That Which Hath Wings 2That Which Hath Wings (part 2)
18
Literature · Romance
That Which Hath Wings 2
That Which Hath Wings (part 2)
DehanEnglish
But little of the inner meaning of Bouguereau's great picture filtered through Franky's honest brown eyes to the mind that lay somewhere behind them. But he realised that for the grieving woman who had borne a son and lost him there was no more joy in the world.
The Child of that Woman upon whose knees she leaned her breaking heart had lived to attain to the perfect ripeness of glorious Manhood. But then.... Franky followed the lines of the dark, downward-drifting veil up to the rapt Mother-face with the sorrowful, close-folded mouth and the deep, fathomless eyes, and remembered what had happened to Her Son.
"Beg pardon!" he found himself muttering between his teeth. His hand went up, and he had bared his sleek brown head before he knew. This wasn't a Roman Catholic Church, anyway ... there was no obligation even to appear respectful; France had long ago kicked over the traces of Religion--all French people were Freethinkers in these days. Telling himself this, Franky did not replace the shiny topper. One rapid glance to right and left had shown him that the gallery was nearly empty; the few visitors it contained were too far distant to have observed the action. Except, possibly, one person, a lean, short, elderly man in shabby black, who stood some paces behind, a little to the left of Franky, holding a shovel-brimmed round-crowned beaver with both hands against his sunken chest as he gazed with bright, absorbed eyes at the wonderful rapt face of the Consoler; his lips moving rapidly as he whispered to himself, not breaking off or twitching a muscle because Franky had glanced round:
Franky glanced round again, and this time encountered the oddly young eyes of his neighbour, looking from a brown, deeply wrinkled visage framed in thickly growing, straight black hair, heavily streaked with white.
"Monsieur is a lover of Art?"
Undoubtedly a Frenchman, he addressed Franky in cultured English, with a tone and manner excellently graced. The vivid clearness of his amber-coloured eyes, set in the now smiling mask of walnut-brown wrinkles, was attractive. And Franky answered, unconsciously warming to the look and smile:
"Must say I hardly know. Things that clever, intellectual people go into raptures over, bore me simply stiff. Other things--things they howl down--go straight to the spot, you see. And all I can say when I'm hauled over the coals for liking rubbish is, that the rubbish is good enough for this child."
"I comprehend. Monsieur has the courage of his convictions. It is a quality rare in these days. And--this painting particularly appeals to Monsieur? May one be pardoned for asking why?"
The voice was suave, but it somehow compelled an answer. Franky, with an indistinct remembrance of viva voce examinations awakening in him, cleared his throat and fell back a pace or two.... Well set up and well-bred, well-groomed and well-dressed, his figure, beside that other in the priestly soutane of rusty alpaca, short enough to reveal coarse ribbed stockings of black yarn, and cracked prunella shoes with worn steel buckles, made a contrast sufficiently quaint to provoke a stare of curiosity, had any observer passed just then. But standing together on the beeswaxed floor at the upper end of the long, bright, skylighted gallery, the Guardsman and his temporary acquaintance were as private as it is possible to be in a public place.
Thus, at the cost of a heightened complexion and an occasional stammer, Franky explained himself. The painting appealed to him because it recalled a Bible story--made familiar to Franky by reason of having swotted it at School for Sunday Ques. with other fellows of the Fifth in Greyshott's time. Also, on the wind-up Sunday of his, Franky's, Last Term, having passed for the Army with the dev--hem!--of a lot of trouble--a beastly epidemic of diphtheria and scarlet fever having broken out among the children of the Windsor poor, the Head had preached from the text in Big Chapel. And the text went something like this:
"A Voice in Rama was heard, of lamentation and mourning: Rachel bewailing her children: and would not be comforted because they are not."
The haggard, beautiful, tearless Rachel of the picture hadn't bucked at the disfigurement and the pain and the danger of child-bearing. She had welcomed them for the sake of the kid.... It was a thundering pity he hadn't lived--in Franky's opinion; "woman jolly well deserved to have been let keep that clinking fine boy to rear."
"I comprehend." The clear eyes flashed into Franky's, the withered brown mask was alight with sympathetic intelligence. "To Monsieur, an English officer and a member of the Protestant Church of England, that woman who leans her bursting heart upon the knees of the Mother of Consolation is Rachel." He quoted:
"'Vox in Rama audita est, ploratus el ululatus: Rachel plorans filios suos: et noluit consolari, quia non sunt.'"
"That's it!" Franky nodded, admitting candidly: "Though I always was a duffer at Latin, and we weren't taught at School to pronounce it--quite in that way."
Said the clear-eyed old man, whose dark wrinkled throat displayed no edge of linen above the plain circular collar of the soutane, only a significant border of purple from which two widish lappets of the same colour depended beneath the peaked and mobile chin, and who might have been a prelate of sorts, had it not been understood of simple Franky that the State had abolished the Catholic religion and banished all priests, monks, and nuns from France.
"The Italianate Latin puzzles you.... It is--slightly different to the Latin they taught you at Eton? Hein? When I lived in England--not so long ago--I counted several brave Eton fellows among my acquaintances. And their mental attitude with regard to the language of Virgil, Horace, and Tacitus was precisely that of Monsieur."
He chuckled, and his oddly young eyes twinkled quite gaily as he pulled out a battered little silver snuff-box and helped himself, wrinkling his thin hooked nose with evident enjoyment. As he dusted the pungent brown grains from his lappets with a coarse blue-checked cotton handkerchief, an amethyst ring on the wrinkled hand flashed pink and violet in the light.
"To Monsieur who is doubtless familiar with the Scriptures in Tyndall's translation, I might suggest that the Latin of the Ancient Romans should be pronounced in the Roman style! But Monsieur will pardon this tone of the pedagogue. I will not 'bore you stiff' with a classical disquisition. Permit me to thank you for your amiable compliance with the request of an old man, and to wish you good-day."
He combined apology, farewell, and dismissal in a courtly little bow, and as though undoubting that the other would pass on, plunged again into the picture. But Franky lingered to say, awkwardly:
"Perhaps ... If you don't mind...."
"Hein? ..."
The keen eyes reverted to his embarrassed face instantly.
"What if I do not mind? ... There is something you desire to ask me?"
"Well, yes!" Franky admitted. "Don't quite pipe why, but I rather cotton to hearing your version.... Of the meaning of that picture, you know! ..."
"Yes--yes! I understand! ..." The vivid eyes flashed piercingly into Franky's, and leaped back to the great glorious canvas within the stately frame. "To you who were once a boy at Eton that woman who has no more tears to shed is Rachel of Rama.... To me, once Seminarist of the Institut Catholique, as to others of my holy faith and sacred calling--she is France--our beloved France, who leans upon the knees and against the bosom of the Catholic Church in her bereavement--mourning with anguish unutterable her children who are dead.... Dead to Faith, dead to the Spiritual Life--members separated from the Body of Christ by their own choice as by the act of Government. Lost!--unless the ray of Divine Grace find and touch them in their self-made darkness, and they repent, and turn themselves to Christ again!"
