tophole dream! Thought I was back at the Club in my three dear rooms
with the Adams doors and chimney-pieces--and Pauline came in with a huge
basket of white flowers--and I asked: '_Who are they for?_' And she
said: 'For Mademoiselle!' And I was Margot St. John--and had never been
married!" There was infinite wistfulness in the little voice.
"White flowers mean death, don't they, when you dream of 'em? And I'm
sorry your dip in the Bran Tub of Matrimony has turned out such a bad
investment. What I came to tell you should revive your hopes of making
a better one, my child!"
That jarring note of mingled resentment and irony, how new and strange
it sounded to Margot! Until this moment Franky's voice had never been
anything but gentle. It was gentle now as he said, at his dressing-room
door:
"Finish your sleep. I was rather a brute to wake you!" He was going
without a backward glance.
"Come back! Come off it! Don't be dignified!" Margot called after the
retreating figure. "I'm quite awake now, so you'd better tell. What's
on?"
He came back to the bedside, looking tall and shadowy in the blue
dimness. Margot put up a little hand and patted his cheek. There were
wet drops upon the smooth, warm skin.... Perhaps he had walked home,
and it had been raining. Or--
"_Franky_! You're not----"
He captured the little hand and took it in both his own, and squeezed
it. He said in a cheerful but rather choky voice:
"Of course not! And--the news could have waited. Only--since midnight
England and Germany have been at War. The Big Scrap is three hours old.
First battalion of Ours is under orders for the Front--I've exchanged
out of the Second with Ackroyd--too sick a man for fightin' just now,
luckily for me. You know Ackroyd. Used to flirt with him
frightfully--to give me beans when I'd vexed you when we were first
engaged. When do we go, did you ask? Liable to be off at any old
minute. By-bye, little woman. Too late to go to bed--heaps of things to
attend to. God bless you! See you at brekker--or lunch, if I've luck."
*CHAPTER L*
*THE EVE OF ARMAGEDDON*
Kittums, upon that fateful morning, coming down to breakfast and finding
no Franky, was annoyed. One might just as well have had breakfast in
bed. She didn't want any, but Cook would be hurt if the chowder and
eggs, and croquettes of chicken weren't eaten. Therefore Margot ate--to
avoid wounding the cook. The daily papers she left untouched, knowing
that War would leap out from the huge capitals heading the columns and
strike her in the eyes.
She had herself dressed and 'phoned for the car. The house did not seem
a place to stay in, somehow. Dowd was busy in his master's room,
ordering Jobling about in loud authoritative tones and being waited upon
by the maids. Even Pauline, ordinarily scornful, referred to him as
"Monsieur Dowd" instead of "_zat man Dow!_"
Once in Sloane Street, the War rushed at you. Groups of men, young, old
or middle-aged, stood talking at every street-corner, newspapers rustled
in every hand. You couldn't escape the papers. Huge flaring headlines
shrieked from the broad-sheets in the gutters and on the railings: "WAR
DECLARED! ULTIMATUM EXPIRED. BRITISH FLEET READY FOR BATTLE. INVASION
OF BELGIUM BY GERMAN ARMY CORPS!" The drapery salesman who was to win
the Victoria Cross, called from the top of a Knightsbridge motor-bus to
the grocer's assistant who was to receive the Medaille Militaire at the
doughty hands of Joffre.... The budding airman who was to bring down a
Zeppelin single-handed chuffed past on a motor-cycle--the girls who were
to make shells for British guns, or pack made ones with T.N.T. and
kindred explosives, tripped along in their transparent hobble-skirts, to
meet Alf and Ted at the Tube. And neither Alf, who subsequently took
five Huns prisoner by the single hand, shepherding them back to the
British lines with dunts of the gun-butt and sarcasms more pointed, nor
Ted, who threw himself down over the exploding bomb, dying that his
comrades in the trench might live, dreamed what kind of chick would pip
Fate's egg for him or her presently. Yet the dullest face wore a new
expression, in the tamest eyes burned the light of battle! Unquenched
it burns in them still, after four dreadful years of War.
The Club, already deserted by August holiday-makers, would be utterly
abandoned to chimney-sweeps, charwomen and window-cleaners, and yet
Margot told the chauffeur to drive to the Club.
Turning out of Piccadilly she discovered Short Street to be blocked by
taxi-cabs. An endless procession of telegraph-boys plunged in and out
between the thudding swing-doors of the vestibule. The vestibule was
congested with battered, dusty ladies, ladies' maids even dustier and
more battered, and travelling bags battered and dusty to the _nth_
degree.
Some of the bags were bursting, not a few of the maids were hysterical.
