That Which Hath Wings 11That Which Hath Wings (part 11)
18
Literature · Romance
That Which Hath Wings 11
That Which Hath Wings (part 11)
DehanEnglish
In the face of the outrunning tide, Undersea Boat No. 18 had nosed her way from Norderney Gat to Nordeich, by the deep-dredged low-water channel of which Luttha had told. The boy had been roused by the kick of a foot shod with a heelless rubber boot, out of a dog-sleep on the vibrating deckplates of the men's cabin, under the white glare of the electric globes. The man who kicked him hauled away the blue blanket, and pitched him his clothes, yet moist and heavy with sea-water, ordering him in broken English to get into them quickly to go ashore.
The boy obeyed, stiffly, for he yet ached in every limb from the resuscitative rubbing administered by Petty Officer Stoll and his assistant--and his temples throbbed, and there was a singing in his ears. Perhaps that was from the smell of the petrol! One breathed petrol--devoured tinned meat stew petrol-flavoured, and drank soup and coffee made with petrol--judging by the tang upon the palate--on board the German submarine.
The hatch at the top of the dripping steel ladder was open, letting in the smell of the sea tanged with the odours of fish and rotten seaweed and sewage. One emerged through the manhole into a strange, windless woolly world. Through a weeping woolly-grey mist, grey, greasy-looking water lapped and licked against a weedy jetty of grey stone alongside which U-18 lay with the fog smoking off her whitey grey painted steel skin. A bluff-bowed galliot, a yacht or two, and some lighters laden with bricks and cement sat on the blue-grey mud of a small harbour; grey and white seagulls were feeding on the mud, gaily-painted row-boats were lying on the shelving beach of weedy sand.
To the right-hand a lighthouse or beacon made a yellow blur in the prevailing woolliness. Behind one, the foggy land seemed mixed up with the foggy sea, even as the yellow-white curd mixes with the whey in a dish of rennet. North, the intermittent beam thrown from a lighthouse came and went in sudden winks. Facing to the mainland again, one made out east of the quay an aggregation of tiled roofs and chimneys, and a wooden church-spire with a quaint gilded weathercock. Running south were black and white signal-posts, buffers, and a big, barn-like railway station. Beyond, the fog came down so like a curtain, that the shining metals of the permanent way ran into it and ended as sharply as though they had been cut off.
There was a trampling of feet on the steel ladder. Heads showed through the manhole, and a rough hand caught the boy by the collar of his pneumatic jacket and jerked him out of his betters' way. Luttha appeared in his panoply of yellow oilskins, passed aft and went up on the platform, where his second officer and another stood together at the rail. Von Herrnung followed, dough-pale, and wearing an old Navy cap in place of his goggled helmet, and a junior officer came after. They brought the tang of schnapps with the smell of their oilskin coats. The boy had seen them drinking and nodding to each other at the narrow table in the officer's cabin, as he had hurried into his clothes.
"Gute Reise! Viel Glueck!" Luttha had shouted to von Herrnung, and waved his hand with a heartiness that did not seem quite real.
"Auf wiedersehen, besten Dank!" von Herrnung had called back to the Commander, and set his foot upon the one-rail gang-plank by which a seaman had connected the submarine with the quay. And then he had drawn it back, as though the salty plank had burned him. For a party of tall grey soldiers with brown boots and belts, and spiked helmets covered with grey stuff like their clothing, came tramping along the quay with bayonets fixed, and halted at a harsh order from their officer--and von Herrnung, with a shiny grey face, and grey lips under his red moustache, had croaked out meaningly to Luttha:
"My thanks for this, Herr Commander! We will settle the score one day!"
He went on then, and the officer arrested him. And while Bawne stood staring, taking in the scene, another brutal hand had grabbed him by the scruff--lifted him as a boy lifts a puppy--and slung him on to the stones of the quay.
"You come with us!" Somebody spoke to him in English. It was von Herrnung, and his eyes were poisonous with hate. "You bear your share in this, Her Dearest." This was a curious nickname by which the Enemy was often to address Bawne. "Where I go you will go also!--do you understand?"
The officer said something harshly, making an imperious gesture with his drawn sword, and von Herrnung saluted and fell silently into place between the grey files. Then the party marched along the quay between rows of storehouses with doors painted in broad horizontal stripes of black and white, and passed through a yard and a big open gate at the end of it, with a black and white sentry-box, and a grey-uniformed spike-helmeted sentry on duty outside the gate. The sentry presented arms, and the party swung through, and struck into a wide main-road that crossed the railhead, a sandy road with a dyke at either side of it, that followed the curve of the shore-line east.
Beyond the shore-line the North Sea fog came down, blank and drab as an asbestos curtain, waiting a westerly breeze to roll inland and blot out everything. Between shore and road were the clumped houses of the fishing-village, and a church with a wooden spire, shaped like an old-fashioned needle-case. Sand-dunes, covered with sea-holly and bent grass, came up to the road. But on the other side of the road, beyond the dyke, the eye traversed a wide expanse of dead, flat fenland, drained by a many branched creek.
Set in the midst of the fenland were buildings of some kind. One thought of barracks in the same enclosure with a martello tower or a powder-magazine, like that in Hyde Park. But two strange landmarks sticking up into the foggy sky altered the character of the flat-roofed structure of grey stone standing in a wide expanse of gravel enclosed by a strong wooden fence, stained with some drab weather-resisting composition, and entered by an imposing pair of spike-topped gates. A wide dyke full of sluggish water girdled the fence. You crossed by a wooden swing-bridge leading to the big gates. When you approached them by the road that branched from the main-road at right-angles, you realised the immense height of two hollow triangular towers of grey-painted steel latts and girders that straddled over the flat roof of the squat stone building--the shorter tower nosing up three hundred feet into the air, and its big brother more than double that height, sheathing its sharp point amongst the leaden-hued clouds, bellying full of moisture sucked up from the North Sea.
They looked alive to Bawne in a queer ugly way, throwing out their mile-long antennae to the supporting poles, linking their metal guy-ropes to solid structures of stone and concrete, like colossal web-spinning insects, half-spider, half-mantis, wholly horrible. And they reminded him of the three tall Wireless masts rearing over the Admiralty at Whitehall, and Marconi House, in the Strand, and the little one that straddled over the telegraph-cabin on Fanshaw's Flying Ground. And at the remembrance the salt tears overbrimmed his raw and burning eyelids, blotting out the muscular, vigorous backs of the men who walked in front of him, and his throat felt as choky as though he had swallowed a whole bull's-eye.
There was a sharp order to halt, and boots marked time on sandy gravel. A grey-uniformed soldier of the two on guard outside the big spike-topped gates, flanked with a black-and-white sentry-box on either side, brought his bayonet to the slope and challenged sharply. A sergeant-major of the party stepped out and answered; the sentry bellowed:
"Raus!"