Franky said, with wholly lovable banality:
"Rather sweepin', but natural conclusion, from a religious point o' view. Still, when a whole nation gets up like one man and bally well chucks a Religion, there must be something jolly off-colour and thundering rotten about that Religion, don't you know?"
"A whole nation!"
The bright eyes held Franky's sternly. He lifted his right arm, and the withered hand still shut upon the battered snuff-box shot up two fingers in vigorous protest. "Pardon, Monsieur--you are very seriously mistaken. France was never more Catholic at heart than now. How strange!--when but twenty-one miles of salt water divide Calais from Dover--when the Entente Cordiale has established between your country and mine nominally close and intimate relations; that so complete an ignorance as to the French Nation, its Government, its mode of thought, its moral, religious, and social conditions, should be found prevailing in Great Britain to-day!"
"My dear sir, you're off the bull--completely off!" protested Franky--Franky whose second sister was married to a Frenchman, Franky who knew Paris as well as the inside of his week-end suit-case, by Jove!
A deprecating shrug and a supple outstretched hand cut short the speaker.
"Pardon, Monsieur l'Anglais--I know what you would say to me! There is much force in the argument.... It is tres sensee--and there is truth in it, and yet it is false--to be guilty of a paradox. The aristocracy of Great Britain, like her plutocracy, set high value upon much that comes from France. British gold is poured into my country in return for the newest and most fanciful modes in costume, millinery, and jewellery. And not only do your beautiful women adorn themselves with the inventions of our bold and original genius for ornament, but for your menus, your pleasures, the novels and plays that paint in intoxicating colours the joys of unchaste love and illicit passion, for the sensuous poetry that is garlanded with the flame-hued flowers of Evil, you are ready to praise and pay us lavishly, as though no nobler growth than this rank luxuriance sprang from the intellectual soil of France. Our vices--alas!--with the appalling diseases that spring from them, and the combinations of drugs that alleviate these--all find with you a ready market. And you attend our race-meetings at Longchamps and Auteuil, where English jockeys ride French and Irish horses--and you believe, you!--that you know the social life of France. No!--but you are ignorant--profoundly ignorant! May GOD be thanked that you misjudge us thus cruelly. For if my country were no better than Great Britain and other foreign nations believe her to be, it were time indeed for a rain of fire from Heaven!"
Hardly raising his voice above a clear whisper, the emotion and vehemence with which he spoke, and the swift and fiery gesticulations with which he illustrated utterance, made the sweat start out in beads upon his wrinkled forehead and cheeks. He wiped these off with the blue checked handkerchief, saying:
"Pardon! I grow warm when I speak of these things. I recognise that if in the judgment of other nations France is a courtesan drunk with lechery, or at the best un esprit follet, she has brought this judgment upon herself. Flippancy, the desire to faire de l'esprit under any circumstances--the bold and brilliant gaiety that is her exclusive and most beautiful characteristic--these have caused her to be misunderstood. But whatever else she be, she is not Pagan nor Agnostic. To believe that is to wrong her cruelly, Monsieur!"
Franky, by now hopelessly at sea, endured the hailstorm of swift, vehement sentences with an expression of amiable vacuity, his stiffly pendent hands plainly yearning for the refuge of his trousers pockets, his mind rocking on the waves of the stranger's passionate eloquence like a toy yacht adrift on the bosom of the Atlantic. And the resonant Gallic voice went on:
*CHAPTER VIII*
*MONSEIGNEUR*
"The masters of France to-day are hostile to Christianity. They are Freemasons (Freemasonry in England is not Freemasonry as it is understood here); they are Freethinkers, Socialists, Internationalists, and Hedonists, the avowed enemies of the Catholic Faith. Hence, churches, seminaries, and schools have been closed by Government, communities of religious men and women have been uprooted and exiled. Priests have been banished, ecclesiastical and private property has been appropriated and confiscated, churches have been desecrated, the symbols of Christianity and religion everywhere torn down. In France upon Good Friday the standard of the Republic waves proudly, while the flag of every other Christian nation hangs at half-mast high. And yet--the great mass of the French people are--Catholic and nothing but Catholic! The light may be hidden, but the fire of devotion still burns in millions of faithful hearts gathered about the Church's altars, beating beside the hearths of innumerable homes in France. Blood--torrents of blood--would not quench that sacred fire. When the Day of Expiation comes, as it will come, most surely, the Catholicism of France will prove her salvation yet!"
With the final sentence, the hand that had been lifted in gesture dropped to the side of the speaker. The flashing glance took in Franky from the top of his sleek bewildered head to the tips of his beautiful patent-leathers. He said with a smile of irresistible amusement:
"Monsieur, I fear I have fatigued you. Let me thank you for your admirable patience. Au revoir, or if you prefer it--Adieu!"
Another of the quick little bows, and he had covered himself and passed on rapidly. Franky reflected, staring after the short black figure in the caped soutane with the worn purple sash and shabby beaver shovel-hat, as it receded from his view.
"Fruity old wordster, 'pon my natural! Toppin' fine talker! Wonder who he is? Head of a Public School, swottin' an address for the beginning of the Midsummer Half term--a Professor of Divinity gettin' up a lecture--the Archbishop of Paris rehearsin' a sermon. Whichever they call him, why don't he pitch his language at a man of his own size?"
And he went back to the Spitz through the boulevards that were surging with the afternoon life of Paris, and heard from Pauline that Miladi had retired to bed. She had already dispatched a billet of excuses to Sir Brayham, with whom Miladi and Milord were engaged to dine downstairs that evening, explaining that a headache prevented her from accompanying Milord. He--Milord--must be sure to make no noise in changing for dinner, as Miladi, after a crisis of the nerves of the most alarming, was now sleeping like an angel, having taken a potion calmante of orange-flower syrup with water, not the veronal so heartily detested of Milord....
"Sleepin' like an angel, is she? ... Good egg!--though I thought angels never went to bed--flew about singing all the giddy time. Righto, though! I won't disturb her ladyship.... When she wakes, give her my love...."
And Franky entered his dressing-room on cautious tiptoe, lighted a cigarette, rang the bell for his valet, and began to reflect.
