That Which Hath Wings: A Novel of the Day
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