Chapter V: Part 5

When Saxham lifted up his ashen face and looked at the portrait in the third leaf of the triptych frame and met the clear, candid gaze of his son's blue eyes, you know what he was seeking, and praying not to find.

To have given Lynette a drunkard for her son would be the most terrible penalty that could be exacted by merciless Nature for those five sodden, wasted years.

Ah! to have had a clean, unspotted life to share with Bawne's fair mother. That his priceless pearl of womanhood should gleam upon a drunkard's hand--his spotless Convent lily have opened to fullest bloom in a drunkard's holding, had been from the outset of their married life, verjuice in Saxham's cup by day, and a thorn in his pillow by night.

But never before had it occurred to the man of science, the great surgeon, the learned biologist, that relentless Nature might be saving up for him, Saxham, a special rod in saltest brine.

Bawne.... He sat in silence with set teeth, asking himself the bitter question:

"How could I have forgotten--Bawne?"

*CHAPTER XIX*

*BAWNE*

As so often happens, the thought of the beloved heralded his well-known thump upon the door-panel. When had the Dop Doctor ever cried, "Come in!" with such a leaden sinking of the heart?

The boy who came in was alert, upright, slim, and strong for his twelve years. You saw him attired in the dress with which we are all familiar--the loose shirt of khaki-brown, with its knotted silk neckerchief of dark blue, the lanyards ending in clasp-knife and whistle, the roomy shorts upheld by a brown leather pouch-belt supporting a serviceable axe, the dark blue stockings turned over at the knee, fitting close to the slim muscular legs, the light strong shoes, the brown smasher hat with the chin-strap, completed the picture of a Scout of whom no patrol need be ashamed. He carried his light staff at the trail, and entering, brought it to an upright position, and saluted smartly. The salute formally acknowledged, he came straight to the table and stood at his father's elbow, waiting, as Saxham feigned to blot a written line. Outwardly composed, the drumming of the man's heart deafened him, and a mist before his eyes blurred the page they were bent upon. Fatherhood gripped him by the throat as in the first moment of his son's separate existence. A thing we prize is never so poignantly precious as when we contemplate the possibility of its ruin or loss.

"Father, you aren't generally pleased when I come bothering you in consulting hours, but this time it is really serious business, no kid, and Honour bright!"

Saxham answered with equal gravity:

"If you have a reasonable excuse for coming, I have said that you may come."

The boy was like him. You saw it as he stood waiting. The vivid gentian-blue eyes were Saxham's, as were the thick throat and prominent under-jaw and the square facial outline. But the plume of hair that swept over the broad forehead was red-brown like Lynette's. The delicate, irregular profile and a sensitive sweetness about the lips were gifts from his mother. The directness of his look, and the tinge of brusqueness in his speech were unconsciously modelled on the father's, as he said, sacrificing sufficient of manly independence to come within the curve of the Doctor's strong arm:

"First, I wanted to show you my new badge."

Saxham's left hand squeezed the arm most distant from him, where a familiar device was displayed upon the sleeve, midway, between the shoulder and elbow, below the six-inch length of colours distinctive of this Scout's Patrol.

"Turn round and show it, then!"

"Father, you're larking. That's my General Scout Badge. I've had it ever since I passed my Second Class tests. Before then, you know, when I was a Tenderfoot, I'd only the top-part--the _fleur-de-lis_ without the motto, and you wear that in your left pocket button-hole. But this is something special, don't you see?"

Saxham eyed the row of little enamelled circles on the sleeve next him with respectful gravity. The boy went on, trying to control the gleeful tremor in his voice:

"I've got the Ambulance Badge!--look at the Geneva Cross!--and the Signaller's Badge--this is it--with the crossed flags--and the Interpreter's Badge--the one with the two hands holding. But this is the very latest. Our Scoutmaster gave it to me after parade to-day. It's the Airman's Badge--" He caught his breath, the secret was coming in a moment.... He went on: "To get it you must have made a model aeroplane. Not a flying-stick, any kid of nine can make one--but a model that will really fly. That's my special reason for coming. Mother was out--and--and next to her I wanted to tell you!"