It was to have been a dinner of eight people--Brayham the host, with Lady Wathe, skinny little vitriol-tongued woman!--a man unknown who was to have sat next Margot; Commander Courtley--ripping good fellow old Courtley! no better sailor walked the quarter-deck of a First-Class Cruiser--damn shame those Admiralty bigwigs denied such a fellow post-rank; and Lady Beauvayse, formerly Miss Sadie Sculpin of New York--pretty American with pots of boodle, married to that ghastly little bounder who'd stepped into the shoes a better man would be wearing if his elder brother (handsome fellow who married an actress, Lessie Lavigne of the Jollity--good old Jollity!) hadn't got pipped in that scrum with the Boers in 1900-1901.
Lessie, Lady Beauvayse, the widder called herself on the posters and programmes. Come down to second-rate parts in Music Hall Revue--gettin' elderly and stout. Must see red when she happened to spy the present Lord Beauvayse's pretty peeress in the stalls or boxes.... Wonder why the P.P. made such a pal of Patrine Saxham? Niece of Saxham of Harley Street--handsome as paint, proud as the devil, and an Advanced Thinker--according to Margot. Remembering the gift of the jade tree-frog, Franky involuntarily wrinkled his nose.
With Lady Beau and the Saxham girl, there would be a party of seven, counting the man unknown.... Might go on afterwards to the Folies Bergere or the Theatre Marigny--or perhaps the Jardin de Paris. Why hadn't Jobling answered his master's bell? Why had he deputised a waiter to enquire whether his lordship wished his valet? Did he think waiters were paid to do his, Jobling's, work for him? Or did he, Jobling, suppose he was kept for show?
The strenuous stage-whisper in which Franky addressed the recalcitrant Jobling penetrated the door-panels of the adjoining bower, as such whispers usually do. But Margot was really sleeping--the orange-flower water had had a few drops of chloral mingled with it. Milord had never prohibited chloral, as Pauline had pointed out. But unsuspicious Franky, unrigging (as he termed the process), while the tardy Jobling prepared his master's bath and laid out his master's "glad rags," plumed himself upon having made a notable advance in the science of wife-government. Even the blameless potion of orange-flower testified to his masculine strength of will.
*CHAPTER IX*
*SIR THOMAS ENTERTAINS*
You are invited to follow Franky, and sit with him at his friend Tom Brayham's circular board, decorated with great silver bowls of marvellous Rayon d'Or roses, that seemed to exhale the harvested sunshine of summer from their fiery golden hearts.
You remember the famous dining-room of the big Paris caravanserai, with its archways supported by slender pillars of creamy pink Carrara marble, wreathed with inlaid fillets of green malachite and lapis lazuli, and its electric illuminants concealed behind an oxidised silver frieze. And possibly you need no introduction to the deity--plain and middle-aged--in whose honour Brayham--the Hon. Sir Thomas Brayham, an ex-Justice of the King's Bench Division--in the remote mid-Victorian era a famous Q.C.--made oblation of luscious meats and special wines. The clever, sharp-tongued, penniless niece of a famous Minister for Foreign Affairs, she had made a love-match at twenty with Lord Watho Wathe, a handsome and equally impecunious subaltern in a famous Highland regiment, who was killed upon Active Service twenty years later, while travelling upon a special mission to the Front Headquarters during the South African War of 1900.
Two years later his widow conferred her hand upon Mr. Reuben Munts, of Kimberley and South Carfordshire, a diamond-mining magnate who had made his colossal pile before the War. She had never borne her second husband's name, and when he died, leaving her sole mistress of his millions, Lady Wathe resumed her place in Society, thenceforwards to sparkle as never before.
"The 'Chronique Scandaleuse' in a diamond setting" some phrase-maker clever as herself had aptly termed her. Without her riches, stripped of her wonderful diamonds, Society might have found her to be merely a little chattering woman, avid of the reputation of a humorist and raconteuse, unflagging in her relish for stories, not seldom of the broadest, related at her own expense or at the cost of other people, and over-liberally garnished with nods and becks, darting glances, and wreathed smiles.
Upon this night of the Grand Prix--won, you will remember, by Baron M. de Rothschild's "Sardanapole"--the little lady's jests fizzled and coruscated like Japanese fireworks. Her gibes buzzed and stung like wasps about a lawn-set tea-table, when new-made jam and fragrant honey tempt the yellow-and-black marauders to the board. And yet from the soup to the entremets, Franky listened in dour and smileless silence, unable to conjure up a grin at the sharpest of the Goblin's witticisms, or swell the guffaw that invariably followed the naughtiest of her double-entendres.
"Off colour, what? ..." his crony Courtley queried in a sympathetic undertone, catching a glimpse of Franky's cheerless countenance behind the bare, convulsed back and snowy heaving shoulders of Lady Beauvayse, who occupied the intervening chair.
"Putridly off colour.... Walked in the Bois, and got a touch of the sun, I fancy!" Franky whispered back too loudly, drawing upon himself the Goblin's equivoque:
"The sun or the daughter, did you say, Lord Norwater? Dear me!" the Goblin shrilled; "you're actually blushing! You've revived a long-lost Early Victorian art."
"Was blushing really an art with the ladies of that dim and distant era?" asked the friendly Brayham, not in the least comprehending Franky's discomfiture, yet desirous of diverting the Goblin's glittering scrutiny from her victim's scarlet face.
"It was the art that concealed Heart--or assumed it!" Lady Wathe retorted, with a peal of elfish laughter, turning her tight-skinned, large-eyed, wide-mouthed ugliness upon the speaker, and nodding her little round head until the huge and perfectly matched diamonds of the triple-rayed tiara that crowned her scanty henna-dyed tresses flashed blinding sparks of violet and red and emerald splendour in the mellow-toned radiance of the electric lights.
The Goblin had meant nothing, Franky assured himself, as the angry blood stopped humming in his ears, and his complexion regained its normal shade. The bad pun that had bowled him over had possibly been uttered without malicious intent.... Yet Lady Wathe rented a gorgeous suite upon the floor below the Norwater apartments, and one of her three lady's-maids might have been pumping Pauline.... What was she saying? ... Why was everybody cackling? ...
The Goblin was launched upon a characteristic story. Its denouement--worked up with skill and related with point--evoked peal upon peal of laughter from the guests at Brayham's table, with the sole exception of Franky, whom the anecdote found sulky and left glum. He said to himself that if Lady Beauvayse, nee Miss Sadie J. Sculpin of New York, sole child and heiress of a Yankee who had made millions out of Chewing Gum, chose to forget her position as the wife of a British Peer, and mother of his children, by Jove! and scream at such nastiness, it was her look-out. If the big red-blond man who sat on Franky's right shook with amusement, as he recapitulated the chief points of the story for the benefit of the girl who sat next him, it was his affair. But that the Saxham, an unmarried girl, who oughtn't to see the bearings of such a tale, should openly revel in its saltness, made Franky feel sick--on this particular night.
