That Which Hath Wings: A Novel of the Day
little boy hadn't come back. People were sometimes kept for hours
through a Loose Nut, or a Slack Wire, or a Carburetter, or some little
thing or another going wrong.
"You remember when Under-Instructor Davis took Mr. Durrant for an Air
Beano all the way to Upavon, Mr. Sherbrand? Flares burning 'alfway
through the night, and pore me!--new to the Flying then--wasn't I, Mr.
Sherbrand?--going from one fit of astericks into another, and running
out to meet Durrant, when he dropped down calmly 'Ome at four in the
mornin', with my hair all untidy and hangin' about me--" Patrine
swiftly put up a hand to assure herself that her own tawny coils were
securely fastened--"for all the world like an Indian Squawk."
"Wives had their feelings, it was only to be expected," said Mrs.
Durrant. Mothers had also theirs, and, that was natural too! Patrine
found the idea of her own maternal relationship to Bawne so firmly fixed
in the mind of Mrs. Durrant, it was barely worth the trouble to
endeavour to explain it away. Mrs. Durrant had none of her own, worse
luck! but here, just coming with the salad and some fried potatoes, was
Mr. Durrant's married niece, Ellen Agnes, and nobody knew better what it
was to lose a darling child.
Ellen Agnes, wan-eyed, anaemic, slipshod, and overworked, supported the
statement. Only in April it 'ad 'appened, and Ellen Agnes 'ad never
'eld 'er 'ead up properly since. And little Elbert the 'ealthiest of
children. Rising three and never a nillness till the pewmonia carried
'im orf. 'Ad only 'ad 'im phortographed three days before it 'appened!
with 'is lovely little limbs and body naked, sitting on a fur rug, the
blessed dear!
Ellen Agnes not appearing to recognise any connecting link between the
nude pose and the pneumonia, Patrine suppressed the obvious suggestion.
Both women meant well, but their talkative sympathy oppressed her. She
imagined how, when Sherbrand ate alone, the stout aunt and the thin
niece would hover round his table, assailing his ears with their Cockney
voices, making their common, vulgar comments on the happenings of the
day.
Perhaps her disrelish showed, for the kind women presently slackened
their attentions. There was nothing then to divert Sherbrand's
attention from his guest, beyond the undeniable attractions of the
hastily spread board.
So they ate the pie, all of it. Patrine cried, in frank astonishment at
the evaporation of her second plateful:
"But I am a wolf or something. No! Not even salad. What must you think
of me? Crying my eyes out one minute and stodging pigeon-pie the next!
Do the rest of the friends you feed here behave as badly as that?"
Sherbrand returned, ignoring the mention of other guests:
"Now, what should I think? Nothing but that you wanted something to
buck you, and I was pretty ravenous myself. It was pretty parky up
there at 10,000." He answered to her question how high that was: "Why,
comparatively, you might imagine it about nine times as high as the top
of St. Paul's Cross from the level of the ground."
Little the speaker dreamed then of aerial battles to be fought at
20,000. She asked whether he had "felt giddy" and he shook his head,
saying:
"If I had felt inclined to giddiness I should have put off climbing
until I felt fitter. I sympathise with Opera Stars who disappoint full
houses, because some high C or lower G is a hairsbreadth off the bull.
The singer can't afford a false note. It's death to a reputation. And
the Flying Man can't risk brain-swim, because it means possibly
nose-dive and smash. So I stay out of my sky unless I'm sure of myself.
There's nothing on earth like being sure."
He had a way of saying "my sky" that was queer and rather beautiful.
Just as though he had been a lark, occurred to Patrine. And indeed, in
the beaky, jutting nose, and the full, bright eyes set forward and flush
with the wide orbital arches, there was some resemblance between the man
and the bird.
Patrine sunned herself in the lighter moment. She who had lain through
the night sleepless--had risen still a bond-slave--realized that her
fetters were broken now that her evil genius had flown. Taking with him
her beloved, she fully believed in malice. Piercing though that
knowledge was, it could not mar the blissful sense of freedom, mental
and physical.
Bawne would be brought back. Meanwhile, one's blood sang through one's
being, mere living was riotous ecstasy, mere breathing sheerest delight.
The joy of life radiated from her. And to Sherbrand, sitting opposite
at the little coarse-clothed table, she grew momentarily more and more
like the girl of the Milles Plaisirs.
True, instead of cloudy black, her hair vied in tone with the banner of
coppery flame that streams from the crater of an active volcano, or
burns above some giant crucible of molten metal ready to be poured
forth. Her long eyes under her wide level brows looked the colour of
peat-water, in the electric light that contracted their pupils to
pin-heads, and brought out against the yellow-distempered walls the
creamy whiteness of her wonderful skin. When she leaned her round
elbows on the table-cloth and smiled at him, it was the frank, generous
smile that had warmed his heart when he stood solitary and unfriended on
the rose-pink carpet near the gilt turnstile on the Upper Promenade.
He would put it to the test. He beckoned the pallid Ellen Agnes, asked
for the bill, slipped his hand into a breast-pocket and drew from it a
tiny white silk purse.
"Oh! You found ..."
With an indescribable emotion, half pain, half pleasure, she saw her
missing property in the broad extended palm. He said:
"It flashed on me, even as I blackguarded Davis, that you must have paid
that Commissionaire-fellow at the turnstile or he'd have been breathing
vengeance at my back. So I ran back to find you and ask for an address
where I might send the money. You were gone! He had got this purse in
his hand. So I--bluffed the brute for all I was worth, and got him to
give it me!--a stroke of luck--for I'd no money left to bribe him with!