"And next after me?"

The boy considered a moment before he looked up to answer:

"Cousin Pat, because she can keep a secret so tightly."

Saxham patted the sturdy square shoulders.

"You are fond of Cousin Patrine, aren't you?"

"Rather!"

"Just tell me why?"

"Because"--the young brows were puckered--"because she's so big and so--beautiful. And she'd just die for you and Mother.... She comes in my prayers next after you two."

"And--the Chief Scout?"

"Father, wouldn't it be--a bit cheeky to go and pray for a man like that?"

A spark of laughter wakened in Saxham's sombre eyes.

"Not quite respectful, you think? Is that it? Why so, when you're taught to pray for the Holy Father, Mother Church, and the King and Queen?"

The boy's puckered brows smoothed. The question was settled.

"Of course. I forgot. Then the Chief Scout must come in after Cousin Patrine. Because a gentleman must always give place to a lady. That's what Mother says."

"Suppose Cousin Patrine never came to see you any more, what would you do then?"

Bawne straightened the sturdy body and proclaimed:

"I would go and find her and bring her back!"

"Suppose she did not want to come?"

Bawne said instantly:

"I would tell her Mother was wanting her. For Mother would be, you know. And Cousin Pat wouldn't keep her waiting. Not much, sir, she wouldn't!"

"She cares so?"

"Doesn't she! Why, have you forgotten when I was a little shaver and Mother was so ill?"

Saxham, with a certain tightening of the muscles of the throat, recalled the wan, red-eyed spectre that had haunted the landing outside the guarded bedroom where Lynette lay, white and strengthless, while her husband fought for her with Death.

"Well, well. Go on loving Patrine and praying for her! Now tell me of your model."

The boy said, controlling his exultation:

"It has to be left at our District Headquarters until to-morrow. You see--it's rather a special affair. It's not a flying stick, like the things I used to make when I was a shaver, nor a glider--you see men in spectacles flying those every day to please the kids on Hampstead Heath and in Kensington Gardens, but a model of a Bristol monoplane with a span of thirty inches, and a main-plane-area of a hundred and fifty"--he caught his breath and with difficulty kept his eager words from tumbling over one another as he reached the thrilling climax--"and I built up her fuselage with cardboard and sticking-plaster out of the First Aid case you gave me to carry in my belt-pouch, and cut the propeller out of a tin toy engine I've had ever since I was a kid--and made the planes of big sheets of stiff foolscap strengthened with thin strips of glued wood, and her spars, sir!--the upright ones are quills, and her stays and struts I made of copper wire and she's weighted with lead ribbon like what you wrap about the gut when you're bottom-fishing for tench or barbel--and her motor-power is eighteen inches of square elastic twisted--and father"--he broke into a war-dance of ecstasy unrestrained--"when Roddy Wrynche and me went on a secret expedition to Primrose Hill to test her--she flew, sir! First go-off--by George!"

"Really flew? ... You are certain?"

"Upon my life, sir, and that's my Honour. Scout's Honour and life are the same thing. That's what the Oath rubs into us." He squared his shoulders and lowered his voice as a boy speaking of high matters that must be dealt with reverently. "I think it's--ripping. I can say it. Would you like me to?"

Saxham nodded without speaking, because of that choking something sticking in his throat. That something Lear called "the mother." And, dammed away behind his eyes, were scalding tears that only men may shed. As the young voice said:

"On my Honour I promise that I will do my best to be loyal to God and the King.

"On my Honour I promise that I will do my best to Help other people at all times.

"On my Honour I promise that I will do my best to obey the Scout Law.... You see"--the boyish arm was on Saxham's shoulder now, the ruddy-fair cheek pressed against the pale, close-shaven face--"you see, Father, when a Scout says 'On my Honour' it's just as if he swore on the Crucifix!"

Saxham said, crushing down the fierce emotion that had almost mastered him:

"It is--just the same! For the man who breaks a promise will never keep an oath.... I have a friend of whom I have told you.... I think he would like to hear about your model aeroplane.... May I tell him, or would you prefer to tell him yourself?"

