The results of the Olympic Games of 1912 must have made dour reading for the fathers of these youthful Britons, remembering their own triumphs in the early eighties. A bitter pill for those stark old men, their grandfathers, makers of 'Varsity records in '61 and '67, whose faith in the superiority of British lungs and muscles had been bequeathed them by their own sires. Yet their juniors took it calmly. They carried the stigma of inferiority with cheerful indifference. Even while holding it the thing best worth living for--they placidly submitted to be outclassed in sport.
And both the man and the woman of this era were possessed by strange crazes and pleased with vivid contrasts. The musical jig-saw puzzles of Lertes, Hein, and de Blonc vied in their favour with the weird Oriental Operas of the Russian Rimsky-Korsakov and the delicate rhapsodies of Delius, and the sylvan nymphs and fauns of Russian Ballet shared their plaudits with Senora Panchita and Herr Maxi Zuchs, the celebrated exponents of the Tango.
Ah, yes, it was an extraordinary era. Slips from that old, old Tree that bore the Forbidden Fruit had been successfully grafted upon so many old-world stocks in British orchards, that you caught a tang of its exotic flavour in almost everything. Play ran high. Luxury ran riot. Period Balls and Upas Club Cabaret Suppers were IT--absolutely IT. Morality was at lowest ebb--Religion a forgotten formulary. And as the Christian virtues cheapened, so the prices of dress, jewellery, motor-cars, and other indispensables of modern existence climbed to still more amazing altitudes. The marvel was, because nobody seemed to have any money--where the money came from to pay for these things? What we are yet to pay for the wholesale levelling of moral barriers, and the abolition of old-world modesty and good taste, that distinguished the years of ill-fame 1913 and 1914, only Heaven knows.
Even more comprehensively pervasive than the illusion perfumes extracted from coal-tar by German chemists, and supplied us by German manufacturers; even more striking than the dazzling, vivid aniline dyes, procured from the same source, even more potent than the vast array of by-product drugs which represent as it were the scum of the insulated vats wherein the Teuton chemist macerates and mingles his high explosives--was the strange, mysteriously pervasive flavour, the seductively-suggestive tang of evil in the social atmosphere. You caught the look of secret, intimate, half-cynical knowledge in the faces not only of the merest youths, but of the youngest, freshest, prettiest girls. Subjects held unmentionable a few years ago were openly discussed in English drawing-rooms. Curious lore in strange things old and new was much sought after at this period, when Cubism and Futurism governed design, not only in dress and stage scenery, but in Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture; and dances known in the voodoo-houses of East Africa and the West Indies, and the hells of Central America and the Argentine were seen in the ball-rooms as in the brothels, of Paris and London, Petrograd and Brussels, Vienna, New York, and Berlin.
Novelty was so much the rage, that if the Arch-Enemy of Mankind had appeared among the exclusive patrons of a fashionable night-club in any one of these cities, a hearty welcome would have been extended to him, and his ripe experience would have been laid under contribution with a view to imparting to the latest Cabaret entertainment some exotic novelty from Hell.
Franky with obtrusive care selected a comfortable corner of the Persian divan for Margot, and while she signed for coffee and Kuemmel, established himself at her side.
They were isolated, it seemed to Kittums. Friends nodded and smiled cordially, but did not attempt to join them. Was it because Franky's too-possessive manner had told secrets? ... She shivered and glanced at her lord. He said, as the light-footed button-boys scoured about with coffee and liqueur-trays, while the electric fans purred, the blue smoke-canopy thickened under the green and rose glass dome, and the clamour of many feminine voices, in combination with the gaudy feathers of the clamourers, suggested the South American macaw-house at the Zoo:
"My eye! you're pretty thick in here. Might be a fog in mid-Channel." He mounted a square monocle recently purchased in Paris and the pride of his bosom, threw back his head and stared up into the famous green and rose dome. "Swagger affair. How much did it tot up to?"
"Seventeen hundred, clear, with the carpet and the divan."
