The Light Heart (34 page)

Archie when he finally heard about it advised her that she would rue the day. “No doubt,” said Virginia unrepentantly, “but it will cook Selma’s goose! He can’t possibly make do with her after he’s had another good look at Rosalind.” Archie said that was Interference, and should be punishable by hanging.

The first few days of that dubious week went exceedingly well, and everyone was charmed with Prince Conrad’s
affability
and good manners, and certain political and
international
subjects were prudently avoided in general
conversation
. To everyone’s relief, Conrad seemed almost to seek out Charles Laverham’s company rather than to resent his presence there, and Charles’s attitude towards Rosalind was of course the last word in casual friendship casually renewed. If Conrad had ever been jealous of Charles there was no sign of it now, and Virginia, who would never have admitted to Archie that she had had her own misgivings, began to breathe easier.

Oliver and Maia were not at the Hall that week, but Clare and Mortimer had come down to await the birth of Clare’s third child in her old home, and Mortimer accompanied Edward and Winifred when they drove over to Farthingale for dinner one night. It was dear old silly-ass Mortimer who put his foot in it up to the elbow, Archie told Virginia later that evening when he was trying to explain to her how on earth he had allowed the subject of a possible future war to get started in his own gun-room after dinner. Archie indignantly denied her brutal accusation that he had dozed off and let the
thing get out of
hand. He had merely turned his back for a minute, he said, to pour himself a whisky and soda, and when he turned round again there was Mortimer saying something about putting your money into oil shares because the next war would be fought with petrol.

“You mean aeroplanes and that sort of thing?” suggested Tommy Chetwynd sceptically. “Charles here is always saying that we shall be bombed from the air in the next war, and I don’t mind telling you it gives me the creeps, rather. We shall all have to live underground, or something. Beastly
uncomfortable
, what?”

“I was talking to a feller in the club last week,” said
Mortimer
, oblivious of the fact that Archie was trying to catch his eye, “who said that we should have German dirigibles over London in no time if we got mixed up in another war.” Then he realized, belatedly, the presence of Prince Conrad, and refusing to be disconcerted put him a straight question. “Does that sound to you like nonsense or not?” he demanded frankly.

“No. But first—why German, and why over London?” Conrad asked quietly. “Everyone now has dirigibles, have they not? Our Zeppelins are not the only machines of the kind. Why not say French dirigibles over Berlin?”

“Further to go,” said Mortimer bluntly. “Neutral territory between, and all that. Besides, if France goes to war with Germany, England is bound to come in.”

Prince Conrad raised his eyebrows.

“Bound?” he queried softly.

“Because Germany will have to violate Belgian neutrality to get at France, now that the French have got those forts along the north-eastern frontier,” said Mortimer, and Archie looked at Charles and they both looked away, because now they were in for it.

“I most sincerely hope you may be wrong about that,” said Conrad gravely. “I should hate to think, for one thing, that the German General Staff would do anything so—uninventive as to invade Belgium.”

“Well, there’s one other way into France, through
Switzerland
,” Mortimer conceded drily.

“I think plain commonsense would tell the German General Staff that the consequences of invading a neutral country would be too dire to contemplate,” Charles remarked, and Prince Conrad gave him a quick glance and a nod, as though he agreed with that. “It wouldn’t do them much good to get a clear road ahead from Belgium to Paris if they had the British Army on their tails all the way.”

“Commonsense might also tell the British Cabinet that England would make money by remaining neutral,” said Conrad thoughtfully, gazing at the amber liquid in his glass.

There was an embarrassed sort of silence, as though someone had said something very off colour.

“But there
is
the Belgian treaty, isn’t there,” said Tommy Chetwynd uncomfortably at last. “That brings us in automatically if Belgium is molested.”

“In that case, I am afraid Graf Zeppelin would have
something
to say to London before long,” said Conrad, it seemed with regret.

“But, my dear fellow, our Army won’t be in London, it would be on the Continent,” Mortimer pointed out, and as Prince Conrad did not reply at once, looking down at his glass, waiting for his remark to sink in, Mortimer added angrily, “To drop bombs on London would be simply to murder a lot of defenceless women and children!”

