Part 37

So Roger escaped whenever he could from his home circle and travelled in Germany, France, Holland, Italy, in order to study the game of foreign politics, find out why in most people's light-hearted opinion a great war was "inevitable" as a solution of conflicting ambitions, and whether it might not be possible to avert it completely if only Britain, Germany, the United States and France could form a League for the maintenance of peace.

The Schraeders made much of him in Germany. Rather timidly they stood up against Potsdam, tried to create an opinion in the South German States—their Alsatian origin carried them in that direction—favourable to a Naval and Colonial understanding with Britain. At their instigation Roger gave a series of addresses in western and southern Germany in 1910 which were deemed a great success, though they were rather frowned on in Berlin. He promised to renew his visit and his lectures in the autumn of 1911.

Meanwhile, Sibyl had returned to London in the early autumn of 1910. It was of course the dead season, but it gradually dawned on Society that she intended to entertain no more. She was probably going to write a book about the British Empire; she had turned quite serious, others said, and was going in for religion. She had evidently lost her health and—no doubt—her appearance.

Roger had hastened to greet her in the much shut-up house in Carlton House Terrace. Here she sat, generally with her back to the light. He was prepared to find her greatly altered. What struck him most was the pathetic thinness of face and hands, and the shapelessness of the figure. The new fashions in dress—straight up and down, no waist, one of the greatest revolutions of our age—helped her here, but at the expense of womanly charm. For Roger had the old-fashioned man-mind which has for some twenty thousand years—did it not begin in Aurignacian times?—admired the incurve below the well-furnished female bust and the outcurve from waist to hip.

"I'm glad you came so promptly," said Sibyl, "because I'm turning out of this gloomy mansion and surrendering it to Clithy. I simply can't afford to keep it up and Engledene too, and although he says of course he will pay for everything and I can have my own suite of rooms, I somehow fancy a cosy little flat which I could share with Maud, or Vicky Masham when she comes back from the States.... Yes, I left her at Washington, going to stay at the White House. I came back alone from there, but I had sulky Sophie to look after me. One thing that makes me think, Roger, that I am really ill, really doomed, is that Sophie no longer gives me notice whenever any whim of mine displeases her. I am sure she is saying to herself now, 'The poor old gal won't be with us much longer: better hang on with her and then she may leave me something.' But about Vicky, for it really is a good story.... Only first I'm going to—or you might—ring for tea. Of course you'll stay? You couldn't in decency refuse.—Do you know, we haven't set eyes on one another for ... for ... three years? We are both swallowing pungent things we might say about one another's appearance, and both resolving to bite our tongues off rather than say them." ... (To servant: "Tea please; and ask Miss Mills to make the sandwiches, my sandwiches, I mean.") ... "I have to take these frame-foods in the form of sandwiches, and Sophie has learnt the art of making them so seductive that I get them down without any difficulty....

"About Vicky.—Do draw up your chair; you needn't be so frigid with a moribund friend. Directly it became known in California that Vicky had been a maid of honour to the late Queen Victoria, my dear, the Americans nearly killed us with kindness! Our roles were reversed. She was the lady of distinction and I was her travelling companion. You know the Americans, especially in the west and east, have a culte for Queen Victoria, and Vicky's stories of her home life held them spell-bound. She felt in her position it wouldn't be right to lecture publicly on her late mistress, but the difficulty was got over.—D'you still drink tea without sugar? I'm told I ought to take it—got over by drawing-room meetings, tickets subscribed for, and no charge at the door, a sumptuous tea—supposed to be modelled on the kind of tea the Queen took at Osborne—served in the middle of Vicky's talk. She refused to take any direct payment, so they sent her thumping cheques for her travelling expenses. And now she's going to put her talks on Queen Victoria as Mother, Wife and Queen into a book.—One way and another, she'll make five or six thousand pounds out of the whole business. And I'm jolly glad. It'll be some provision for her real old age, after I'm gone—for I shan't have much to leave, and most of that I must give to my sisters in the Colonies and to your Sibyl, and some of my servants....

"Now: you've got endless things to tell me. Indeed I really can't see why we should be separated, now, except when we are put to bed. You must be a mental wreck, and I am a physical one.... I got frightfully tired in the States—it spoilt much of the good I derived from the long steamer voyages.... We are simply two imprisoned souls in very battered cages. All the gilding is off mine."

