That Which Hath Wings: A Novel of the Day
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