That Which Hath Wings 3That Which Hath Wings (part 3)
18
Literature · Romance
That Which Hath Wings 3
That Which Hath Wings (part 3)
DehanEnglish
"Especially," said Courtley, as Franky collapsed, dewy all over and wondering where his breath had gone to--"especially as--a friend of mine happens to have heard that toast proposed rather recently during a Staff banquet at a military headquarters in Germany. And the words, are--not--quite exactly flavoured to suit the British taste."
"'To the Day of Supremacy. On the Land and on the Sea, under the Sea and in the Air, Germany Victorious for ever and ever!'" said von Herrnung, who had got upon his legs, and loomed gigantic over the lace-covered, flower-decked table, now in the after-dinner stage of untidiness, with its silver-gilt and crystal dishes of choice fruit and glittering bonbons disarranged and ravaged, its plates littered, its half-emptied wine-goblets pushed aside to make room for fragrant, steaming coffee-cups in filigree holders, and tiny jewel-hued glasses of Maraschino Cusenier, and Pere Kermann. There was a rustle, and a general scraping-back of chairs. Courtley had also risen, and Lord Norwater. A susurration of excitement had passed through the long, lofty, brilliant dining-room. People were getting up from the tables--the pink-and-yellow sheets of Paris Soir, the late edition of the Daily Mail, and another of the Liberte, were fluttering from hand to hand.... And the shrill voice of Lady Wathe was heard.
*CHAPTER XII*
*THE GATHERING OF THE STORM*
"Sit down, Tido!" said Lady Wathe. "What is the matter with everybody? What are they talking about? Tell a waiter to get us a paper! What do you say, Sir Thomas? Of course! Stupid of me to forget. To-day was to be the official summing-up of the evidence in the Perdroux Murder Case. A French Jury won't guillotine a woman--you said they wouldn't, Sir Thomas, from the beginning. But of course the verdict's 'Guilty' for Madame! ..."
Brayham, with a King's Bench cough, admitted that he had few misgivings as to the ultimate upshot. Upon the waiter's return without a newspaper, affirming a copy not to be procurable, judicial inquiries elicited from the man that the general furore for news was less due to popular interest in the famous cause celebre than to popular thirst for details with reference to the Assassinations at Serajevo. Which brought from Lady Wathe the shrill query:
"Sarajevo--where's Sarajevo? Ask him about the Verdict--I simply must know!"
The Verdict had been "Not Guilty," according to the waiter.... The Goblin screamed:
"But she is!--she is! Good heavens, my dear Sir Thomas! Isn't it murder to riddle an editor to death in his own office, before his subordinates, with bullets from a revolver you've hidden in your muff?"
Brayham summoned up his best King's Bench manner to answer:
"If he dies--and a jury don't happen to decide that you're innocent--the evidence is against you, my dear ma'am!"
Lady Wathe's vivacious gestures provoked astounding coruscations from her panoply of jewels. She had been certain from the first that there would be no capital sentence. But "Not Guilty." ... Surely it should have been Mazas for life. Or New Caledonia--didn't they send murderesses to New Caledonia?
Brayham, with a tone and manner even more deeply tinged with the King's Bench, begged leave to correct--arah!--his very dear friend's impression that the blameless and much-tried lady, now probably--aha--arah!--supping in the company of her husband and her advocate in her own luxurious dining-room, might, without libel, be called a murderess. Like--aha!--many other highly-strung women, Madame Perdroux had had recourse to the revolver as the ultima ratio. But the Verdict pronounced by the President of the Paris Court of Assize that afternoon had--arah!--purged----
"Bother the Verdict!" snapped the Goblin.
Brayham, incensed at this irreverence, replied with acrimony. The pair wrangled as Paris had wrangled since March 16th, while the great, crowded restaurant buzzed with the name of an obscure town in Eastern Europe--"Sarajevo, Sarajevo"--tossed and bandied from mouth to mouth.
We have learned to our bitter cost the appalling significance of this crime of Sarajevo, which had dwarfed in the estimation of the keen-witted Parisians the most sensational cause celebre ever tried before a French Criminal Court.
The Perdroux trial and its probable result had split Paris into hostile factions. The Press had attacked or defended, lauded or vilified the chief personages of the drama with tireless energy for weeks. The Verdict of "Not Guilty" would have caused fierce rioting upon the boulevards this sultry night of July. Blood would have been spilt between the partisans of Madame Perdroux and her opponents, but for this unexpected bolt from the blue.
Berlin had had the story of the assassinations with its breakfast-rolls and hot creamed coffee. Now, in the blue-white glare of the great electric arc-lamps of the Paris boulevards, men and women leaned over one another's shoulders to get a whiff of the big black letters on the displayed contents-bills; at every kiosk and bookstall the newspaper-vendors were sold out; much-thumbed copies of the papers were bought by knowing speculators, to be sold and bought and sold again.
The Kaiser at Kiel was racing his own clipper when the operator of the Imperial private wireless read a story from the notes of the singing spark that smote him pale and sick. When his anointed master heard the gory news, his chief regret seems to have concerned the untimely decease of the partner of his "life-work." "It will have," he said with bitterness, "to be begun all over again!"
One wonders, in the blood-red light of four years of dreadful carnage, seeing Hell and its dark Powers still unchained, and raging on this War-torn earth of ours--what would have been the nature of the edifice reared by these two Imperial craftsmen, had the younger not been removed by a violent and sudden death?
Did the prospect of unlocking--with one touch on an electric button and the scrawl of a wet pen--the brazen gates of Death and Terror ever strike cold to the heart of the rufous Hapsburg Archduke? Madness, we know, is in the blood of his evil-fated House. But, when the shots from a Bosnian High School student's revolver pierced Franz Ferdinand's brain and body, was he sane enough to realise that the crime of the Anarchist had saved his own name from foul, indelible, and hideous infamy? We shall know when the trumpet of the Archangel sounds the Last Reveille, and the grave gives up its dead, and the Sea spews forth its victims, and the secrets of that deeper abyss, the human heart, are revealed in the sheer, awful Light that streams from the Throne of God.