Roger saw as much of Lady Silchester as he could during the last months of 1910. He and Maud assisted her to find just the right sort of flat, where she would have no household worries, where, in fact, she need only keep Sophie to look after her. They all spent a reasonably merry Christmas at Engledene, where Lord Silchester joined them, and where Fatima—Maud junior—expressed and perhaps felt such an intense interest in his Keltic operas and reforms in stage scenery that a glint of the match-maker's eagerness came into Sibyl's tired eyes; she pressed Roger's hand and murmured, "Wouldn't it be too delightful...?"

During the first half of 1911 the Intelligence Division of the War Office discovered Major Brentham as a really great authority on African geography and African campaigns, and he worked there over maps, and gave them in addition much other information. As some return he was gazetted Colonel, and again there was talk of utilizing such an administrative capacity in our own dominions.

In June, 1911, Sibyl's physician and surgeon were not altogether satisfied as to her progress towards recovery, and suggested she might derive great benefit from the waters of Villette, a thermal station in the east of France near the Vosges. So she said to Roger: "You look quite as ill as I feel. It's malaria. You never quite got rid of that blackwater fever. Come to Villette later on. Maud and the girls and Clithy could join us too. I'll have a month first of all, alone except for Vicky. I'll give the closest attention to the cure, and then perhaps when you arrive I may be able to sit up and take notice and even do a little motoring...."

Accordingly the scene of this dwindling story changes in Villette-es-Vosges, a Ville d'eaux in eastern France, in the month of August and September, 1911. Germany has spoilt the summer for all statesmen, soldiers and sailors by challenging the French protectorate of Morocco at Agadir. It is supposed by the middle of August, after Mr. Lloyd George's speech in the City, and after a succession of "kraches" in German banking firms, that the Kaiser's Government is hesitating to go the full length of War: but Germany is growling horribly because she is realizing that her financial arrangements for a war of great dimensions are imperfect, and that she is unprepared with aircraft to cope with the French aeroplanes.

So she is consenting to pourparlers for the purpose of ascertaining the terms on which she may be bought off, persuaded to leave Agadir, and withdraw a portion of the army she is crowding into Alsace-Lorraine.

Villette-es-Vosges is well suited for the work of the old diplomacy. It is, to begin with, a Ville d'eaux; and in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries, statesmen who were negotiating treaties and alliances or resolving problems which threatened war, usually met at some gay place near their frontiers where they could, under the guise of "taking the waters," carry on their conversations with one another and draft protocols of conspiracy or of agreement. Consequently, in late August and early September, 1911, Villette was unusually thronged: not only by its accustomed clientele of middle-aged invalids trying to combat all manner of diseases for which its springs were efficacious, but also by their demoiselles-a-marier, their gawky boys and bread-and-butter, pigtailed girls, playing tennis, croquet, and crowding into the cinemas while their parents sip and bathe and undergo massage sous l'eau; by wicked gamblers, obvious adventurers, demure cocottes (needing a month's repose and a reduction of their figures); and by European statesmen trying to look like tourists. The German diplomatists have dressed and hatted themselves to resemble the Frenchman of caricature; the French ministers and ex-ministers are out-doing the average English gentleman in bluff "sports" costumes; and there are Russians and Austrians too quaint for words, a pouffer de rire, as Sibyl says; with such weeping whiskers, such forked beards, such frock-coats in the early morning and such tall hats as you never saw, except in pictures of Society in Paris under the Second Empire.

These diplomatists foregather in the theatrically beautiful park with its swan-pools, its canalized river, its groves and bosquets, pavilions, tea-houses, summer-houses, chalets, kiosques of newspapers and salacious novels, open-air orchestras, croquet-lawns, and tennis-courts. Or if the problem is very grave, and excited speech should not be audible nor gesticulations visible to prowling journalists, they stroll away to the race-course, to the golf links.

It is the glorious summer of 1911, when there was little rain between the beginning of June and the end of September. Nevertheless, if you should weary of the heat or if there should be a sudden shower you have a long cool arcade of tempting shops, a Grand Guignol, and the necessary retreats—on a large scale—for those who are summarily affected by the cathartic action of the waters, especially that very potent Source Salee, which is never mentioned without respect, except where it is the foundation of Rabelaisian stories. The medicinal springs are housed in temples of great architectural beauty. The town of pleasure, with its eight or nine hotels, rises in terraces that survey the park—not long ago a forest in which wolves roamed in winter time. New Villette contains a theatre, a Club des Etrangers with gambling rooms, a Salle de lecture, a Concert Hall, an Eglise Anglicane, and a Catholic church, a post-office, doctors' houses and laboratories, and the necessary usines and garages. A mile away is the real Villette, a common-place Lorraine town of purely agricultural interests, turning its back, so to speak, on the adjoining health resort which has made its name famous.

