That Which Hath Wings: A Novel of the Day
raised traceries all over it, suggesting outline maps of countries in
Fairyland, Franky curiously regarded his wife. He said:
"Why are you and all your friends so funky of--what's only a natural
phe--what do you call it? ... What do men and women marry for, if it
isn't to have--children? ... Perhaps you'll answer me?"
"What do people marry for?" Margot regarded him indignantly over the
neglected pyramid of luscious, tempting strawberries, "To--to be happy
together--to have a clinking time!" Her voice shook. "And this is to
be a gorgeous season. Balls--balls! right on from now to the end of
July--then from the autumn all through winter. Period Costume Balls,
reviving the modes, music, and manners of Ancient
Civilisations--Carthagenian, Assyrian, Babylonian, Gothic--got up and
arranged by the Committees of the Cercle Moderne, here in Paris, and in
London by the New Style Club.... Tony Guisseguignol and Paul Peigault
and their set are busy designing the dresses and decorations--nothing
like them will ever have been seen! And--Peigault says--Tango and the
Maxixe are to be chucked to the little cabbages. A new dance is coming
from Sao Paulo that will simply wipe them out.... And now--just when I
was looking forward--when everything was to have been so splendid----"
The shaking voice choked upon a note of anguish. Franky had picked up
the melon, quite unconsciously, and was balancing it. At this juncture
he gripped the green globe with both hands, and said, summoning all his
courage to meet the agonised appeal of Margot's tear-drenched eyes:
"Look here. This is--strict Bridge.... Do you loathe 'em--the
kiddies--so horribly that the idea of having any is hateful to you? Or
is it--not only the--the veto it puts on larking and kickabout and--the
temporary disfigurement--you're afraid of--but the--the--the inevitable
pain?" He glanced round cautiously and looked back again at his wife,
saying in a low voice: "Nobody's listening.... Tell me frankly...." He
waited an instant, and then said in an urgent whisper. "Answer me! ...
For God's sake, tell the frozen truth, Margot!"
*CHAPTER III*
*FAIR ROSAMOND'S CHOICE*
The terrace under Nadier's roses--dotted with little tables covered with
napery, silver, crystal, and china, surrounded with laughing, chattering
feasters--the terrace was no longer a scene out of a comedy of the
lighter side of Parisian life.... Tragedy, pale and awe-inspiring in her
ink-black mantle and purple chiton, had stepped across the gravel in her
gold-buckled leather buskins, to offer to the girlish bride--a piece of
human porcelain, prinked in the height of the fashion, and lovely--with
her wild-rose cheeks and little uptilted nose, her floss-silk hair and
wide, dark, lustrous deer-eyes--Fair Rosamond's choice, the dagger or
the bowl....
"Yes--yes.... It is the ugliness of the thing! ..." The little mouth
was pulled awry as though it had sipped of verjuice. The tiny hands
knotted themselves convulsively, and the colour fled in terror from her
face. "The grotesque ugliness.... And the"--the last two words came as
though a pang had wrung them from the pale lips--"the pain--the awful
pain! And besides--my mother died when I was born!" Margot's voice was
a fluttering, appealing whisper; her great eyes were dilated and wild
with terror. "Perhaps that is why I am so deadly afraid"--she caught her
breath--"but there are heaps, heaps, _heaps_ of married women who
fear--_that_--equally! And they arrange to escape it--I don't know how!
... For I knew--nothing--when I married you! ..." She lifted her great
eyes to Franky's, and he realised that it had been so, actually. "I've
been ashamed ever to confess that I was--ignorant about these things!
... I've talked a language--amongst other women--that I didn't
understand! ..."
There are moments when even the shallow-brained become clairvoyant.
Franky's love for her made him see clear. He looked back down the vista
of Margot's twenty years of existence, and saw her the motherless
daughter of a self-absorbed, cultivated, Art-loving valetudinarian, who
habitually spent the chillier part of each year in ranging from French
to Italian health-resorts, occupying the spring with Art in
Paris--returning to London for June and July, generally spending August
and September in Devonshire--to take flight Southwards before the
migrating swallows, at the first chill breath of October frosts.
Margot had been educated at home, down in Devonshire, by a series of
certificated female tutors. The spinster aunt, the younger sister of
her father, extended to her niece for a liberal remuneration a nominal
protection and an indifferent care.... And Mr. Mountjohn had died when
the girl was sixteen, leaving her unconditionally heiress to his
considerable fortune, and the aunt had let Margot have her head in every
imaginable way. She had allowed her to take up her residence at the
"Ladies' Social" Club three years subsequently, on the sole condition
that a responsible chaperon accompanied Margot to Society functions.
Hence, Mrs. Ponsonby Rewes, the irreproachable widow of a late King's
Messenger, was evoked from Kensington Tower Mansions upon these
occasions--by telephone--to vanish when no longer wanted, in the
discreetest and most obliging way.
"Poor little Margot! .... Poor little woman!..." Franky could see how
it all had happened by the wild light of the great deer-eyes, so like
those in the portrait of the girl's dead mother--half Irish, half Greek
by birth.
While Franky reflected, the tables had been emptying. People were
hurrying away to hear the band of the Jardin d'Acclimatation or to
fulfil other engagements of a seasonable kind. Some remained to smoke
and gossip over liqueurs and coffee. The light blue wreaths of cigar
and cigarette smoke curled up towards the awning overhead. Franky
mechanically produced his own case and lighted up. And Margot,
stretching a slender arm across the table, was saying:
"Give me one!--I've forgotten mine! ..."