He realised that he detested the Saxham girl, one of Margot's chosen Club intimates, more fervently than even Tota Stannus or Joan Delabrand; more thoroughly than Rhona Helvellyn; only little less heartily than he hated Cynthia Charterhouse. Big, bold, galumphing, provocative--in fact, so much IT that you couldn't overlook her--he found her more unpleasantly attractive than usual, in a bodice that was no more than a fold of shimmering orange stuff above the waist--tossing the panache of ospreys that startlingly crowned her, offering up her persistant illusion perfumes for the delectation of the appreciative male.
Only look at her, ready to climb into her neighbour's pocket. Leaning her round white elbows on the guipure table-cloth, half-shutting those long greeny-brown Egyptian eyes of her, wreathing her long thick white neck to send a daring challenge into the face of the laughing man. A big man, bright red-haired, blue-eyed, and broad-chested, showing every shining tooth in his handsome grinning head....
"She's screaming, isn't she, dear Lady Beau?" Thus the Saxham to her employer, friend, and ally, across the silver bowls of Rayon d'Or roses, her naked shoulder brushing the coat-sleeve of her neighbour, the big rufous man. And Lady Beau gushed back:
"In marvellous form to-night.... Don't you think so, Count? Do agree with us!" and the big man agreed, with the accent of the German Fatherland:
"She is kolossal.... Wunderlich! ..."
"Who's the German next me--big beggar Lady Beau and Miss Saxham are gushing over?" Franky presently telegraphed to Courtley behind the charming American's accommodating back. And Courtley signalled in reply:
"Von Herrnung. German Count of sorts--Engineer and Flieger officer. Son of an Imperial Councillor, and cousin to Princess Willy of Kiekower Oestern--really rather an interestin' beast in his way. Made a one-stop flight to Paris from Hanover in April, with an Albatros biplane. Previously won an event in the Prinz Heinrich Circuit Competition." He added: "We can't decently blink their progress in military aviation. It's one o' them there fax which the brass-hats at the War Office pretend to regard as all my eye. Yet they know the Fatherland--or if they don't they oughter! Good-lookin' chap this. Not over thirty, I should guess him. Always dodging in and out of the German Embassy. The Goblin frightful nuts on him.... Goin' to steer him through the next London Season--suppose he's lookin' out for a moneyed wife!"
"Hope he gets her!" Franky mentally commented. But he looked with new interest at his big blond German neighbour, mentally calculating that with all that bone, brawn, and muscle, von Herrnung couldn't tip the scale at less than sixteen stone.
Small-boned himself and of stature not above the medium, Franky appreciated height and size in other men. And von Herrnung was undeniably a son of Anak. The noiseless, demure waiters who paused beside his chair to refill his glass or offer him dishes were dwarfed by his seated presence to the proportions of little boys.
Once, when there was a momentary bustle at the principal entrance to the now crowded restaurant, and a party of men, ceremoniously ushered by M. Spitz in person, passed up the central gangway between the rows of glittering tables, shielded by glass-panelled screens framed in oxidised silver, and crowded now with gossiping, laughing, gobbling patrons--men and women of varied nationalities, representing the elite of the fashionable world, von Herrnung rose and remained imperturbably standing at the salute, his eyes set and fixed, his head turned rigidly towards the personage, semi-bald, stout, with a prominent under jaw and a hard official stare rendered glassier by a frameless square monocle, and showing beneath the open front of a loose military mantle a star upon the left side of his evening dress-coat, and the glitter of an Order suspended from a yellow riband about his thick bull-neck.
"The German Ambassador, Baron von Giesnau," Lady Wathe returned to a question from Lady Beauvayse, as the portly official figure creaked by, leaving a whiff of choice cigars and a taint of parfum tres persistant, lifting three fingers of a white-gloved hand in acknowledgment of his countryman's salute, and von Herrnung unstiffened and dropped back into his chair. "No! ... I'm not sure where the Emperor is...." She added, with one of her laughs and a shrug of her thin vivacious shoulders: "Ask Count von Herrnung--he's sure to know!"
"Gnaedige Graefin," von Herrnung returned when interrogated, "I am not able to answer your question." He shrugged his broad shoulders and showed his white teeth. "Unser Kaiser is--who shall say where? At the Hof ... possibly at Homburg.... Stop! ... Now I remember! Seine Majestaet is at Kiel...." He continued, arranging with a big white hand displaying a preposterously long thumb-nail a corner of his glittering, tightly rolled moustache: "At Kiel ... ach, yes! he has been there since the 25th of June. Entertaining the British and American Ambassadors, visiting the Commander-in-Chief of your British Squadron, superintending the armament of one of our own new battle-cruisers,--seeing put into her those great big Krupp guns that are to sink your super-Dreadnoughts by-and-by!"
The deliberately-uttered words of the last sentence dropped into a little pool of chilly silence. He had spoken with perfect gravity, and the Englishmen who heard him stared before they grinned. Then the women shrieked in ecstasies of amusement--the Goblin's laugh overtopping all.
"For he hates us! ... You can't think how he hates us! ..." she crowed, writhing her lean little throat, clasped by seven rows of shimmering stones, wagging her Kobold's head, crowned by its diadem of multi-coloured fire. "Tell us how you hate us, Tido! ... Do--pray do!"
"I hate you, ach yes! ... All German officers are like that--particularly the officers of our Field Flying Service," gravely corroborated von Herrnung. "We have many pleasant acquaintanceships with men and women of British nationality, but your race--the Anglo-Saxon branch of the great Teutonic oak-tree, it is natural that we should hate! For that Germany must expand upon the west and north-west as well as south and east, or suffocate, is certain. She must wield the trident of Sea Power; she must transform the map of Europe. She must exploit and disseminate German trade and German Kultur; therefore, as the British, more than any other nation, stands in the way of German development, we look forward to the Day when we shall exterminate you and take our right position as masters of the world!"
The women screamed anew at this. The men were now laughing in good earnest. Franky found it impossible to restrain the convulsions that shook him in his chair. Purple-faced Brayham tried to speak, but broke down wheezing and spluttering. The Goblin shrilled:
"Tell them, Tido.... Please tell them! ... Do--ha! ha! tell them how you're spoiling for a scrimmage with us! Show them your thumb-nail, pray do!"
Thus adjured, the big German solemnly extended his left hand for general inspection. The pointed, carefully-manicured thumb-nail was at least two inches long. Its owner said with perfect gravity:
"This is the badge of a Society of England-haters, chiefly Prussian military officers, young men of noble birth, bound by an oath of blood. This mark we carry to distinguish us. It is a sign of our dedication, to remind us of the purpose for which we are set apart." He added: "Count Zeppelin himself set the fashion of the uncut thumb-nail. It will be cut when the Day comes, and it has been dipped in blood!"