In the arcade is a large black notice-board, whereon besides local notices are pinned the Havas telegrams. Hither, during one critical week, comes a throng of anxious readers. Is it to be peace or War? Will Germany be satisfied with French Congo and give up Morocco? Should we pack to-night and leave before Mother has completed her cure, in case mobilization upsets the trains? Will my husband be called up? What will happen to my boy?

Sibyl, lying on her comfortably-sloped invalid chair in the verandah of the Pavilion des Dejeuners, opines the Germans must be perfect beasts to upset every one like this, and all over some place on the Sahara coast where there are just a few verminous Moors. She is not in favour of anarchism, but she really does wish some one would assassinate the Kaiser....

Roger looks grave and essays the hopeless task of defending Germany. "It is all this mania for 'Empires across the Seas.' Germany gets mad when our Empire, the French Empire, the Russian Empire each year get bigger, while she is prevented everywhere from expanding—, etc., etc."

Victoria Masham hazards the conjecture: "If only the dear Queen were alive! She would soon...."

Sibyl interrupts: "My dear Vicky, you must look facts in the face. Queen Victoria would now be 92. She would not be of much use at that age ... See! There is obviously our Foreign Minister ... disguised with smoked glasses, but you can't mistake his nose. I think he's so good-looking.... And there is young Hawk of the F.O. He's just been sent to Brussels. I hear the Villierses are expected to-morrow. That man in the straw hat and the cricketing flannels is Monsieur Viviani, and the handsome old lion with the grey mane is Leon Bourgeois. The tight-trousered man you'd take for a 'booky' is Count Palastro—and there's no mistaking that stuffed figure of the last century, in a stove-pipe hat, a buttoned-up frock-coat, and pointed whiskers: that's Polanoff of the Russian Foreign Office. We saw him when we were in Japan.... 'Whithersoever the carcass is, there are the eagles gathered together.'"

Roger: "I suppose the carcass is the unhappy peoples of Europe?"

Sibyl: "I suppose so. Vicky, dear. Go and have breakfast at the hotel this morning. D'you mind? Maud has taken off the two girls to some violent sports' competition, and Clithy has motored over to Domremy." (To Roger): "He is studying local colour for the libretto of an opera on Joan of Arc. His great clou—if he can only bring it off—is the last scene. Joan of Arc, while bound to the stake and encircled with flames, sings a scena of the fireworks kind. Clithy says it would be natural under the circumstances. He thinks if they can devise some kind of asbestos shift for the prima donna and the usual chemical flames that don't burn much it could be arranged...." (To Vicky): "I want Roger all to myself this morning. We are going to have our breakfast together, here, in case events call him to sterner duties...." (Vicky acquiesces with a good grace—in her new transformation to which a little more grey has been added, she looks surprisingly well, and younger than Sibyl, though she is ten years older).

A pause. The waiter lays the table between them for Roger's dejeuner a la fourchette. He is accustomed to preparing Sibyl's special dietary and arranges for that also. He is a pleasant-faced man, deeply deploring "le peu de progres que fait M'ame la Baronne...."

Sibyl: "What a scene for a dying woman to be looking at!"

Roger: "Sibyl! Don't be so lugubrious...."

Sibyl: "Why? Do you suppose I don't pretty well know my own condition? I am dying slowly of cancer, what the doctors call 'un lent deperissement.' I expect this is what Mother died of later in life. The doctors would be ready enough to operate again if there was any chance.... As it is, they know it is more merciful to let me linger out my few remaining weeks or months than submit me to the shock of an operation which might kill me at once. I may live to October, Dr. Perigord thinks. Or he puts it more pleasantly: 'Vers le mois d'Octobre nous saurons oui ou non, si la guerison de M'ame la Baronne s'effectuera. Les eaux de Villette operent parfois des miracles: esperons toujours.' ... And so on.... I don't suffer much pain—as yet. When it comes on they'll put me under morphia. I shall stay here till this political crisis is over or the fine weather begins to break. Then Clithy will motor me to Calais and from Dover to Engledene. Engledene will be the best place to die at. And, of course, remember, I want to be buried at Aldermaston, near Lucy—and near where you'll be laid some day—unless you marry again, which I should hardly think you'll do. I shall have a perfect right to occupy a small space in Aldermaston churchyard, because I'm a parishioner. I bought the farm that father so ridiculously mismanaged and that you made so prosperous. I've left it in my will to my brother Gerry, as some compensation for having taken no notice of him since I got married.... But, as I said before, what a scene! Not even your beloved Happy Valley could better those flowers in the urns and vases and borders and parterres—those scarlet geraniums, scarlet cannas, scarlet salvias, and scarlety-crimson Lobelia cardinalis. We grow them at Engledene, but they're nothing like these. And the heliotrope, and ageratum ... and those blue salvias and orange calceolarias. I know it's rather vulgar, but the whole effect is superbly staged; don't you think so?....