"Ought you? ... Is it wise? ..." Franky was on the point of asking, but
his good Angel must have clapped a hand before his mouth. He silently
gave Margot a thick, masculine Sobranie and supplied a light; and as
their young faces neared and the red spark glowed, and the first
smoke-wreath rose between the approximating tubes of delicate
tobacco-filled paper, his wife whispered as their eyes met:
"You're hurt! But now you know--you're sorry for me, aren't you?" It
was a dragging, plaintive undertone, not at all like Margot's voice.
"Frightfully! All the more because"--Franky drew so hard at his
cigarette that it burned one-sidedly--"I can't help being
thundering--glad!"
"I--see! ..."
She breathed out the words with a thin stream of fragrant Turkish vapour
crawling over her scarlet under-lip, it seemed to Franky, like a pale
blue worm. And he bit through his Sobranie and threw it on his
dessert-plate, saying desperately:
"Not yet. Will you listen quietly to what I've got to say?"
She nodded. Franky launched himself upon the tide of revelation.
Nearly everybody who had been eating when he had come into Nadier's with
Margot had got up and gone away. And the Cuirassiers band was playing
the love-music from _Samson et Dalila_ on the terrace of the Jardin
d'Acclimatation, as melodiously as only a French military band can play.
"It's got to do with the Peerage. Only a Second Afghan War-Earldom
dating from 1879--tacked on to the Viscounty they gave my
great-grandfather after Badajos--but worth having in its way, or the Dad
wouldn't have accepted it. And, naturally enough--I want a boy to take
the Viscounty when I succeed my father, and have the Earldom when I've
absquatulated, just as the kiddy'll want one when his own time comes."
Margot was burning a strawberry-leaf on her plate with her
cigarette-end. She asked, impressing another little yellow scorched
circle on the surface of rough green:
"Would it matter so very much if there wasn't any boy?"
Franky jumped and turned red to the white, unsunned circle left by the
field-cap on the summit of his high forehead.
"It would matter--lots! For my Uncle Sherbrand, a younger brother of my
father's, would come in for the Viscounty when I succeeded the dear old
Dad. And my Uncle Sherbrand is a blackguard! Got cashiered in 1900,
when he was an Artillery officer in a gun-testing billet at Wanwich.
Kicked out of the Army--in War-time, mind you!--for not backing up his
C.O. And the brute has got a son, too, an apprentice in an engine-shop,
if he isn't actually a chauffeur. Probably the young fellow's
respectable, and of course it ain't the pup's fault he's got such a
sire. But my Dad would turn in his grave at the idea of being succeeded
by the brother who disgraced him--and as for _his_ grandfather--the
jolly old cock 'ud bally well get up and dance, I should say.... So,
you see, I can't--sympathise with you as you want me to do in this,
darling! I want you to buck up and be cheerful, and face the music like
a brick.... As for what you've told me--about your mother----" In
spite of himself, Franky gulped, and little shiny beads of sweat stood
upon his cheeks and temples. "That sort of thing doesn't run in
families, like rheumatism"--he was getting idiotic--"or Roman noses! Be
plucky--and everything will turn out all right. Can't possibly go wrong
if we call in Saxham ... Saxham of 000, Harley Street--man my sister
Trix simply swears by. Brought her boy Ronald into the world thirteen
years ago, and successfully operated on him for appendicitis only the
other day! ..."
Margot looked at Franky attentively and bent her head slightly. Had she
understood? She must have.... Had she tacitly agreed? Of course....
*CHAPTER IV*
*RAYMOND OF THE S. AE. F.*
The Masculine Will had conquered. You had only to be firm with
women--bless their hearts! and they caved directly.... Couldn't hold
out.... Not built that way.... Franky's sternly-clamped upper-lip
relaxed. He beamed as he proposed a noonday stroll in the Bois. In the
direction of the bigger Lake, by one of the narrower avenues, or if
Margot preferred a look-in at the Polo Club, another avenue,
intersecting the Allee de Longchamps and skirting the enclosure of the
Gun Club, would take them there in a jiffy, _via_ Bagatelle.
Margot assented to the latter proposition, and, with a little flutter of
the lips Franky accepted as a smile, reached for her egret stole, a
filmy feathery thing she had removed on entering Nadier's, and drew on
her long mousquetaire gloves and pulled down her veil of sunset
_chiffon_, half shaded red, merging into jonquil yellow matching the
shade of her marvellous gown. And Franky paid the bill in plump English
sovereigns (invariably exchanged as good for louis of twenty francs by
the suave and smiling waiter) and tipped the said waiter extravagantly,
and took his hat from the second waiter (who invariably starts up by the
side of the first when you are going) and tipped him, and got his stick
from the third waiter (who came forward with this, and the _en tout cas_
of Madame--a lovely thing in the latest dome-shape, of black net over
jonquil colour, with a flounce, and an ivory stick, upon the top of
which sat a green monkey in olivines, eating a ruby fruit), and lighted
another cigarette, and returned the elaborate bow of the manager with a
nod of the cheerful patronising order as he followed Margot through the
Rambler-wreathed archway leading by a flight of shallow steps from
Nadier's terrace to the wide carriage-sweep that links the broad Allee