"In blood--how beastly!" said the Saxham girl, curling the corners of her wide red mouth contemptuously. "What a horrid crowd your noble young Prussian officers must be! And when is the dipping to come off?" Her voice was deep and resonant as a masculine baritone, and of so carrying a quality that Franky started as though the words had been spoken at his ear.
"Gnaedige Fraeulein," von Herrnung answered, "I have already told you. When the Day comes for which we are preparing. When the great German nation shall abandon Christianity--cast off the rusty fetters of Morality and Virtue--call on the Ancient God of Battles--and beat out the iron sceptre of World Power with sword-blows upon the anvil of War."
"When we're all to be exterminated, he means!" Lady Wathe gasped behind her filmy handkerchief. "Tido, you're too absolutely screaming! Do say why your noble young Prussians keep us waiting? ..." And von Herrnung answered composedly:
"Because we are not yet ready. We shall not be perfectly ready before the spring of 1916."
His hard, bright glance encountered Franky's, and he lifted his full glass of champagne and drank to him, smiling pleasantly.
Of course the German was rotting, reflected Franky. If he wasn't, the combined insolence and brutality of such a menace, uttered at the table of one of the Britons in whose gore von Herrnung and his comrades yearned to dip their preposterous two-inch thumb-nails, took the bun, by the Great Brass Hat! He was perfectly cool, as his muscular white hands--for the dinner had arrived at the dessert stage--manipulated the silver knife that peeled a blood-red nectarine. What a splendid ring, a black-and-white pearl, large as a starling's egg, and set in platinum, the fellow sported on the little finger of that clawed left hand. What was he asking, in the suave voice with the guttural Teutonic accent?
"You were in the Bois, I believe, Lord Norwater, early in the midday. Did you see any avions of the Service Aeronautique? Did the invention they were testing come up to expectations? .... Did the English aerial stabiliser answer well? ..."
Franky knew, as he encountered the compelling stare of the hard blue eyes, that he objected to their owner. He returned, in a tone more huffy and less dignified than he would have liked it to be:
"Can't say.... I was merely walking in the Bois with a lady. Wasn't on the ground as--an investigator of the professional sort."
"So!" Von Herrnung's face was set in a smile of easy amiability. The shot might have missed the bull for anything that was betrayed there. "And the name of the inventor? It has escaped my memory. Possibly you could tell me, eh?"
"Certainly," said Franky, planting one with pleasure. "He happens to be a cousin of mine. Would you like me to write down his address?"
"Gewiss--thanks so very much. But I will not trouble you!"
Nobody had heard the verbal encounter. Lady Wathe was holding the table with another anecdote punctuated with staccato peals of laughter, tinkling like the brazen bells of a beaten tambourine. Mademoiselle Nou-Nou, a Paris celebrity, belonging to the most ancient if not the most venerable of professions, had promenaded under the chestnuts at Longchamps that morning, attired, as to the upper portion of her body, in a sheath of spotted black gauze veiling, unlined--save with her own charms. And a witty Paris journalist had said that "the costume was designed to represent Eve, not before nor after, but behind the fall"; and Paillette, who was there, working up her "Modes" letter for Le Style, had answered----
Everybody at table was leaning forward and listening, as the Goblin quoted the riposte of Paillette.
Von Herrnung, showing his big white teeth in a smile, chose another nectarine from the piled-up dish before him, seeming to admire the contrast between his own muscular white fingers and the glowing fruit they held. But Franky saw that he was angry as he neatly peeled the fruit, split the odorous yellow flesh, tore the stone out crimson and dripping like a little human heart, and swallowed both halves of the fruit in rapid succession, dabbing his mouth with the fine serviette held up before him in both hands. Then, with an air of arrogant self-confidence peculiar to him, he said loudly, addressing the whole company:
"Madame Paillette certainly deserves the Croix d'Honneur for so excellent a bon-mot. As for Mademoiselle Nou-Nou, I do not myself admire her, but my brother Ludwig, when he was alive, paid intermittent tribute to her charms." He added: "He was killed in the charge by a fall with his horse in the Autumn Manoeuvres of last year, while the Emperor was being entertained by command at a shooting-party upon a forest property of my father's that is about fifty kilometres from Berlin."
*CHAPTER X*
*A SUPERMAN*
"Do tell what the Kaiser said when he heard of the accident!" came in the voice of Lady Beauvayse, pitched now in a high, nasal tone that was a danger-signal to those who knew her, like the mischievous twinkle in her beautiful eyes. "I guess he must have been real upset!"
"Ja, ja, gewiss," returned von Herrnung, slightly shrugging his broad, square shoulders. "Of course the Emperor was greatly grieved for my father's loss. But naturally the programme had to be carried out. There is another day's Imperial shooting; the business is concluded--very satisfactorily--and Seine Majestaet takes leave..... But of course he sent to my mother a sympathetic message, which greatly consoled her. And his Chief Equerry, Baron von Wildenberg, represented him at my brother's funeral. And shortly afterwards he graciously conferred upon my father the Second Class of the Order Pour le Merite."
"How nice! But what for?" demanded the downright American, with astonishment so genuine that Brayham strangled with suppressed chuckles, and the bearded mouth of Commander Courtley assumed the curve of a sly smile.
"What for?" exclaimed von Herrnung. He stiffened his big body arrogantly, reddening with evident annoyance, and thickly through his carefully-accentuated English the Teutonic consonants and gutturals began to crop. "Gnaedige Graefin, because that so coveted decoration is the reward of special service rendered to the Emperor. And my father in his-personal-sorrow-conquering that it upon the amusements of Imperial Majesty-might-not-intrude--had the noblest devotion and courage exhibited--in the opinion of the All-Highest."
"My land!" exclaimed Lady Beauvayse, stimulated by the undisguised enjoyment of Brayham, Courtley, and Franky, "if that don't take the team and waggon, with the yella dog underneath it, an' the hoss-fly sittin' on the near-wheel mule's left ear!" She added: "No wonder your Kaiser thinks himself the hub of this little old universe--being nourished from infancy on flapdoodle of that kind." She added, dropping the saw-edged artificial accent, and reverting to the agreeable, drawling tones familiar to her friends: "But, last fall, when King George and Queen Mary were allowing to spend the day with us at Foltlebarre Abbey, and see the Gobelins tapestries after Teniers that were restored by our great American dye-specialist, Charlotte B. Pendrill of New York--and I had a dud head with neuralgitis, and couldn't have bobbed a curtsey without screaming like peacocks before a wet spell--Lord Beauvayse just sent a respectful note of excuse over by fast car to the place in our county where their Majesties were spending a week-end, and got a kind, cosy little line by return, making an appointment for a more convenient day."
