That Which Hath Wings: A Novel of the Day
She averted her eyes hastily as though she shunned some ugly, sickening,
spectacle. He said:
"I see that you honour me by wearing my mascot. The magpie pearl most
excellently becomes your beautiful hand, my dear!"
They had reached Regents Park Square and were turning into the Broad
Walk. She plucked the ring from her bare finger, and held it out to
him, saying in a low tone:
"Please take it back!"
"I am to take it back? ... You are in earnest?"
She repeated her words, holding out the bauble. He released his gloved
left hand from the steering-wheel to take it. His eyes were on the road
ahead and his face was hard as pink stone. But she heard him give a
little sigh of relief as he slipped the ring into an inside coat-pocket.
He said, as though to excuse the sigh:
"It was given me in April, when I made my raid on Paris from Hanover,
landing my _Albatros_ once only during two days' flight. The weather
was magnificent. My engine gave no trouble. That is why I call the
ring my mascot, you understand. Now that it has been worn by you, it is
more precious than when I first received it. Whenever I look at it, it
will speak to me of you."
"Don't let it!"
"Why should it not speak of you? Isis! My heart's Queen!"
"I have told you--don't revolt me with--piffle of that kind. And don't
touch me, unless you want me to jump out of the car!"
A voice that he barely knew had issued from the face she turned on
him--a face all violet shadows and haggard drawn lines, under the
burning splendour of the dead beech-leaf hair. She vibrated like an
electrified wire, and round her pale pinched mouth and about her
blue-veined temples were little points of moisture, fine and glittering
as diamond-dust.
"Am I to understand that my touch is unpleasant to you? That you are
angry with me? That you do not love me any more?"
"Love...."
She laughed out harshly, hugely disconcerting him.
"Lady Wathe said at that Grand Prix night dinner in Paris that you were
without a sense of humour. But you must have a grain or so--to talk of
love to me!"
She turned her face away, and the exquisite beauty of her small white
ear appealed to him provokingly. He ground his teeth. He could have
thrown his arm about her, and crushed the tall, full, womanly figure
against him. How superb she was in her mood of hate. The strapped-up
wound in his left hand was throbbing and smarting, just as when she had
writhed her head free from his furious kisses and bitten him to the
bone.
He had made her pay richly for her bite. He hugged himself as he
remembered.... Now the sting of desire was renewed in him and he eyed
her with greediness. Presently he stooped and said in her ear,
coaxingly:
"Let us be friends! Dine with me at the Rocroy to-night. We will have
a box at the Alhambra, and sup again at the Upas. Say you will come,
loved one! Will you not, Patrine?"
"No!"
"No? But I think you mean Yes! Do you not?"
"I have said No! Is that not enough?"
"You are mad!" he blustered at her--"mad as a March hare!"
She answered him:
"I have been mad, but I am sane now and I stay so."
He said scoffingly:
"You may not always remain as you are now!"
If he launched a poisoned dart, its meaning glanced aside from her.
"Shall you not write to me when I am back in Germany? Not one line? Not
one single word? Yet I have a few little notes from you that I
particularly value...."
"Make the most of them. I shall write no more." And suddenly her hate
and loathing of him reached boiling point and ran over. "My God! Can't
you understand that I ask nothing better than never to see nor hear of
you again!"
"_Grossartig_! You are hellishly conciliatory." His voice was thick
and shook with anger. His smile mocked and the look in his eyes was
hateful as he pursued in a tone that was now quite gentle and purring:
"Just think a bit, my dear! Because--to burn one's boats behind
one--that is not prudent at all!"
She did not answer, and he drove on to Hendon, planning fresh assaults
upon this unconquerable woman's pride.
*CHAPTER XXV*
*THREE MEN IN A CAR*
When the yellow Darracq car turned in under the archway that advertised
Fanshaw's Flying School in three-foot capitals, the name revived no
associations in the mind of Patrine. She had never visited the
aerodrome upon an afternoon in the mid-week, when as in the present
instance practice and instruction were being carried on. The cafes, no
longer crowded by smart people, were thinly patronised by bronzed young
men in overalls, not innocent of lubricating medium, thirstily drinking
ginger swizzle or sucking iced-lemon squashes through yellow straws.
Business-looking middle-aged men discussed the market-prices of steels
and timbers, dope and fabrics, over bitter beer and ham-sandwiches,
while experimenting amateurs, male and female, discussed in loud,
relieved voices the experiences of the premier flight. These, having
been previously warned not to experiment upon a crowded system, were now
ravenously putting in the solid, three-course lunches they had foregone.
It was a perfect July day, hot and blue and green and golden. To the
nor'-west, you glimpsed the elms and oaks and beeches of Boreham Wood,
westward the chestnuts of Bushey and Stanmore in fullest summer foliage.
The hawthorns of New Barnet were already browning in the sun. Hill and
common were plumy with the brake-fern. Heather and ling were purpling
into bloom.
Still looking westwards, you snatched a glimpse of Windsor. Eastwards, a
diamond set in emeralds, was the Crystal Palace at Sydenham. Across the
whitish-grey scarp of Highgate and the verdant shoulder of heathy
Hampstead you saw the dun-coloured haze that is the breath of London,
the huge, black, formidable and formless monster, as, sprawling on her
ancient River, she keeps her envied place in the Sun.