And with the ruffle of a side-drum, the gates swung open, the guard turned out of a stone guardhouse within, and the armed party with the prisoner and the boy marched into the gravelled courtyard. The gates shut, and von Herrnung was taken off to a block of buildings distant from the central erection with the Wireless towers. There was a clock over the doorway of the guardhouse. The hands indicated a quarter to four.
Bawne, standing shivering in the morning rawness, heard the infantry officer commanding the party say in a loud, harsh voice that the boy was to be kept close and sharply looked after. Then a heavy hand gripped him roughly by the collar, and the voice belonging to the grip shouted:
"At the Herr Lieutenant's orders!"
Whereupon the boy was summarily thrust before the gruff-voiced speaker to a shed behind the guardhouse--a shed whose planks were a-tremble at all their lower edges with glittering drops of North Sea fog. He was helped in with a kick, scientifically administered--the big key crashed in the lock--and one was free to sob one's bursting heart out, lying face downwards among the hard, clean, shining straw-trusses that covered the floor of beaten earth. Somehow the tears relieved, and merciful sleep came to the child, and presently he awakened under the oilskin coat that served for bed-covering, to the rustling of the straw under his head, and through one unglazed aperture that admitted light and air, shone a large, lucent moon--in her last quarter, with Saturn, blazing like a great blue diamond, at her pale and silvery side.
In the shed, which had been destined but luckily not used as a kennel for the Adjutant's Pomeranian boar-hound, the boy remained in durance vile for a period of several days. The drills and parades, the buglings and drummings that marked the ordinary course of garrison life, alone enlivened the cramped monotony. He was given coarse food and drink three times a day, and permitted to exercise for half-an-hour in charge of a corporal within the limits of the gravelled courtyard. Soldiers were drilling there on most of these occasions, big men in the brand-new green-grey uniform that seemed a kind of Service kit, and who regarded Bawne with looks of quite incomprehensible malignancy, and when their mouths were not closed by Prussian military discipline, made coarse or beastly jokes at his expense.
You are to suppose a pitifully unequal struggle on the part of the boy to maintain decency, cleanliness, and self-respect under these conditions, which would have ended in hopeless lethargy had the Saxham pup sprung from a feebler race. Two things helped him at this juncture. The Rosary he said in his straw lair at night, and certain stimulating reading contained in a sea-stained and grimy-paged Scout's Notebook, that nobody had seen him with, or having seen had thought it worth their while to take away. You can see him on the sixth morning of captivity squatting on his straw, poring over the Alphabet of the Morse Signalling Code, the Rules for First Aid, and so on, following the ten precepts of Scout Law.
"Rule No. 7. A Scout obeys orders of his patrol-leader or scout-master without question."
He nodded his head as he read the words and his heavy eyes brightened. He pushed back the dulled and rumpled hair from his forehead and straightened his hunched back.
"Rule No. 8. A Scout smiles and whistles under all difficulties...."
The smile was bravely forced. He held up his head, filled his lungs with air, inflated his chest, pouted his lips, and began to whistle Rule Britannia. And at the second bar, somebody booted the door heavily and a thick voice bellowed:
"Halt den Mund!"
It was the voice of the soldier who was Bawne's jailor, and the whistle quavered and broke down. And as the boyish heart swelled to bursting and the irrepressible tears brimmed over, a musical motor-horn, some distance off, sounded clearly and sweetly:
"Ta-rara-ta ra!" And a Prussian officer's voice drowned out the sweetness of the answering echo, shouting:
"Achtung! Wache heraus!"
Bugles sounded, side-drums beat, there was a crunching of heavy boots upon stone and gravel, followed by the click of presented arms, and the groaning of the heavy gates swung back. Amidst all these significant noises, you caught the purr and crackle of pneumatic tyres rolling over the wooden bridge into the courtyard. As they stopped short, a bugle sounded imperatively, and hoarse voices gave the order:
"Helm ab!"
And a multitudinous shout answered--a thick, short, crashing utterance that suggested the fall of a tree. Three trees fell crashing, and then in a little still of awe a sharp, hollow voice answered:
"Danke, meine Kinden!"
And the boy squatting, listening in the straw, was conscious of a queer tingling sensation that made his hair stiffen on his scalp and sent odd little waves of shuddering down the whole length of his spine. The voice was not melodious or powerful. But it set the nerves on edge, and made you wonder what he could be like--the man to whom it belonged. And the question made a picture in the mind, of a mouth with thin lips that were parched and discoloured, a cruel mouth, matching the harsh and hollow utterance.
The time crawled on and the sun climbed high. It must have been noon or nearly when measured steps approached the shed, and the door was unlocked. This time a non-commissioned officer who had kicked Bawne yesterday caught hold of the boy, hauled him out of the shed, and made at the double towards the squat stone building bestridden by the pair of Wireless towers. Their intolerable shadows, the sun being nearly overhead, barred the big courtyard with wide lateral and diagonal bands and stripes of blackness. It was as though two Brobdingnagian spiders had spun there a pair of webs of incredible size.
There were soldiers on guard with fixed bayonets at the open doors, that led into the square low-ceiled stone vestibule. Before the two wide steps stood a bright yellow motor-car. It was big, roomy, and luxurious, with the Prussian eagle in black and red on both doors. A young officer in field-grey and flat cap sat immovable at the steering-wheel. At a little distance waited two other cars. Their chauffeurs wore a dark blue livery with silver braid and buttons, and these cars were black-enamelled and studiously plain.
Inside the vestibule were more sentries and a small body of soldiers, all with fixed bayonets. Also three dubious individuals in black uniform who might have been detectives or not. They were grouped outside a heavy door on the right hand as you entered. Despite the presence of so many persons a singular quiet reigned. Footfalls made no noise on the floor, presumably of stone, covered with thick, resilient red rubber. There were no windows, light being admitted from overhead by a skylight of thick opaline glass.
I have said that quiet reigned, but as the corollary of a sharp harsh voice that talked without cessation. It upbraided, denounced, interrogated; interrupted conjectural answers with contradiction; burst out anew into shrill denunciation, and switched off the current of abuse to pelt its object with questions again. It rasped the nerves. Of the men who heard it some grew pale, others were red and sweated freely. When it broke off in a scream like a vicious stallion's neigh, a susurration of horror passed from one to another of the erect, silent, and rigid men waiting in the vestibule. The neighing scream was followed by a small commotion. The door opened, and a tall, grey-moustached, grey-cloaked cavalry officer, in a silver helmet crested with a perching eagle, demanded--Bawne's little German serving him once more at this juncture:
"Water! Immediately--a glass of water!" and vanished again.