*CHAPTER XIII*
*THE SUPERMAN*
People had for some time been rising, passing out through the oxidised silver-framed glass doors of Spitz's big brilliant dining-room; beyond these the vestibule was now full to the walls, so that its palms and tree-ferns rocked amidst the billows of a heaving human sea. Many guests lingered in conversation, standing in groups near the vacated tables. The glitter and blaze of jewels, adorning bizarre coiffures, bare and powdered throats, bosoms, arms, and backs,--the dazzling display of brilliantly-hued toilettes, made an ensemble marvellously gay. And now, returning as they had arrived, but unattended by M. Spitz, came the party of notables from the German Embassy, talking together in loud, harsh, Teutonic accents. Von Herrnung, erect, stiffening to the salute as previously, remained in the rigid attitude until the Ambassador had passed. But this time the official finger beckoned. He turned, pushed back his chair, and in a stride, joined the squat, elderly figure. The yellow-white, heavily-featured face with its stiff brush of white hair above the square brain-box turned to him, the deeply-pouched, shrewd grey eyes looked past him to the table he had left. The coarse mouth under the white moustache with the brushed-up points, uttered a few emphatic words. Then, with a slight nod, the representative of the All Highest at Berlin passed on. The swing-doors opened and shut behind him and his following. And von Herrnung rejoined his party, saying with a queer, excited breathlessness:
"The ladies will pardon.... His Excellency had something to say!"
The ladies were rising, looking for their theatre-wraps. He deftly lifted the barbaric garment of green velvet and sable-edged ermines from the back of Miss Saxham's chair, and, opening it, held it to receive her tall, luxuriant person, mentally commenting:
"With such hips, such a bosom, and such shoulders, the jade must be twenty-eight or nine." And remembering how boldly she had said to him that she liked red men, he thought: "Amusement here.... Nothing needed but time and opportunity--which this Bosnian affair reduces to a minimum." "Gnaediges Fraulein will you not put on your mantel?"
She told him that she was too hot. He insisted, with all the Teuton's dread of chill:
"But it will be cooler in the vestibule, and cooler still when we are driving. Do we not go on to a theatre? I think Lady Wathe has told me so?"
She shrugged her splendid shoulders.
"Nothing so proper. The Jardin des Milles Plaisirs, on the Champs Elysees. We're all dead nuts on seeing the new dance from Sao Paulo. The thing that has exploded Tango and Maxixe, you know. Look!--the others are moving. Don't let's lose them! No! I won't take your arm. Please carry my wrap with your coat."
"I will put my coat on. Then I shall better carry your mantel."
An attendant deftly hung von Herrnung's thin black, sleeveless garment over his broad shoulders, and gave him his white silk wrap and soft crush felt. He slipped a coin into the man's palm, its small value being instantly reflected in the features of the receiver, and moved towards the swing-doors with Patrine. She said, as a slight block momentarily arrested their progress:
"What are they all jabbering about? Who has been assassinated? What has happened at this place with the crack jaw name? ..."
"Sarajevo..." came in von Herrnung's guttural accent.
"Sarajevo.... Not that I know where it is," said the deep warm voice, that was more like a young man's baritone than a young woman's contralto. And von Herrnung answered, with a renewal of that tingling thrill:
"Sarajevo is the capital of Bosnia in Eastern Europe. When Austria annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1909, she made her seat of Government at Sarajevo. The Slavs grumbled. They wished for union with Servia--that little nation of pig-breeders! ... They themselves--the Bosnians--are stupid peasants, duemmer Teufels!--Schafskopfs! They cultivate their land with the wooden ploughs that were used at the date of the Trojan War.... But this does not interest you at all, I think?"
"How do you know it doesn't interest me?"
"Because dress and jewellery and amusement are the chief things in your life, gnaediges Fraeulein. You are not even interested in der Politik, or in the higher Kultur. The social progress of your own country is nothing to you. You are too----"
"Too frightfully stupid.... Thanks!"
"I did not say too stupid," von Herrnung contradicted. "But if you were stupid, you are too hellishly handsome for that to matter in the least."
To be called hellishly handsome pleased her. Her eyes gave him a flashing side-glance. As a surge in the crowd pressed her curving hip against his tall, muscular body, she took his offered arm with a rough, brusque grace. They were near the swing-doors when she spoke:
"Tell me about the Sarajevo business.... Who is the official swell the Trojan ploughmen have hoisted--as Lady Beau would say?"
"I will tell you. It has happened only this morning----"
She felt the man's powerful muscles thrill and become rigid with suppressed excitement under the hand that rested on his arm.
"Two personages of the highest rank have been horribly assassinated. The Archduke Franz Ferdinand, Kronprinz of the Imperial House of Austria, and his wife; you have heard of the Graefin Sophie Chotek, created Duchess of Hohenberg? Virtually she was Erzherzogin--Archduchess--but the wife of the Archduke by a mariage de la main gauche. A morganatic marriage--such unions have been heard of in your virtuous England."
They had passed the swing-doors now, and mingled, with the crush in the vestibule. Patrine said, signalling with a pair of long black suede gloves and a vanity-bag of gilded metal chain-mail:
"There's Lady Beau. Behind the second column right of the entrance. And here's Captain Courtley coming to hurry us up!"
Courtley, smiling and unruffled as ever, dodged under the huge roseate elbow of an immense lady in Oriental kincob tissues. He gave his message, turned and dived back again. The rich, womanly baritone of Miss Saxham said, addressing von Herrnung:
"Lady Wathe and Sir Thomas Brayham have gone on in Lady Wathe's auto-brougham. Lord Norwater has done a bunk. Pretended he had an appointment; he's been frightfully fed up with all of us this evening. Lady Beauvayse says her chauffeur is on the string all right, but about a million cars are ahead of him. Why did your Austrian Archduke and his wife go to that place in Bosnia if it wasn't healthy for Royalties? Fancy!--they went to their deaths this Sunday morning! Why does one always forget it's Sunday in Paris?"
"That English Sunday of yours," exclaimed von Herrnung, "is very good to forget, I think!"
She gave her deep, soft laugh. He went on rapidly:
"Of the Archduke and the Duchess I tell you, since you have asked me.... They inspected the troops--regiments of the Austrian garrison. Then they drove in their automobile along the Appel Quay, towards the Sarajevo Town Hall. They are passing beneath the shade of an avenue of tamarind and oak trees when a bomb is thrown at them by a man hidden among the branches.... The Archduke is very prompt--he wards off the bomb with his arm. He is not then hurt, nor is the Duchess. But his Adjutant--in the car behind them--is wounded in the neck. When they arrive at the Town Hall the Mayor commences the address of welcome. To him Franz Ferdinand says angrily: 'Halt den Mund! ... Shut up, you silly fellow! What the big devil is the use of your speeches? I came to Sarajevo on a visit, and I get bombs thrown at me.... It is too damned rotten for anything! ..."
"Yes, yes! ... Go on!" She bit her lips, fighting a nervous impulse to laugh.
"So the Imperial cortege drove away, and a student threw at the Archduke another bomb. It did not explode, so he shot him with an automatic revolver, an American Browning. The Duchess tried to cover him with her body, and the assassin shot her also. The Archduke begged her to live for their children, but both victims died as they were being taken to the Governor's house.... They have arrested the assassins, he who tried to kill, and the fellow who succeeded.... They are both young, and men of Serb race. They are rebels all--they hate their Austrian rulers. Sarajevo is swarming with fellows of the same breed...."