"Es mag wohl sein," said von Herrnung stiffly, repeating an apparently favourite phrase. "It may be so--in Great Britain. But in Germany the trivial happenings of ordinary existence are not permitted to interfere with the Imperial plans."
"Mustn't spoil Great Caesar's shoot by letting a natural sorrow dim your eye, in case you're unexpectedly informed of a family bereavement," said Brayham to Lady Beauvayse. "So now you know what to expect in case the Kaiser should take it into his head to pop in on you at Foltlebarre somewhere about July."
"I surmise I'd expect a visitor of mine, whether he's the Kaiser, the King, or the President," retorted Lady Beauvayse, "to be a gentleman!" Her beautiful eyes blazed with genuine ire as she gave back von Herrnung's dominating stare. She continued, reverting more purposefully than ever to the exaggerated New York accent, mingling cutting Yankee humour with bitter irony in the sentences that twanged, one after another, off her sharp American tongue: "And I guess, Count von Herrnung--though between your father and Amos J. Sculpin of Madison Avenue, New York, and Sculpin Towers, Schenectady, there's considerable of a social gulf--if your Emperor had been a house-guest of my parpa's, and my elder brother"--she lifted an exquisite shoulder significantly ceilingwards--"had happened to get the hoist--parpa'd just have said: 'Your Imperial Majesty, I am unexpectedly one boy short, and far from feeling hunkey. My cars are waiting at my door to convey you right-away to your hotel. Look in on us after the interment, when Mrs. Sculpin has had time to get accustomed to her mourning. And as my chef had orders to serve a special dinner in honour of your Majesty, I shall be gratified by your taking the hull menoo along--outside instead of in!'"
The Goblin cackled. Ecstatic Brayham shrieked:
"Magnificent, by Gad! He ought to know your father!" Franky and Courtley yielded unrestrainedly to mirth, as did the Saxham girl. While her teeth, dazzling as those of a Newfoundland pup, gleamed in her wide red mouth, and her long eyes glittered between their narrowed eyelids, von Herrnung gave her a quick sidelong glance of anger. She caught the look, and suddenly ceased to laugh, as the young Newfoundland might have stopped barking. She said below her breath:
"Vexed? ... Why, you're really! ... And Lady Beau wasn't joking about your brother.... She wouldn't dream of such a thing! .... She's tremendously kind and sympathetic. Was he--your brother--nice? ..."
"Most women thought so."
"Would I have thought so? What was he like?" the girl persisted.
Von Herrnung turned in his chair so as to face her, answering:
"You see him now, with one difference. He was as black as I am red."
The blue eyes of the man and the long agate-coloured eyes of the young woman encountered. She said slowly in her warm, deep voice, less like a feminine contralto than the masculine baritone:
"I like--red men--best!"
"So! Then it was lucky that, instead of me, my brother Ludwig died!" said von Herrnung, so loudly that Lady Wathe's quick ear caught the final words. She shrilled out her laugh:
"But you're a wretch, Tido!" She shrugged her thin vivacious shoulders under their glittering burden. "A heartless wretch!"
"Of course I was regretting my brother, yes!" said von Herrnung. "But I do not pretend that his death did not improve what you English would call my worldly prospects. That is the cant of Christianity--particularly the sentimental Christianity of England. One world is not enough for your greed of possession. You must eat your cake here and hereafter. But for the robust super-humanity of Germany, this world is both Hell and Heaven. It is Hell for the man who is stupid, weakly, poor, and conscience-ridden. It is Heaven for the man who has knowledge, power, health, wealth, the craft to keep his riches, and the capacity to enjoy to the fullest the pleasures they can procure him, with the courage to free himself from the bonds of what Christians and Agnostics term Morality, and live precisely as Nature prompts. So when my brother fell in the charge," continued von Herrnung, with perfect seriousness, "he opened for me the gates of Heaven. Since then I am a god!"
"A mortal god," called out the chuckling Brayham; "for you've got to die, you know, when your number's up."
"When the time comes, of course I shall die," acquiesced von Herrnung, "in the vulgar sense of the word. But not so those who come after. Our bacteriologists will have discovered the microbe of old age and its antitoxin, and then we shall die no more."
"Dashed if I know the difference between the vulgar way of dying and the other style!" Brayham snorted apoplectically, feeling in his waistcoat-pocket for the box of digestive tabloids that showed in a bulge. "Dashed unpleasant certainty--however you look at it! And a man who weighs eighteen stone at fifty has got to look at it, every time his tailor lets out his waistcoats, and his valet asks him to order more collars because the last lot have shrunk in the wash."
"Ah, yes, to die is a hellish bore!" agreed von Herrnung, contemplating his obese and purple host with a cruel smile. "But I and my friends have no Hell, and we have done away with the myth of Heaven. To dissolve and be reabsorbed into the elements--that is the only after-life that is possible for a Superman."
"You'd hardly call it Life, would you?" came unwillingly from Franky. For von Herrnung's eyes seemed to challenge his own.
"'Imperial Caesar, dead and turned to clay,' what?" quoted Courtley, to whom von Herrnung transferred his smiling regard.
"I venture to hope that my clay may serve a more patriotic purpose than stopping a draught-hole," said the German, carefully fingering the tight roll of glittering red hair upon his upper-lip. "It may be baked into a sparking-plug for the aero-motor of one of our Zeppelin dirigibles--the mysterious Z. X., for instance, in whose trial trip from Stettin across the Baltic to Upsala in Sweden you were so keenly interested some months ago. Or some of my body's chemical constituents may pass into the young tree beneath which my ashes will be deposited. If beech or spruce, then I may furnish ribs or struts for an Aviatik or a Taube. But the best way of continuing to exist after one is dead is to leave plenty of vigorous sons behind one. To perpetuate the race"--he continued speaking to Lord Norwater, who had flushed and moved restlessly--"that is the high and noble obligation Duty imposes upon the German Superman."
"You'll have to hurry up your matrimonial arrangements, Tido," interposed the Goblin, with her cackle, "if your family is to tot up to a respectable number before the year 1916."
"You mean that I may get killed in our great War of Extermination? That is possible," agreed von Herrnung. "Our Flying Service is not a profession conducive to long life. Many of our keenest officers remain unmarried for that reason. The Emperor would prefer each of us to marry, or at least adopt a son. For myself, I would like to steal one of your splendid British boys and rear him up as a true German----"
Something sharp and keen and burning stabbed through Franky's brain to his vitals. It would have been a relief to have insulted von Herrnung. He set his teeth, fighting with the desire, as the guttural voice went on:
"I would teach him to hate you...." The speaker sucked in his breath as though he relished the idea exceedingly. "You cannot think how he would hate you!--my German-British Superman."