An orderly got the water, passing out by another tall door in the centre of the vestibule and coming back with a filled tumbler on a china plate. One of the men in black snatched it from him and knocked officiously. But the harsh shrill voice had begun to rate again, and when the door was opened, a thick-set officer in a spiked infantry helmet, with a glittering gold moustache and sharp blue eyes twinkling through glittering gold pince-nez, waved the water away as though it had never been asked for.
"The boy!" he said, in a shrill falsetto whisper. "Seine Majestaet wants the boy!"
Then it seemed as though twenty zealous hands propelled the boy towards the mysterious room's threshold. The officer in pince-nez grabbed his arm and pulled him briskly in.
*CHAPTER XLVII*
*THE MAN OF "THE DAY"*
You were in a square, singularly light, though windowless room immediately underneath the lower, pointed end of the biggest Wireless. The room was lighted along the top of the walls on two sides by oblong slabs of thick opaque glass with many ventilators controlled by levers. The huge metal ribs and supports of the colossal steel tower overhead were built deep into the solid stone masonry. Through a massive block of crystal glass--the insulator on which the pointed end of the mast rested, your vision was snatched up--up dizzily--through the vertical labyrinth of metal ribs and girders, until it ended at the inner extremity of the apex, seven hundred and fifty feet above. The shrill song of the wind amongst the steel ribs, and spars, and guy-ropes, whose ends were linked to reinforced steel beams or ground-anchors, sunk in heavy outside foundations of masonry, hardly reached one here. But from the dynamo-room that absorbed the space between this and the second Wireless chamber, you heard the deep moan of the Goldberg Alternator, its rotor speed maintained by a 500 horse-power Krafit engine, sunk, to lessen the tremendous vibration, in a solid steel and cement lined power-house, deep below the level of the soggy ground.
The boy's wide blue eyes took in the wonder and the strangeness of his surroundings. Lightness and whiteness, a ship-shape neatness, a scrupulous freedom from dust, a dazzling polish and burnish on surfaces or knobs or handles of wood, brass, or copper, characterised the place. About the walls were metal cylinders with pipes and induction-coils, frames supporting reels of wire in rows, and brass things like pincers in rows above them; and above these, rows of shining crystal bull's-eyes like port-lights, and yet others with stars and circles of electric bulbs.
At the distant end of the long, light, shining room, the deck-like run of the polished boards was broken by a step leading to a platform where the rigidly-erect figures of three men in dark blue uniform sat at the middle, and at either end of a long narrow table burdened with instruments whose use Bawne partly knew. The midmost operator, sitting with his back to you, wore a head-band with receiver ear-pieces, beyond which his ears, large, thick, and red as quarter-pounds of beefsteak, projected in a singularly grotesque way. The man seated on the right of the table had a paper-pad and pencil, and the man on the left sat in front of a typewriter, with lowered intent eyes and fingers crooked above the keys, as one waiting to type off a Wireless message, and the tingling desire to approach and see the apparatus more closely evoked a wiggle on the part of the boy that was grimly checked by a big hard hand that gripped his arm. This reminded him that he was a prisoner. Like von Herrnung, Bawne thought and--then upon his right he became aware of von Herrnung, green as a drowned man--and with all the stiffening gone out of him--wilting over the supporting arms of two officers of the garrison. And then a voice said something shrilly and harshly--and Saxham's son found himself looking into a pair of steel-blue, shining, flickering eyes, with whites curiously veined with red.
The man to whom the eyes belonged sat immediately facing you, on the opposite side of a big kneehole writing-table with rows of drawers in its pedestals, and official-looking ledgers upon it, also files of papers, dispatch-cases, three big inkstands, and the shining metal pillar of a telephone transmitter, the base of which the officer gripped with his right hand as he leaned forwards, sharply scrutinising you. The hand was large and muscular, with short, thick, crooked fingers, covered with jewelled rings that sparkled in the sun.
Half a dozen other officers stood at some little distance behind the seated personage.... Five out of the six wore the Service dress of grey-green serge, with spiked helmets covered with the same material. Badges, buckles, chain-straps, and the hilts of swords curved or straight were dulled to rigorous uniformity, and belts, gloves, and boots were of earth, not tan-coloured, brown. Thus much Bawne grasped, but of these individualities, save one, he got no clear impression. You were obliged to look at, and think of, the man sitting in the chair.
Those strange eyes stung as they fastened on you and sucked at you, somehow making you think of a tiger lurking in a cave of ice. They were shadowed by the peak of a grey-green field-cap, with an edge of vivid crimson showing above its deep band of silver lace, oakleaf and acorn-patterned. He wore a loose grey overcoat with silver buttons, thrown open to reveal a grey-green single-breasted Service jacket with a turn-down collar edged with silver lace and faced with crimson, and a glittering decoration dangling below the hook. But as he was of the short-necked, fleshy type of man, and kept his head well down and thrust forward, staring you out of countenance over a grizzled moustache with upright, bushy ends--and all the light in the room came from overhead, the decoration was obscured by the shadow of his chin. A sharp chin, meagrely modelled, with a cleft in the middle, suggesting petulance and vanity. The chin of a mediocre actor of romantic parts.
"So you are the boy?"
The tobacco-stained teeth in the mouth under the dyed moustache were filled and patched with gold that glittered when he spoke to you. There was a flash of yellow metal now as he added:
"You do not answer, no? Come nearer, boy!"
His legs, short, thick legs in grey riding-breeches and brown boots with beautiful spurs of gold and steel, stuck out towards you under the table. As you stepped out briskly to lessen the distance between you, he pulled the legs back sharply, and a handsome, dark young officer, standing on his right, put out a brown-gloved hand warningly, as though the border of the big Turkey rug on which stood the kneehole writing-table were a frontier-line that must not be crossed.
As he did this, the seated man glanced round at him, nodding approval, and the pale, jagged seam of a scar on his left cheek showed plainly against the dark, harsh, fever-dry skin. With the slewing of his head the decoration hanging by a swivel at the collar of his single-breasted Service jacket flashed into the light. Bawne saw a large Maltese Cross eight-pointed and blue-enamelled, having a black eagle, with outspread wings, between each arm. Crossed swords in diamonds were above, surmounted by a diamond Crown Imperial. And a black and white ribbon supported another Cross of plain black edged with silver, at a buttonhole of the Norfolk-cut jacket of grey-green. Possibly the boy had guessed in whose presence he stood, even before the young officer, at an impatient signal from his master, said in excellent English:
"I am commanded to tell you that you are in the presence of the Emperor of Germany."