"What will the Austrian Government do to them, now they've caught them?"
"To the regicides," von Herrnung returned harshly, "Austria will do--nothing that very much matters. It is not an important thing to destroy two trapped rats. But I think there will be an ultimatum from Vienna to the Servian Government; and if the terms of that are not complied with, then the Emperor of Austria may give the signal for his monitors upon the Donau to open fire upon the capital of Belgrade."
Patrine asked negligently, as a new surge of the crowd thrust her tall, lithe figure away from her companion's, forcing her to tighten her hold upon his arm:
"'Monitors?' ... I used to think monitors were big schoolboys and schoolgirls. Senior pupils told off to keep order. I was one myself once.... Chosen because I was bigger, and noisier, and naughtier than any other girl in my class...."
"Ha, ha, ha! ... Praechtig! ... That is capital!" She could feel the laughter shaking his big ribs. "That is just what they are--those monitors of the Donau. Each is a big girl who keeps order von anderen Sorte. But they have turned-up noses, not Egyptian and beautiful like yours!"
He added, with the calculated roughness that had previously pleased her:
"You shall now put on your mantel. For the car, I see, is open." He shrugged his broad square shoulders closer into his overcoat and pulled up the collar about his throat, saying ill-temperedly: "Always does one find it with the English. It is laecherlich--that passion for the air."
"Lovely, did you say? ..."
Ignorant or careless that he had said "ridiculous," Patrine suffered him to wrap her mock ermines about her, seeing above the frieze of waiting figures that filled in the lower part of the picture framed by the portico, the emerald-green bird-of-Paradise plume of Lady Beauvayse whisk into the big white Rolls-Royce, past the neat black-haired head of Courtley, and the peaked cap and pale Cockney profile of Morris, the chauffeur. She threw back a jest as she passed out:
"I'm glad you think it lovely. It's one of the nicest things about us--that we're keen on soap and water and can't do without lots of fresh air."
She was in the car before his outstretched hand could touch her. He followed, letting Courtley precede him because he wished to sit opposite, and the great Rolls-Royce purred out of the jam beneath the illuminated glass archway, and in a moment was out of the Place Vendome and moving with the stream of vehicles down the Avenue of the Champs Elysees. In the mingling of moonlight and electric light the tawdry paste jewels of Patrine's preposterous diadem rivalled the costly splendours of the jewelled fillets adorning Lady Beauvayse's coiffure, her panache of white osprey flared above her broad, dark brows as insolently as though they crowned a Nitocris or a Cleopatra. But--and here was a titillating discovery--the strange face with its broad brows, wide, generously-curving cheeks, and little rounded chin, did not belong to a woman of thirty, or even twenty-five. She was much younger than the German, who plumed himself upon his flair for the accurate dating of women, had at first credited. It would be amusing--he told himself again--hellishly amusing, to cultivate this curious hybrid, half hoyden, half femme-du-monde.
Sarajevo--still Sarajevo. You caught echoes of the crime of that morning in the tongues of twenty nationalities upon the Paris boulevards that night. People in automobiles and open carriages, people in the little red and blue flagged taxis, people crowding the auto-buses and Cook's big open brakes, the army of people on foot, endlessly streaming east and west along the great splendid thoroughfares, tossed the name of the Bosnian capital backwards and forwards, as though it had been a blood-stained ball.
A gay masculine voice called from a knot of chatterers standing near the wide illuminated archway of electric stars and crowns and flowers under which streamed a variegated crowd of pleasure-seekers as the big Rolls-Royce deposited its load:
"Nom d'un chien! What a pack of assassins these Serbians! ... And yet--what if the whole show were got up by Rataplan at Berlin? ... His bosom friend, you say--the big Franz Ferdinand? Zut! what of that? ... Sometimes one finds inconvenient the continued existence of even a bosom friend."
*CHAPTER XIV*
*A PARIS DANCE-GARDEN*
By "Rataplan" was meant the Kaiser, Patrine comprehended, as her companion glanced over his shoulder at the candid speaker, muttering something that sounded like a German oath. But Lady Beauvayse was twittering through a filmy screen of verd-blue chiffon, now discreetly enveloping her lovely Romney head:
"We're going to hunt up Lady Wathe and Sir Thomas. Take care of Miss Saxham, Count von Herrnung, in case we get separated in the crush.... Don't forget our programme, Pat. A whiff of Cafe Concert ... Colette Colin is billed to sing some of her old songs and the very newest of the new ones.... Then we're coming to the Pavilion de la Danse to see the Sao Paulo sensation.... La Rivadavia and Herculano, and all the rest of the crowd.... Meet you there.... So long! Mind, you're not to get lost!"
"In London you often hear La Colette," said von Herrnung, as he paid the lean-jawed functionary in the gold-laced light-blue uniform--the usual notice of free entry having vanished from the entrance--and passed with his companion into the gravelled promenade of the open-air concert-hall. "But to-night you will hear no songs of old France, no Chansons Pompadour nor Chansons Crinoline. She comes to this place from her own theatre to oblige an old comrade. There is Nou-Nou in that box with some smart women and the Turk who wears our Prussian Order of the Red Eagle with the Star and Crescent of the Medjidie. He is Youssouf Pasha, the Sultan's Envoy-Extraordinary. Nou-Nou has brought him to hear La Colette. Shall we not sit here?"
"Who is Nou-Nou?" Patrine asked, as she settled her tall, luxuriant person on one of the little green-painted iron chairs.
"Who is Nou-Nou?" her companion echoed. "You saw her to-day at Longchamps in her black confection. Everybody was looking.... She is wonderfully chic--Nou-Nou! May I be permitted to light a zigarre? ..."
"Do! ... But--why is she so much the rage? She isn't even pretty, your Mademoiselle Nou-Nou." Patrine said it with her bright gaze fastened on the famous Impropriety who had paraded under the chestnuts of Longchamps in the sheath of black gauze unlined, save with her own notorious attractions--both irresistible and fatal, judging by their recorded effects upon excitable Parisian viveurs and gommeux. She saw a triangular and oddly-crumpled face, rouged high upon the cheek-bones in circular patches, a pair of almost extinguished eyes, indicated by streaks of blue pencil, and caught a sentence screamed at the stout Turk in a voice like a hoarse cockatoo's. Boldly erect upon the skull adorned by a scanty thatch of lemon-yellow balanced a black feather, long and attenuated as the wearer. Nou-Nou's stick-like, fleshless arms, the cadaverous and meagre torso unblushingly revealed by the transparent casing of her upper person, might have enthralled a keen student of anatomy. But of feminine charms, in the accepted sense of the word, she possessed not one, it seemed to Patrine.
