That Which Hath Wings 4That Which Hath Wings (part 4)
18
Literature · Romance
That Which Hath Wings 4
That Which Hath Wings (part 4)
DehanEnglish
His vexation broke up in laughter.
"That's what she did. She sympathised with Davis and carried him off here."
Patrine said, a light breaking in on her:
"Why, of course, there would be a girl.... He'd hardly come to a place like this alone, would he?"
Some query in his look made her add hastily:
"What was she like?"
"Like.... The girl who's carried off Davis? ..." He reflected a moment. "Pretty and plump and fluffy, with a pair of goo-goo eyes! She's daughter or niece or something"--he boggled the explanation rather--"to the German chap who hired us the hangar at Drancy--if you can give that name to a ramshackle shed in a waste building-lot! And Davis--thundering good man, but once on a spree..." He whistled dismally. "If I could only get my claws on him! ..."
Here the uniformed official returned to the charge:
"Monsieur has found his friend--Monsieur has explained the situation. To enter the Salon de Danse with Madame is not permissible--in the costume Monsieur displays. No doubt Madame will understand!"
Patrine said, with a slight catch in her breath, as though some drops of chilly pleasant perfume had been suddenly sprayed on her:
"He supposes ... he thinks ... that I'm ... your friend!"
"I'll explain." He reddened, turning to the official, saying in the French of the British schoolboy, laborious, devoid of colloquialisms:
"Monsieur, vous n'avez pas compris. Madame elle--elle n'etes qu'une etrangere. Pour mon ami, je ne lui vois. Si vous permettre d'entrer, peut-etre----"
"Rototo! Voyez, man blousier, j'connais bien la sorte! Sufficit! Assez! Ca m' fait suer, comprends?" The gold-braided arm described a magnificent sweep, the large white kid-covered hand indicated remote distance--"Sortez! ..."
The Briton, thus invited to retire, looked at Patrine.
"I can't quite follow, but it's plain he's telling me to hook it. The rest is--pretty--strong?"
She nodded, biting her lip.
"Frightfully rude. Not that I know much Paris slang. But a friend of mine--" She broke off to listen, as from under the functionary's waxed moustache rattled another sentence:
"A l'instant, ou j'appelle l' sergent d'ville!"
"He's talking about sending for the police now!" She added hastily: "Don't let him do that! Offer him a tip!"
The magic word must have been comprehended of the braided functionary. He ceased to fulminate. He waited, his avid eye upon the pair. The lean hatchety face of the aviator had flamed at Patrine's suggestion. He said:
"Don't you think I'd have tipped him in the beginning--if I'd had the wherewithal? But expenses have been frightful!--the waste lot with the shed I've stalled the machine in costs as much as a suite of rooms at a decent middle-class hotel would. Had to fork rent in advance too. Proprietor's a German as well as a jerry-builder, and when I've paid his goo-goo girl for our coffee and rolls to-morrow morning"--the speaker exhibited a disc of shiny metal bearing the classical capped and oak-wreathed head of the Republic, value exactly twopence-halfpenny--"I'll have just one of these blessed tin things left."
"How rotten!" In the gilt metal vanity-bag, Patrine's inseparable adjunct, lurked, in the company of a mirror, powder-puff, and note-book, a tiny white silk purse. In the purse nestled two plump British half sovereigns, the moiety of Patrine's salary for the previous week. "Would you jump down my throat if I asked you to let me finance you?" she pleaded, an eager hand in the depths of the receptacle. "Why not?"
"Because I'm a decent man!" If he had been previously crimson he was now scarlet as a boiled lobster. "Thanks all the same, though! I can't wait here, even to catch Davis.... I must bike back to Drancy, where I've left the Bird--the machine--in the German's shed... Not a soul to keep an eye on her! ... My heart's in my mouth when I think of what might hap--" He bit off the end of the sentence and went on: "But if you'd be so awfully kind as to take charge of this, in case you ... There's a message written on it...." He offered her a soiled, bent card.