*CHAPTER XLVIII*
*PATRINE IS ENGAGED*
"Don't tell me--not that you ever have--that there ain't such a thing as Providence!" Thus Franky, after lunch upon the fateful Third of August, from the hearthrug of the drawing room at 00, Cadogan Place. "When," he went on, "just as I'm on the point of sendin' in my papers to please you--good old England kerwumps into War!"
He continued, as Margot shrugged her small shoulders:
"All right, best child! Bet you twenty to one in gloves it comes off!--as sure as the Austrian monitors were shellin' Belgrade, and the British Cabinet were sittin' on Sunday, and the weekly rags selling like hot cakes, when you and me and the rest of the congregation were slowly oozin' out of Church. Why, the Kaiser and the Tsar have been at loggerheads since Saturday. German troops are swampin' Luxembourg, and the next move will be the Invasion of France. There We come in--and the rest of the big European Powers! Like a row of beehives kicked over!--all the swarms mixed and stingin', and Kittums' little Franky in the middle of the scrum!"
"Why are you so--frightfully keen about it?"
Margot's great dark deer-eyes were vaguely troubled. She got up from her writing-table, a lovely thing in Russian tulip-tree, the shelf of which was graced by a row of mascots: Ti-Ti and the jade tree-frog, Jollikins, Gojo, and half a dozen more.
"Best child, I'm not keen!" asserted Franky. "But I'm pattin' myself on the back--gloatin' over the knowledge that I'm not a bally Has Been--but a real live soldier--just when I'm likely to be wanted to be one! Switch on?"
He added, as Margot shook her head: "My grammar's a bit off, but I know what I mean if I can't express it. Here's a telegraph-kid on a red spider. Two to one in cough-drops that yellow screed's for me! Callin' me to Headquarters just as I'd got into my civvy rags to spend the afternoon with my wife!"
The prophecy proved correct. Franky vanished upstairs to peel, plunge into his Guards' uniform, and whirl away, borne by a taxi, into the dim conjectural regions known as Headquarters.
Margot went back to her desk to re-read a type-written letter from the Secretary of the Krauss and Wolfenbuchel Fraueenklinik at Berlin, counselling the honoured English lady whose introduction, supplied by a former lady-client, was specially satisfactory!--to secure a room at the Institute, by the payment of a moiety of the fee in advance. The crowd of applicants desirous to subject themselves to the wonderful "Purple Dreams" treatment, was so large, the accommodation, by comparison, so restricted, that to follow this course would be the only wise plan. Similar treatment could be obtained in Paris and Brussels, but to ensure success beyond doubt it was wisest to seek it at the German fountainhead. One hundred guineas would secure admission to the Berlin Fraueenklinik. By cheque made payable to the British Agent of Professors Krauss and Wolfenbuchel, Mr. Otto Busch, 000, Cornhill, London, E.C. It would be advisable were the English client to follow her remittance, taking up residence in Berlin within the next few days. Travelling might not be so easy in October, mildly hinted the Secretary of the Institute.
Why, bosh! what utter piffle! Good old England wasn't going to toddle into any European War in a hurry, decided Margot. She had had enough bother over the South African biz. Perhaps if Germany was having a rag with Russia, and a tiny bit of a scrap with France, one would have to get a passport, and travel by a different route to Berlin. Perhaps the best thing would be to go now--and stick the boredom of a three months' residence in the Kaiser's capital! Why not? Under the existing circumstances, one would be bored anywhere.
She drew the cheque, and enclosed it to Mr. Busch's address, and wrote a little letter in a huge hand to the Secretary, saying that she had done this and was obliged by his advice. Then she 'phoned to the Club to ask Patrine to come round to tea at 00, Cadogan Place. Miss Saxham was not there, according to the hall-porter, but might be found at AA, Harley Street. There Margot ran her to earth. Yes, Pat would come with pleasure! but upon condition that Lady Norwater was alone.
"Of course!" Margot remembered. "She's in mourning for the pretty kiddy-cousin! I must be getting stupid, or I'd have thought of that!"
But when the tall figure passed under the Persian portiere of the Cadogan Place drawing-room, it was arrayed in a revealing gown of pale rose lisse with the well-known stole of black feathers and a tall-crowned hat of golden braiding topped the Nile sunrise hair.
"Why, I thought--" Margot began:
"I know! Do you think it horribly unfeeling?" The speaker stooped to kiss the soft cheek of the little creature curled up in the corner of a favourite sofa in a favourite attitude which conveyed an impression of Margot's having no feet. Patrine did not look at all horrid or unfeeling as she said, winking back the tears that had overbrimmed her underlids, "My heart is in crape if my body isn't!"
"I know!" Margot's lovely eyes looked sympathy. "I remember how fond you've always been of the little cousin."
"Uncle Owen and Lynette won't believe that the darling's drowned," Patrine went on. "But I can't hope! I'm not of the hoping kind! When I shut my eyes I seem to see Bawne fighting to keep afloat--then sinking. It's as though he called me, and--it's horrible!" She shuddered. "It's horrible!"
"And--Count von Herrnung? The German Flying Man?" Margot touched the large white hand next her. "You know what a bad hand I am at saying things that are consolatory and cosy. Couldn't rake up a single text for my life--or if I did I'd quote 'em wrong end topside. Like the callow curate who assured the weeping widow that 'Heaven tempers the wind to the lorn sham!'"
"I'll let you off the texts, not being a weeping widow!"
But Patrine's pale cheeks burned. Margot pursued, not looking at them:
"Rhona Helvellyn told me there was nothing serious between you. Indeed, she said you rather hated him than otherwise. But of course you're sorry he's drowned, naturally!"
There was a silence. Then:
"Yes," Patrine agreed, "I rather hated him than otherwise!"
"Ah!" Margot's little face was sage. "It's a pity you don't care for some nice man or other!"
"Isn't it?"
"But you will one day. It's much nicer to live with your husband than with your sister. Though I never had a sister," added Margot. Then her mind, light and brilliant as a humming-bird, flitted to another subject. "Rhona and her two Militants lunched with me on Sunday. Awfully down on their luck, all three. The Grand Slam they'd planned--the surprise-packet for the Mansion House Banquet had had the lid put on it by the Police. Fancy Scotland Yard finding out anything! But it had, for Rhona got a mysterious note warning her that she'd be dropped on before she could open her head. So--the Bishops toddled through their speeches without being interrupted! Sit down and light up. These Balkan Sobranies are tophole!"
"I can't stay!" But Patrine sat down on the sofa, dipped in the ever-brimful silver box, and kindled a cigarette.
"Where's His Nibs?" she asked. For not even the chastening of bereavement could cure Patrine of slanginess.
"Called to B.P.G. Headquarters suddenly." Margot blew rings. "Or doing duty for some pal or other at the Tower. Don't bother about him! Tell me--why can't you stay with me?"