Bawne's fair face glowed. He gasped in ecstasy:

"_Father_.... You mean Mr. Sherbrand--your Flying Man who's in the Hospital?"

"My Flying Man--but he is well again and back at work at Hendon. There was not much the matter with him; a slight obstruction in one of the nasal passages that prevented him from breathing with his mouth shut as he should. Now he has asked me--this afternoon if I am at leisure--to bring my little son to the aerodrome and see him make a flight."

"And go up in his aeroplane with him? Father, say Yes! Do, please do!"

As the little figure bobbed up and down beside him in joyous excitement, Saxham answered, not without an inward tug:

"If your mother says 'Yes' I shall not say No! Now off with you, my son!"

The boy saluted and went. Even his bright obedience wrung his father's heart. The man looked haggard and old. He hid his careworn face in his hands for a minute. His lips were still moving when he looked up and made the Sign so well known to many of us upon his forehead and breast. Prayer, that most powerful of all therapeutic agents, so often prescribed by Saxham for his patients, was his own tonic and sedative in moments of bodily exhaustion and mental overstrain.

He had prayed, he, the sceptic, on that unforgettable night at Gueldersdorp, when he wrestled with his possessing fiend.... Lynette had taught him the habit of prayer. And even as she, a friendless, neglected waif, had learned to look up and see the shining Faces of our Divine Redeemer and His Virgin Mother through the features of a pure and tender woman; so her husband, looking in the eyes of Lynette, had found the gift of Faith lost years before.

"Oh! ... Prayer!" you say--"Faith!" ... and I see you shrug and sneer a little, you who are intellectual and highly educated, and have ceased to believe in what you term the Hebraic myth or the Christian legend--since you learned to point out the weak places in the First Book of Genesis, and sneer at the discrepancies between the statements of the Gospel narrators--though you will hear such testimonies sworn to in good faith, wherever witnesses are examined in a Court of Law.

But no! you tell me, you are not an Agnostic. You credit the existence of Almighty God, but prayer is the parson's affair. Well, because a man wears a straight black coat, will you abandon to him so inestimable a privilege? Is it not a marvellous thing that you or I should lift up our earth-made, earth-begrimed hands, and that He who set this tiny planet to spin out its aeons of cycles amidst the innumerable millions of systems wheeling through His Universe should stoop to hear the words we utter? Feeble cries, drowned by the orchestras of the winds, and the chorus of the Spheres revolving in their orbits, or silent utterances imperceptible to any Ear save His alone.

*CHAPTER XX*

*THE MODERN HIPPOCRATES*

Patients rapidly succeeded one another in the chair that faced the window. There were confirmed invalids who were really healthy men and women, and certain others who came in smilingly to talk about the weather and the newest Russian Opera, who bore upon their faces the unmistakable stamp of mortal disease. The wife or the husband, the father or the mother had worried for nothing.... Would the Doctor prescribe a little tonic to buck them, or the surgeon alleviate a little trouble of the local kind? Really nothing--but--Death's knock at the door. And there were cases--open or unacknowledged--of the liquor-habit and the drug-mania. To these, instead of dropping out bromide of potassium and throwing in the chloral hydrates with strychnine and the chloride of the metal that is crushed and assayed out of the quartz reef near Johannesburg, or pick-axed out of the frozen ground of the Klondyke, Saxham dealt out that savage tonic Truth, in ladlesful.

The secret dipsomaniac or druggard could not deceive this man's keen scrutiny, or escape his unerring diagnosis. When, beaten, they admitted the fact, Saxham said to them as to the others:

"You say you cannot conquer the craving. I myself once thought so. Your moral power can be restored, even as was mine. In your case the habit is barely as ingrained as in the case I quote to you. I drank alcohol to excess for a period of five years."

Some of the sufferers--elderly women and mild-mannered old gentlemen--were horrified. Others thought such candour brutal--but attractively so. Yet others responded to the sympathy masked by the stern, impassive face, and the blunt, brusque manner.