"I understand. If I should chance to come across your Davis.... A little man ... looking like a Welshman.... But you haven't told me whether he's dark or fair!"
"Black as a crow," he told her. "Not dressed like me!" His well-cut mouth began to twist upwards at the corners.
"Quite a swell, in a silk-faced frock-coat, white vest and striped accompaniments. A silk hat, too, rather curly brimmed, but still, a topper. I suppose a friend of the lady's rented Davis the kit."
"Of the lady's? ..." She remembered. "Yes, yes! Of course! ... The German's appendage.... Why! ... Look! ... Those two people who have just passed the turn-stile at the other end of the Promenade.... If there's anything in description, here comes Davis with the goo-goo girl!"
"By--gum! You've nailed me the pair of them." As the aviator's long strides bore him down in the direction of the little sallow, black-avised mechanic in the capacious silk-faced frock-coat, and his high-bosomed, florid, flaxen-haired enchantress, and before the moustached guardian of the Promenade could renew his indignant protest, Patrine had dropped the little sovereign-purse in his deep, rapacious hand. And at that instant the music ended with a crashing succession of barbaric chords. The Sao Paulo dance was done.
"Merci millefois, Madame! ..."
Patrine turned from the hireling's thanks to see the high head and powerful square shoulders of von Herrnung forging towards her, towering above the polyglot, variegated crowd. He hailed her with:
"So you met a friend? Is that why I found myself deserted?"
She answered coldly:
"I did not desert you--and I did not meet a friend."
His face, still suffused with a purplish flush, pouched and baggy about the eyes, told of the maelstrom of unhealthy excitement the dance of the jaguars in the jungle had set whirling in his brain. She guessed that he had taken advantage of their separation to descend into the ball-room, and that as one of the spectators in the front rank he had revelled in the final thrill. He persisted:
"Was? But what means it? I have lost you.... I think you must have gone down into the ball-room after your friend.... I follow and you are not there. I come back to find you.... Who was that dirty bounder I saw you talking to?"
"He wasn't a dirty bounder!" His rudeness enraged her. "He was a nice, clean, first-class, top-hole, plucky English boy!"
He sneered:
"'Boy' ... Men of forty are boys, in the mouths of you English ladies. You borrow the term from women of the street-walking class."
"Then I'll call him a man. The best kind of man going! English--from the top of his nice head to the very tips of his toes."
"How can you tell if he was not a friend of yours? What do you know of him?" He fixed his eyes compellingly on hers.
She answered:
"Nothing but that he flew the Channel yesterday--with Davis--to test his invention--and he has got to be on the wing for home at four."
"So! He has told you all this, and you do not know his name, even? Perhaps it is on that card you hold in your hand?"
She started, and the card fluttered from her twitching fingers to the carpet.
"Allow me...." Von Herrnung stooped as though to retrieve the bit of pasteboard. "Curious! It has gone! ... It is not there!" he said.
"I think you have your foot on it." Her eyeballs ached, she felt weary, and flat, and stale. "Please lift up your foot and let me see if it is there," she urged, and grown suddenly obtuse, he lifted up the wrong foot. She was trying to explain that he had done so when they were rejoined by Courtley and Lady Beauvayse.
"Say, did you see she wore a head-band with a rubber mouth-hold at the back of her neck? And waist-fixings under her frillies so's Herculano could swing her around his head. My land! that man has jaw-power to whip Teddy Roosevelt, and she's got vim enough for a nest of rattlesnakes.... Used up, Pat? ... If you aren't, you look it!" The speaker yawned prettily: "I'm about ready to be taken back to by-by, though it's only two o'clock."
Von Herrnung escorted the wearer of the green bird of paradise as they went through dark alleys and illuminated avenues back to the archway with the blazing crowns and stars. Courtley accepted the offer of a lift back to the hotel. The German declined, saying that he preferred to walk, as the car was closed.
