That Which Hath Wings: A Novel of the Day
before dropping in for a whiff of the new comedy at the Ambassador's, or
the latest revue at the Fleur de Lis. To be followed by Tango Tea at
the Rocroy, or Unlimited Bridge at the house of an accommodating friend.
Perhaps you can recall them--those men and women of the best and bluest
blood in Britain, strenuously spending their days in doing nothing as
expensively as ever it could be done. Light, frivolous, shallow,
dry-hearted; restlessly seeking new things on which to waste their
barren energies, they seemed, and bore out their seeming in all
thoroughness; the degenerate sons and daughters of a once great and
splendid race.
Save Vanity and the Pride of Life there seemed but little in Eve or
Adam. Not overmuch grey brain-matter appeared to be contained within
their small neat skulls. Though in comparison with the modern Eve,
slangy, loud, extravagantly attired in every tint of the Teutonic
dye-chemist's chromatic register, topped with feathers that missed the
ceiling by a bare half-foot, Adam in his neutral greys, and buffs and
browns, and umbers, struck you as a being of mild demeanour and uncostly
apparel, until looking closer, you found him out.
His nice hair was gummed about his head as sleekly as a golliwog's. He
sported stays, for the preservation of his silhouette. His gossamer
cambric exhaled perfumes like a Georgian dandy's. Fashionable
complexion-creams lent his tanned and well-shaved cheek a tempting
peachiness. His socks were all too lovely for description by this feeble
pen of mine. The uppers of his boots were of every imaginable material
and substance, ranging from silk brocade, green lizard, and ivory-white
shark skin, to sandy-pink armadillo-belly, or the tender grey of the
African gazelle.
The results of the Olympic Games of 1912 must have made dour reading for
the fathers of these youthful Britons, remembering their own triumphs in
the early eighties. A bitter pill for those stark old men, their
grandfathers, makers of 'Varsity records in '61 and '67, whose faith in
the superiority of British lungs and muscles had been bequeathed them by
their own sires. Yet their juniors took it calmly. They carried the
stigma of inferiority with cheerful indifference. Even while holding it
the thing best worth living for--they placidly submitted to be
outclassed in sport.
And both the man and the woman of this era were possessed by strange
crazes and pleased with vivid contrasts. The musical jig-saw puzzles of
Lertes, Hein, and de Blonc vied in their favour with the weird Oriental
Operas of the Russian Rimsky-Korsakov and the delicate rhapsodies of
Delius, and the sylvan nymphs and fauns of Russian Ballet shared their
plaudits with Senora Panchita and Herr Maxi Zuchs, the celebrated
exponents of the Tango.
Ah, yes, it was an extraordinary era. Slips from that old, old Tree
that bore the Forbidden Fruit had been successfully grafted upon so many
old-world stocks in British orchards, that you caught a tang of its
exotic flavour in almost everything. Play ran high. Luxury ran riot.
Period Balls and Upas Club Cabaret Suppers were IT--absolutely IT.
Morality was at lowest ebb--Religion a forgotten formulary. And as the
Christian virtues cheapened, so the prices of dress, jewellery,
motor-cars, and other indispensables of modern existence climbed to
still more amazing altitudes. The marvel was, because nobody seemed to
have any money--where the money came from to pay for these things? What
we are yet to pay for the wholesale levelling of moral barriers, and the
abolition of old-world modesty and good taste, that distinguished the
years of ill-fame 1913 and 1914, only Heaven knows.
Even more comprehensively pervasive than the illusion perfumes extracted
from coal-tar by German chemists, and supplied us by German
manufacturers; even more striking than the dazzling, vivid aniline dyes,
procured from the same source, even more potent than the vast array of
by-product drugs which represent as it were the scum of the insulated
vats wherein the Teuton chemist macerates and mingles his high
explosives--was the strange, mysteriously pervasive flavour, the
seductively-suggestive tang of evil in the social atmosphere. You
caught the look of secret, intimate, half-cynical knowledge in the faces
not only of the merest youths, but of the youngest, freshest, prettiest
girls. Subjects held unmentionable a few years ago were openly
discussed in English drawing-rooms. Curious lore in strange things old
and new was much sought after at this period, when Cubism and Futurism
governed design, not only in dress and stage scenery, but in Painting,
Sculpture, and Architecture; and dances known in the voodoo-houses of
East Africa and the West Indies, and the hells of Central America and
the Argentine were seen in the ball-rooms as in the brothels, of Paris
and London, Petrograd and Brussels, Vienna, New York, and Berlin.
Novelty was so much the rage, that if the Arch-Enemy of Mankind had
appeared among the exclusive patrons of a fashionable night-club in any
one of these cities, a hearty welcome would have been extended to him,
and his ripe experience would have been laid under contribution with a
view to imparting to the latest Cabaret entertainment some exotic
novelty from Hell.
Franky with obtrusive care selected a comfortable corner of the Persian
divan for Margot, and while she signed for coffee and Kuemmel,
established himself at her side.
They were isolated, it seemed to Kittums. Friends nodded and smiled
cordially, but did not attempt to join them. Was it because Franky's
too-possessive manner had told secrets? ... She shivered and glanced at
her lord. He said, as the light-footed button-boys scoured about with
coffee and liqueur-trays, while the electric fans purred, the blue
smoke-canopy thickened under the green and rose glass dome, and the
clamour of many feminine voices, in combination with the gaudy feathers
of the clamourers, suggested the South American macaw-house at the Zoo:
"My eye! you're pretty thick in here. Might be a fog in mid-Channel."