“The British Army wouldn’t like that, would it,” suggested Conrad. “It would want to be at home, defending its families. And if an army goes home, the war ends.”

“But no civilized nation makes war on noncombatants!” Mortimer insisted, shifting in his chair. “That’s sheer,
unbridled
hate!”

“War is not a civilized pastime,” Conrad reminded them patiently. “With man’s conquest of the air, it will become still less so. But a short war, brought to a quick end because one side finds it intolerable, could be more merciful in the long run
than the old-fashioned sieges which went on for months while people starved by inches.”

“You mean it’s kinder to blow people up than to starve them to death,” said Tommy, wincing.

“And quicker,” nodded Conrad. “But why on earth does everyone in England think Germany wants war? That is absurd.”

“There’s never been a war without at least one side wanting it,” Charles told him coolly.

“True. But now that I have spent several weeks here after a long absence, it seems to me that the anti-German spirit in England amounts to foolishness.” Conrad looked round at them, polite and correct and unargumentative, as though seeking enlightenment. “People whom I must take seriously, like yourselves, predict war with Germany. I confess I do not understand why.”

“Because a big German fleet on top of the Kaiser’s bad
manners
is too much to bear!” exploded Mortimer, and Archie slid down in his chair and buried his face in his glass. “The fellers who say Germany is building the fleet to protect her dear little merchant marine make me laugh! As long as Germany increases her Navy at the present rate of speed England has got to do the same, and sooner or later the lid blows off!”

“Then, of course, we come to the submarine,” Conrad reflected. “An unknown quantity still. And I think with all of us”—he flashed a keen glance round their closed, guarded faces—“rather a dark secret. Nothing but actual warfare can determine its precise value as a weapon, I suppose. It is logical that you here in England should be preoccupied with the submarine. England without a Navy, or with a defeated one, could no longer exist. Whereas Germany without a Navy would still be Germany.”

“I wonder if an aeroplane could spot a submarine under the surface,” Charles threw in unexpectedly. “The Americans are using aeroplanes with great success on the Mexican border now—for scouting and mapping. And last May at Henley, as
everyone knows, we were able to drop plaster-of-Paris bombs on a dreadnought-shaped target marked out on the ground—and hit it from an altitude of a thousand feet going at forty-five miles an hour.”

“But there’s the question of flying range.” Tommy was getting interested. “An aeroplane would never dare go far out to sea. Dirigibles could, they can stay up for hours—days, maybe. I’m for dirigibles myself, every time. Oliver says our new army biplanes are killing their pilots right and left down at Aldershot.”

“This is the most bloodcurdling conversation I’ve heard in a long time,” Archie observed from the depths of his chair. “You remind me of a half dozen housemaids all trying to top each other with gruesome stories of their great-aunts’ operations.”

“I think it is very illuminating,” said Mortimer, with his usual imperviousness to hints or tact, “getting a foreign viewpoint like this. Now, with regard to invasion, how about Britain?” he resumed to Prince Conrad. “The First Sea Lord says it can’t be done. What do you think?”

“But of course it can be done,” Conrad assured him quietly, nursing his glass. “By a determined enemy, who did not count the cost, and with a superior air force, any country on earth can be invaded. Transportation centres could be pulverized, the civilian morale destroyed by loss of life behind the fighting line, panic and confusion created in the capital city—no government could hold out long, there would be a mass demand for peace. The country which is ruthlessly prepared to strike first and hardest is bound to win.”

“But at what cost!” cried Mortimer. “The first country to wage war from the air on civilians back of the lines would become a pariah—an outcast among nations!”

Prince Conrad gave a small, unconcerned shrug.

“The country which wins the next war can make its own right and wrong,” he said.

Just as Archie was thinking, I really must do something
about this, the door of the gun-room opened and Virginia looked in, demanding what on earth was keeping them so long, and announcing that everybody wanted to dance and the rugs were up.