"Pardon! ..." His voice had arrested Morris on the point of starting the Rolls-Royce. His handsome face had appeared in the frame of the car-window. "Excuses! but this belongs to Miss Saxham!" His cuff shone white in the semi-darkness, the great magpie pearl on his little finger gleamed maliciously as he dropped the missing card upon Patrine's lap, and drew back, uncovered and smiling, as the car moved away. Later on, when she was safe in her room, she looked at the card, and read upon it in plain black lettering:
+-----------------------------------------------+
| |
| ALAN SHERBRAND, |
| |
| PILOT-INSTRUCTOR AND BUILDER OF AEROPLANES, |
| FANSHAW'S SCHOOL OF FLYING. |
| |
| THE AERODROME, |
| COLLINGWOOD AVENUE, |
| HENDON, N. W. |
| |
+-----------------------------------------------+
Something was scrawled in violet pencil on the upper blank space. Being a girl with notions about squareness, Patrine would not at first read, remembering that it was his private message to Davis, whom Chance had brought within his master's reach. But later still, or earlier, when, after a brief interval of silence, the traffic of Paris began to roll over the asphalt, principle yielded to impulse. She switched on the electric light above her pillow and read:
"This Sarajevo business spells War. Must get back at once to Hendon. I trust to your Honour not to fail me. You know what this means to
"A. S."
So the young Mercury in gabardine and overalls was a professional, a teacher; a pilot who helped men to qualify for the certificate given by the Royal Aero Club without breaking too many bones. She had seen the big painted sign in the Collingwood Avenue, Hendon, that advertised Fanshaw's Flying School.
"I trust to your Honour," he had written to his mechanic. The word would have seemed big, and awful, and imposing, spelt like that, with a capital "H," if the writer had been a gentleman.
Disillusioned, she tore the card into little pieces and sank into a heavy sleep before the broad yellow sunshine of Monday outlined the pink velvet brocade curtains unhygienically drawn before the open windows. And she dreamed, not of the magic wind that had blown upon her that night, nor of the Mercury-like figure in the suit of Carberrys, but of the supple bodies that had bounded and whirled, and of the gleaming panther-fangs that had clashed in mid-air. Then the dominant figure became that of von Herrnung. Again the red mouth under the tight-rolled red moustache alternately flattered, insulted, and cajoled. Again she felt that violation of her virgin flesh, its moist, hot touch upon her naked shoulder. Its kiss bit and stung.
She awakened late from those poisoned dreams to a riotous blaze of colour and a breath of musky fragrance. On the coffee-stand beside her bed lay a great sheaf of long-stalked roses; deep orange-hearted, with outer petals of ruddy flame. She plunged her face deep into the flowers. The corner of a large square envelope thrust from amongst them. She caught it between her teeth and pulled it out.
It was from von Herrnung, written on paper bearing the device of the Societe Aeronautique Internationale in the Faubourg St. Honore. It was brief enough.
"That I offended yesterday, Isis will pardon. The address I promised is--'Atelier Wiber, 000, Rue de la Paix.' The good Wiber demands no fee for making Beauty yet more beautiful. All has been arranged.
"Devotedly,
"T. v. H."
*CHAPTER XVII*
*INTRODUCES AN OLD FRIEND*
Saxham, M.D., F.R.C.S., M.V.O., Consulting Surgeon to St. Stephen's and the Hospital of St. Stanislaus and St. Teresa, sat busily writing at the big leather-topped table in the consulting-room, that, with the well-stocked library adjoining, occupied the rearward ground-floor of the Harley Street corner house.
The hands of the table-clock pointed to eleven A.M. Since nine the doctor had sat at the receipt of patients, the crowd in the waiting-room had melted down to half a dozen souls. Fourteen years had gone by since Saxham, late Temporary Captain, R.A.M.C., attached Headquarters Staff, H.I.M. Forces, Gueldersdorp, had taken over the lease and bought his practice from the fashionable physician who had been ruined by the war slump in South African mining-stocks.