"Do not look at her too hard, or she may send round and invite you to supper," warned the laughing voice of von Herrnung speaking close to her ear. "She has all the vices--the good Nou-Nou!"
"Including the vice of indiscriminate hospitality," Patrine laughed; but a little uncontrollable shudder rippled over her as she withdrew her eyes from the painted, crumpled visage, leering with half-extinguished eyes from under the canary-coloured wig.
"That is so. Tell me--you and Lady Beauvayse seem great friends--quite inseparable...." He leaned nearer, his bold eyes closely scrutinising her face. "How comes it that she leaves you alone in a Paris dance-garden: with me, whom you have met to-night--for the first time?"
"She knows I can take jolly good care of myself, wherever and with whomsoever I may happen to be!" Her black brows frowned; it was evident she resented his criticism. "And--what are you getting at? What's the matter with poor old Paris? You know--perhaps it sounds odd!--but I've never been in Paris before.... And I love it! Down to the ground--it suits me! It's so gay and brightly-coloured and pagan. The public buildings and parks are dreams; the shops--too entrancing for anything! And this place, with its jabber and music and stagy illuminations, trellises where real roses mix up with artificial ones--ornamental beds of geraniums and calceolarias and thingumbobs bordered with smelly little oil lamps, gilt band-stands, concerts, and lovely trees in blossom.... Is it so luridly awful? To me, it's rather sweet! Of course the dancing--everybody knows the dancing is pretty well the limit. But one has seen such a lot of Tango in London--the bloom will be pretty well rubbed off!"
"Yet some lingers. You have still something to learn from Herculano and La Rivadavia! ..."
"Do I strike you as such a perfect daisy of inexperience?" Something in his tone stung, for the full white cheeks coloured faintly. "You didn't talk to me at dinner as though I were one!"
"How could I help that?" he asked, with the roughness that had previously intrigued her. "Am I to blame that you look like Phryne or Aspasia when you are only Mademoiselle de Maupin--before she set out upon her travels? For you have only got as far as Paris with your friend Lady Beauvayse. Why does she bring you? I am curious to know."
"Because I am her paid secretary and amanuensis." Patrine brought the words out with a rush; it was clear that she thought the candour a necessity, but hated it. "She can't get on without one, and her husband, Lord Beauvayse--awful little bounder!--won't stand her having a man. Don't great ladies have secretaries in Germany? Can't you see me doing Lady Beau's correspondence in my fearful fist--enclosing cheques to people who solicit donations for charities with a committee and Hon. Treasurer--tearing up the begging letters full of howlers in the spelling-line--smelling of bad tobacco and beer or gin? Then I have to keep her posted in her engagements, go to shows, and functions, and kettledrums with her when she hasn't a pal handy--that's where my share of the fun comes in. Just as I'm visiting Paris, as I dare say I shall visit other centres of lively iniquity--in the character of the sheep-dog that doesn't bow-wow at the wrong man!"
"You should bow-wow at me." His teeth were hidden, but his eyes were crinkled up with soundless laughter. "For I am a very wrong--a very wicked man!"
"How sad!" Her brows were still frowning, but her wide red mouth was beginning to curl up at the corners. "Couldn't you reform? Is it too late?"
"I hope so!" he answered her. "For if I were good I should possess no attraction for a woman of your type. And to charm you I would give my soul--if I had a soul!"
"Great Scott! You're candid.... Modest too.... And complimentary!"
"I am candid, because I cannot help myself."
Three comedians had come upon the stage. She told him not to talk to her. She wanted to see the turn; she liked music-hall stuff. He obeyed, mentally congratulating himself on having ascertained her social status, something better than a typist, hardly on the same level with his sister Gusta's dame de compagnie.
While his bold eyes read the book of her provoking beauty, the performance on the stage, backed by the deep green palmate foliage and white or ruddy candelabra-like blossom-sprays of the chestnuts, framed by a broad band of electric lamp-flowers, was culminating to its final gag. A preposterously fat man attired in the historic low-crowned hat, Union Jack waistcoat, brass-buttoned blue tail-coat, leathers and hunting-tops of the traditional John Bull, another comedian in the legendary costume of M. Jacques Prud'homme, and a truculent-looking personage whose Teutonic French accent, spiked silver helmet with the Prussian eagle, First Imperial Guards cuirass and tunic, breeches and spurred jack-boots, in combination with a well-known moustache with upright ends, a huge Iron Cross, and a great many other property decorations, left no doubt as to the political bent of the scrap of pantomime.
It was an ordinary bit of comic knockabout, to which the tragic circumstances of the day lent a peculiar tang. One has seen it before, played by the three comedians, in the green-baize aprons, brown duffel knee-breeches, and shirt-sleeves sported by the waiters of low-class Paris or Munich brasseries.
In the centre of the stage, instead of a bright-hooped beer-barrel on a wooden cellar-stand, was a revolving globe representing the World. And each of the three comedians, being armed with a tumbler, a spile-awl, and a spigot-tap, proceeded, with appropriate patter, gesture, and grimaces, to insert his spigot, draw, and drink. John Bull turned the globe to the United Kingdom, and tapped the big black patch in East Middlesex. Creamy-headed London porter filled his glass. He held it up, nodded a "Here's to you!" and toped off. M. Prud'homme punctured France in the rich vine-growing district of Epernay. Champagne crowned the goblet, and he drank in dumb show to Gallia, the land of love, laughter, and wine. It was then the turn of the Teuton. He bored, and Brandenburg yielded a tall bock of foaming blonde lager. He sucked it down with guttural Achs of delight.
But this was not all. John Bull exploited the East Indies. A stream of rubies and emeralds filled his glass. He bored deep in the Union of South Africa--diamonds and gold-dust heaped the vessel. Fired by his success, M. Prud'homme inserted his spigot into wealthy Bordeaux, whipped it out, applied his lips, and drank deep. He corked the oozing spot and tapped Algerian Africa. Coffee rewarded him, fragrant and richly black. He next exploited Pondicherry, Chandernagore on the Hooghly, French Equatorial Africa, and New Caledonia. Nothing came. He tried Cochin China, and drew off a glass of yellow tea at boiling-point. Encouraged to drink the strange beverage by the appreciative pantomime of his British neighbour, he swallowed it, with results of a Rabelaisian nature, at which everybody laughed heartily, including Patrine.