All the returned travellers were telling their adventures at once. The
air was thick with exclamations, explanations, cries and ejaculations.
Unfed, unslept, baggageless and penniless in many instances, the members
of the Ladies' Social--seeking health, or novelty, in half the
pleasure-resorts upon the map of Europe--had come hurtling back to Short
Street like leaves driven before the furious blast of War.
"Has anything happened?"
Lady Norwater addressed this query to the Club hall-porter, a bald
person of habitually slow movements and singularly bland address. The
man gnashed his teeth at her, uttering a sound between a groan and a
snarl--made as though to tear non-existent hair,--leaped with
astonishing nimbleness over a pile of luggage, and vanished. Margot
would have made a note of his conduct in the Complaints register, but
that the hall-table was obliterated by heaps of rugs, dust-cloaks and
waterproofs. Wondering, she made her way into the big General Room on
the ground-floor.
Here travel-creased, dust-smeared members sat in voluble rows on the
comfortable sofas, or reclined speechless in the capacious armchairs.
Medical men, hastily summoned by 'phone, moved noiselessly from patient
to patient. Husbands and male friends listened not unmoved, to piteous
recitals of adverse experiences undergone on enemy ground.
Kittums, snatched into the whirl, moved from friend to friend, gathering
experiences. Mrs. Charterhouse, with her Pekinese pug and her maid, had
just arrived at Homburg to undergo treatment for a twenty-two-inch waist
when the War Cloud gathered monstrous on the horizon. Had not her Swiss
doctor written a warning instead of a prescription the white and golden
Cynthia, Mademoiselle Mariette and Chin-Chin, would at this moment have
been languishing on rye bread and bean coffee in a Teutonic jail.
"As it is, we've spent a whole week, and every sou we had on us making
the journey!" said Cynthia, in her plaintive tones. "They held us up at
Frankfurt, Basel, and Geneva! What inquisitions, what scowling
suspicious looks! To be hunted and suspect makes you wicked, I've found
out! When we got to Paris at four yesterday morning and took a rickety
_fiacre_ to the Palais--all the taxis have vanished!--I could have
_prayed_ for a cup of tea and a roll! But at the Palais all was
confusion. The hotel was shutting up--every male servant called to the
Reserve. We got to the 'Spitz'--the same experience there! Exhausted,
I sat on something in the vestibule--it moved, groaned, and I found it
to be the wreck of Sir Thomas Brayham. He and Lady Wathe, his man and
her maid, who have been all through July at Franzenbad in the
Egerland,--reaching Paris after awful adventures, had all four been
hurled out in the same way. One of those jiggety motor-omnibuses took
all of us to the Couronne. They were full to the roofs and cellars, but
they wedged us in, somehow! Then, for two days Sir Thomas tore round
Paris trying to get _laissez-passers_." She turned her lovely eyes upon
a large, stertorously-breathing but otherwise inert object reclining
with closed eyes and folded hands in the biggest of the Club armchairs.
"Didn't you, Sir Thomas?"
"Beparr?"
Brayham, waking with a bewildered stare, regarded the charming Cynthia
uncomprehendingly until the Goblin, sitting opposite, centre of a knot
of bosom friends, repeated the query:
"Didn't you run about Paris for passes for two days?"
"No!" bounced out Brayham, now aroused, and purpling under the coal-dust
that begrimed his large, judicial visage. He added, with a vestige of
his King's Bench manner, as the Goblin stared at him in concern for his
mental state: "I retain the use of my reason, dear friend! But I WILL
NOT consent that the varied tortures of the abominable ordeal I have
undergone could possibly be packed within the nutshell limits of
forty-eight hours! Mph!"
So dust-covered was the ex-Justice that the very act of shaking his head
rebukingly at the Goblin, raised a cloud that made him sneeze. He
uttered the curious composite sound that heralds sternutation, drew out
a voluminous, coal-dusty handkerchief, stared at it indignantly, and in
the very act of returning it to his pocket--fell asleep again.
"A perfect wreck, as I said just now!" whispered Mrs. Charterhouse to
Kittums.
"_How_ I congratulate you, dear Lady Wastwood," said the Goblin, "on not
having gone abroad!"
"Was it so horrid?" asked Trixie, sympathetically, arching the eyebrows
that resembled musical slurs.
