Her years had been richly full of varied events, giving a strong and far-seeing mind reason for much unspoken thought of the kind which leaps in advance of its day’s experience and exact knowledge. She had learned when to speak and when to be silent, and she oftener chose silence. But she had never ceased gazing on the world with keen eyes, and reflecting upon its virtues and vagaries, its depths and its shallows, with the help of a clear and temperate brain.
By her fire she sat, an attracting presence, though only fine, strong lines remained of beauty ravaged by illness and years. The “polished forehead” was furrowed by the chisel of suffering; the delicate high nose springing from her waxen, sunken face seemed somewhat eaglelike, but the face was still brilliant in its intensity of meaning and the carriage of her head was still noble. Not able to walk except with the assistance of a cane, her once exquisite hands stiffened almost to uselessness, she held her court from her throne of mere power and strong charm. On the afternoons when people “ran in to warm themselves” by her fire, the talk was never dull and was often wonderful. There were those who came quietly into the room fresh from important scenes where subjects of weight to nations were being argued closely—perhaps almost fiercely. Sometimes the argument was continued over cups of perfect tea near the chair of the Duchess, and, howsoever far it led, she was able brilliantly to follow. With the aid of books and pamphlets and magazines, and the strong young man with the nice voice, who was her reader, she kept pace with each step of the march of the world.
It was, however, the modern note in her recollections of her world’s march in days long past, in which Coombe found mental food and fine flavour. The phrase, “in these days” expressed in her utterance neither disparagement nor regret. She who sat in state in a drawing-room lighted by wax candles did so as an affair of personal preference, and denied no claim of higher brilliance to electric illumination. Driving slowly through Hyde Park on sunny days when she was able to go out, her high-swung barouche hinted at no lofty disdain of petrol and motor power. At the close of her youth’s century, she looked forward with thrilled curiosity to the dawning wonders of the next.
“If the past had not held so much, one might not have learned to expect more,” was her summing up on a certain afternoon, when he came to report himself after one of his absences from England. “The most important discovery of the last fifty years has been the revelation that no man may any longer assume to speak the last word on any subject. The next man—almost any next man—may evolve more. Before that period all elderly persons were final in their dictum. They said to each other—and particularly to the young—‘It has not been done in my time—it was not done in my grandfather’s time. It has never been done. It never can be done’.”
“The note of today is ‘Since it has never been done, it will surely be done soon’,” said Coombe.
“Ah! we who began life in the most assured and respectable of reigns and centuries,” she answered him, “have seen much. But these others will see more. Crinolines, mushroom hats and large families seemed to promise a decorum peaceful to dullness; but there have been battles, murders and sudden deaths; there have been almost supernatural inventions and discoveries—there have been marvels of new doubts and faiths. When one sits and counts upon one’s fingers the amazements the 19th century has provided, one gasps and gazes with wide eyes into the future. I, for one, feel rather as though I had seen a calm milch cow sauntering—at first slowly—along a path, gradually evolve into a tiger—a genie with a hundred heads containing all the marvels of the world—a flying dragon with a thousand eyes! Oh, we have gone fast and far!”
“And we shall go faster and farther,” Coombe added.
“That is it,” she answered. “Are we going too fast?”
“At least so fast that we forget things it would be well for us to remember.” He had come in that day with a certain preoccupied grimness of expression which was not unknown to her. It was generally after one of his absences that he looked a shade grim.
“Such as—?” she inquired.
“Such as catastrophes in the history of the world, which forethought and wisdom might have prevented. The French Revolution is the obvious type of figure which lies close at hand so one picks it up. The French Revolution—its Reign of Terror—the orgies of carnage— the cataclysms of agony—need not have been, but they were. To put it in words of one syllable.”
“What!” was her involuntary exclamation. “You are seeking such similes as the French Revolution!”