"By-the-by, the literary genius of Dreadnought type who invented the Superman," began Courtley, who had been peaceably nibbling salted pistachios, "can't pronounce his name for ginger-nuts, but it sounds something like a sneeze----"
Von Herrnung said stiffly:
"You doubtless speak of our great Nietzsche, whose triumphant thought has crushed all other mental systems."
"Quite so. Must be the chap!" said Courtley. "That is, if he died a lunatic.... But possibly I'm mixing him up with some other philosopher of the crushing kind?"
"No, no. It is true," corroborated von Herrnung. "The brain of Nietzsche gave way under the terrific strain of incessant creation. How should it be otherwise?" He became ponderous, even solemn, when he descanted upon the literary idol of Modern Germany. "How should it indeed be otherwise?" he demanded. "And was it not the fitting crown of such a career--the appropriate end to such a life-work?--to evolve the Superman--and die!"
"Quite so, quite so!" Courtley agreed. He smoothed his well-trimmed beard with his broad hand, and his eyes assumed a meditative expression. "Rather tantalising--always hearing about Germany's Supermen and never seeing any. What sort of chaps are they? I'm really keen to know."
"You have not to go far," returned von Herrnung. His fine florid complexion had suffered a deteriorating change. Savage anger boiled in his blood. He had thrown the iron gauntlet of German military preparedness in the faces of these cool, well-bred, smiling English, and brandished the iron thunderbolt of German intellectual supremacy--and with this result--that they took his deadly earnestness as jest. "Kreutzdonnerwetter! these English officers.... The pig-dogs! the sheep's heads! ..." He swallowed down the abusive epithets he would have liked to pitch at them, and stiffened his huge frame arrogantly as he stared in Courtley's simple face:
"Aber--you have not far to go, to visualise the type conceived by Nietzsche. I and my comrades--we are Supermen!"
"Thanks for explaining, frightfully!" said Courtley with artless gratitude, as Brayham purpled apoplectically and even the Goblin tittered behind her fan. "Shall know what to ticket you now, you know. Thanks very much!"
"You have read Nietzsche?" the sailor's victim queried.
Said Courtley, with his best air of frank simplicity:
"His works were recommended to me by my doctor, when I had a bad attack of insomnia, about a year ago. Ordered a volume of 'Thus Spake Zara Somebody.' Half a chapter did the business. No insomnia since then. Sleep like a mite in a Gorgonzola, the instant my head touches the pillow--never read another word. But heaps of friends in the Fleet'll be wanting to borrow the book presently, depend on it. For we'll all be too scared of Germany to sleep--in the year 1916."
Laughter broke forth. Lady Wathe gasped, dabbing her tearful eyes with a lace-bordered handkerchief:
"Oh, Tido! will you dead-in-earnest Germans never learn what pulling a leg means?"
"Ach ja! I should have understood!" He had stared, frowned, and reddened savagely. Now, with a palpable effort, his equanimity was regained. He turned with a smiling remark to Patrine Saxham, as Lady Beauvayse breathed in Courtley's ear:
"You perfect pet! How I love you for that!"
"Man simply suffering for a set-down. Good egg, you!" murmured Franky in the other ear of the Commander.
"Felt sorry for him. Had to do something--common humanity!" rejoined Courtley, eating more and more pistachios. "Seems as over-crammed with their Kultur as a pet garden-titmouse with coco-nut. Vain too, but that's the fault of the women. Lord! how they gush at those big, good-looking blighters. See the Saxham!--ready to climb into his waistcoat-pocket and stop there. Would, too, if she wasn't built on Dreadnought lines herself."
She was laughing into von Herrnung's smiling visage as he offered her a light from his cigar. For with the arrival of coffee and liqueurs, the fragrance of choice Havana and Turkish had begun to mingle with the tang of Mocha, the heady bouquet of choice wines, and the odours of fruit and flowers. The screens of frosted glass were rearranged,--the ladies had produced their cigarette-cases,--of gold with the monogram of the Goblin set in diamonds; of platinum adorned with turquoises and pearls wrought into the Beauvayse initial and coronet; and of humbler tortoiseshell, bearing in fanciful golden letters the name "Patrine"----
"Patrine..."
"The Saxham girl" had taken the tortoiseshell cigarette-case from the front of her low-cut, sleeveless bodice. Von Herrnung had leaned towards her, boldly exploring with his eyes the bosom where the trinket had been hiding, and read the golden letters. He smiled as he met her puzzled eyes, saying:
"'Patrine' is your name.... Now I know it I will not forget it! Tell me!"--he spoke in lowered tones--"why do you carry your cigarette-case just in that place?"
She laughed, half-shutting her long eyes and slightly lifting her big white shoulders. "Simply for convenience--when I'm in evening kit. Dressmakers don't allow us poor women pockets in these days."
"It may be so!" As von Herrnung spoke with a calculated roughness that he had found useful in dealing with many women, he took the cigarette-case from her, momentarily covering her hand with his own. As his curving fingers touched her palm, he felt the soft warm flesh wince at the contact. Her black brows drew together, her sleepy agate eyes shot him a hostile sidewise glance.
"I have not offended?" he whispered in some anxiety. And she answered in a louder tone, under cover of the talk, and laughter of the others:
"No! ... Only--I hate to be touched, that's all."
He smiled under the crisp tight roll of his red moustache, and his large, well-cut nostrils dilated and quivered.
"One day you will not hate it. I will wait for that day. But--about your cigarette-case--you do not now tell me the truth! ... The real reason is more subtle. You carry that thing there--under your corsage--to make live men envious of an object that cannot feel!"
"Really! ... What a lot you must know about women!"
The words were mocking, but the voice that uttered them was big, warm, and velvety. Far above the ordinary stature of womanhood--you remember that Franky regarded her as a great galumphing creature--her head would yet have been much below the level of von Herrnung's, but for the height of the extraordinary diadem or turban that crowned her masses of dull cloudy-black hair. Folds of vivid emerald-green satin rose above a wide band of theatrical gilt tinsel, set with blazing stage rubies, and above the centre of the wearer's low, wide brow a fan-shaped panache of clipped white ospreys sprang, boldly challenging the eye. Thrown with royal prodigality upon the back of the chair she occupied was an opera-mantle of cotton-backed emerald-green velvet lavishly furred with ermine and sables that were palpably false as the garish gold and jewels of the diadem that crowned her, yet became her big, bold, rather brazen beauty as well as though the Siberian weasel and the Arctic marten had been trapped and slain to deck and adorn her, instead of the white rabbit of ordinary commerce and the domestic pussy-cat.