It was now the turn of the Teuton. He drew German beer from Togoland, Cameroon; German South-West and South-East Africa yielded an indifferent brand of the beverage. German New Guinea in the Pacific, the Solomon, Caroline, and other islands, with Asian Kiao-Chao, merely wetted the bottom of the glass with a pale fluid, German beer by courtesy. "Sapperlot! Der Teufel! Kreuzdonnerwetter!" He tasted, spat, stamped, and sputtered forth strange expletives, M. Prud'homme's terror at these unearthly utterances being provocative of more humour of the Rabelaisian kind. Then he decided to try again, excited to envy by the spectacle of the stout Briton drawing gold from Australia, gold from Canada, gold from New Zealand and the West Indies, and gold from Ceylon, gold from the Crown Colonies in China, gold from the Gold Coast, gold from Rhodesia and Nigeria, gold from everywhere; filling the capacious pockets of his blue brass-buttoned coat, of his tight breeches, of his nankeen waistcoat, until he bulked enormously, a Bull of Gargantuan size.
Such wealth roused respect in Prud'homme, who esteems the yellow metal. He embraced the Briton, heartily congratulating him. This roused the Teuton's ire. He seized the spigot and once more plunged it into Germany, Prussia, Bavaria, Saxony--each of the States yielding beer, beer, BEER. He went on, tapping, filling, and guzzling.... Twelve full tumblers and he had begun to swell most horribly. Fifteen--and his rotundity equalled that of John Bull. But one State remained untapped. He swilled down the twenty-fourth bock, drawn out of Lubeck--plunged the spigot into the Reichsland--once Alsace-Lorraine----
And the big glass crimsoned with a sudden spurt of blood.
It was over in an instant, the comedians had skipped nimbly from the scene, the globe had developed a pair of very thin human legs and followed them off at a proscenium-wing, before many of those who had witnessed, clearly understood. Only the men and women of Gallic race among the cosmopolitan, polyglot audience answered with a deep, inward thrill to the ruby gush that told how the blood of France still ran red in the throbbing arteries of the beloved, reft, alienated province, in spite of her forty-five years of separation, in defiance of the loathed laws, customs, language, service, all the gyves rivetted on her by the Teuton, her conqueror. Now round after round of applause signified their comprehension. But the comedians did not answer the call.
Von Herrnung, who had worn the same contemptuous smile for every phase of the clumsy by-play, relaxed his stiff features. A stout tenor from the Opera appeared and sang a Spring song by Tchaikovsky, following it with the exquisite Serenade of Rimsky Korsakov, "Sleep, Sad Friend."
The tenor was recalled. Colette Colin succeeded him. She sang "Notre Petite Compagnon" and "La Buveuse d'Absinthe" to the accompaniment of a pale, lean, red-nosed man with a profile grotesque as ever adorned a comic poster; who touched the piano-keys as though they were made of butter; and had a way of sucking in his steep upper-lip and cocking his eye at the star as he waited on her famous efforts, that made Patrine shake with suppressed laughter on her green iron chair.
The last ironic line of Rollinat's ballad, marvellously uttered rather than sung, died out upon a stillness. A storm of approval broke. Men and women stood up applauding in their places, and the singer came back, to sigh out the bitter-sweet lyric of Jammes, "Le Parle de Dieu." Then, while her name still tossed on the surges of human emotion, backwards and forwards under the electrics, Colette Colin, the pet of Paris, the eclipser of the famous Theresa, was gone. Something of the yearning anguish of Jammes, who sees Religion as a dusty collection of ancient myths and folk-tales; to whom Faith is mere superstition, but who would give his all to be able to pray once more as in childhood, had given the girl lumps in the throat as she listened to Colette Colin. Though, unlike the sad, Agnostic poet, Patrine had no tender, sentimental memories in connection with a mother's knee.
Not from Mildred Saxham had she learned her first childish prayer, but from a procession of nurses; beginning with "Now I Lay Me Down" and "Gentle Jesus," instilled by Hannah, a Church of England woman, continuing with the Lord's Prayer, insisted on by Susan, a Presbyterian; culminating in the "Our Father" "learned the childer" by Norah the Irish Catholic, a petition which--minus the final line--was just the same as the Lord's Prayer. Also the Creed in English, and a surreptitious "Hail Mary" which brought about the sudden exit of Norah from the domestic scene.
For teaching Patrine and Irma about God and Heaven and all that, was sufficiently interfering, said Mrs. Saxham, but when it came to Popery, rank Popery, it was time the woman went. So Norah ceased to be, from the point of view of the little Saxhams--and He who had risen above the horizon of childish intelligence, a Being vaguely realised as all-powerful and awful, great and beneficent, stern and tender, sank and vanished at the same time.
But the Idea of Him remained to be merged in the personality of the child Patrine's dada. Dada, so handsome and jolly, and nearly always kind to his rough little romping Pat. The boy, Patrine's senior by sixteen months, had died in infancy. Captain Saxham was always gloomy on the deceased David's birthday. Mildred reserved a nervous headache of the worst for the anniversary, the kind that is accompanied by temper and tears.
She was indifferent to Patrine, who resembled the Saxhams. But she was devoted to Irma, her own image bodily and mentally. Thus nothing interfered with Patrine's adoration of her father. The handsome, genial, ex-officer of cavalry was his daughter's god, until Mildred tore away the veil of Deity, broke the shrine and cast down the idol, one day when Patrine was fourteen years old.
The girl learned that Captain Saxham's noisy fun and alternating fits of rage were due to over-indulgence in brandy-and-soda. That he gambled away Mildred's income over cards and Turf speculations, as he had wasted the sum of money for which his Commission had been sold. That he was "not even faithful"--that he spent week-ends "at hotels with fast women"; that he was not worthy the sacrifice Mildred had made for him.
Had she not for his sake jilted his younger brother, Owen! Even on the verge of their marriage; the presents received; the house taken and furnished; the trousseau ready, everything perfect to the last pin in the wedding veil. Nobody could resist David when he chose to woo, but why, why had Mildred yielded? So fierce a sense of shame awakened in the daughter as she listened, that it seemed to her as though her face and body scorched in the embrace of an actual, material flame.
"How could he? ... How could you? ... Betray Uncle Owen.... One of you was as low-down as the other, to play a beastly, sneaking game like that!"
"You insult your mother and father. Leave the room!" commanded Mildred. And Patrine left it, vigorously slamming the door.
Captain Saxham, who had sold out of the Army when Patrine and Irma were respectively seven and six years old, never knew what he had lost in the esteem of his elder daughter. She loved him still, but he had ceased to be her god. They lived at Croybourn and occupied three sittings at one of its several Anglican Churches. The Vicar, a strenuous man, whipped in Patrine and Irma for Confirmation classes. They studied the Thirty-Nine Articles, the Athanasian Creed, and dipped once more into the Protestant Church Catechism, first instilled at the certified High School for the Daughters of Gentlemen--an establishment they attended as day-pupils, and were to leave, without passing the Oxford Secondary, in the following year when Captain Saxham died.