Be kind and tell me how much you gave the fellow!"
The deep dimple Sherbrand remembered showed in the full oval of one of
her white cheeks. Slowly the pale rose-flush sweetened and warmed the
whiteness. Her eyes were dusky stars under the barbaric wealth of
beech-leaf tresses. A slow smile curved her mouth, the scarlet lips
parted widely, showing two perfect rows of gleaming teeth.
"Two half-jimmies!" said the rich, mellow woman's baritone. Why did it
talk such awful slang? "Half my screw for one whole week of
letter-writing, running errands, doing shopping, and generally
sheepdogging for my friend, Lady Beauvayse!"
"Then please take this!" This was a fat bright sovereign. "And be kind
and say that I may stick to the purse?"
"If you care to--" Patrine began, dubiously.
"I care--most awfully!" He went on quickly. "Lady Beauvayse--your
friend--I've seen her--if she's very pretty and tremendously American?"
She nodded.
"You've spotted her! That's Lady Beau--the dear thing! But she only
talks Yankee Doodle to bounders or fogies, or people who seem to expect
it from her. Her English is as good as mine."
"You don't mean it!" His keen face crinkled with laughter. She was
superbly unconscious of its cause. He went on, rather ashamed of having
made fun of her: "That accounts for the Old Kent Road-_cum_-Whitechapel
I've heard from the august lips of British duchesses. At
cricket-matches when Eton and Harrow were playing 'Varsity."
"Does it? I think not! The duchesses weren't amusing themselves, or
trying to snub swankers. They were just mothers--_real_ mothers--trying
to talk cricket to their boys. And the boys--the sweets!--grinning up
their blessed young sleeves, and saying 'Yes'm!' and 'No'm!' How I do
love boys! Don't you?" Her smile contracted with a spasm of anguish.
"And I'm sitting here, gobbling and gabbling, when my darling!--" She
rose taller than ever, from the little table, caught up her feather
stole from a chairback near and slung it vigorously round her,
straightened the tinsel hat with a side-glance at the strip of a
looking-glass nailed in a frame of cheap gilt beading on the
matchboarded wall at her right hand, picked up the vanity-bag and the
long-sticked sunshade, and declared herself ready to go.
*CHAPTER XXXIX*
*A NIGHT IN JULY*
She reached the door before him. He had turned to say considerately to
the good woman of the restaurant:
"We shall be late.... Frightfully, I expect! Promise me you won't sit
up!"
"Oh! but I can't promise! One never knows! Best to have people up an'
ready when there might be need of 'em!" Patrine heard, as she wrenched
at the handle of the green curtained glass door.
"No--no! Let me!"
His hand touched hers and she drew it away, not before a keen, sharp
thrill had traversed her. "_Vile, hateful creature!_" she said to the
Patrine von Herrnung knew--the other woman within her, whom she loathed.
"_Is not it enough that you have done what you have done?_" Then as she
passed out into the night, feeling beneath her feet the roughness of the
gravel walk that led between grass-plats studded with green painted
chairs and little iron tables, a strange roaring filled her ears and
hellish tongues of fire licked a sky of vivid blackness. She recoiled,
saying in awed and shaken tones:
"Why! What has happened? What does it mean? ... How horrible!"
The door had shut behind them. Now the round dome of the sky showed not
black, but velvety purple. Away in the south-east a fierce red moon
drifted like some derelict vessel burning away to embers on a waveless
midnight sea. And sheaves of dazzling blue-white flames, leaping and
roaring, fenced in, or seemed to fence, a dreadful lake of Stygian
darkness, upon the surface of which figures--were they men or
devils?--moved....
"Don't be scared, Miss Saxham! It's nothing ... though I ought to have
wanted you...!"
Not with intent, her heaving shoulder pressed against the breast of the
man who had followed her. Perhaps the contact thrilled him, for his
voice was unsteady as he went on:
"I was rather a brute to forget! ... It's a night-flare to
guide--possible home-comers! ... Wads of tow dipped in petrol, burning
in iron buckets round our landing-place.'
"I ought to have guessed," she said ruefully. "Forgive me for being
such an idiot!"
His answer was unexpected.
"On condition that you'll leave off saying 'Great Scott!' and things
like that."
"All right! But what's the matter with the expression, anyhow?" she
demanded. "Do you always get riled when women use slang?"
They had been standing within the gate that led upon the Flying Ground,
still girdled by its Valkyr-ring of leaping flame. He said, holding
open the gate to let her pass through:
"I use slang myself, habitually, like every other man I know. But I
don't know a man who really likes to hear his wife or sweetheart copy
him in that respect. For myself who have neither wife, sweetheart, nor
even sister, I can only say what I feel. It is--that a beautiful woman
should use beautiful language. One of the old Greek poets put the whole
thing into two lines. I've forgotten the original, but the translation
runs like this:
"From the goddess the speech of Olympus,
From the herd-maid the language of the cows."
"I'm no goddess, God knows!" said Patrine, sorrowfully and sincerely.
Then a light scorching flame seemed to envelop her whole body. She felt
Sherbrand's breath upon her cheek.... He said, speaking swiftly, and
close to her ear:
"No, you are not a goddess, but something far better! You are a woman