"At any rate the man's no humbug!" such and such an one would stutter. "And seems to have any amount of Will. Think I shall put myself in his hands for a bit." Adding with a rueful twinkle: "He knows how the dog bites, if anyone does!"

He did, and those hands of his were strong, prompt and unfaltering. Since the grip of human sympathy had fastened on the Dop Doctor of Gueldersdorp, and drawn him up out of the depths into sunlight and free air, and set his feet once more on the firm ground, how many of his fellow-sufferers had Saxham not hauled reeking and squelching out of the abysmal sludge, whose secrets shall only be revealed upon the Last Day.

Yet Saxham realised that the grand majority of these twentieth-century men and women really wanted little more of the physician and surgeon than the thirteenth-century patient desired of the apothecary or the leech. A patient hearing given to their category of evils--a little hocus-pocus, and a nostrum or so.

We scoff, thought Saxham, at the ignorance of those men of the Dark Ages, yet in this enlightened era the eye of newt and toe of frog, the salted earthworms, and the _Pulvis Bezoardicus Magistralis_ or _Pulvis Sanctus_, dissolved in the liquor of herbs gathered under a propitious conjunction of their ruling planets with the Moon--have but given place to extract of the dried thyroid gland of the sheep, the ovaries of the guinea-pig, the spinal cord and brain of rabbits and mice and other small mammalia, with--instead of broth of vipers, liquor distilled from the parotid secretion of the tropical toad; identical with the reptile administered in boluses to Pagan patients by the Greek Hippocrates. With other remedies hideously akin to the hell-brews that whipped the sated desires of Tiberius and Nero.... Such as the pastelloids frequently prescribed by bland-mannered, frock-coated, twentieth-century physicians--professing Christians who pay West-End pew-rents, and deplore the abnormal drop in the birth-rate--for the spurring of the sense of debilitated Hedonists.

Thus, summed Saxham, we have rediscovered Organotherapy. We have harnessed the bacillus to Hygeia's silver chariot. In Surgery the Short Circuit is the latest word. It is wonderful to know how well one can get on, at a pinch, without organs hitherto deemed indispensable to existence. Radiology reveals to us the inner mysteries of the human machine, alive and palpitating. The splintered bone, the bullet or the shell-splinter embedded in the muscle or the osseous structure, can be detected and photographed by the teleradiographic apparatus. The electro-magnet automatically carried out the removal of such fragments, provided only that they are of steel. Ah yes! We are very clever in this twentieth century, reflected the Dop Doctor. Modern Science has even weighed the Soul.

Could Dee and Lilly have bettered that? Debate--consider.... This quenchless spark of Being, kindled in Saxham's breast and in yours and mine by the Supreme Will of the Divine Creator--this Ego for whose eternal salvation Christ died upon the bitter Cross, dips the scale at precisely one-sixteenth of an ounce avoirdupois. The expiring man, weighed a moment previously to dissolution, and again immediately afterwards, was found to have lost so much and no more.

The dying world is in the scales to-day, thought Saxham, bitterly and sorrowfully. Religious Faith being the soul of the world, one wonders, when the last thin hymn shall have died upon the fierce irrespirable air; when the last human sigh shall have exhaled from Earth, how much in ponderability shall be lacking to the acorn-shaped lump of whirling matter. Will the result proportionate with the moribund's sixteenth of an ounce?

It seemed to Saxham, that without a moral and social upheaval upon a vaster scale than historian ever recorded or visionary ever dreamed; a cataclysmic cleansing, a purging as by fire; the regeneration of the human race, the reconstitution of the human mind, the renaissance of the Divine Ideal, could never be brought about. Unconsciously he sought for the decadent world some such ordeal as he himself had passed through. You looked at him and saw the scars of suffering. The soil of his nature had been rent by volcanic convulsions and seared by the upburst of fierce abysmal fires, before the green herb clothed the sides of the frowning steeps, the jagged peaks were wreathed with gentle clouds; the pure springs gathered and ran; the valleys became fruitful and the plains carpeted themselves with flowers.