"Was it so--" Lady Wathe shrugged her thin shoulders and gave the ghost
of one of her rattling laughs. "If to fight your way back, stage by
stage, amidst inconceivable difficulties, obstacles and insults, is
horrid!--if to travel for two long days and nights in trains crowded to
suffocating excess merits the term--" She loosened the quadruple string
of superb Oriental pearls that tightly clipped her stalk-like throat and
went on: "If it comes under the heading to find yourself and your
friends--in tatters after a suffocating struggle!--packed with sixty
other squalid wretches in a luggage-van _en route_ for Dieppe! If to
sit for three hours on your jewel-case, waiting, in a crush of congested
humanity, for the arrival of the Newhaven boat--if to fight as with
beasts at Ephesus to gain its gangway--if to fall in a heap on the
sodden deck--to lie there lost to everything but the fact that the waves
that drench you are British waves, and the British coast is slowly
crawling nearer!--if all this and how much more, can be lumped under the
term of horrid, it has been, dear Lady Wastwood, horrid in the extreme!"
Lady Wastwood's small, triangular, white face with the V-shaped scarlet
mouth, looked enigmatical. She arched the thick black slurs that were
her eyebrows again, and said not without intent, to her crony Cynthia
Charterhouse:
"_Who_ would have _dreamed_ only three weeks ago, when that excessively
long-legged and extremely good-looking Count von Herrnung sat here and
talked to us about German women and German Supermen--that we should be
at War to-day with Germany?"
"Poor Count Tido!" Something rattled in the Goblin's meagre throat as
though she had accidentally swallowed some of her pearls. "That
dreadful report in _The Wire_ made the Franzenbad treatment disagree
with me horribly! To be drowned in that commonplace North Sea crossing,
upon the very eve of realising the one ambition of his life! For he
hated us so thoroughly! His Anglophobia was a perfect obsession. Poor
dear Tido! One might call it a wasted career!" The speaker dried a
tear and continued: "His family will be frantic. You know he was to
have been married in October! Baroness Kriemhilde von
Wolfensbragen-Hirschenbuttel. Immensely rich! Her father has large
interests in the pearl-fisheries of German New Guinea. Her betrothal
gift, a superb black and white pearl, the Count always wore as a mascot.
Poor Baroness! She will be inconsolable. Marriage means the first
draught of real freedom to young German girls!"
Mrs. Charterhouse said in her sweetly venomous way:
"Miss Saxham bears up--under the circumstances!"
"Under what circumstances, might one presume to ask?" Then, reading
aright the ambiguous smile of Mrs. Charterhouse, the Goblin rattled out
her characteristic laugh:
"What absurdity! You refer to a mere dinner-table flirtation in Paris.
The mere _rapprochement_ of _atomes crochus_! Miss Saxham and Lady
Beauvayse dined with us on the night of the Grand Prix. Poor Tido was
certainly struck with her. I remember he talked about her eyes and
figure afterwards. But her hair being so black and growing so
heavily--did not please him. He found the effect--I think his term
was--'too crepuscular.'"
"Ah! You throw a ray," said Mrs. Charterhouse in that sugared way of
hers, "on a mystery that has intrigued me. Now I know why Miss Saxham
went to the Atelier Wiber in the Rue de la Paix and got her crepuscular
tresses changed to terra-cotta!"
"_Not_ saffron? Now," said Lady Wastwood, pensively tilting her own
green-gold head and elevating her arched black eyebrows, "I should have
called that shade saffron or tumeric. Who do you suppose footed the
bill for the process? The wretch Wiber simply won't look at you under
four hundred and fifty francs!"
"Perhaps Vivie Beauvayse--" suggested Mrs. Charterhouse.
"I think not. Vivie preferred the crepuscular effect. It contrasted
capitally with her own style of colouring. You must have noticed, they
are seldom seen going about together as they used. Dear Lady Wathe, do
you feel faint? Can I get you anything?"
For something had clicked behind the Goblin's pearls, and she had
suddenly stiffened in her seat. The superb figure of Patrine Saxham had
entered by the swing-doors leading from the vestibule followed by a
tall, broad-shouldered young man in loose grey tweeds, whose left sleeve
displayed a band of black significantly new.
"Can that be Miss Saxham? It must be!--her type is so unusual! Not
having seen her since the night of the dinner I referred to I did not
quite grasp the meaning of your references to ingredients common in
Indian curries. Of course, I understand now!" The Goblin surveyed the
tall, pliant figure with the dead beech-leaf hair through her lorgnette
before she leaned forwards and roused the sleeping Brayham by a brisk
application of the instrument. "Look, Sir Thomas! Would you have known
Miss Saxham?"
"Beparr! ... Wharr? ... God bless my soul, no!"
Brayham, turning in the armchair as the Zoo walrus turns in his concrete
pond, surveyed Patrine with a bloodshot stare.