The broken speculator's successor had struck pay-reef from the outset. Society had taken Saxham up and could not afford to drop him again. He was harsh and unconciliatory in manner--a perfect bear, according to Society--but quite too frightfully clever; and as yet no speedier rival had outrun him in the race.
Now as the July sunshine, its fierceness tempered by the short curtains of pale yellow silk that screened the wide-open windows, came streaming in over the fragrant heads of a row of pot-grown rose-trees, ranged on the white-enamelled window-seat, it shone upon a man to whom both Time and Fortune had been kind. The admirable structure of bone, clothed with tough muscle and firm white flesh, had not suffered the degrading changes inseparable from obesity. Nor had the man waxed lean and grisly in proportion as his banking account grew fat. His scholar's stoop bowed the great shoulders even more, disguising the excessive development of the throat and deltoid muscles. The square, pale face, with the short aquiline nose and jutting under-lip, was close-shaven as of old. The thickly growing black hair was streaked with silver-grey and tufted with white upon the temples. His loosely fitting clothes of fine silky black cloth were not the newest cut, neither were they old-fashioned. They were suited perfectly to the man.
While Saxham minutely copied his prescription, the patient who sat facing the window in the chair on the doctor's left hand had not ceased from the enumeration of a lengthy catalogue of symptoms, peculiar to the middle-aged, self-indulgent, and tightly-laced. At the close of a thrilling description of after-dinner palpitations, she became aware that her hearer's attention had strayed. Following up his glance she ran him to earth in one of three tinted photographs that stood in a triptych frame upon his writing-table, and glowed with an indignation that tinged with violet a plump face coated with the latest complexion-cream.
"How very charming your wife is--still!"
The speaker, her recent character of patient now merged in that of visitor, plucked down her veil of violet gauze with a gesture that betrayed her wrath. But her voice was carefully honeyed to match her smile--as she continued:
"You have been married quite an age, haven't you?"
The anniversary of her own second honeymoon was due next week. She went on answering her own query:
"Nearly fourteen years, I think?"
Saxham answered, not glancing at the silver table-almanac but at the threefold photograph frame:
"To be precise, just fourteen years and six weeks. We were married on the 6th of June, 1900."
"You have a good memory--for some things!"
The undisguised resentment in her tone pulled Saxham's head round. He surveyed her with genuine surprise. She bit her lips and tossed her head, waggling her tall feather, jingling her strings of turquoise and amber, coral and onyx, kunzite and olivine, big blocks of which semi-precious stones were being worn just then, strung on the thinnest of gold chains. Each movement evoked a whiff of perfume from the scanty folds of her bizarre attire. Her frankly double chin quivered, and her redundant bosom, already liberally displayed through its transparent covering of embroidered chiffon, threatened to burst its confining bands of baby-ribbon, as the Doctor said:
"Is it not natural that I should have a particularly clear recollection of the greatest day of all my life--save one?"
"You're quite too killing, Owen!"
She laughed tunelessly, clanking her precious pebbles.
"Of course, we all know you're fearfully swanky about your wife's beauty. I saw her yesterday at Lord's--sitting under the awning on the sunny side, with the Duchess of Broads and Lady Castleclare. Your boy was with them, jumping out of his skin over Naumann's bowling for Oxford. Really marvellous! Your poor dear Cambridge hadn't a chance! Tremendously like you he grows--I mean Bawne. Really, your very image!"
"I should prefer," said Saxham, stiffly, "that my son resembled his mother."