"Aunt Lynette wants me, for one thing. And----"
"And who for the other?"
"A man!" Patrine sent a thin blue spiral of cigarette smoke twirling upwards from her pursed lips. Intently she watched it climbing and spreading. When it faded between her absorbed eyes and the Futurist mouldings of the lapis lazuli-grounded ceiling whereon a silver comet swung in a great elliptical orbit about a golden central Sun, she resumed:
"A man----"
"That makes two men!" said Margot shrewdly,
"No, only one. A man I'm going to marry. Rather soon, too," said Patrine calmly, and put her cigarette into her mouth again.
"PAT!"
Margot was staring at her blankly.
"Well, my dinkie?"
"Isn't this frightfully previous?"
Patrine removed the cigarette to say:
"It depends on how you look at things."
"But--when did you meet?"
"In Paris."
"Do I know him?"
"No, luckily for me!"
Margot's small, amazed face dimpled a little at the compliment.
"Is he nice?"
"I think so!"
"In Our Set?"
"I don't think so! He's a Flying Man by profession. Now you know nearly as much as I do," said Patrine. "And I've to be getting back to Harley Street." She rose from the sofa, towering over her small, indignant friend.
"You're not going out of this room until you tell me the rest of it! What is his name, and when did--it--come off?"
"His name is Alan--and he only asked me on Wednesday, when he came to Harley Street. He has called every day since that horrible 18th of July, but this time he came to bring"--Patrine choked a little--"Bawne's Scout staff and smasher. They had been forgotten in the dressing-shed at the Flying School. Lynette was too ill to go down to receive them. I had to instead--and the sight of them broke me up."
"I--see!"
"And," Patrine went on, "he--Alan--was being sympathetic, when Uncle Owen came in."
"My hat!" Margot sat up, her small face alight and sparkling. "The Doctor-man with the chin and eyebrows! Did he give you unlimited wigging or relent and bless you like the heavy uncle in a proper French Comedy?"
"He saw how things were between us. He wasn't astonished. He was very kind. He is always kind!" said Patrine, swallowing. "If I really believed God were as good as Uncle Owen, I shouldn't be afraid to die."
"He makes me feel like an earwig under a steam-roller," affirmed Margot. "And the charming aunt. Does she cotton to the engagement?"
"Lynette is not, for the present, to be told. I asked that. It seems so cruel to be happy when she is so broken-hearted."
"Umps! Then--Irma and your gay and giddy mater? How do they take it?"
"They haven't been asked to take it any way."
"Oh well! Love is good while it lasts," Kittums said from the summit of a pedestal of experience, "but if I could change back to Margot St. John again----"
"You wouldn't!"
"Wouldn't I, that's all! This horror that November brings--that's coming every day closer! ... Pat--I haven't told Franky yet, that's to be got over! But I've definitely settled to go to that Institute in Berlin where women can have babies without knowing anything about it--under--Bother! I never can remember the name of that drug!"
Patrine sat up. Her face was curiously expressionless. She said, crushing out the last spark of her cigarette-end against the face of a Chinaman on the lacquer ash-tray that occupied a little stand beside the sofa with the silver Sobranie box:
"You told me something--you showed me the pink book with the pretty title, 'WEEP NO MORE MOTHERS'--wasn't that the name? You've made up your mind? Does it cost the earth?"
"Two hundred for patients of the superior class--wohlgeboren clients. Half paid in advance! Stiff!--but to make sure of not suffering I'd plank a thou'! It's a nightmare, and a Day-mare, that haunts me all the clock round. That's why I'd change--and be Margot St. John again! That's why I can't whoop with joy when my friends tell me they're going to be spliced!"
Patrine got up.
"Oh!--well! Perhaps I shall escape. After all--it's a lottery!"
"Not for big, splendid women like you. You were made to be a mother, Pat!"
"Don't!"
She kissed Margot hastily and went to the door.
"Stop!" Margot scrambled off the sofa. "You've forgotten the most important thing of all. Hasn't 'Alan' got a surname by any chance?"
Patrine looked back over her shoulder with something of the old smile.
"Rather! What do you think of Sherbrand?"
"What do I think of Sherbrand? How odd! It's Franky's family name!"
"Queer coincidence. But my Sherbrand hasn't any relatives in the Peerage!--or if he has, he hasn't told me! I'll butt you wise when I know him well enough to ask him about them. You see, the whole thing has been beautifully sudden!"
"Bring him to lunch at the Club to-morrow. You're not in mourning, and if you were it wouldn't matter. It's simply a family affair, if he's really Franky's cousin. So, say yes."
"Very well, if he'll come!"
*CHAPTER XLIX*
*THE WAR CLOUD BREAKS*
Patrine kissed her friend again, and went, leaving Kittums in a whirl of astonishment. To Franky, presently returning from the conjectural region known as Headquarters she announced:
"Here's something like news! Pat Saxham--the girl with the Nile sunrise hair that you don't like!--is going to marry a Flying Man. And his name is--the same as yours!"
"By the Great Snipe! you don't say so!"
Franky, slim and dapper in the scarlet Guards' tunic and crimson sash, divested himself of his sword, dropped his immaculate buckskin gloves into his forage-cap, and sighed with undisguised relief as the attentive Jobling, who had been hovering in the background, disappeared with these articles. Then he proceeded carefully to choose a cigarette from the silver box of Sobranies, lighted it up, bundled Fits out of her master's corner of the sofa, and dropped into it with a sigh of relief.
"Sherbrand.... Must be the aviator-fellow we met in Paris. The chap whose hoverer was bein' tested by the swells of the French S. Ae! Saved your life and snubbed me for askin' him to dine with us! Well, that's what I call a cannon off the cush for the Saxham girl!" His dislike of her betrayed itself in his tone. "Must be the same man! supposin' him short of a father! Hilton of Ours showed me an advertisement in the B.M.D. column of The Banner this afternoon briefly announcin' my Uncle Sherbrand's death. Never read The Banner--that's how I missed it. Can't say I feel much like puttin' crape on my sleeve in any quantity," went on Franky. "My Uncle Noel has been the Family Skeleton, poor old chap! since that affair in 1900. No doubt his son's cut up--wouldn't be decent of him not to! But at any rate it brings him nearer these--" Franky stuck out a beautifully-cut pair of red-striped auxiliaries ending in dazzling patent-leather Number Eights, and craning over Fits, who had jumped upon his knees, regarded them critically, ending after a pause--"By one life out of the three that stand between. Don't be so gushin', old girl!" The rebuke was for Fits, who had taken advantage of her master's attitude to lick him on the chin.
Margot crinkled her slender eyebrows and moved restlessly among her big bright, muslin-covered cushions as she asked:
"Is this Volapuk or Esperanto? For mercy's sake don't be obscure! Why is this Flying Sherbrand nearer your shoes by one life out of three? What has he got to do with your shoes at all?"
