CHAPTER 21.
Destiny seemed to be setting the stage for Armageddon, the last tragic scene in the play of human life. Pandora’s box had been opened and every mortal ill loosed to the bonds of hate. For more than three years, the sword of War had maimed the body of civilisation. It was a time when the vision of young men was carnage, and the dream of old men, despair. Prussian frightfulness was still exacting dreadful tribute from Celt and Anglo-Saxon battlefields that had lost all trace of old-time chivalry. The virtue of sheer sacrifice was confined to the English-speaking Dominions, the flower of whose youth had gone forth against a foe that had not directly challenged them; gone forth with joy to build their splendid bodies into ramparts that might be shattered but never stormed.
The Blond Beast was shaking the blood from his eyes and looking anxiously across the Atlantic. But America had not yet decided to step into the breach.
Thus with the men. Nor was the mettle of our women lacking in the hour of trial. Spartan mothers never sent their sons into battle with finer renunciation than did the mothers of the unconscripted youths who crowded the transports in the first two years of conflict. Women stepped into the gaping ranks of industry at home—into the farms and fields, and into factories originally designed for making ploughshares and pruning hooks, but now converted into plants for fashioning the panoplies of war. Thousands of these women clad themselves in the overalls of labour, and hundreds put on the uniform of the Red Cross. Life so lived was hard but it was intense, and “Carry on”, came to express one of the spiritual values of the ages.
This was one picture of the activities of women during the grim tourney of Might against Right. There was another, not so inspiring. It revealed the cocotte and the flapper. Birds of beautiful plumage, these, who thronged London, Paris, Ostend—God knows where they were not—and sang their siren songs into masculine ears echoing with the shriek of shot and shell . . . songs that offered forgetfulness, Nirvana, to men who came out of a stinking Hell where the form of Death stalked grinning at their side. These were they who filled the theatres, cabarets, and tea shops, providing fat profits for jewellers, modistes, motor liveries; the hotels and inconspicuous road-houses.
How swiftly in our own land came the changes wrought by war! One grew inured to bobbed hair, knee-length skirts, universal smoking, Einstein, trousered women, camouflage, expensive economy and economical extravagance, unashamed macquillage, weddings à la volée, War Babies, and appetency for divorce.
The social limousine, as it sped on the road of Hysteria, was not alone in its responsiveness to the influences of the time. The car of politics was jolted from its accustomed track. Union Government was formed under the leadership of Sir Robert Borden, and both the great parties lost their distinctiveness, not so much from the deliberate fusion as from the departure of the pick of capable men from each. To complete the debacle of the Liberal Party, Sir Wilfrid Laurier—the thaumaturge of Canada’s peaceful days of growth—passed away, stupefied by the alarms of war. The nation lost its beautiful Parliament House by fire, set it was generally thought, by the myrmidons of the Kaiser.
In the Dillings’ home, changes had also made their way. Marjorie found the top floor convenient as a meeting place for the dozen and one organisations over which she was asked to preside. Dilling had an office on the ground floor as well as at the Victoria Museum—whither the burnt-out Members of Parliament had been driven for refuge, and Azalea practically lived at the house.
Mr. Sullivan was by no means an infrequent visitor and Lord Ronald Melville, the A.D.C., found a curious respite from Society’s kaleidoscopic demands upon him in the prim ugliness of Marjorie’s drawing-room.
“I like him better than any man I ever knew,” she confided to Azalea, one evening as they sat waiting for the children to return from a masquerade at Government House. “He’s so old-fashioned.”
Azalea laughed. “In what way?”
“Ever so many ways! He doesn’t like women who smoke or swear, and he’s so fond of children.”
“That is old-fashioned!”
Marjorie nodded. “I don’t think he likes Ottawa very much. He said that the Society here was like a blurred and microscopic reflection of London life. Wasn’t that pretty strong, Azalea?”
“Well, it certainly is a definite view.”
“I find it easy to get on with him,” Marjorie continued. “All the things I like to talk about seem interesting to him. With other people, no matter what I say, it doesn’t sound quite right, but with Their Excellencies and Lord Ronald, there is such a different feeling!”
She sighed. Long ago, she had observed that famous people whose names she used to revere in Pinto Plains, neither talked nor acted like the sons of God; gradually, she discovered that age was not to be confused with sapience or high life with respectability. She realised that to succeed she must say daring things to people from whom she shrunk, and repeat the latest gossip freshened by a spraying of her own invention. She divined that in being kind to men and allowing them to talk frankly with her, she earned the enmity of their wives, and that if she held herself aloof, these same women considered her a stick and a fool. She could acquire neither the smart badinage of people of parts, nor the air of those who used ponderosity to cloak their native insipidities.
“You should be very grateful for being clever,” Marjorie said. “If I were only a little bit cleverer, I shouldn’t have found Ottawa half so—so—difficult.” She blushed. “Do you know, Azalea, I used to think that everybody here would be like Lord Ronald, good and kind and friendly. I used to think Society was exactly like that!”
Azalea’s mouth grew hard. She knew, without being told, that some one had inflicted a hurt upon Marjorie’s tender spirit, and all her love rose up in revolt.
“Society!” she cried. “Can’t you see that what we dignify by that name is merely a mechanism devised to give a certain class of climbers and parasites the power to lead a comfortably otiose existence at the expense of the shrinking and the credulous?”
“I’m afraid I don’t understand quite all of that,” confessed Marjorie. “But I know it’s clever. There are so many clever people, here. That is what makes me seem stupider than I really am, by comparison.”
“They are not clever,” contradicted Azalea. “They are simply experts in the art of pretence. They succeed by bluff.”
“You have to be clever to do that,” argued Marjorie. Then suddenly, “I hope you won’t mind my saying so, Azalea, but you know I’ve often thought how much better everything would have been for everybody if you had been married to Raymond!”
Azalea raised startled eyes to see Dilling standing in the doorway. That he had overheard Marjorie’s words was obvious. He stood regarding her with a strange interest as if studying her in the light of a sudden revelation. With an onrush of knowledge, he became conscious of his soul, for the first time. He knew its needs and how Azalea had met them during the months they had worked together. He saw Azalea as a woman . . . as the luminous source of all his inspiration.
A moment passed . . . a moment that held an eternity of understanding. Soul met soul, disdaining the barriers of sense. The room was filled with the sound of Marjorie’s knitting needles. The clock began to chime . . .
The pell-mell entrance of the children shattered the spell that gripped them. Baby, drunk with excitement, staggered to Marjorie and climbed, a crumpled heap of tarltan and tinsel, into her lap. Besser, proudly wearing a jester’s cap over one ear, retrieved from his pocket, three sticky lumps that had once been cake, and laid them on the table. Althea, infected by the snobbery in which she had so lately been a participant, flipped up her skirts at the back, and wriggled decorously upon a chair.
“Well, my treasures, and was the party boo-ti-fool?” demanded Marjorie.
A torrent of speech answered her.
“And were you dear, good children?” she asked. “What of my tomboy, Althea?”
“I was the goodest one at the party,” replied that young person. “Mind you, Mummie, I was the only child what folded up my napkin!”