A miracle had been wrought for Saxham the Man, and he saw the need of one for the World, and said in his heart that, though holy men might pray, it would not, could not, ever be vouchsafed. And all the while the miracle was ripening, the Day was coming, the Great Awakening was at hand.

*CHAPTER XXI*

*MARGOT LOOKS IN*

It drew on to the luncheon hour. The last patient a very young, very little, very pretty married woman, was summoned by the neat maid from the waiting-room, in a remote corner of which a husband of military type and ordinarily cheerful countenance, remained, maintaining with obvious effort a fictitious interest in the pages of a remote issue of _Punch_.

The dainty little lady bore a name well known to Saxham. The fact that a title was attached to it did not interest him, nor had it shortened her term of waiting by a second of the clock. But her youth smote him with a sense of pity as she took the chair upon his left hand facing the window, and without overmuch embarrassment made clear her case.

She was going to have a baby. Franky, her husband, earnestly desired the kiddie for family reasons, yet its advent was unwelcome to him, in that it must inevitably involve physical pain and mental anxiety for the little lady, Franky's wife.

The little lady had been frightfully downed by the prospect. She rather cottoned to kiddies, she explained, than otherwise. It was the bother of having them that didn't appeal. It put everything in the cart as regarded the Autumn Season. Besides--there were family reasons on her side, why the prospect should not be too rosy. She stated the reasons, and Saxham's listening face grew grave. He realised the danger of a Preconceived Idea.

He said nothing. Margot went on talking. Her beautiful deer-eyes were alternately wistful and coaxing. They entreated sympathy. They begged for gentleness. They grew brilliant with enthusiasm as she explained that after a lot of chinning, she and Franky had hit upon a perfectly ripping plan.

A friend, recently encountered in Paris, had thrown a ray of hope upon the doubtful prospect. No doubt Dr. Saxham was in sympathy with the pioneers of the New Crusade against Unnecessary Pain.... Of course, Dr. Saxham knew all about the wonderful experiments of German gynaewhatdoyoucall'ems. The right term was frightfully crack-jaw. Perhaps Dr. Saxham knew what was meant?

Saxham reassured the little lady.

"You refer of course to the experiments of Professors von Wolfenbuchel of Vienna, and Krauss of the Berlin _Fraueenklinik_, resulting in the method of treatment now known throughout the Continent as 'Purple Dreams.' Wolfenbuchel and Krauss have published a pamphlet on the subject. Perhaps you have read the pamphlet?"

"Yes--I've read it. A wonderful book that has been translated into every language. A German officer, friend of a friend I met in Paris, told her about it. His sister had tried the treatment, and found it A1. So I bought a French translation of the book in Paris, and an English one at a shop in the Haymarket. It's bound in rose-coloured vellum stamped with a rising sun in gold. 'Weep No More, Mothers!' it's called. Isn't that a charming title? And the subject is: 'Pangless Childbirth, Produced through Purple Dreams.'"

In a sweet, coaxing voice that trembled a little, she began to tell the Doctor about the wonderful results obtained by hypodermics of Krauss and Wolfenbuechel's marvellous combination of drugs. And Saxham hearkened with stern patience, while the table-clock ticked and the luncheon hour drew near, and Franky chewed the cud of suspense in the Doctor's waiting-room.

Thousands of peasant women, and others of the lower middle-class in Germany had become mothers under the Purple Dreams treatment. Maternity Hospitals in Paris, Brussels, and New York had adopted the method after controversy and hesitation. It had triumphed over every doubt. An American woman whose brother's wife had had a "Purple Dreams" baby at the Berlin Institute had told the little narrator only yesterday how quite too wonderful was the discovery of the enlightened Krauss and the gifted Wolfenbuchel. Everything was made easy. When your ordeal drew near you simply went to the place, and signed your name in a book, and put yourself in the hands of skilled persons. You felt no pain--not a twinge. Only the prick and throb of the hypodermic needle-syringe, and most people were used to the _pique_ nowadays--administering the first subcutaneous injections of the wonderful new drug.... Under its mild sedative influence you dozed off to sleep presently. And when you woke up--there was the baby--beautifully dressed, and lying on a lace pillow in the arms of a smartly dressed, fresh-cheeked nurse.