"Don't you switch on?" He lifted his sleek brown head and turned his neck in the setting of the gold-encrusted collar badged with the Scottish Thistle, and stared at Margot with the brown eyes that had seemed so beautiful under the awnings of the Nile dahabeyah, and were only stupid now.
"Have you forgotten? Don't you twig, best child? Suppose--for the joke of it--there's War, and I get wiped out tryin' to keep up the fightin' traditions of my family and get a bit of gun-metal to hang on a ribbon here." He glanced down at the left breast of the red coat, guiltless of anything in the decoration line. "Then--unless the child"--his tone grew gentle--"our kiddy that's coming, happens to be a boy--my Cousin Sherbrand steps into my billet. He's the next heir to the Norwater Viscounty. Look in Burke or Whittaker if you don't believe me! Get down, old lady, you're coverin' me with white hairs!" He bundled Fits off his knees, got up and rang. "A man ought to be here from Armer's," he told the servant who responded. "Armer and Co., Pall Mall, Military Tailors. Send him up to my room and tell Jobling to help him with all those cases and things. No! don't send Jobling!--send Dowd!"
The said Dowd being Franky's soldier servant, between whom and the civilian Jobling reigned a profound mutual contempt.
"What is Dowd going to do?"
"Oh! only goin' to help overhaul my Service kit and so on," Franky responded lightly. "What with gettin' leave and bein' married I've hardly sported kharks since last Autumn Slogs. Wouldn't do to find myself too potty to get into the regulation tea-leaves in case my country called."
"What rot! ..."
But Franky had swung out of the room and clattered upstairs with Fits close upon his heels. Fits, who, ordinarily unwilling to be out of sight and sound of her master, now adhered to him like a leech, or his shadow; whining and fidgeting in his absence, as though her feminine mind were beset by haunting apprehensions of some sudden parting, or impending loss.... Long afterwards Margot wondered: "If I had loved him as Fits loves him--should I not also have felt that foreshadowing dread?"
But she was conscious only of her own physical discomfort and the increasing weariness that movement brought her. Sharp discontent peaked and pinched the tiny features. She caught a reflection of them in a screen-mirror and shuddered. With every day that dawned now, their wild-rose prettiness faded. By-and-by--
"If I were as good to look at as I used to be in June--or even a month ago!" she wondered--"would he leave me as he is leaving me to-night--to go down to the House? Don't I know that the House means the Club, or the music-hall, or a card-party! Why do men get the best of everything and never have to pay the bill?"
She dined in a tea-gown, and when Franky, still in that strange mood of suppressed excitement, attired to four pins in the magpie evening garb of civilized life, had kissed her and said: "So-long, Kittums, little woman! I'm going down to the Big Talk Shop for a bit. Expect me back on the doormat when the Mouthpieces of the Nation have done swoppin' hot air!" she tucked up her feet on the big sofa in her charming drawing-room and read "WEEP NO MORE, MOTHERS," until the pink pamphlet with the gilt sunrise stamped upon it grew heavy in the tiny hand. Then she rang for Pauline and betook herself to bed.
The bedroom was blue-green as a starling's egg, its painted walls adorned with delicate lines of black and silver. Perhaps you can see Kittums, under her Brittany lace coverlet amongst the big frilled pillows in one of the narrow black oak bedsteads standing side by side on a carpet of deep rose. A silver night-lamp burned under a dome of sapphire glass on her night-table, and an electric clock noiselessly marked the hours. Lying thus, wrapped about with all the swaddlings of Civilisation, this dainty daughter of the Twentieth Century strove in blind revolt against Nature, the huge relentless Force that was slowly grinding her down. The ant that gets fed into the mill-hopper with the grain might resent the millstone after the same fashion. Ridiculous, but infinitely pathetic, the tragedy of an infinitesimal thing.
What did Franky comprehend of her terrors, her forebodings? Even Saxham's counsels were a man's counsels, his advice a man's advice. "Face your ordeal! do not flee it, lest you encounter something even more terrible!" Not more terrible for oneself, mind you! but for that unknown, conjectural being, referred to by Franky with such foolish tenderness.
The child always! Never Margot! She set her little teeth, staring out into the blue-green dusk from among her pillows. What if it were to be always so? "My boy," "My son," for ever, instead of "My wife."
It was a breathless night. A hush of suspense brooded over the huge, hot city, such as prevails before the breaking of a storm. Sentences from the Secretary's letter came back to her as she tossed under the cool light coverings:
"Wiser not to delay, lest travelling should become difficult. It will be advisable indeed for the gracious lady to start as soon as may be. English bank-notes are negotiable here to some extent. A sum in gold is most convenient to bring."
Why hang back? Why hesitate because one expected opposition from Franky? Why not slip off on the quiet without a hint to him? What a perfectly tophole idea! One could pack secretly, get funds from one's Bank, and skip with Pauline via Ostend to-morrow! Berlin was a dull place, but anyhow one had got to be dull for some months yet. The thing could be arranged while Franky was absent on duty at the Tower, or on one of his mysterious errands to Headquarters. One could cable to him afterwards from the Fraueenklinik at Berlin.
An electrical thrill of energy and purpose volted through the humming-bird brain under the silken brown waves. Margot tossed back her coverings and sat up suddenly in bed. Her great eyes gleamed like a lemur's in the light of the night-globe. She would steal that march on Franky, she told herself, to-morrow, or at the latest, the day after. Wouldn't it be A1?
The small face dimpled into mischievous smiles. She caught a glimpse of it in a mirror on the opposite wall and kissed her little hand to Margot with saucy gaiety. If Franky, down at Westminster, could only know what Kittums was planning! She had a vision of the Houses of Parliament under the white-hot August moonlight, outlined in bluish-green and dazzling silver against a background of glittering black. Like a Limoges enamel, she told herself. The long lines of electric arc-lights stretching over the bridge, up Whitehall and down Victoria Street--all along the Thames Embankment--strings of diamonds--crowds and crowds of people ... talking bosh about War when there wouldn't----She was asleep.
Asleep, while packed thousands waited under the blue glare of the arc-lights for the rising of the Curtain on the World Tragedy, of which four yearlong Acts have been played out. For the tag of which Humanity is waiting with held breath, too weary even to cry out: "How long, O Lord?--how long?"
Prone to assume strange, angular attitudes when speaking, the Foreign Secretary hung over and clutched at the dispatch-box before him, as though it literally contained that most malignant of all the swarm of Evils that issued from the Box of Pandora, as he told his hearers of the rejection of the German bribe and warned them of the imminence of a Declaration of War. Then, amidst increasing, deepening excitement, the Prime Minister read the appeal of the King of the Belgians, and told of Great Britain's ultimatum to Germany....
