*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.”