This had been the experience of the sister of the German officer, as of the wife of the brother of the American lady. The same thing happening to thousands everywhere. The philanthropic Wolfenbuchel and the benevolent Krauss had made of the stony Via Dolorosa by which Womanhood attains maternity--a path of soft green turf bordered with fragrant lilies and bestrewn with the perfumed petals of the rose.

She ended. Saxham had kept his keen blue eyes steadily upon her during the eloquent recital. Not a hair of his black brows had twitched, not a muscle of his pale face had moved--betraying his urgent inclination to smile. His fine hand, lying upon the blotter near the small black case-book, might have been carved out of ancient Spanish ivory, or yellow-white lava. Now he said:

"There is nothing new nor marvellous about the 'Dreams' method. It is--persistent narcosis obtained from the subcutaneous injections of morphine with the hydrobromide of hyoscine, another alkaloid obtained from henbane. I have visited not only the Institute at Berlin, but the Rottburg Fraueenklinik--and an establishment of the same type in Paris, and another in Brussels. It is a fact that when a patient awakens from the anaesthesia there is no recollection of anything that has taken place subsequently to the injection of the drug."

"There has been no pain. Absolutely--none whatever!" She spoke with a little, joyful catch in her breath.

"Pardon me," said Saxham. "You labour under a delusion which the rose-coloured pamphlet was not written to dispel. There must have been pain--if there has been childbirth. Perhaps there has been overwhelming pain. Pain manifested by outcries and convulsions--violent struggles--subdued by the attendants and nurses--for the friends and relatives of the patient are rigidly excluded--the patient enters and leaves the Home alone. Two or three days may have vanished in that vacuum which has been created in her memory. Days in which she has been lying--it may be--strapped to the bed in the private ward of the nursing home--her purple, congested face and staring eyes concealed by a mask of wetted linen--her agonies only witnessed by paid attendants whose interests are best served by denial or concealment--supposing anything to have gone wrong?"

The relentless surgeon's hand had torn away the painted curtain. Margot contemplated the grim truth in silence for a moment. Then she found words:

"But nothing ever _does_ go wrong. The pink pamphlet says so. My American friend's sister-in-law says so.... Thousands of women have had children under scopolo--what's its name? And none of them felt pain--not the slightest. And in every case--in _every_ case--there was the baby when they woke up!"

The sweet bird-voice quivered. She had entered the room so full of hope and enthusiasm, and this man with the piercing eyes and the brusque, direct manner was putting things before her in a way that dashed and damped. Hear him now:

"Yes, there is generally a baby--when it is necessary there should be one. Though the patients who are treated in the free wards of German and Austrian _Kliniks_ may not always be scrupulous upon this point. Still, if the treatment can be carried out without undue peril for the mother--and I do not allow this for a single moment--have you not considered the risk for the child?"

Margot had pulled off one long glove. Now she murmured, setting the tip of a little bare, jewelled finger near the corner of a distracting little mouth:

"You consider that it's handicapping the start for--the kiddie?"

The avalanche fell; shocking and freezing and stunning her.

"Ask yourself, Lady Norwater, and do not forget to ask your husband: Will a healthy or a degenerate type of man or woman be eventually reared from an infant in whom the springs of Life have been deliberately poisoned with henbane and morphia--before its entrance into the world?"

She gasped:

"Then it's all U.P.?" She was slangy even in her tragic misery. She sought in her gold vanity-bag and produced the envelope that held the cheque, but Saxham waved it away.

"Pray put that back.... Neither from rich nor poor do I accept unearned money. You have not really consulted me. You have asked my opinion upon a course of treatment. And I have given it, for what it is worth. You will go home, and tell your husband that I have talked tosh, and consult another physician."

"No, I won't!" She said it bravely. "I want you to prescribe!"

"If I prescribe," Saxham told her, "you shall certainly fee me. But you do not need treatment." His eyes smiled though his mouth did not relax its grimness, as he added: "You strike me as being in excellent health."