"Ha, ha, ha! How quite too romantic!" She threw back her head, its henna-dyed hair plastered closely about it and fastened with buckles of jade, set with knobs of turquoise. A kind of stove-pipe of enamel green velvet crowning her, was trimmed with a band of miniature silk roses in addition to the towering violet plume. The plume, carefully dishevelled so as to convey the impression of a recent wetting, threatened the electric globe-lamp springing from a standard near. Her crossed legs liberally revealed her stockings of white silk openwork, patterned with extra-sized dragon-flies in black chenille, and her laugh rattled about Saxham's vexed ears like Harlequin's painted bladder, full of little pebbles or dried peas. "In love with your wife--and after fourteen years and six weeks!" Her fleshy shoulders shook, and her opulent bosom heaved stormily. She passed a little filmy perfumed handkerchief under her violet gauze veil and delicately dabbed the corners of her eyes. "You remind me of my poor David. I was always the one woman on earth, in his opinion. To the last, he was jealous of the slightest reference to you!"
"To me? Why should he have been?"
Mildred--for this was Saxham's faithless bride-elect of more than twenty years previously--swallowed her wrath with an effort, and went on with the mulish obstinacy of her type:
"Perhaps it was absurd. But men in love are unreasonable creatures, and David was perfectly mad where I was concerned. He worshipped me to the point of idolatry! He never could quite believe that I did not regret my--my choice--that my heart did not sometimes escape from his keeping in dreams, and become yours again, Owen! He never really cared for Patrine, because she has a look of you.... Absurd, considering that she was born two years after you disappeared into South Africa.... Though of course I could not truthfully say that I did not--think of you a great deal!"
It seemed to the silent man who heard, that Mildred offended against decency. His soul loathed her. She went on:
"Her brother--my darling boy who died--was the very image of David!" Her tone was even womanly and tender in speaking of the dead boy. "But Patrine--a year younger--Patrine is really wonderfully like you, with her commanding figure and almost Egyptian profile, those long eyes under straight eyebrows--and all those masses of dead-black hair!" As Saxham writhed under the category she gave out her irritating laugh again. "Ah!--I forgot! When Patrine was in Paris with Lady Beauvayse for the Big Week--Lady Beau took her to the Atelier Wiber--the famous hairdresser's establishment at 000, Rue de la Paix--where they specialise in Chevelures des Teintes Moderne--all the newest effects displayed by stylish mannequins--and really the change is astonishing--her sister Irma and I hardly knew Patrine when she came to see us at Kensington--looking superb, with hair--one might almost call it terra-cotta coloured--showing up her creamy-white skin."
"Do you tell me that Patrine has bleached her splendid hair and stained it with one of those vile dyes that are based on aniline--or Egyptian henna at the best?"
Mildred retorted acidly:
"It was a very expensive process.... Five hundred francs--but I understand that Lady Beauvayse was so good as to insist on paying Wiber's charges herself."
Saxham answered brusquely:
"I would have given ten times the money to know my niece's hair unspoiled. Whoever paid, the process will prove an expensive one to Patrine when she finds herself excruciated by headaches, or when the colour changes--as it will by-and-by!"
Mildred shrugged:
"She can have it re-dipped, surely? Or let it return to its original black!"
"There are many chemical arguments against human hair so altered returning to its original colour," came from Saxham grimly. "As these women who have made coiffures of orange, pink, crimson, blue and green, fashionable, had previously found to their cost. Do you not realise that from mishaps of this kind resulted the chromatically tinted heads one sees at public functions? Bizarre and strange in the electric lights, hideous in the sun."
"Ha, ha, ha!" Mildred's laugh rattled about the Doctor's ears like a shower of walnuts. "I shall certainly bring Patrine to call upon you, if her hair happens to turn peacock-green or pinky-crimson. I would not miss seeing your face for all the world! But seriously, my dear Owen, when a girl is as handsome as my girl and has no dot to back her, she must make herself attractive and desirable to eligible men."
"By trying to make herself look like a Parisian cocotte, she renders herself neither attractive nor desirable--to the kind of man whom I should like to see married to my niece. The cleanly kind of man, with wholesome tastes, a sound constitution, and an upright character."
"My dear Owen, you might be composing an advertisement for a butler or a chauffeur!"
