is--persistent narcosis obtained from the subcutaneous injections of
morphine with the hydrobromide of hyoscine, another alkaloid obtained
from henbane. I have visited not only the Institute at Berlin, but the
Rottburg Fraueenklinik--and an establishment of the same type in Paris,
and another in Brussels. It is a fact that when a patient awakens from
the anaesthesia there is no recollection of anything that has taken
place subsequently to the injection of the drug."
"There has been no pain. Absolutely--none whatever!" She spoke with a
little, joyful catch in her breath.
"Pardon me," said Saxham. "You labour under a delusion which the
rose-coloured pamphlet was not written to dispel. There must have been
pain--if there has been childbirth. Perhaps there has been overwhelming
pain. Pain manifested by outcries and convulsions--violent
struggles--subdued by the attendants and nurses--for the friends and
relatives of the patient are rigidly excluded--the patient enters and
leaves the Home alone. Two or three days may have vanished in that
vacuum which has been created in her memory. Days in which she has been
lying--it may be--strapped to the bed in the private ward of the nursing
home--her purple, congested face and staring eyes concealed by a mask of
wetted linen--her agonies only witnessed by paid attendants whose
interests are best served by denial or concealment--supposing anything
to have gone wrong?"
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*