That Which Hath Wings: A Novel of the Day
"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