No wonder those close-packed crowds of sturdy Britons waited under the blue glare of the arc-lamps to hear Big Ben bell the midnight hour. As the great voice boomed Twelve from the illuminated square of the dial amidst the striking of the countless clocks of London, a tremendous roar of cheers acclaimed the pipping of the egg of Fate and Destiny, echoed by other crowds in distant thoroughfares, spreading in waves to the unseen horizon, whose East was pregnant with the Kaiser's Day.
That Fourth of August; Eve of the Feast of British Oswald, King, soldier and Saint, whose Address to his Northumbrian warriors before the battle of Denisburn, fought against Pagan Cadwalla in 633, the Catholic Church enshrines in Her Chronicles:
"Let us all kneel and jointly beseech the true and living GOD ALMIGHTY in His Mercy to defend us from the doughty and fierce enemy. For He knoweth that we have undertaken a just War...."
"Whereupon," says the Venerable Bede, "all did as the King commanded. And advancing towards the enemy with the first dawn of day, they won the victory their Faith deserved."
And before midnight of this pregnant Fourth of August, from the great Wireless Station of Eilvise in Hanover, Germany flung round the world this vital message to all her mercantile Marine:
"War declared on England! Make as quickly as you can for a neutral port!"
On the outbreak of War the British Navy cut the All German cables. One by one the German Colonial Wireless Stations were dismantled. When the great station at Kamina in Togoland fell, the only remaining link in the system was between the Fatherland and the United States.
Dawn outlining the silken blinds, vied with the blue glimmer of the night-lamp as Margot wakened, to hear, in the hush that precedes the Brocken-hunt of Sloane Street motor-traffic, Franky's low, urgent appeal:
"Kittums! Kittums, best child!"
"What on earth did you wake me for?" said a sleepy and distinctly cross voice.
"Couldn't help it! I simply had to tell you!" Franky began.
The little hand touched the electric clock-button and on the ceiling wavered a gigantic dial of yellow brightness.
"Had to! At three o'clock in the morning! When I was having such a tophole dream! Thought I was back at the Club in my three dear rooms with the Adams doors and chimney-pieces--and Pauline came in with a huge basket of white flowers--and I asked: 'Who are they for?' And she said: 'For Mademoiselle!' And I was Margot St. John--and had never been married!" There was infinite wistfulness in the little voice.
"White flowers mean death, don't they, when you dream of 'em? And I'm sorry your dip in the Bran Tub of Matrimony has turned out such a bad investment. What I came to tell you should revive your hopes of making a better one, my child!"
That jarring note of mingled resentment and irony, how new and strange it sounded to Margot! Until this moment Franky's voice had never been anything but gentle. It was gentle now as he said, at his dressing-room door:
"Finish your sleep. I was rather a brute to wake you!" He was going without a backward glance.
"Come back! Come off it! Don't be dignified!" Margot called after the retreating figure. "I'm quite awake now, so you'd better tell. What's on?"
He came back to the bedside, looking tall and shadowy in the blue dimness. Margot put up a little hand and patted his cheek. There were wet drops upon the smooth, warm skin.... Perhaps he had walked home, and it had been raining. Or--
"Franky! You're not----"
He captured the little hand and took it in both his own, and squeezed it. He said in a cheerful but rather choky voice:
"Of course not! And--the news could have waited. Only--since midnight England and Germany have been at War. The Big Scrap is three hours old. First battalion of Ours is under orders for the Front--I've exchanged out of the Second with Ackroyd--too sick a man for fightin' just now, luckily for me. You know Ackroyd. Used to flirt with him frightfully--to give me beans when I'd vexed you when we were first engaged. When do we go, did you ask? Liable to be off at any old minute. By-bye, little woman. Too late to go to bed--heaps of things to attend to. God bless you! See you at brekker--or lunch, if I've luck."
*CHAPTER L*
*THE EVE OF ARMAGEDDON*
Kittums, upon that fateful morning, coming down to breakfast and finding no Franky, was annoyed. One might just as well have had breakfast in bed. She didn't want any, but Cook would be hurt if the chowder and eggs, and croquettes of chicken weren't eaten. Therefore Margot ate--to avoid wounding the cook. The daily papers she left untouched, knowing that War would leap out from the huge capitals heading the columns and strike her in the eyes.
She had herself dressed and 'phoned for the car. The house did not seem a place to stay in, somehow. Dowd was busy in his master's room, ordering Jobling about in loud authoritative tones and being waited upon by the maids. Even Pauline, ordinarily scornful, referred to him as "Monsieur Dowd" instead of "zat man Dow!"
Once in Sloane Street, the War rushed at you. Groups of men, young, old or middle-aged, stood talking at every street-corner, newspapers rustled in every hand. You couldn't escape the papers. Huge flaring headlines shrieked from the broad-sheets in the gutters and on the railings: "WAR DECLARED! ULTIMATUM EXPIRED. BRITISH FLEET READY FOR BATTLE. INVASION OF BELGIUM BY GERMAN ARMY CORPS!" The drapery salesman who was to win the Victoria Cross, called from the top of a Knightsbridge motor-bus to the grocer's assistant who was to receive the Medaille Militaire at the doughty hands of Joffre.... The budding airman who was to bring down a Zeppelin single-handed chuffed past on a motor-cycle--the girls who were to make shells for British guns, or pack made ones with T.N.T. and kindred explosives, tripped along in their transparent hobble-skirts, to meet Alf and Ted at the Tube. And neither Alf, who subsequently took five Huns prisoner by the single hand, shepherding them back to the British lines with dunts of the gun-butt and sarcasms more pointed, nor Ted, who threw himself down over the exploding bomb, dying that his comrades in the trench might live, dreamed what kind of chick would pip Fate's egg for him or her presently. Yet the dullest face wore a new expression, in the tamest eyes burned the light of battle! Unquenched it burns in them still, after four dreadful years of War.
The Club, already deserted by August holiday-makers, would be utterly abandoned to chimney-sweeps, charwomen and window-cleaners, and yet Margot told the chauffeur to drive to the Club.
Turning out of Piccadilly she discovered Short Street to be blocked by taxi-cabs. An endless procession of telegraph-boys plunged in and out between the thudding swing-doors of the vestibule. The vestibule was congested with battered, dusty ladies, ladies' maids even dustier and more battered, and travelling bags battered and dusty to the nth degree.
Some of the bags were bursting, not a few of the maids were hysterical. All the returned travellers were telling their adventures at once. The air was thick with exclamations, explanations, cries and ejaculations. Unfed, unslept, baggageless and penniless in many instances, the members of the Ladies' Social--seeking health, or novelty, in half the pleasure-resorts upon the map of Europe--had come hurtling back to Short Street like leaves driven before the furious blast of War.