She owned to feeling "top-hole," first-class, and simply awfully beany! Though, and her dimple faded as she owned it, the thought of what must happen in November took "the gilt off the gingerbread."

"Do not think of what is going to happen in November," Saxham advised her. "Or teach yourself to think of it in the right way." The sense of her childishness and inexperience went home to the sensitive quick beneath the man's hard exterior, as she said to him with an unconsciously appealing accent:

"But how am I to find out what is the right way?"

He had gained upon her confidence. The admission proved it. With infinite tact he began to win yet another woman to drain out her chalice of Motherhood, untinctured with the druggist's nepenthe,--to gain for the race yet another babe unmarred before its birth. For this end no labour was too great for Saxham. A crank you may call him, but that cranks of this type are the leaven of the world, you know.

It is typical of the human butterfly Saxham dealt with, that his clothes pleased Margot. She liked their characteristic mingling of elegance with simplicity. Some fashionable doctors got themselves up like elderly bloods, others affected garments dating from the year One. There was neither perfume upon Saxham's handkerchief nor flue upon his coat-sleeve. His shirt of soft white cashmere, his slightly starched linen cuffs and narrow double collar were fastened with plain buttons of mother o' pearl, the black silk necktie was blameless of pin or ring. The handsome gold chronometer he carried because it had been presented to him by the Staff and patients of St. Teresa and St. Stanislaus. The chain attached to it--rather worn and shabby now--was of woven red-brown hair.

The hair of his wife. A creamy-pale Niphetos rose stood where her hands had placed it near his writing-pad, in a tall, slender beaker of green-and-gold Venetian glass. His eyes drank at the beauty of the lovely scarce-unfolded blossom. Perhaps the resemblance of the fair flower to the beloved giver softened the lines of the stern square face into the smile that Margot liked, as he found her eyes again, saying:

"Perhaps I could better answer your question by telling you how another patient bore herself in--circumstances akin to yours. Will it tire you? I promise not to be unduly prolix. And to listen commits you to no course of action. Now, shall I go on?"

"I'd love you to go on!"

Always in extremes, the little wayward creature. She flushed and sparkled at the Doctor as he took from its place on his writing-table a triptych photograph-frame in gold-mounted mother-o'-pearl, folded the leaves so as to reveal but one of the portraits, and held under Margot's eyes the delicately-tinted photograph of a girl of twenty. The portrait had been taken the year following Saxham's return from South Africa with his young wife.

"How beautiful!" Margot exclaimed.

"Beautiful, as you say, but does she look happy?"

Margot wrinkled her dainty eyebrows, puzzling out the question. Did she look happy, the girl of the portrait, whose face and figure might have served one of the old Greek masters as model for an Artemis to be carved upon a gem? Well, perhaps not quite happy, now one came to look again.

The black-lashed eyes of golden hazel were full of wistful sadness, there was a faintly indicated fold between the fine arched eyebrows, much darker than the rippling red-brown hair, whose luxuriance seemed to weigh down the little Greek head. The closely-folded, deeply-cut lips spoke dumbly of sorrow, the nymph-like bosom seemed rising on a breath of weariness. Something was lacking to complete her beauty. So much was plain even to Margot. But not until the Doctor showed by the side of the first, the second portrait, did she realise what that Something was.

In the first portrait both face and figure were shown in profile. In the second, bearing a date of two years later, the beautiful, sensitive face of the young woman was turned towards you. Still rather grave than smiling, she held in her arms a sturdy baby boy of some twelve months, upon whose downy head her chin lightly rested. The clasp of her slender arms about her child, the poise of her still nymph-like figure, expressed fulness of life, buoyant energy, and happiness in fullest measure. What was previously lacking was now made clear.

"Lovely, quite lovely!" trilled the sweet little voice. "And what an exquie kiddy!"

"Then you do not dislike children?" Saxham asked, as his visitor's husband had done not long ago.

"On the contrary," the little lady assured him, "I rather cotton to them. But"--she shrugged her little shoulders prettily and quoted boldly from another woman--"but the fag of having them doesn't--appeal!"