He mounted a square monocle recently purchased in Paris and the pride of
his bosom, threw back his head and stared up into the famous green and
rose dome. "Swagger affair. How much did it tot up to?"
"Seventeen hundred, clear, with the carpet and the divan."
"Pretty stiff!" His doleful whistle set Margot's teeth on edge. She
added:
"And rattling cheap at the price! And--if it wasn't, I was spending my
own money.... There was nobody--then--to interfere!"
He conceded:
"Of course I don't suggest that you were done in the eye. Probably you
got the value of your dibs. But you'll have something better to spend
cash on presently. Me, too! We must both draw in our horns now,
Kittums. For the sake of--you know who! ... Hullo! Is anything wrong?"
She had winced, but she gritted her little teeth, and fought back the
rising hysteria. She could have shrieked, or thrown the little
coffee-pot at his head. He went on, recognising friends through the
smoke-haze:
"There's Lady Beau with that German aviator-chap we met in Paris. Big
red-headed brute. You remember him? And--who's the girl? But for her
hair, I'd say it was Miss Saxham. By the Great Brass Hat, it is! With
a wig, or dyed...."
"Dyed. It was done in Paris--done most beautifully." Margot's eyes had
lighted up with interest. "I must have forgotten to tell you. I've
known it three or four days. Don't you like it?"
"Like it?" Franky had reached for his little glass and gulped the
contents hurriedly. "My stars, I never saw such a transformation.
Order another Kuemmel, please, to give me a buck-up."
"Take mine. I simply loathe the sticky stuff." She added, as Franky
obliged: "_I_ think that Pat looks ripping."
"All too ripping. That's where the trouble comes in." He went on:
"When her hair was black, you knew where it was you'd seen her. Makin'
one in an endless procession of women--all with long eyes and big busts
and curving hips, walkin'--like pussy-cats along a roof-ridge, on the
walls of those old Egyptian temples we did together--that November when
I got such spoons on you--going up with the Gillinghams from Cairo to
Philae--a flat-bottomed Nile tug towin' the whole crowd in a string of
dahabeahs. You remember those ochre-coloured Nile sunrises? When a
dust-storm had been blowin' over the Desert, and the River was all
wrinkly white, like curdled milk."
"How killingly poetic!"
"Am I poetic? Good egg! Never thought I'd live to be called that."
"Live and learn!" Margot's laugh was a hard little silvery tinkle. She
too was remembering the sunrises and sunsets of Egypt, and the long days
under the green canvas awnings. How beautiful she had thought the brown
eyes that seemed only vacuous now. She, Margot, would be ugly very soon
now, she told herself. Already her small face showed lines and hollows.
Soon beauty-loving men and women would turn their eyes away.... Her
cheval-glass would tell her why, and shop-windows when she passed them
would reveal her shapelessness. She would only possess interest for
three people. For the doctor, as a patient. For the certificated
nurse, as a Case. For her husband, as the potential mother of the boy
he longed for. And--what price Margot?
"Should you like me to take you to see some polo, or wouldn't a
chuff-chuff in the country be best?" Franky's eyes were full of hungry
solicitude as they rested on the small, pinched features. "You look a
bit fagged, it strikes me!"
She nipped her little lower lip, stung by the tone of sympathetic
proprietorship. "Oh! very well. A drive!" she told him, and they
passed together from the smoking-room. The sheath-skirt revealed, as she
moved, what she would have hidden. Von Herrnung smiled, following the
little figure with bold, curious glances. Other men stared, if more
discreetly. Towering feathers nodded to each other as their feminine
wearers commented:
"Poor little Margot, how quite too rough on her!"
Said Lady Beauvayse, assuming the rip-saw Yankee accent in which it
pleased her to deliver her witticisms:
"Say now! if we women could pick babies right away off the
strawberry-vines, it would save a deal of trouble, and a considerable
pile of self-respect."
Everybody laughed. A slender white and golden woman with a string of
sapphires very much the colour of her own eyes, picked up a toy
Pekingese that squatted near her, and said, cuddling the goggling morsel
under her chin:
"I agree. When I look at my two precious duckies I say to myself: 'You
little dears, for each of your sweet sakes I became a plain woman with a
shapeless silhouette and saucer-eyes. Now that I've done my duty to
your pappy and Posterity, this is the only kind of baby I'll indulge
in." She kissed the Pekingese on the end of its black snub-nose. "And
when I want a new one--I'll buy it at the shop!"
"_Noch besser_. Why not hire one? ..." suggested von Herrnung.
Mrs. Charterhouse laughed and gave him the Pekingese to hold. But it
snapped at him furiously and she took the little beast back again.
"Dogs do not like me," said the big German. "You will read perhaps in
novels that that is a bad sign, yes?"
"I never read novels," returned Mrs. Charterhouse, with her famous
manner, "nor any books, only bits of the papers for the Sporting and
Society news. And Reports of Divorce Proceedings, and the Notices in
Bankruptcy. One likes to know what one's friends are doing, and where
they are to be found. Don't you, Count? Not that there is any great
difficulty in ascertaining your whereabouts, just now, I fancy.... Why,
what has become of Patrine?"
"Miss Saxham went in there just now to write a letter," said the smiling