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 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.