“Who knows how far a madness may reach and what Reign of Terror may take form?” He sat down and drew an atlas towards him. It always lay upon the table on which all the Duchess desired was within reach. It was fat, convenient of form, and agreeable to look at in its cover of dull, green leather. Coombe’s gesture of drawing it towards him was a familiar one. It was frequently used as reference.
“The atlas again?” she said.
“Yes. Just now I can think of little else. I have realized too much.”
The continental journey had lasted a month. He had visited more countries than one in his pursuit of a study he was making of the way in which the wind was blowing particular straws. For long he had found much to give thought to in the trend of movement in one special portion of the Chessboard. It was that portion of it dominated by the ruler of whose obsession too careless nations made sly jest. This man he had known from his arrogant and unendearing youth. He had looked on with unbiassed curiosity at his development into arrogance so much greater than its proportions touched the grotesque. The rest of the world had looked on also, but apparently, merely in the casual way which good-naturedly smiles and leaves to every man—even an emperor—the privilege of his own eccentricities. Coombe had looked on with a difference, so also had his friend by her fireside. This man’s square of the Chessboard had long been the subject of their private talks and a cause for the drawing towards them of the green atlas. The moves he made, the methods of his ruling, the significance of these methods were the evidence they collected in their frequent arguments. Coombe had early begun to see the whole thing as a process—a life-long labour which was a means to a monstrous end.
There was a certain thing he believed of which they often spoke as “It”. He spoke of it now.
“Through three weeks I have been marking how It grows,” he said; “a whole nation with the entire power of its commerce, its education, its science, its religion, guided towards one aim is a curious study. The very babes are born and bred and taught only that one thought may become an integral part of their being. The most innocent and blue eyed of them knows, without a shadow of doubt, that the world has but one reason for existence—that it may be conquered and ravaged by the country that gave them birth.”
“I have both heard and seen it,” she said. “One has smiled in spite of oneself, in listening to their simple, everyday talk.”
“In little schools—in large ones—in little churches, and in imposing ones, their Faith is taught and preached,” Coombe answered. “Sometimes one cannot believe one’s hearing. It is all so ingenuously and frankly unashamed—the mouthing, boasting, and threats of their piety. There exists for them no God who is not the modest henchman of their emperor, and whose attention is not rivetted on their prowess with admiration and awe. Apparently, they are His business, and He is well paid by being allowed to retain their confidence.”
“A lack of any sense of humour is a disastrous thing,” commented the Duchess. “The people of other nations may be fools—doubtless we all are—but there is no other which proclaims the fact abroad with such guileless outbursts of raucous exultation.”
“And even we—you and I who have thought more than others” he said, restlessly, “even we forget and half smile. There been too much smiling.”
She picked up an illustrated paper and opened it at a page filled by an ornate picture.
“See!” she said. “It is because he himself has made it so easy, with his amazing portraits of his big bo
ots, and swords, and eruption of dangling orders. How can one help but smile when one finds him glaring at one from a newspaper in his superwarlike attitude, defying the Universe, with his comic moustachios and their ferocious waxed and bristling ends. No! One can scarcely believe that a man can be stupid enough not to realize that he looks as if he had deliberately made himself up to represent a sort of terrific military bogey intimating that, at he may pounce and say ‘Boo?’”
“There lies the peril. His pretensions seem too grotesque to be treated seriously. And, while he should be watched as a madman is watched, he is given a lifetime to we attack on a world that has ceased to believe in the sole thing which is real to himself.”
“You are fresh from observation.” There was new alertness in her eyes, though she had listened before.
“I tell you it grows!” he gave back and lightly struck the table in emphasis. “Do you remember Carlyle—?”
“The French Revolution again?”
“Yes. Do you recall this? ‘Do not fires, fevers, seeds, chemical mixtures, go on growing. Observe, too, that each grows with a rapidity proportioned to the madness and unhealthiness there is in it.’ A ruler who, in an unaggressive age such as this, can concentrate his life and his people’s on the one ambition of plunging the world in an ocean of blood, in which his own monomania can bathe in triumph—Good God! there is madness and unhealthiness to flourish in!”
