard Marjorie’s words was obvious. He stood regarding her
with a strange interest as if studying her in the light of a sudden
revelation. With an onrush of knowledge, he became conscious of his
soul, for the first time. He knew its needs and how Azalea had met them
during the months they had worked together. He saw Azalea as a woman
. . . as the luminous source of all his inspiration.
A moment passed . . . a moment that held an eternity of understanding.
Soul met soul, disdaining the barriers of sense. The room was filled
with the sound of Marjorie’s knitting needles. The clock began to chime
. . .
The pell-mell entrance of the children shattered the spell that gripped
them. Baby, drunk with excitement, staggered to Marjorie and climbed, a
crumpled heap of tarltan and tinsel, into her lap. Besser, proudly
wearing a jester’s cap over one ear, retrieved from his pocket, three
sticky lumps that had once been cake, and laid them on the table.
Althea, infected by the snobbery in which she had so lately been a
participant, flipped up her skirts at the back, and wriggled decorously
upon a chair.
“Well, my treasures, and was the party boo-ti-fool?” demanded Marjorie.
A torrent of speech answered her.
“And were you dear, good children?” she asked. “What of my tomboy,
Althea?”
“I was the goodest one at the party,” replied that young person. “Mind
you, Mummie, I was the _only child_ what folded up my napkin!”