For David, that cheerful, easy-going Hedonist, dropped off the perch quite suddenly, in the smoking-room of his London Club. In life he had been of the easy-going type of Christian, who avoids open scandal, and hopes to die at peace with the clergyman.
An attack of cerebral effusion had anticipated the clergyman. Mildred and Irma wept bitterly, Patrine sat dry-eyed. Even in the face of the new tombstone at Woking Cemetery, testifying to the many virtues of David, as soldier, husband, and father, her stiff eyelids remained unmoistened by a tear. At the base of the scrolled Cymric Cross ran a text in leaded letters:
BLESSED ARE THE DEAD WHO DIE IN THE LORD.
The undertaker had recommended the text to the widow because it contained the right number of letters required to fit in at the bottom. But did it fit in, Patrine had sometimes wondered, quite so appropriately, at the close of her father's life?
She treasured his portrait, taken at the age of thirty, the tinted presentment of a handsome, stupid young officer, resplendent in the gold and blue and scarlet of a crack Dragoon regiment. It had fallen to her keeping when her mother had re-married. But she cherished no illusions regarding the original. How often, since her own eyes had been opened to the fact of their existence, had she not screened David's vices from strangers' eyes.
She had made him her ideal, and Mildred had revealed him to her as vicious, unprincipled. She could not forgive her mother for telling her those horrors, she, Mildred--seemed to forget whenever she was pleased. But Patrine had never forgotten. She would wake at night even now with the dry sobs shaking her.... To have been able to believe in that dead father as noble, chivalrous, good, would have been so sweet; she had shed big surreptitious tears in sympathy with the anguish of Jammes, who would have so loved to believe in the existence of Almighty God, and the dear little Jesus, the Blessed Virgin, and the holy Angels, because Faith is so restful, si paisible....
*CHAPTER XV*
*THE BITE IN THE KISS*
But von Herrnung was saying, as they moved with a straggling procession of similar pleasure-seekers, over smooth sanded pathways between beds of geranium and verbena and lobelia, ivy-leaved geranium and gaily coloured foliage-plants, bordered with little twinkling lamps:
"Shall I tell you what I have just heard as those people passed us? The tall man with the white moustache, and the chic little woman in the Spanish mantilla. She told her friend that we make a handsome couple. Perhaps that makes you a little angry? ... Shall I make you still more angry? Well then, listen? ... If we were really a couple you would not have that so-black hair...."
"Why not?" He had roused her curiosity. She put away the little damp, laced handkerchief. "Would your cruel usage of me have turned it white?"
"Not that, but you would have added the one touch that makes perfection. You are too sombre--too much like a night in October with all that cloudy blackness.... You would have bleached and dyed your hair--not yellow, nor yet orange--nor even flame.... The colour of beech-leaves in winter, as one sees them burning against a snow-bank. And--all the women would be crazy with jealousy--and all the men would be dying at your feet! For you would be Isis then--you would be the Sphinx-woman of whom La Forgue wrote and Colette has sung to us. You would be hellishly, divinely beautiful!"
"Hellish again." She gave her low, deep laugh, prolonging it a trifle stagily. "What do you bet me I don't--do what you said?"
"Bleach and dye...?"
"That's it." She nodded. "To the colour of--what was it?
'Beech-leaves in winter.' ..."
"Against a snow-bank." He added: "The snow is your wonderful skin. And I will bet you four hundred and twenty marks--that is twenty pounds English. Is it agreed? ... Do you not say--Done? ..."
"Twenty pounds...." She shrugged her big white shoulders. "My dear man, I haven't got twenty pounds in this blessed old world!"
He hesitated; finally said with reluctance:
"I will lend you twenty pounds--it will cost you twenty pounds to have your hair done here in Paris.... But you will be sehr schoen--the money will be well spent. No? ..."--for she had shaken her head, frowning. "It is offered--why will you not accept?"
"Because I won't.... There are some things I draw the line at. Borrowing money's one of them."
"Then I will bet you my magpie pearl--you may have seen it"--he displayed the ornamented little finger--"against that not-very-good diamond you wear on your left hand."
She burst out laughing and repeated through her laughter: "'Not very good.' I call that insulting.... When it cost me fifteen francs in the Palais Royal. Well, done with you!"
"It is done! But you have not done with me." Von Herrnung's tone had a new note of triumph. He urged: "You go back to London--when? ... The day after to-morrow.... Gut! ... I have myself to visit London upon business--I shall see Isis with her beautiful new hair. One thing more. An address where I may call and see it. Be quick! We turn down here! ..."
Patrine protested, peering with narrowed eyes through the dusk-blue twinkling semi-darkness. "But no! ... That big marquee-thing at the end of this avenue--with all the festoons of lights and the ring of promenade about it--surely that's the Pavilion de la Danse?"
"Halt den Mund!" His hand closed peremptorily on her arm: he hurried her down the trellised vine walk that invited on the left of them, as light measured footsteps padded on the gravel, and a man ran past calling, as it seemed, to somebody ahead:
"Let him call! Are you not with me?" Von Herrnung's tone was masterful. "You shall go to him when you have given me that London address!"
She was amused and yet annoyed by his persistency.
"Oh, all right! 'The Ladies' Social Club, Short Street, Piccadilly, West.' That's where I'm generally to be found when I'm in town."
"Sehr gut! Tell me once again, then I shall not forget, no!"
"Write it on your cuff!"
"It is written in a safer place," he told her. "We Prussian officers are trained to remember without writing things down. A face, an address, a conversation, the outlines of a country. Though for reconnaissance there is nothing like die Photographie." He added: "When we meet in London I shall be able to tell you everything you wore to-night."
"Really! ... How flattering! ... You've made a mental inventory?"
They were retracing their steps to the avenue recently quitted. He walked with noiseless strides behind the tall, supple figure as it moved between the trellised vines and roses, gowned with its flaunting diadem, robed in the insincere splendours of the opera-mantle already described.
"As you say. I shall be able to tell you that the back of your mantel was cut in a V-shape nearly reaching to your waist-line. Shall I tell you why?"
"If you're keen to...." She felt a scorching breath between her shoulders and quickened her pace, making for the avenue. But he moved with her, his voice came thickly: "Because your back is so superbly beautiful you cannot bear to hide it from men!"
"Ah-h!"
She whirled about, glaring like an angry leopardess, her strong white arm upraised to strike. Face, throat, and bosom glowed with painful crimson. Between her violated, insulted shoulders, his furious kiss still burned and stung.