"Has anything happened?"
Lady Norwater addressed this query to the Club hall-porter, a bald person of habitually slow movements and singularly bland address. The man gnashed his teeth at her, uttering a sound between a groan and a snarl--made as though to tear non-existent hair,--leaped with astonishing nimbleness over a pile of luggage, and vanished. Margot would have made a note of his conduct in the Complaints register, but that the hall-table was obliterated by heaps of rugs, dust-cloaks and waterproofs. Wondering, she made her way into the big General Room on the ground-floor.
Here travel-creased, dust-smeared members sat in voluble rows on the comfortable sofas, or reclined speechless in the capacious armchairs. Medical men, hastily summoned by 'phone, moved noiselessly from patient to patient. Husbands and male friends listened not unmoved, to piteous recitals of adverse experiences undergone on enemy ground.
Kittums, snatched into the whirl, moved from friend to friend, gathering experiences. Mrs. Charterhouse, with her Pekinese pug and her maid, had just arrived at Homburg to undergo treatment for a twenty-two-inch waist when the War Cloud gathered monstrous on the horizon. Had not her Swiss doctor written a warning instead of a prescription the white and golden Cynthia, Mademoiselle Mariette and Chin-Chin, would at this moment have been languishing on rye bread and bean coffee in a Teutonic jail.
"As it is, we've spent a whole week, and every sou we had on us making the journey!" said Cynthia, in her plaintive tones. "They held us up at Frankfurt, Basel, and Geneva! What inquisitions, what scowling suspicious looks! To be hunted and suspect makes you wicked, I've found out! When we got to Paris at four yesterday morning and took a rickety fiacre to the Palais--all the taxis have vanished!--I could have prayed for a cup of tea and a roll! But at the Palais all was confusion. The hotel was shutting up--every male servant called to the Reserve. We got to the 'Spitz'--the same experience there! Exhausted, I sat on something in the vestibule--it moved, groaned, and I found it to be the wreck of Sir Thomas Brayham. He and Lady Wathe, his man and her maid, who have been all through July at Franzenbad in the Egerland,--reaching Paris after awful adventures, had all four been hurled out in the same way. One of those jiggety motor-omnibuses took all of us to the Couronne. They were full to the roofs and cellars, but they wedged us in, somehow! Then, for two days Sir Thomas tore round Paris trying to get laissez-passers." She turned her lovely eyes upon a large, stertorously-breathing but otherwise inert object reclining with closed eyes and folded hands in the biggest of the Club armchairs. "Didn't you, Sir Thomas?"
"Beparr?"
Brayham, waking with a bewildered stare, regarded the charming Cynthia uncomprehendingly until the Goblin, sitting opposite, centre of a knot of bosom friends, repeated the query:
"Didn't you run about Paris for passes for two days?"
"No!" bounced out Brayham, now aroused, and purpling under the coal-dust that begrimed his large, judicial visage. He added, with a vestige of his King's Bench manner, as the Goblin stared at him in concern for his mental state: "I retain the use of my reason, dear friend! But I WILL NOT consent that the varied tortures of the abominable ordeal I have undergone could possibly be packed within the nutshell limits of forty-eight hours! Mph!"
So dust-covered was the ex-Justice that the very act of shaking his head rebukingly at the Goblin, raised a cloud that made him sneeze. He uttered the curious composite sound that heralds sternutation, drew out a voluminous, coal-dusty handkerchief, stared at it indignantly, and in the very act of returning it to his pocket--fell asleep again.
"A perfect wreck, as I said just now!" whispered Mrs. Charterhouse to Kittums.
"How I congratulate you, dear Lady Wastwood," said the Goblin, "on not having gone abroad!"
"Was it so horrid?" asked Trixie, sympathetically, arching the eyebrows that resembled musical slurs.
"Was it so--" Lady Wathe shrugged her thin shoulders and gave the ghost of one of her rattling laughs. "If to fight your way back, stage by stage, amidst inconceivable difficulties, obstacles and insults, is horrid!--if to travel for two long days and nights in trains crowded to suffocating excess merits the term--" She loosened the quadruple string of superb Oriental pearls that tightly clipped her stalk-like throat and went on: "If it comes under the heading to find yourself and your friends--in tatters after a suffocating struggle!--packed with sixty other squalid wretches in a luggage-van en route for Dieppe! If to sit for three hours on your jewel-case, waiting, in a crush of congested humanity, for the arrival of the Newhaven boat--if to fight as with beasts at Ephesus to gain its gangway--if to fall in a heap on the sodden deck--to lie there lost to everything but the fact that the waves that drench you are British waves, and the British coast is slowly crawling nearer!--if all this and how much more, can be lumped under the term of horrid, it has been, dear Lady Wastwood, horrid in the extreme!"
Lady Wastwood's small, triangular, white face with the V-shaped scarlet mouth, looked enigmatical. She arched the thick black slurs that were her eyebrows again, and said not without intent, to her crony Cynthia Charterhouse:
"Who would have dreamed only three weeks ago, when that excessively long-legged and extremely good-looking Count von Herrnung sat here and talked to us about German women and German Supermen--that we should be at War to-day with Germany?"
"Poor Count Tido!" Something rattled in the Goblin's meagre throat as though she had accidentally swallowed some of her pearls. "That dreadful report in The Wire made the Franzenbad treatment disagree with me horribly! To be drowned in that commonplace North Sea crossing, upon the very eve of realising the one ambition of his life! For he hated us so thoroughly! His Anglophobia was a perfect obsession. Poor dear Tido! One might call it a wasted career!" The speaker dried a tear and continued: "His family will be frantic. You know he was to have been married in October! Baroness Kriemhilde von Wolfensbragen-Hirschenbuttel. Immensely rich! Her father has large interests in the pearl-fisheries of German New Guinea. Her betrothal gift, a superb black and white pearl, the Count always wore as a mascot. Poor Baroness! She will be inconsolable. Marriage means the first draught of real freedom to young German girls!"
Mrs. Charterhouse said in her sweetly venomous way:
"Miss Saxham bears up--under the circumstances!"
"Under what circumstances, might one presume to ask?" Then, reading aright the ambiguous smile of Mrs. Charterhouse, the Goblin rattled out her characteristic laugh:
"What absurdity! You refer to a mere dinner-table flirtation in Paris. The mere rapprochement of atomes crochus! Miss Saxham and Lady Beauvayse dined with us on the night of the Grand Prix. Poor Tido was certainly struck with her. I remember he talked about her eyes and figure afterwards. But her hair being so black and growing so heavily--did not please him. He found the effect--I think his term was--'too crepuscular.'"