Mildred ostentatiously controlled a yawn as the Doctor continued:
"As to a provision for Patrine on her marriage, you know that I shall gladly give it. Of course, upon condition----"
"Yes, yes, I know what your condition would be!" Mildred's finger-tips, adorned with nails elaborately veneered and dyed, drummed a maddening little tattoo on the table-ledge. "That she marries the 'right kind of man, with wholesome tastes,' and all the rest of it. The question is--would Patrine be able to endure him? She is--let us say--more than a little difficult to get on with--and essentially an independent, up-to-date girl."
"If Patrine would have subdued her ideas about independence and given up this idea of taking a place as salaried companion, I would have welcomed her, and so would my wife!"
"Patrine is--as you are very well aware--something very different to a mere companion. She is reader and secretary to Lady Beauvayse. Her Club subscription is paid, she moves there amongst gentlewomen, and is treated at Berkeley Square exactly like a favoured guest. You should see the presents Lady Beauvayse absolutely showers upon her--and she gets all her expenses and a hundred a year."
Saxham was silent. Patrine might have had all this and much more, if she would have accepted the home he offered. Not only because she was his niece, but the girl was dear to him. His wife loved her, and in her strange, wild way Patrine returned some measure of Lynette's tenderness.
"She is worth loving," Lynette had told her husband. "She has a generous, brave, independent nature and a deep heart. She is not easily won because she is so well worth winning. Ah! if the Mother were only with us, how well she would understand and help Patrine!"
But Mildred had risen to depart. Saxham rose too, not without alacrity, and taking her offered hand, pressed it and let it fall to her side.
"Well, good-bye. My kind regards to Captain Dyneham." He referred to the second legal possessor of Mildred's once coveted charms. "When can I dine with you at Kensington, do you ask? I fear I have very few opportunities for sociality. Some day! ... Tell Patrine to come and see me. Half-past one o'clock to-morrow. Lunch after my scolding--and a chat with Lynette."
"You are extremely kind to Patrine." Mildred's tone was sweetly venomous. "But I fear just at present she has little time to spare. Men in love are so exacting. Dear me, what a feather-brained creature I am! ... Haven't I told you about Count von Herrnung?"
"You have told me nothing," said Saxham, "and you know it. Who and what is the man?"
Mildred said with a great air of dignity:
"He is a distinguished officer of the Prussian Flying Service, the son and heir of a high official in the German Foreign Office. He holds the rank of Count by courtesy. I assure you I never met a more agreeable young man."
"Even were he all that you say, and more, and even while I regard the German Army as a marvel of organisation and efficiency--I should not, knowing the type of man that is the product of their military system, desire my niece to marry a German officer."
Mildred mocked:
"'Marry'--who said anything about marriage? ... When they have not known each other for a month. Not"--her tone became sentimental--"that I am a disbeliever in love at first sight. No one could doubt that Patrine is attracted, and he--the Count"--she dropped her eyelids--"is simply too fearfully gone for words. Absolutely dead-nuts!"
"'Gone.' ... 'Dead-nuts.' ..."
"I give you my word. Entangled hopelessly. 'What a captive to lead in chains,' I said to Patrine--he is quite six feet in height or over, and has the most perfect features; simply magnificent eyes, the most fascinating manner, and the build of a Greek athlete. He is staying at the 'Tarlton,' and I must say Lady Beauvayse is extremely sympathetic. For since they came back from Paris together the Count has been taking Patrine about everywhere. She can hardly have had a glimpse of my gay girl.... Dinners, theatres, the opera, and heaven knows what else, they have crowded into the week!" The smiling speaker shrugged her ample shoulders. "To say nothing of cabaret suppers and dances. He even promises to take her to the famous 'Upas Club.' Wonderful, by all accounts. They say the French Regency came nowhere near it. Dancing in the Hall of the Hundred Pillars, a simply wonderful three A.M. supper, and champagne of the most expensive brands, served up in gold-mounted crystal jugs."