"Silly girl! Spoilt her looks!" he snorted. "Handsome as the dooce
with her gipsy-black tresses. Won her bet. Won't get her ring now
though, unless von Herrnung paid before he flew!"
"Was there a bet between them? How is it you never told me? Have I
deserved this from you?" demanded Lady Wathe indignantly, as Mrs.
Charterhouse and Lady Wastwood exchanged glances and smiles.
"Sorry! ... Forgot! ..." Brayham gobbled apologetically. "Man I know
happened to be close to 'em leaving Spitz's Restaurant that Sunday night
in Paris. Told me he heard von Herrnung lay Miss Saxham his magpie
pearl solitaire against a bit o' Palais Royal paste she was
wearing--that she wouldn't change the colour of her hair! Made the
appointment for her, with Wiber--'_Pastiches Artistiques_,' and so on,
_Rue de la Paix_. He bragged of it afterwards at the _Cercle Moderne_!
Dam Germans! no idea of decency! Why do Englishwomen intrigue with 'em?
Bounders that kiss and tell!"
There was a significant pause, broken by the Goblin's shrillest peal of
laughter. The ex-Justice, whose vitality was low, folded his hands and
dozed again. Then----
"Now we _know_ who footed the bill," said Cynthia Charterhouse in
dove-like accents. While Trixie murmured in the vexed ear of Margot:
"Kitts, my dinkie, you are a pal of the Saxhams. _How_ far had the
affair _really_ gone?"
"There was no affair!" said Margot's sweet little voice, very clearly.
"Pat rather hated Count von Herrnung than otherwise!"
"Judging by the mute evidence of her hair--" began Mrs. Charterhouse,
languidly. How Margot loathed these women, erstwhile her chosen friends
and associates, tearing with greedy beaks and vicious claws at the
reputation of an unmarried girl....
"Her hair belongs to her! She can bleach it if she wishes!" The little
figure rose to its altitude of four feet seven inches and surveyed the
scandalmongers with wrathful eyes. "I have said that there was nothing
between Miss Saxham and Count von Herrnung"--the little voice was
crystal-cold: "I should be extremely obliged to all of you if you will
understand this clearly! Miss Saxham is engaged to my husband's cousin,
Alan Sherbrand."--Had Franky heard that stately reference to my husband,
he would have been "bowled," to quote himself. "Franky likes him, and
so do I, tremendously! We're both keen on their bringing off the
match!"
There was another resounding silence. Brayham snored melodiously. Then
Trixie Wastwood said with her Pierrot smile:
"Really, Kitts, it was--hardly cricket not to have warned us!"
While Mrs. Charterhouse added in tones of iced velvet:
"Regard me also as prone beneath Miss Saxham's Number Eight shoes. Did
you say her _fiance_ was a cousin of Lord Norwater's? Not possibly the
son of the uncle who died quite recently? Captain the Hon. Noel
Sherbrand, late of the Royal Gunners.... My husband used to know him
before--people left off!"
"It is the same. He muddled his career somehow, and--most people cut
him! But he is _dead_," said Margot very deliberately, "and his son, if
we have no--" the delicate cheeks flushed with sudden vivid
crimson--"his son is perfectly tophole and Franky's next heir. We met
him in June in Paris, and so did Pat Saxham! How do any of you know she
didn't tint her hair to please _him_."
"Possibly she did! But, according to Sir Thomas--it was the other man
who paid!"
"Odd, isn't it? In this world," said the Goblin with her crackling
laugh, "the other man invariably pays the bill! And so the young
gentleman over there--who is quite remarkably good-looking in the blond
Norman style--and who is going to marry Miss Saxham--succeeds to Lord
Norwater in--a certain eventuality! May one be permitted to hope, dear
Lady Norwater, that Fate and yourself will combine fortuitously, to keep
the cousin out of the House of Peers!"
"Rude, ill-bred, horrid woman!" thought Margot, clenching her little
teeth to keep back these epithets. "How dare she twit me with--_that_!
How dare--" Then her hot flush sank away and a mist came before her
eyes, and she would have fallen, but that Trixie Wastwood jumped up from
the sofa and threw about the little figure a kind, supporting arm.
"I've got you! You're not going to faint, Kittums, are you? Forgive
us, my dinkie! What _pigs_ we have been!"
"Heckling the tomtit for defending the saffron-crested blackbird! I
rather agree with you," admitted Mrs. Charterhouse as Margot freed
herself, saying it was nothing, and proudly moved away. "We women are
horribly spiteful," continued Cynthia. "Yes, we are spiteful, Lady
Wathe! I am perfectly in earnest. What is the reason? Will anything
cure us? Do somebody tell me! Colonel Charterhouse would say it is
because we eat too much rich food, walk too little, automobile too much,
and want some useful work or other to occupy our minds! He is coming
here to lunch with me--he was quite touchingly anxious to be invited!"