"How dare you touch me!" she gasped. But he had shot past her even as she turned. He was running towards the avenue, calling gaily:
"Were you looking for us, Lady Beauvayse? Here we are!"
"Cad, cad!" she stammered. "Insufferable! beastly!" Then, because a scene was quite out of the question, she went forward with head held high, and resentment heaving her broad bosom, to meet Lady Beauvayse.
"Pat! You needle in a haystack," cried her friend, "where did you get to?"
"Nowhere. We missed you at the Cafe Concert," Patrine began.
"And then," von Herrnung explained, "we happened to take the wrong turn. But we have not gone far before we are recalled."
"--To the path of probity," suggested Lady Beauvayse, adding: "And in this instance the path of probity leads to the Pavilion de Chahut." She explained to Patrine: "Chahut is the modern version of the can-can--famous in the days of the Second Empire; when the great cocodettes of the Court of the Tuileries--rivals of Cora Pearl and Skittles and other naughty persons--did high-kicking under the rose here, and they called the place Mabille."
It was not easy to get near the Pavilion, so dense and variegated a crowd had congregated before its illuminated entrance. But the entrance fee was doubled. Gold must be paid to see the famous Sao Paulo dance. Thus many would-be pleasure-seekers of the less affluent kind turned back disappointed from the row of gilt turnstiles under the blazing archway, compelled to content themselves with the outer promenade.
Breasting the human eddy caused by these, Patrine and her party passed the barrier, climbed a flight of shallow gilt marble stairs carpeted with pink plush and decorated with roses and tree-ferns and reached the elevated promenade. Set within the circumference of the outer one, it commanded a complete view of the circular ball-room, to whose level descended from it at intervals yet other flights of broad gilt stairs, similarly carpeted and flower-decked for the convenience of those who wished to join the dancers, or return from the ball-room to the level of the promenade.
The revels were in full swing. Standing upon the brink, looking down as into a cockpit, you saw Patrine, superb in her false diadem and mock ermines, leaning her bare white hand upon a velvet-covered rail. At first she could only make out a giddying whirl of arms and heads and shoulders. Presently, the picture began to clear.
To the wail, clang and clash of strange, discordant, exotic music, rendered by an orchestra of coloured performers, two wide circles of dancers rhythmically spun. The floors they danced on were set at different levels, and rotated automatically,--each floor revolving in a different direction. Coloured lights, flung at intervals from reflectors in the ceiling, conveyed to Patrine the impression of staring down upon the whirling planes of a huge gyroscopic top.
Only the central space of shining parquet was void within the double circle of gyrating dancers. A crash from the orchestra and three couples, oddly costumed, leaped suddenly out upon the floor. Patrine could not make out where they had come from. They appeared, and there was a slight commotion. A hedge of applauding spectators, four or five deep, formed about the central, stationary patch of parquet. The music changed, the six Brazilians began the famous dance.
They were not beautiful to look at it seemed to Patrine, the men, familiarly styled by voices in the crowd as Lauro, Pedro, and Herculano, being undersized, sleek-headed, lithe and sallow, attired in faultlessly fitting evening dress-coats, white vests, black satin knee-breeches, black silks, and buckled pumps. They wore shallow collars of curious cut, lawn-frilled shirts and wide black neckties. Their female companions were swarthy as Indians, even through their paint, and plain of feature. But their superb hair and eyes, the rounded grace of hip and waist and limb, the slenderness of throat and wrist and ankle, testified, like their tiny feet and high-arched insteps, to a strain of Spanish blood.
"La Rivadavia, Alexandrina, and Silvana," the eager spectators named them. They wore transparent sheaths, and brief, oddly bouffante overskirts, like flounced muslin lamp-shades with a boldly suggestive forward tilt. They began the dance with some familiar Tango figures. The poses, the approaches, the hesitations, were well known to Patrine.
"Nothing very new.... But--the music made by those buck niggers! 'Bizzarramente' isn't the word for it. One expects to see gombos covered with serpent-skin, trumpets of elephant-tusk, skull-rattles, and all the paraphernalia of Obeah in the orchestra, instead of those huge, superb brass wind-instruments, cymbals as big as table-tops and ten-foot silver trumpets, like poor de Souza's.... Raised in the States, but wasn't he a Brazilian by birth?" It was the voice of Lady Beauvayse, and von Herrnung's answered from behind Patrine:
"It may be so. But the Blechinstrumente and the Blasinstrumente--for the biggest of those they have to go to Germany. Nowhere else can they be made as there.... Bravo! ... Bis--bis!"
He applauded.... Everybody was applauding. The gyroscopic whirl of dancers had become stationary. All now were eager spectators. And the three couples from Sao Paulo had reached the culminating point of a uniquely curious and exotic figure. Savage and violent, sinuous and creeping; suggestive of the nocturnal gambols of enamoured jaguars, in the deep primeval forests of Brazil.
"Horrid! One expects them to lash tails and roar.... I've got what Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch called 'cold clams walking up my backbone.'" Lady Beauvayse shuddered and made a pretty grimace. "All the same I think I'll go down and look at them a little closer. Ah-h! ... Good grapes! Why, he simply picked her up by the scruff of the neck with his teeth and shook her.... I've just got to see that done over again!"
She was gone, with a whisk of the emerald bird of paradise and a waft of parfum tres persistant. Captain Courtley vanished in her wake. Patrine made no motion to follow them.
The tense excitement, the pungent exhalations rising from the crowded ball-room were affecting her brain. She felt giddy, and the steady pressure of the crowd behind her was thrusting her to the very verge of the promenade. She yielded automatically, unconscious of danger near.
You are to see her there, poised on the verge of the rose-carpeted precipice, her hand gripping the velvet-covered railing, her wide nostrils distended, her broad bosom heaving as she inhaled the sultry, vitiated atmosphere, heavy with a myriad perfumes, tainted by a thousand breaths. Her stare, lifeless as the enamelled, glittering regard of some Princess-mummy of Old Egypt, was fixed upon the artists, of whom two couples had retired, as though in despair of competition with the chief favourites, leaving La Rivadavia and her comrade Herculano in possession of the floor.
And the passions expressed by the rhythmical, sinuous movements of these dancers grew moment by moment less human, and more bestial. Art of the most consummate was displayed and degraded. Beauty and Truth shone pre-eminent in the hideous display. Now the woman sank towards the ground, with supple limbs outstretched and her wild head thrown back in fierce surrender. Her white fangs gleamed, her dumb mouth seemed to roar. And as her conqueror crept stealthily towards her, the play of his great muscles could be seen beneath his civilised attire, as though his supple body had been clothed with the tawny-golden, black-dappled hide of the Brazilian jaguar.