"Can it be possible? ..." broke from Saxham. "Are you mad, that you countenance this German in taking Patrine to such an infamous place?"
"'Infamous!' Really, Owen, your notions are too old-fashioned for anything." Her laughter broke out, and her chains and bangles jingled an accompaniment. "Do," she urged, "come out of your shell. Dine with us on Thursday. We have a box for the 'Ministers' Theatre. We'll go on, you and I, George and Irma, from there to the cabaret supper at the 'Rocroy.' We can't afford the 'Upas,' the subscription is too fearfully prohibitive. But the entertainment at the 'Rocroy' is really chic--the dancing is as good--everyone says--as they have it at Maxim's. Do come! Of course, you can trust us not to blab to your wife! Mercy! how severe you look!" Her tone changed, became wheedling, her made-up eyes languished tenderly. "Odd! how we poor, silly women prefer the men who bully us. Come! One chance more. Dine Thursday and see 'Squiffed' at the 'Ministers'--try a whiff of Paris at the 'Rocroy' after midnight, 'twill buck you up like nothing else--take my word! Won't you?"
"I will not!"
"Why not?"
"I have told you why not. Because these places are centres of corruption, schools for the inculcation and practice of vice in every form. Men and women, young or old, those who take part in or witness one of these loathsome dances, hot and reeking from the brothels and voodoo-houses of Cuba and the Argentine are equally degraded. I had rather see my niece Patrine dead and in her coffin than know her capable of appreciating such abominable exhibitions, pernicious in their effects, as I, and others of my profession have grave reason to know!--ruinous in their results to body, mind, and soul!"
"Intolerable!"
Her plump, middle-aged face was leaden grey beneath her violet veil as she screamed at him:
"You have insulted me! Horribly--abominably! ... How dare you tell me that I frequent infamous places, and encourage my daughter to visit schools of vice! And it is not for Irma you are so rottenly scrupulous, but for Patrine, your wife's favourite! Who will do as she pleases, and marry whom she prefers without 'by your leave' or with mine! She is a mule for self-will and obstinacy--another point of resemblance to yourself! ..."
He had recovered his stern self-possession. His face was granite as he said:
"I have not insulted you, but if you will set no example to your daughters in avoiding these evils, it is my duty to expostulate."
She reared like an angry cobra, then spat her jet of scalding venom.
"I take leave to think my present example quite harmless to Irma and Patrine. Now yours--of a few years ago--was certainly calculated to damage the bodily and worldly prospects of your son." She added, as Saxham silently put out his hand to touch the bell: "No! please don't ring. I know my way out. Good-morning.... Pray remember me to Bawne and your wife!"
*CHAPTER XVIII*
*SAXHAM PAYS*
Thus, having shot her bolt, Mildred departed. The Dop Doctor standing in the open doorway, watched the gaily-accoutred, middle-aged figure in the peg-top skirt and bouffante tunic of green taffeta patterned with a violet grape-vine, moving down the white-panelled corridor.
Saxham watched her out of sight before he shut the door and went back to his chair. There he sat thinking.... No one would disturb the Doctor until he touched his electric bell.
Ah! if the truth were told, not all of us find solace in the thought that in the niches of Heaven are safely stored our ancient idols. To Owen Saxham it was gall and verjuice to remember that for love of this woman, weak, vain, silly, spiteful, he, the man of intellect and knowledge, had gone down, quick, to the very verge of Hell.
Mildred was just eighteen when he had wooed and won her. She had been slight and willowy and pale, with round, surprised brown eyes, an indeterminate nose, and a little mouth of the rosebud kind. Her neck had been long and swanlike, her waist long and slim, her hands and feet long and narrow. He had desired her with all the indiscriminating passion of early manhood. He had planned to pass his life by her side. He had hoped that she might bear him children--he had wrought in a frenzy of intellectual and physical endeavour to take rank in his chosen profession, that Success might make life sweeter for Mildred--his wife.