“The world!” she said. “Yes—it will be the world.”
“See,” he said, with a curve of the finger which included most of the Map of Europe. “Here are countries engaged—like the Bandarlog—in their own affairs. Quarrelling, snatching things from each other, blustering or amusing themselves with transitory pomps and displays of power. Here is a huge empire whose immense, half-savage population has seethed for centuries in its hidden, boiling cauldron of rebellion. Oh! it has seethed! And only cruelties have repressed it. Now and then it has boiled over in assassination in high places, and one has wondered how long its autocratic splendour could hold its own. Here are small, fierce, helpless nations overrun and outraged into a chronic state of secret ever-ready hatred. Here are innocent, small countries, defenceless through their position and size. Here is France rich, careless, super-modern and cynic. Here is England comfortable to stolidity, prosperous and secure to dullness in her own half belief in a world civilization, which no longer argues in terms of blood and steel. And here—in a well-entrenched position in the midst of it all—within but a few hundreds of miles of weakness, complicity, disastrous unreadiness and panic-stricken uncertainty of purpose, sits this Man of One Dream—who believes God Himself his vassal. Here he sits.”
“Yes his One Dream. He has had no other.” The Duchess was poring over the map also. They were as people pondering over a strange and terrible game.
“It is his monomania. It possessed him when he was a boy. What Napoleon hoped to accomplish he has believed he could attain by concentrating all the power of people upon preparation for it—and by not flinching from pouring forth their blood as if it were the refuse water of his gutters.”
“Yes—the blood—the blood!” the Duchess shuddered. “ He would pour it forth without a qualm.”
Coombe touched the map first at one point and then at another.
“See!” he said again, and this time savagely. “This empire flattered and entangled by cunning, this country irritated, this deceived, this drawn into argument, this and this and this treated with professed friendship, these tricked and juggled with—And then, when his plans are ripe and he is made drunk with belief in himself—just one sodden insult or monstrous breach of faith, which all humanity must leap to resent—And there is our World Revolution.”
The Duchess sat upright in her chair.
“Why did you let your youth pass?” she said. “If you had begun early enough, you could hare made the country listen to you. Why did you do it?”
“For the same reason that all selfish grief and pleasure and indifference let the world go by. And I am not sure they would have listened. I speak freely enough now in some quarters. They listen, but they do nothing. There is a warning in the fact that, as he has seen his youth leave him without giving him his opportunity, he has been a disappointed man inflamed and made desperate. At the outset, he felt that he must provide the world with some fiction of excuse. As his obsession and arrogance have swollen, he sees himself and his ambition as reason enough. No excuse is needed. Deutschland uber alles—is sufficient.”
He pushed the map away and his fire died down. He spoke almost in his usual manner.
“The conquest of the world,” he said. “He is a great fool. What would he do with his continents if he got them?”
“What, indeed,” pondered her grace. “Continents—even kingdoms are not like kittens in a basket, or puppies to be trained to come to heel.”
“It is part of his monomania that he can persuade himself that they are little more.” Coombe’s eye-glasses had been slowly swaying from the ribbon in his fingers. He let them continue to sway a moment and then closed them with a snap.
“He is a great fool,” he said. “But we,—oh, my friend—and by ‘we’ I mean the rest of the Map of Europe—we are much greater fools. A mad dog loose among us and we sit—and smile.”
And this was in the days before the house with the cream-coloured front had put forth its first geraniums and lobelias in Feather’s window boxes. Robin was not born.
Chapter 18
In the added suite of rooms at the back of the house, Robin grew through the years in which It was growing also. On the occasion when her mother saw her, she realized that she was not at least going to look like a barmaid. At no period of her least refulgent moment did she verge upon this type. Dowie took care of her and Mademoiselle Valle educated her with the assistance of certain masters who came to give lessons in German and Italian.
