Part 51

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Dear Roger. I have lost all my good looks. That's why I don't want you to see me till I recover them--a little. Meantime, dearest of friends and cousins, if you believe in Anything with a power to save--alas! I don't--pray to it to save me from this terror that hangs over me--especially in the silent watches of the night--and bring me back safe from my world-tour, with at least another ten years of life before me.

Whilst I am away, remember Engledene is entirely at your children's disposal. I have written to the head gardener to see that fresh flowers are sent every now and again to Lucy's grave. You will tell him when? Lucy was a real good sort and I think she came to understand me and forgive....

Ever yours, SIBYL.

Roger spent the remainder of 1909 as he had planned: looking after his boys and girls to some extent, trying to get interested in his children. The girls bored him with their chatter of surface things: school quarrels and rivalries, school friendships, school mistresses; their individual tastes in chocolate creams and caramels; their school sports; the actors whom they adored--at a distance--and whose photographs they collected; their disdain for those silly asses the Suffragettes--they themselves would never want a vote! The two boys were not much less shallow with their Sandhurst and school-boy slang--"top-hole, sir," "ripping," "ruddy," "rotters," "we rotted 'em a bit"--their school-boy games of such vast importance; their dislike of anything sincere, original, warm-hearted; their rash criticisms of great writers, frantic admiration for great sportsmen, religious reverence for cut and colour, style and form; enthusiasm in general for things that did not matter and contempt for things that did.

Was he like that at their age? Had Sibyl the elder at sixteen been such a goose as Sibyl the younger? Was it the hollow falsity of a classical education, the dreary sham of School Christianity which had made his boys so cynical, so coarse in their tastes? His children were good to look at, handsome, healthy, physically well-bred. But weren't they--weren't their contemporaries a bit heartless? These in particular had forgotten their mother completely. Yet surely they might have remembered Lucy's unceasing tenderness and the many sacrifices of health and convenience she had made for them?

In the press of that day and in the books and plays most in vogue you were supposed to make everything give way to the pleasures, needs, caprices, expectations of the young, of the coming generation. But why had no author the courage to point out the lack of interest which youth under twenty-one possessed for most persons of matured mind? Girls of eighteen wrote novels entirely without experience and direct observation of life, merely based on their wishy-washy recollections of books written by "grown-ups"; boys of eighteen published sardonic poems and green-cheese essays for which they ought to have been birched, not boomed. How infinitely preferable to Roger, when he put his secret thoughts into words, was the society of middle-aged friends and relations of his own period in life, who really had brain convolutions moulded by sad and joyous, sharp and unusual experience.

Aunt Maud said there was something evidently very wrong with his liver, and his sons and daughters in an interchange of eye-glances gave a tacit assent. They had felt (though they had never dared to say so in his hearing) a tiny bit ashamed of their ineffective mother. Wasn't it rather infra dig. to have been a school-teacher and a missionary? But of their father they all stood in awe, because he was considered in his time a handsome man, was now of distinguished appearance, and was respected in the best circles as an explorer, a big-game shot, a naturalist, and a man who had made some part of Africa pay. But if he stooped to their level and attempted to justify this eminence by talking technically on African subjects or on home problems they soon showed they thought him a bore.

Aunt Sibyl they spoke of warmly, and wailed over the illness which kept her absent from their circle. She was their ideal of a modern great lady. Her cynical speeches appealed to their own lack of convictions; there was nothing "soppy" about Aunt Sibyl.

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...."