XXXV.

One afternoon in early spring, when the streets of London resounded with bugles and drums calling the manhood of Britain to rise in arms in defense of Russia’s menaced right to Petrograd and Germany’s ownership of Eastern Prussia, a dark curled, hazel-eyed girl rang the bell of Stonedge House and asked for Lady Ottercove, who a moment later greeted the visitor with astonished delight.

“Baby!” she exclaimed and threw her arms around her neck. She dragged Baby by the hand into the drawing-room, and from the drawing-room into the second drawing-room, and from the second drawing-room into the ball-room, and then up to her beautiful bedroom; and in all the rooms Baby displayed astonishment and rapture. “I have another house,” Eva said, “in the country, and Rex has another small house in town where we go when we wish to be alone with nobody to bother us, and I have a villa near Nice and a Rolls and lots of servants and everything, and more money than I know what to do with.”

“Not really!”

“Oh, yes! And Rex is very pleased with me, he says, and very proud.”

And indeed, every one of Lord Ottercove’s friends could testify that Eva proved an admirable hostess. She seemed to carry out her duties with ease and without self-consciousness; she had learnt the essentials of the game by hearsay; and there was something so fresh, naïve, spontaneous about her nature that men found her irresistible. And women she did not bother about.

“Aren’t you terribly, _terribly_ happy?” Baby asked.

Eva suddenly looked a little grave and sad. “Can you,” she said, “keep a secret?”

Baby said she could.

“If you can,” said Eva, “I will do something for you.”

“Really? What?”

“Save your life.”

“No?”

“Yes. I will tell you if you promise never, _never_ to say a word of it to anyone. It’s about Christopher de Jones. All these years he has been wanting to blow up the earth with all the people, etcetera, on it, and when we were in Greece and he descended into a deep, deep crater which he said was the deepest crater of them all, going right down into the bowels of the earth, he said to me that he had only to disintegrate one single atom in it to blow up all the earth with all the people on it into smithereens. But I said that this was very, very wicked of him, so he said that suffering humanity had suffered long enough and that if he blew it up it would no longer suffer pain, and so on, but that as he loved me more than anything else on earth he wished to spend the last few hours with me, holding hands, etcetera, and one day he came to me all radiant in the face and happy, and said he’d done it. ‘Done what?’ I said. ‘Disintegerated the atom,’ he said, and that we were all doomed and done for. ‘But, Chris,’ I said, ‘how could you have done such a thing!’

“‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘You needn’t worry; it’s all quite respectable, and there is no noise or explosion. I have only disintegrated the atom, and now all matter, the whole of the world is slowly disintegrating, too, peeling away into nothing. Soon nothing will be left of our planet.’

“‘But oh, Chris!’ I said.

“‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘There is no pain, no suffering, no inconvenience or discomfort. People just soften, disintegrate atom by atom, turn into whiffs of steam, a sort of mist, and vanish like smoke up the chimney. All is over in a few seconds.’

“‘Chris,’ I said, ‘I don’t understand.’

“‘It’s--how shall I say?--as if people ate themselves up,’ he said.

“‘But they can’t quite, Chris. There’ll be crumbs left after them.’

“‘No, crumbs and all.’

“‘But the mouth will be left, Chris; when the mouth has eaten everything there will still be the mouth left to eat.’

“‘And the mouth will eat it,’ he said.

“‘I see. Chris, I want to tell you something,’ I said.

“‘What?’ he said.

“‘I am going to have a baby,’ I said.

“‘Oh!’ he said. ‘Whose baby?’

“How could I know? But I looked soft and tender, as if it might be his. ‘Chris,’ I said, ‘Can you not save yourself and your baby--and me too, perhaps?’

“‘I would do anything,’ he said, ‘to save you and the baby, but I’ve laddered the world. You know what happens when you’ve laddered a silk stocking.’

“‘You’ve got to buy a new pair,’ I said.

“‘Exactly,’ he said.

“‘Can’t you buy a ... a new world?’ I said.

“‘I’ll have to see if I can mend the old one,’ he said.

“‘Can’t you?’

“He said he didn’t know. He said he would have to look into it, think about it. He might be able, he said, to isolate a bit of earth somewhere--a mountain-top or something, where we three could be saved.

“‘Yes, yes!’ I said. ‘We three and all our friends. Just a little house-party!’

“‘No house-parties, by God!’ he said. ‘Just you and I and the baby--you and I and the baby.’”

Eva paused. Baby looked at her long and sadly, modestly, too, as if reluctant to press her own claims to survival.

“But if you keep quiet about it,” said Eva, “I will tell you where to go to. You will just hide in the cellar or somewhere, lie low for a day or two, and then creep out when I tell you to. I will make it all right with Chris.”

For a long while the two cousins chattered together of matters irrelevant to the coming apocalypse; but presently they were back in the future. “And Rex, and Ferdinand, and one or two others,” said Eva. “I will manage it so that Chris doesn’t know.’

“And your mother, and Zita, and Pilling, I suppose?”

“No, no! We mustn’t have a crowd. You see, there will be very little to eat on the top of a hill. But we’ll have a good time all the same.”