Her beautiful eyes widened as the swing-doors thudded behind three
entering masculine figures, "Why, here he is with Lord Norwater, and
your boy, Trixie! All three in khaki! What a day we are having!"
She added, as her handsome middle-aged Colonel made his spurred way
through the ever-thickening crush to her:
"I am enlightened! So _this_ was your surprise!"
"Not half as big as mine when I found they were willing to take me.
'Fit as a fiddle,' according to the M. O. Gad!"--he went on, as his wife
made room for him on the settle by her side--"as willingly as though he
had been somebody else's husband," Lady Wathe said subsequently--"It's
to my golf I owe it--these A.M.S. sawbones finding me in the pink! And
instead of a back-seat, what do you think they've given me? Command of
the Third Reserve Battalion of the blessed old Regiment, the Loyal North
Linkshires, _vice_ Crowe-Pinckney, kicked out by a gouty toe! ... How's
that for an oldster of fifty-five, ... Eh, what?" His chuckle was that
of a Fourth Form athlete picked to supply a gap in the School Eleven.
And Cynthia's beautiful eyes, as she slipped her hand into the
Colonel's, looked at him as the boy's mother's might have looked upon
her son.
Lady Wastwood's Pierrot smile might have played upon the reunited couple
mockingly, but that the unexpected apparition of her boy Wastwood in
single-starred khaki, adorned with the badge of a crack Hussar Regiment,
girt with the Sam Browne and narrow officer's shoulder-strap, and clad
as to the legs in spurred brown butcher-boots--dimmed her bright green
eyes and brought a choke into her throat. Wastwood the son was so like
Wastwood the father--killed at Magersfontein in 1900,--whom Trixie, for
no reason apparently, had romantically adored. A burly young man, pink
as a baby, with thick fair hair growing down within two inches of his
eyebrows, small, fierce blue eyes, and a huge roaring voice, softened
down now to a tender bellow as he answered a pale girl's eager question
with:
"Well, I can't say exactly when we're going to the Front, but I hope to
Christmas it'll be soon!"
Wastwood's engagement to the girl had been announced only the week
previously in the Society Columns of the leading dailies. Now, while
Wastwood's younger brother Jerry anguished in the throes of a final
Exam, at Sandhurst, the said Jerry being set upon getting a Commission
in time to go to the Front with one of the First Divisions--his elder
sat on a Club sofa and made love to the girl Jerry was subsequently to
marry. For not only Wastwood's title, but his vacant Commission as a
Lieutenant in the Dapple Greys and his sweetheart went to his junior
after Mons.
There was a lot of family and regimental re-shuffling and re-dealing,
you will remember, after Mons.
The leaven of the Great Awakening was working in the souls of these
worldly-minded, ultra-modern men and women, even as the crowd in the
rooms grew denser, as the buzz of talk became almost solid, and khaki
mingled with the brilliant toilettes. Hardly a man but wore dead-leaf
brown. Wives were entertaining their husbands, mothers were lunching
their sons, that day, at the multitudinous little tables in the great
and lesser dining-rooms,--there was a revival of old code-words, an
interchange of almost forgotten pet-names, a resurrection of ancient
jokes, when the atmosphere seemed dangerously charged with emotion. How
many Last Sacraments of renewed love were eaten and drunk by husbands
and wives who, estranged for years, were to be reunited by the War, and
parted by the War until the Day when Wars shall be no more.
That a tall young man in grey tweed with a crape armlet should sit
opposite Patrine that day at Margot's special table was one of the
thousand miracles already wrought.
Sherbrand had shelved all recollection of that June adventure in the
Bois de Boulogne, when a flushed young husband in immaculate top-hat and
frock-coat had thanked an angry young man in waterproof overalls and
gabardine for not chopping his wife into kedgeree.
Could one be angry any more when this little human dragon-fly was what
Patrine called "a frightful pal" of hers. Thank Heaven! Patrine had
known nothing of the cousinship when she had answered Sherbrand's plain
question, "Will you marry me?" with an assent:
"_Sooner than not!_"
"Then--it is settled?"
"Yes, you poor dear! If you think me worth having!"
_Worth having_! Sherbrand's glorious Patrine. Whom to be near was
heaven on earth. Whom to obey was a lover's luxury, even when she had
issued the mandate:
"Now, you must come to the Club and lunch with me, and meet my friends.
Do be decent to them!"