At the cafe end of Fanshaw's enclosure the Frogged Roumanian String
Orchestra were playing the "Dance Rhapsody" of Delius. From a rival
establishment came the brazen strains of a German band in a
death-wrestle with ragtime. Behind a straggling crowd of visitors,
where the cars that had brought them were parked in a double row, von
Herrnung stopped the yellow Darracq, leaned across Patrine's unwilling
knees and opened the car-door.
As Patrine was getting out, a large hand in a white leather glove was
thrust forwards for her assistance. The owner of the hand was a
square-faced, fair-haired, soldierly-looking servant of the somewhat
hybrid type that has replaced the carriage-groom. He wore a dark blue
livery overcoat with silver braid upon collar, belt, and
shoulder-straps, black knee-boots, and a white topped cap with silver
braid, a shiny black peak and an enamel front badge in black, white, and
red. Looking past Patrine, he saluted in military fashion and spoke to
von Herrnung in German, of which language Patrine possessed a
smattering:
"Will the _Herr Hauptmann_ speak to the _Herrschaft_? Upon business.
_Er ist sehr wichtig_."
Von Herrnung, at the first sound of the messenger's voice, had stiffened
to rigidity. He glanced over his shoulder in the direction pointed out
by the big hand in the white glove, and answered:
"Say to the _Herrschaft_ that I come!"
The groom vanished. Von Herrnung jumped out of the yellow Darracq and
went quickly over to the machine that had been indicated, a large,
superbly-finished F.I.A.T. touring-car of the landau-limousine type,
enamelled dark blue with a narrow silver line of finish. The top was
open. A white-capped chauffeur in dark blue and silver livery sat
immovable at the steering-wheel, and three men, only one of whom was
plainly visible to Patrine, occupied the roomy body of the car.
The visible man, sitting in the forward seat with his back to the motor,
his baldness topped, in deference to the weather, with a white felt
Newmarket, was a long-bodied, broad-shouldered personage, certainly over
seventy; clean-shaven, with staring eyes of light grey tinged with
bilious yellow, and skin of a prevailing yellow-grey doughiness, with a
huge wart in the middle of the cheekbone on the side next to Patrine.
His clothes were of yellowish-grey like his eyes and skin, his linen had
a yellow line in it and a huge, crumpled vest of buff nankeen threw into
relief a flaming crimson satin necktie confined within bounds by a flat
jewelled ring. He had the air of an old actor of character parts, or of
a libertine monk who has foregone the cord and cowled habit. Of the two
men sitting facing him little could be seen beyond the peak of a
gold-banded white yachting-cap pulled rather low over a bronzed and
rather aquiline profile with an upward-turned moustache and
slightly-grizzled beard of reddish-brown, and a Homburg straw with a
broad black ribbon and a slouched brim, overshadowing the face of the
man who sat on White Cap's left hand. An astute and cunning face, his;
long and sallow, with narrow, blinking eyes, a drooping nose, and a
drooping black moustache. With this its owner played constantly,
twisting and pulling it with a delicate white hand that wore a diamond
solitaire. He never looked up, when addressed by either of his
companions, but raised his eyes to the speaker, and pivoted, without
lifting his head.
Von Herrnung's friends were nothing to Patrine, and von Herrnung's
person was by now intolerable, yet her eyes unwillingly followed the
tall, soldierly figure as he drew himself up, clicked his heels and
uncovered. A brown hand went up to the peak of the white yachting-cap,
the wearers of the straw Homburg and the felt Newmarket slightly raised
their hats. Von Herrnung did not speak first, he waited bareheaded to
be spoken to. When the door of the big blue car was opened by the
servant at an imperious signal from the sallow man, von Herrnung got
inside, and sat down beside the personage with the wart on his
cheek,--leaning forwards deferentially to be addressed by the bearded
wearer of the white yachting-cap, who made great play with a brown right
hand that sported a heavy gold curb-chain watch-bracelet. Once the hand
clenched and shook in vivacious threat or warning, very close to von
Herrnung's handsome nose. That made Patrine laugh, and instantly she
was angry with herself for laughing. She put up her long-sticked
sunshade, turned her back upon the blue F.I.A.T. car and moved away
towards the part of the enclosure where the visitors sat or promenaded,
drawing eyes as she went with her spangled silver headgear twinkling in
the sunshine, and its black cock's plume waving over her strangely
coloured hair.
So changed, so changed. She was sensible of an alteration even in her
gait and gestures. A sickness of the soul weighed on her body as though
she walked in invisible fetters of lead. The free space, the fresh air,
seemed to yield no physical stimulus. She had bitten deep into the
apple of Knowledge, and found bitterness and ashes at the core.
*CHAPTER XXVI*
*A PAIR OF PALS*
Among a dozen pairs of masculine eyes that followed the gallant womanly
figure, crowned by the plumed hat of silver spangles and displayed in
the frank unreticence of fashion by the semi-transparent sheath of
glistening white, a pair very blue, very shiningly alert and interested,
drew nearer until the elongated shadow of a small boy in Scout's uniform
mingled upon the sunlit turf with the longer shadow of Patrine.
His thumping heart had said to him: "You know her!" It was Pat and yet
not Pat. Her tall, rounded figure. Her walk. The same face--and
another woman's hair. The white gown and the long stole of black cock's