That Which Hath Wings: A Novel of the Day
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!"
"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,