Charles, who had said so little, heard her with thankfulness and rose with alacrity. Charles had been suddenly visited with what he was inclined to consider a revelation. The blighter hasn’t come here to snoop, thought Charles—he’s been sent here to scare us. The next war must be made to look too
horrible
for words. That way we shall try and avoid it, while Germany, in their own homely phrase, stuffs its mattress. How childish they are. How Boetian. Fatheads. Bogey-bogey-bogey, like one’s nursery days. If only one could laugh. If only they didn’t mean it….

P
HOEBE
found Rosalind’s childlike good spirits at being in England again rather heartrending, and had glanced more than once at Prince Conrad in the effort to comprehend him—for if he enjoyed his wife’s radiant happiness as his expression of indulgent amusement indicated, why had he withheld the privilege so consistently and against his prenuptial promises?

That evening at Farthingale Phoebe determined to take it up with him. The gramophone was playing a waltz in the drawing-room, and she was strolling with Conrad in the moonlight on the stone-flagged terrace outside the long
windows
, cooling off after a romping polka. The casual ways of an English country house made many more opportunities for tête-à-tête conversation than had existed in the formal
atmosphere
at Heidersdorf, and every now and then he had been tempted to make what Phoebe derisively called in her thoughts “advances” to the baffling American who seemed to know every parry and counterthrust in the game at which he
considered
himself an expert. She took no particular pains to
avoid him—she would not dignify his pursuit of her by being angered or frightened by it. She simply presented to him an impenetrably amused and efficient cold shoulder, and every now and then laughed in his face, which is always disconcerting to the most cast-iron masculine ego. When they danced together he was inclined to hold her much too close and so she had suggested the terrace. And now, before the moonlight could go to his head, she attacked him.

“You ought to let Rosalind come home more often,” she began accusingly, glancing in through the window to where Rosalind was dancing in innocent mirth with Archie, seeming to float with sheer, uncomplicated happiness.

“It is difficult for me to get away from Heidersdorf now. I am a man of many affairs, you see,” he replied without any signs of umbrage, and so she tried again.

“Then let her come alone, it would do her good,” she persisted.

“A good German wife does not leave her husband and children to go junketing and flirting in London,” he said, still without animus.

“She isn’t a German wife, she’s as English as the day she was born. And it’s not children. It’s only one.”

“Ah, yes,” said Conrad, and sighed his regret.

Phoebe scowled at him.

“You are a brute, aren’t you!” she said almost admiringly.

“Why do you say that?” His eyes were on her, piercing, caressing, challenging. “I am devoted to Rosalind, as you very well know—as you are yourself. However, to me that does not constitute an insurmountable barrier to our being devoted—you and I—to each other.” His bright, intimate gaze probed her defensive silence, meeting no response. “Without her my life would be very flat,” he added as though stating a fact so obvious as to be negligible. “Without her I bore myself. It has always been like that.”

“How about your boring her?” Phoebe asked bluntly, and he laughed with perfect good humour.

“Oh, I think not,” he replied easily, and she saw that she had voiced what was to him a mere whimsicality.

They are impervious, she thought, pacing beside him in the pure white light with the sentimental music beyond. Germans are completely oblivious of any idea they don’t wish to entertain. Nothing can get through their skulls that they don’t want there. Even the best of them—and surely Conrad is among the best of them, she thought—have heads made of solid bone. It must be very comfortable—never to wonder, never to wish, never to doubt—always to
know.
But suppose, just once, they were wrong. I should think, if they were ever
proved
wrong, so conclusively that they could find no
explanation
, no way out, and had to face the fact that they were actually
wrong
—I should think their reason would totter….

They had reached the far end of the terrace, where a vine cloaked the corner of the house beyond the windows, and turned to retrace their steps. Suddenly Conrad’s arms were around her and his lips had caught hers by surprise. At first shocked into immobility and then swept by congealing anger, she merely stood, passive, stiff, enduring, until he let her go, and then said with what she felt was childish inadequacy, “Don’t ever do that again. And I mean it.”