*CHAPTER XI*
*PATRINE SAXHAM*
Who was the girl--the woman rather--who diffused around her so powerful a magnetic aura, whom prodigal Nature had dowered with such opulence of bodily splendour, that cheap, tawdry clothes and ornaments borrowed from her a magnificence that conjured up visions of the Salammbo of Flaubert, gleaming moon-like through her gold and purple tissues--of Anatole France's Queen of Sheba treading the lapis-lazuli and sardonyx pavements of King Solomon's palace in her jewelled sandals of gilded serpent-skin, darting fiery provocations from under the shadow of her painted lashes towards the Wise One rising from his cushions of purple byssus, between the golden lions of his ivory throne?
What a voice the creature had! thought von Herrnung. Soft and velvety like that dead-white skin of hers. The tortoiseshell case he held in his big palm still glowed with the rich vital warmth of her. His blood tingled and raced in his veins; his hard, brilliant stare grew languorous, and his mouth relaxed into sensuousness. He said almost stupidly, so keen was his enjoyment:
"You English ladies smoke a great deal, I think."
"Why should we leave all the pleasant vices to the men?"
She asked the queer question, not defiantly, but bluntly. Her strange eyes laughed a little, as she saw Franky wince. "Lord Norwater hates me. Well, that's about the limit!" she told herself. "And I helped on his love-affair for little Margot's sake!" "I beg your pardon, Lord Norwater! You were saying something? ..."
"You're an Advanced Thinker, aren't you, Miss Saxham? At least, my wife tells me so," Franky began. "Well, I'm not! But I've got my doubts as to whether vice is pleasant, for one thing--and for another, whether the general run of women in these days aren't quite as vicious as the men?"
"He wants to be nasty.... Poor boy, what have I done to him?" passed through the brain topped by the bizarre diadem. But before its wearer could reply, von Herrnung interposed:
"Naturally they are vicious--if they desire to please men. A dash of vice--that is the last touch to perfect an exquisite woman. It is the chilli in the mayonnaise, the garlic and citron in the ragout, the perfume of the carnation, the patch of rouge that lends brilliance to the eye, the bite in the kiss! ..."
"The bite in the ... Great Snipe! what an expression!" thought Franky, whose attack of propriety had reached the acute stage. Patrine Saxham repeated slowly, and with brows that frowned a little:
"'The bite in the kiss'...."
"You pretend not to understand..." said the guttural voice of von Herrnung, speaking so that his wine- and cigar-scented breath stirred the heavy hair that hid her small white ear. "But you are wiser than you would have me believe. Are you not? Tell me!--am I not right?"
He bent closer, and she broke a web that seemed in the last few moments to have been spun about her, invisible, delicate, strong, making captive the body and the mind. Her odd agate-coloured eyes laughed into his jeeringly. Her wide red mouth curved and split like a ripe pomegranate, showing the sharp white teeth that, backed by a vigorous appetite and seconded by a splendid digestion, had done justice to every course of Brayham's choice menu.
Men always waxed sentimental or enterprising towards the close of a rattling good dinner. Patrine didn't care, not a merry little hang! They might say and look what they liked, as long as they kept their hands off. At a touch, the quick revulsion came.
"You are amused.... I understand...." Von Herrnung spoke between his teeth, in a tone of stifled anger. "Always to rot; it is your English fashion.... When you encourage a man to make love to you, you are rotting. When you say sweet things to him--possibly you are rotting too?"
She turned her face away from him, striving to control her irresistible laughter. In vain; it took her as a sudden gale takes a pennant at the masthead--seized and shook her--as von Herrnung could have shaken her had they been alone. He turned savagely from her; she heard him speak to Brayham, who responded with what-whattings, his fleshy hand to his deafest ear. Von Herrnung repeated his utterance. Brayham goggled in astonishment. Courtley murmured to Franky:
"Hear what the blighter's saying.... No keeping him down, is there? ... Buoyant as one of his own Zeppelins!"
They looked and listened. Brayham's thick bull-neck was shortening as his shoulders climbed to his mottled ears. They caught a sound between a snort and a bellow. Then Lady Wathe's diamonds flashed all the colours of the rainbow as she turned vivaciously to her friend.... Count Tido wanted to propose a toast, the custom in dear, sentimental Germany.... Why shouldn't he? Rather amusing. She begged him to go on. Said von Herrnung:
"To-night the laugh goes much against me. I have been most frightfully rotted. Now, in my country it is the custom when a guest has been made game of that those who have laughed at him must drink a toast with him--to show there is no ill-will."
"Never heard of such a custom--and I've lived in Germany a good deal."
This from Brayham. The German persisted:
"Still, it is a custom, and it may be you will gratify me?" He went on, now addressing the company generally: "Here at the Spitz they have a Tokayer that is very old and very excellent. If I might order some? It would be amusing if you would all join me in drinking to The Day! ..."
The speaker, without waiting consent, beckoned to one of the attendants. Brayham, his cockatoo-crest of stiff grey hair erect, stared, as at a new and surprising type of the human kind.
But the words Brayham might have uttered were taken out of his mouth. A swift glance had passed between the English Naval officer and the rather stupid, titled young Guardsman occupying the seat left of von Herrnung. And while the Commander coolly intimated to the advancing waiter by a sign that his services were not needed, Lord Norwater, lobster-red and rather flurried, turned to von Herrnung and said, not loudly, yet clearly enough to be heard by every guest at the table:
"Stop! Sorry to swipe in, Count, but you'd better not order that wine, I think!"
"You think not?" asked von Herrnung, with coolest insolence.
"I--don't think so. I'm dead-sure!" said Franky, getting redder. "We Britons laugh at brag and bluffing, and the gassy patriotism shown by some foreigners we're apt to call bad form. We abuse our Institutions and rag our Governments--we've done that since the year One--far as I can make out. And when other people do it we generally sit tight and smile. We've no use for heroics. But when the pinch comes--it ain't so much that we're loyal. We're Loyalty. We're IT!"
With all his boggling he was so much in earnest, and with all his earnestness so absurdly, quaintly slangy, that the listeners, men and women of British race, whose blood warmed to something in his face and utterance, were forced to struggle to restrain their mirth. Some inkling of this increased the speaker's confusion. He cast a drowning glance at his bulwark Courtley, and Courtley's eye signalled back to his, "Good egg! ... Drive on, old son!"
"You're a foreigner here, of course ..." Franky pursued before the German could interrupt him. He appeared oblivious to his own analogous case. Perhaps for the moment the Hotel Spitz in the Place Vendome, Paris, and its gorgeous namesake in the London West End, were confused in his not too intellectual mind. He went on: "We're ready to make allowances--too rottenly ready sometimes.... But I read off the iddy-umpties to Full Stop, a minute back.... Count von Herrnung, when you ask English ladies and Englishmen--two of 'em in the Service--to drink that toast with you--you must know you're putting your foot in your hat!"