The Doctor replaced the threefold frame and turned his regard back upon his visitor.

"These photographs speak for themselves ..." he said quietly. "She--the mother of the boy you see, was, when she first knew that she was to be a mother, fragile and delicate in body, and in mind highly-strung and sensitive. As a child she had known neglect and unkind usage. Twice she had sustained an overwhelming shock, physical and mental; she had rallied, passed through a crisis and regained lost ground. But the possibility of a relapse was not to be blinked at. It was a lion in the path!"

The slight form of the listener was convulsed by a shudder. The pretty face lost its wild-rose tint. The lion in the path ... Margot saw him crouching, his tawny eyes aflame, his great jaws slavering, his tail lashing the dust, his great muscles tightening for the fearful spring. And Saxham went on:

"She maintained from the first a sweet, sane mental standpoint. She tamed her lion by sheer force of will. Her courage was her own: she did not owe it to the physician and surgeon. But he advised as he knew best, and she followed his advice implicitly, as to wholesome diet and regular exercise, thus keeping her body in health. She surrounded herself with objects that were beautiful in form and colour. She made a point of hearing great music and of re-reading the works of great poets, essayists, and novelists. She wished her child to owe much to pre-natal influences. For that these----"

The speaker faltered for a moment, before he resumed the thread of his discourse.

"--That these form character for good or evil no physiologist can deny. Therefore while she did not flee from, she avoided the sight of deformity or ugliness, as she shunned active infection, or tainted air. It was desirable that her child should be healthy, strong, and beautiful. But the love of loveliness, though one of the dominants of her character, scales lowest of the triad. Human love, the love of mother, husband, and friend rank above it, and first of all stands the love of God."

"How awfully good she must be!"

"She took the child, first and last, as a gift from God to her. If she lived or died, and she longed inexpressibly to live--Death, like Life, would be the fulfilment of the Divine Will. Fortified by the Sacraments of her Church she lay down upon her bed of pain as though it were an altar. She suffered intensely----"

His voice broke.

"She suffered inexpressibly. Not until the actual crisis did I have recourse to chloroform. When I was about to use it she said to me: '_Not yet! ... I will wear it a little longer... this mother's crown of thorns._' To-day the crown is one of roses. Does not this appeal to you?"

The Doctor's supple hand displayed the third portrait in the triptych, and Margot saw the same assured joy, rounded with a richer and more deep content. The exquisite face was fuller, the outlines of the form displayed the ripeness of early maturity, the slender palm was now a stately tree. The girl of twenty was merged in the woman of thirty, rich in all feminine graces, beautiful exceedingly, with the beauty that is not only of line and proportion, form and colour, but shines from within, irradiating the perishable living clay with the immortal radiance of the soul. Her boy stood at her side, a manly square-headed young British twelve-year-old, wearing a simple, distinctive dress; familiar to us all.

"Y-yes. But I'm afraid you have forgotten: I told you at the beginning, or I meant to.... My--my own mother died when I was born!"

"And that sad fact increases your natural fear and repugnance. Naturally. It will strike you as a curious point of resemblance between your case and that of the--patient whose portrait I have shown you, when I tell you that her mother did not survive the birth of a later child. May I tell you further that the possibility of some inherited weakness does not render you more promising--regarded as a subject for the treatment of Wolfenbuchel and Krauss."

Margot was beginning to hate this stern-faced man who set forth things so clearly. He had bored her almost to weeping. Why on earth had she come? The fact that Franky's sister Trix's boy Ronald had been helped into the world by Saxham thirteen years ago and recently operated on for the removal of the appendix, was no reason that Franky's wife should regard him as infallible. She glanced at her tiny jewelled wrist-watch. Ten whole minutes had gone. She rose.

"You have been so kind, and I have been so much interested. But I must go now!" she said, like a weary child pleading to be let out of school. "Franky--my husband--will be waiting. I have promised to lunch with him at the Club."

"If he is here, perhaps Lord Norwater would like to speak to me," Saxham suggested.

Margot lied badly. She reddened as she answered:

"Oh, what a pity that he did not come!"

*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."

*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.

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.