As Herculano crouched and sprang, La Rivadavia's muscles visibly tightened. She bounded high, turned in the act.... Their gleaming fangs clashed in mid-air. And from the massed spectators came a hiss of excitement, "Th-h-h! ..." like the hissing of a thousand snakes.
She no longer heard von Herrnung harshly breathing behind her.... He had moved to the leftward. His tall, broad-shouldered figure now stood against the railing some dozen feet away. His well-cut face, seen in profile, was purplish-red to the crisp, scarlet waves topping his high square forehead. The big white hands that held the glasses glued to his eyes, jerked, and as he pressed against the railing Patrine knew that he was shuddering. Now he looked at her, and his ravaged face was terrifying to the girl.
"Will you not..." he began, thickly.
She quivered, cast a look about; saw the ugly emotion under which he laboured reflected in every face within her range of vision, as round after round of plaudits rose to the roof of the pavilion, escaping through the wide-open spaces between its gilded, rose-twined pillars into the night. The rafters vibrated with demands for a repetition of the popular sensation. The dancers accepted the encore.
If von Herrnung beckoned now, asking Patrine to go down with him amongst the acrid exhalations of that cockpit of variegated lights, thronged with excited men and strangely-bedizened women, rent by devastating emotions, drunk with strange excitements, would Patrine say Yes or No? ...
Ouf! but it was hot. How thick the air was with those illusion perfumes. And from whence was that cool breeze blowing that suddenly freshened the heavy air? ...
*CHAPTER XVI*
*THE WIND OF JOY*
Patrine drew back from the edge of the promenade. A stout, swarthy Frenchman, a Southerner evidently, whose full brown face streamed with little rills of perspiration, stepped nimbly into her vacated place. His female companion instantly took his. The same movement was repeated--the packed bodies seemed to melt before her. In a few more steps she had merged from the crowd, upon the outer edge of the elevated promenade.
There was another velvet railing there, and steps leading down to the promenade upon the ground-level. Against the background of starlit sky and illuminated gardens stood the tall figure of a man. He was broad-shouldered and lightly built, the poise and balance of his figure admirable. But for the gleam of his living eyes in his tanned face, and the movements of his head as he turned it from side to side, evidently seeking somebody, he might have been a statue of Mercury cast in light-hued bronze.
For he wore loose, waist-high leggings strapped at the ankles, and a belted gabardine of thin light brown material, while a cap with an upturned brim and ear-flaps dangled from his sunburnt hand. And a uniformed official, all lacquered moustaches and gold-laced blue cloth, stood gesticulating a few paces from him, keen on defending from so unceremonious an intruder the integrity of the Upper Promenade.
"Monsieur cannot possibly descend into the ball-room ... the costume of Monsieur is not appropriate. It offends against good taste. It outrages the proprieties.... It is peu convenable even that Monsieur should be here."
Patrine heard the protest, saw it driven home by swift expressive Gallic gestures, caught a gleam of mirth in the eyes of the oddly-garbed intruder, and the quirk of a smile at the corners of his mouth. No doubt the suggestion of the proprieties in connection with the traditions of Mabille had evoked it. She liked his face; it was lean and hard and rather hatchety, with a brave outlook of clear light eyes under the marked eyebrows, thick and straight and silvery-fair against his sunburnt skin. To her woman's eyes, Fatigue was stamped upon it and anxiety, and a kind of rueful impatience, as he apologised for the necessity of the intrusion in fragmentary but excellently accentuated French. He came in search of a friend, who was here and must be found; it was imperative...
"There is to-morrow!--there is always to-morrow!" the official stated with a wave.
"That's just the point.... To-morrow! ..." The stranger's forehead was ploughed with lines of anxiety. He spoke in English now--the well-bred, modern, clipped English of the public school and the University. "No! you don't understand"--for the official had vigorously disclaimed all knowledge of the strange, barbarous tongue in which the other addressed him. "And I don't believe I'd ever make you. If I could only hammer into you what sort of a hat I'm in!"
He knitted his brows; pulled himself together for a crowning effort. Patrine spoke, not as a stranger yielding to a sudden, helpful impulse, but quite simply, with a little, joyful catching of her breath:
"Could I explain for you, do you suppose?"
"A--thanks! You're awfully good!"
He turned to her eagerly, if with a certain embarrassment.
"If you would.... There is a man here I have to get word to. And--what French I have is simply technical.... You hardly find it in modern dictionaries--the argot of the engine-shop and the Flying School."
"Now I understand...." She smiled in his perplexed face, drinking in deep breaths of the fresh fragrant air that blew about them as they stood together behind the thick wall of bodies that hid the cockpit from their view. A deep dimple von Herrnung had never seen showed low down in one of her pale cheeks. Their whiteness was slightly tinged with delicate pale rose. And her eyes had lost their brilliant enamelled hardness. They shone like dusky stars as she went on: "Now I know why I thought of wide green spaces and a breeze blowing to me over gorse and heather as I looked at you. Sub-conscious memories of Hendon and Brooklands and Upavon. For you're a Flying Man!"
"Just that!" His ruefulness was banished. "And now you know how I come to be in Paris with the clothes I stand up in and not another rag.... Two of us flew the Channel yesterday morning.... If the weather holds decent, we should be on the wing again by four A.M. And my mechanic's given me the slip. To say he's taken French leave would be appropriate under the circumstances. Left a line--the cool--beggar!--to say I'd find him here."
"Too bad!" she said, as fresh furrows dug themselves into the tanned forehead. "Not fair to leave you in the cart like that. No wonder you followed--hot upon his track."
"Combed the whole place--everywhere they'll let me in. But my aviator's kit's against me. I've seen some rummy get-ups. But they draw the line at Carberry's overalls."
One hand rested easily on his hip, in the other hand he swung the eared cap with goggles. A pedestal in the moonlight would have suited him. It occurred to her to ask:
"What was he like--your runaway mechanic?"
"I hardly ... Oh! ... Little black-avised Welshman--barely tips the scale at eight stone. Has to be a light-weight, because I weigh all of eleven. And with the hovering-gear--but that can't interest you."
"Indeed it does. What of the hovering-gear?"
His face darkened and hardened. He said:
"It's an invention of mine. And after no end trying--our own people at Whitehall simply wouldn't have anything to do with me--the chiefs of the French Service Aeronautique consented to give it a test."
"Sporting of them, wasn't it?"
He agreed:
"No end sporting. So I bucked the tiger over the Channel with Davis--to find that an officer and mechanic of the S. A. were told off to try the hoverer over the selected area. For us to engineer the thing ourselves wasn't 'l'etiquette militaire.' That's the French for Government red-tape."
"Bother etiquette! I'm beginning to sympathise with Davis!"