She had seemed to love him, and he had been happy in that seeming. Then the shadow of a tragic error had fallen blackly across his path. From the omission to copy in his memorandum-book a prescription made up by himself in a sudden emergency had sprung the branding suspicion that culminated in the Old Bailey Criminal Case of the Crown v. Saxham. His acquittal restored to him freedom of movement. He left the Court without a stain on his professional reputation, but socially and financially a ruined man.
Friends and patients fell away from Saxham--acquaintances dropped him. Mildred--his Mildred--was one of the rats that scurried from the sinking ship. She had thrown him over and married David, his brother. Her betrayal had been the wreath of nightshade crowning Saxham's cup of woe. Those vertical lines graven on his broad white forehead, those others that descended from the outer angles of the deep-cut nostrils to the corners of that stern mouth of his, and yet those others at the angles of the lower jaw, were chiefly Mildred's handiwork. They told of past excess, a desperate effort to drown Memory and hasten longed-for death on the part of a man who had quarrelled with his God.
The demons of pride and self-will, defiance and scorn had been cast out. An ordeal such as few men are called upon to endure had purified, cleansed, and regenerated the drunkard. Friendship had taken the desperate man by the hand, plucked his feet from the morass, led him into the light and set his feet once more on firm ground. His profession was his again to follow. Love, real love, had come to him and folded her rose-white wings beside his hearth.
Years of pure domestic happiness, of successful work, had passed, and now--the July sunshine had no warmth in it, though it streamed in through the open window over the tops of the pot-roses. The Dop Doctor's head was bowed upon his hands, his great shoulders shook as though he strove with a mortal rigour, the wood of the table where his elbows leaned, the boards beneath the thick carpet on which his feet rested, creaked as the long shudders convulsed him at intervals.
It had seemed to Saxham--in whom the seed of Faith had germinated and put forth leaves in one great night of storm following upon years of arid dryness--that Almighty God must have forgiven those five worse than wasted years.
Fool! he now cried in his heart. The Divine Mercy is boundless as the ocean of air in which our planet swims, and for the cleansing of our spotted souls the Blood of the Redeemer flowed on Calvary. But He who said in His wrath that the sins of the fathers should be visited on the children, does not break, even for those repentant prodigals whom He has taken to His Heart again--the immutable laws of Nature. Nature, of all forces most conservative, wastes nothing, loses nothing, pardons nothing, avenges everything.
The shouted curse, like the whispered blessing, is carried on the invisible wings of Air forever. Thus, the deformed limb, the devouring cancer, the loathsome ulcer, and the degrading vice, are perpetuated and reproduced as diligently and faithfully as the beautiful feature, the noble quality, the wit that charms, the genius that dominates. Nay, since Nature turns out some millions of fools to one Dante or Shakespeare or Moliere or Cervantes, it would appear that she prefers the fools.
So it is. Divine Grace has reached and saved the sinner. The ugly vice, the base appetite, have been eradicated by prayer and mortification, by years of self-control and watchfulness. Free will, moral and physical force, self-command and self-respect are yours again. And with sobs of gratitude the erstwhile slave of Hell gives thanks to Heaven.
Saved. Cured. Great words and true in Saxham's case as in many others. But though they are saved and cured they cannot ever forget. Their eyes have a characteristic look of alert, suspicious watchfulness. For wheresoever they move about the world, in the drawing-rooms of what is called Society, in the business circles of the City, in the barracks or the mining-camp, on the ship's heaving deck or the floor of the Pullman carriage; amidst the sands of the Desert or the golden-rod of the prairie, or the red sand and dry karroo scrub of the lone veld, they will hear, when they least expect it, the thin, shrill hiss of the Asp that once bit them to the bone. Or supposing that they have forgotten in reality--so cleverly has the world pretended to!--with what a pang of mortal anguish Memory awakens. When you recognise the devil that once entered and possessed you, looking out of the eyes of your child.
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?"