"Pretty stiff!" His doleful whistle set Margot's teeth on edge. She added:
"And rattling cheap at the price! And--if it wasn't, I was spending my own money.... There was nobody--then--to interfere!"
He conceded:
"Of course I don't suggest that you were done in the eye. Probably you got the value of your dibs. But you'll have something better to spend cash on presently. Me, too! We must both draw in our horns now, Kittums. For the sake of--you know who! ... Hullo! Is anything wrong?"
She had winced, but she gritted her little teeth, and fought back the rising hysteria. She could have shrieked, or thrown the little coffee-pot at his head. He went on, recognising friends through the smoke-haze:
"There's Lady Beau with that German aviator-chap we met in Paris. Big red-headed brute. You remember him? And--who's the girl? But for her hair, I'd say it was Miss Saxham. By the Great Brass Hat, it is! With a wig, or dyed...."
"Dyed. It was done in Paris--done most beautifully." Margot's eyes had lighted up with interest. "I must have forgotten to tell you. I've known it three or four days. Don't you like it?"
"Like it?" Franky had reached for his little glass and gulped the contents hurriedly. "My stars, I never saw such a transformation. Order another Kuemmel, please, to give me a buck-up."
"Take mine. I simply loathe the sticky stuff." She added, as Franky obliged: "_I_ think that Pat looks ripping."
"All too ripping. That's where the trouble comes in." He went on: "When her hair was black, you knew where it was you'd seen her. Makin' one in an endless procession of women--all with long eyes and big busts and curving hips, walkin'--like pussy-cats along a roof-ridge, on the walls of those old Egyptian temples we did together--that November when I got such spoons on you--going up with the Gillinghams from Cairo to Philae--a flat-bottomed Nile tug towin' the whole crowd in a string of dahabeahs. You remember those ochre-coloured Nile sunrises? When a dust-storm had been blowin' over the Desert, and the River was all wrinkly white, like curdled milk."
"How killingly poetic!"
"Am I poetic? Good egg! Never thought I'd live to be called that."
"Live and learn!" Margot's laugh was a hard little silvery tinkle. She too was remembering the sunrises and sunsets of Egypt, and the long days under the green canvas awnings. How beautiful she had thought the brown eyes that seemed only vacuous now. She, Margot, would be ugly very soon now, she told herself. Already her small face showed lines and hollows. Soon beauty-loving men and women would turn their eyes away.... Her cheval-glass would tell her why, and shop-windows when she passed them would reveal her shapelessness. She would only possess interest for three people. For the doctor, as a patient. For the certificated nurse, as a Case. For her husband, as the potential mother of the boy he longed for. And--what price Margot?
"Should you like me to take you to see some polo, or wouldn't a chuff-chuff in the country be best?" Franky's eyes were full of hungry solicitude as they rested on the small, pinched features. "You look a bit fagged, it strikes me!"
She nipped her little lower lip, stung by the tone of sympathetic proprietorship. "Oh! very well. A drive!" she told him, and they passed together from the smoking-room. The sheath-skirt revealed, as she moved, what she would have hidden. Von Herrnung smiled, following the little figure with bold, curious glances. Other men stared, if more discreetly. Towering feathers nodded to each other as their feminine wearers commented:
"Poor little Margot, how quite too rough on her!"
Said Lady Beauvayse, assuming the rip-saw Yankee accent in which it pleased her to deliver her witticisms:
"Say now! if we women could pick babies right away off the strawberry-vines, it would save a deal of trouble, and a considerable pile of self-respect."
Everybody laughed. A slender white and golden woman with a string of sapphires very much the colour of her own eyes, picked up a toy Pekingese that squatted near her, and said, cuddling the goggling morsel under her chin:
"I agree. When I look at my two precious duckies I say to myself: 'You little dears, for each of your sweet sakes I became a plain woman with a shapeless silhouette and saucer-eyes. Now that I've done my duty to your pappy and Posterity, this is the only kind of baby I'll indulge in." She kissed the Pekingese on the end of its black snub-nose. "And when I want a new one--I'll buy it at the shop!"