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!"