"And the women's dresses. Many of them, of course, are mannequins, just showing off for the Paris shops. And then to see pass by all the celebrated if over-rated people you've heard so much about, just as though they were well-made-up supers on the stage. And the music of those alternate orchestras... and such African sunlight ... and ... you next to me...."

Roger: "Look here, if you talk so much I shan't wonder you get weaker instead of stronger. Eat up your breakfast and drink your milk."

Sibyl: "I will. But I must talk to you. I shall soon be silenced for ever...."

Roger: "So shall I, when my time comes. So will every one. You don't give yourself a chance, talking in this morbid way. The doctors are often wrong. Remember the case of Lady Waterford?"

Sibyl: "Blanchie?"

Roger: "Yes.... A good soaking in Villette water may get rid of all your trouble and some day you may be weeping over me as I lie dying of Bright's disease."

Sibyl (not paying much attention): "Roger! Do you think there is going to be War?"

Roger: "Not this time. Look there! D'you see those gardes champetres in that green uniform?"

Sibyl: "That nice-looking man, with the blond moustaches?"

Roger: "Yes, and that ugly-looking fellow with the red nose. Well: a week ago they mysteriously vanished, and I asked what had become of them. I was told they had joined up ... the Reserve, you know. Now they're back again. That shows the Germans and French have come to terms. The War is partie remise—this year—but it's certain to come, unless Germany can be squared. Remains to be seen what she wants and what we can afford to give...."

A pause. Sibyl eats a little food and sips her milk. Roger finishes his breakfast and lights a cigarette.

Sibyl: "Do you think there can be any survival after death?"

Roger: "How can I tell? Who knows anything about it? Not even Edison or Marconi. And they come nearest..."

Sibyl: "I mean, of course, our minds, our intelligence, our love. Our poor diseased bodies simply dissolve and are redistributed and worked up again. But the personality we have created in our brains?"... (takes a cigarette from Roger and smokes it). "Talking of personality, isn't it extraordinary how that can be affected through our stomachs; chemically, so to speak? You saw that woman in the dark green dress, who waved to me just now? Recognize her?" (Roger shakes his head)... "That is Cecilia Bosworth, the Marchioness of Bosworth, quite the proudest woman in the Three kingdoms—enough in herself to provoke a middle-class revolution. Her husband's remote ancestor was a by-blow of the Plantagenets, a natural son of 'false fleeting Clarence.' He went over to that usurper—I've always spoken up for Richard the Third—that usurper, Henry the Seventh, at the battle of Bosworth, and so was created Earl of Bosworth, and afterwards Elizabeth made his grandson a marquis. Well, even you, as an African hermit, must have heard of that woman's insolence in Society? She even mocked at the Royal Family and said her husband—a perfect oaf—was more Plantadge than they were and the rightful king.... She wanted Prince Eddy to marry her daughter and make things come right." (A pause ... smokes)...

"Well, when she came here six weeks ago, nobody was good enough to mix with her; she went round blighting us all. My doctor said it was all due to liver and he'd soon cure her. He put her on to La Source Salee—and a slice of melon afterwards. And, my dear, she went through agonies, I believe. I used to hear her shrieking as she passed along the corridor....

"But it's cured her. See what a pleasant nod she gave me just now? And there she is, talking to those very pretty girls—and their father's only a Leeds manufacturer.

"Well, how do you work that problem out?"

Roger: "Give it up! ... But by the look in your eyes, I should say you've got the beginning of a temperature. Let me wheel you back to the Hotel and call for Sophie. Then if you are good and obedient and get an after-breakfast nap, I will come at three and take you and Vicky out for a very gentle motor drive...."