“Why only German and Italian and French,” said Feather, “why not Latin and Greek, as well, if she is to be so accomplished?”
“It is modern languages one needs at this period. They ought to be taught in the Board Schools,” Coombe replied. “They are not accomplishments but workman’s tools. Nationalities are not separated as they once were. To be familiar with the language of one’s friends—and one’s enemies—is a protective measure.”
“What country need one protect oneself against? When all the kings and queens are either married to each other’s daughters or cousins or take tea with each other every year or so. Just think of the friendliness of Germany for instance—”
“I do,” said Coombe, “very often. That is one of the reasons I choose German rather than Latin and Greek. Julius Caesar and Nero are no longer reasons for alarm.”
“Is the Kaiser with his seventeen children and his respectable Frau?” giggled Feather. “All that he cares about is that women shall be made to remember that they are born for nothing but to cook and go to church and have babies. One doesn’t wonder at the clothes they wear.”
It was not a month after this, however, when Lord Coombe, again warming himself at his old friend’s fire, gave her a piece of information.
“The German teacher, Herr Wiese, has hastily returned to his own country,” he said.
She lifted her eyebrows inquiringly.
“He found himself suspected of being a spy,” was his answer. “ With most excellent reason. Some first-rate sketches of fortifications were found in a box he left behind him in his haste. The country—all countries—are sown with those like him. Mild spectacled students and clerks in warehouses and manufactories are weighing and measuring resources; round-faced, middle-aged governesses are making notes of conversation and of any other thing which may be useful. In time of war—if they were caught at what are now their simple daily occupations—they would be placed against a wall and shot. As it is, they are allowed to play about among us and slip away when some fellow worker’s hint suggests it is time.”
“German young men are much given to
spending a year or so here in business positions,” the Duchess wore a thoughtful air. “That has been going on for a decade or so. One recognizes their Teuton type in shops and in the streets. They say they come to learn the language and commercial methods.”
“Not long ago a pompous person, who is the owner of a big shop, pointed out to me three of them among his salesmen,” Coombe said. “He plumed himself on his astuteness in employing them. Said they worked for low wages and cared for very little else but finding out how things were done in England. It wasn’t only business knowledge they were after, he said; they went about everywhere—into factories and dock yards, and public buildings, and made funny little notes and sketches of things they didn’t understand—so that they could explain them in Germany. In his fatuous, insular way, it pleased him to regard them rather as a species of aborigines benefiting by English civilization. The English Ass and the German Ass are touchingly alike. The shade of difference is that the English Ass’s sublime self-satisfaction is in the German Ass self-glorification. The English Ass smirks and plumes himself; the German Ass blusters and bullies and defies.”
“Do you think of engaging another German Master for the little girl?” the Duchess asked the question casually.
“I have heard of a quiet young woman who has shown herself thorough and well-behaved in a certain family for three years. Perhaps she also will disappear some day, but, for the present, she will serve the purpose.”
As he had not put into words to others any explanation of the story of the small, smart establishment in the Mayfair street, so he had put into words no explanation to her. That she was aware of its existence he knew, but what she thought of it, or imagined he himself thought of it, he had not at any period inquired. Whatsoever her point of view might be, he knew it would be unbiassed, clear minded and wholly just. She had asked no question and made no comment. The rapid, whirligig existence of the well-known fashionable groups, including in their circles varieties of the Mrs. Gareth-Lawless type, were to be seen at smart functions and to be read of in newspapers and fashion reports, if one’s taste lay in the direction of a desire to follow their movements. The time had passed when pretty women of her kind were cut off by severities of opinion from the delights of a world they had thrown their dice daringly to gain. The worldly old axiom, “ Be virtuous and you will be happy,” had been ironically paraphrased too often. “Please yourself and you will be much happier than if you were virtuous,” was a practical reading.