That Which Hath Wings: A Novel of the Day
BIRD OF WAR painted on the side of the tapering canvas-covered fuselage,
the diamond-shaped tail swaying between the pendant flaps of the huge
triangular elevators, clearly as though these features had been filmed
upon the screen. In a curious misty circle, spinning under the fuselage,
he suspected lay the secret of her kite-like poise and hover, and behind
his immaculate waistcoat he was sensible of a thrill.
If the English inventor had not solved the baffling Problem of
Stability, he had come uncommonly near it, by the Great Brass Hat! And
the dud-heads at Whitehall had shown the door to him and his invention.
"Good Christmas!--how like 'em!" reflected Franky, lowering the glasses
to chuckle, and looking round for Margot.
There she was, some twenty yards distant, planted right in the middle of
the avenue, lost to the wide in rapt contemplation of the hovering
aeroplane.
"Kitts!" he called, but she did not hear, or disdained to pay attention.
He tried to call again, but his mouth dried up and his feet seemed
rooted to the ground. For, swinging round the turf-banked corner of the
avenue at its junction with another, charging at a terrific pace down
upon the little brilliant creature, came a whity-brown figure on a
motorcycle, the frantic honking of its horn and the racket of its
engine's open throttle mingling deafeningly with the tractor's roar.
*CHAPTER VI*
*SHERBRAND*
The frantic honking of the pneumatic horn was lost in the crashing
collision of earth and metal. Franky, pallid and damp with
apprehension, reassured himself by a rapid glance that Margot was safe
and sound. The aeroplane had ceased buzzing and hovering, headed
southwards, and floated on, trailing her shadow, leaving the traces of
her passage in a smear of brown earth indicating a vicious slash made by
the right-side foot-rest of a motor-cycle in the greensward, conserved
and sacred to the French Republic--the upset machine to which the
foot-rest appertained, and an angry young man in dusty overalls, sitting
in the middle of the raked-up avenue.
"You've had a spill! ..." Franky heard himself saying.
"Yes.... I have had a spill--thanks to that young lady!"
The dusty young man's tone was frankly savage; he regarded the brilliant
little figure in the distance with a scowl of resentment as he gathered
himself up from the gravel, and dabbed at a jagged, oozing cut on his
prominent chin with a handkerchief of Isabella hue. "The brake-handle
did that," he curtly explained, more for his own benefit than apologetic
Franky's. But he looked full in the flushed and dewy countenance of
Margot's lord as he added:
"If I'd killed her, a French jury would have found that she deserved
it!--running like a corncrake across the avenue when I was scorching up
at top speed! ..."
"I know," Franky stammered. "I--I see how it all happened. You had to
steer slap into the bank--to save my--my wife's life. How can I
apologise? ... You see, she was crazy about the aeroplane.... She'd
been warned to keep well out of the way--you know what women are! ..."
"Oh, as to that! ..." The dusty young man, moving with a perceptible
limp, went to the prone motor-cycle, stood it up on its bent stand with
one twist of his big-boned wrist, and began to examine into its
injuries. "Not much wrong," he said to himself, and straightened his
back, and in the act of throwing a leg over the saddle, felt Franky's
restraining grip upon his arm.
"You don't go until my wife has thanked you!" Franky's upper-lip was
Rhadamanthine. "Margot!" he called, in a tone of authority such as he
had never previously heard from his own mouth; "Come here at once,
please! I want to speak to you!"
The fluttering little figure waved a hand to him. The gay little voice
called back:
"Yes.... Oh!--but look at them! ... Can they be going? Why, I believe
they are! ..."
The canvas strips had been rolled up by a mechanician of the Service
Aeronautique, and stowed away behind the big grey telegraph-car, in the
recesses of which the telescopic steel mast and aerials of the wireless
had been snugly tucked away. The mechanics in _kepis_ and overalls had
stowed themselves away inside the _camion_; the wireless operator, a
kepi having replaced his headband, was acting as chauffeur. And,
occupying the front seat beside a junior officer, who piloted a second,
smaller car, Raymond, _Capitaine-Commandant pilot_ of the --th
escadrille of France's Service Aeronautique gave the signal for
departure with an upward wave of his hand. Then, with some sharp,
staccato trills of a whistle and the double honk of a pneumatic horn,
the car of the commandant turned and sped down the avenue, followed by
the tractor-waggon; and both were lost to view.
"But--they're gone! ... And--and the aeroplane...." Margot gasped out
the words in amazed discomfiture, sending her eyes after a dwindling
shape beating down the sky to the southward, and straining her ears to
catch the last of the tractor's whirring song.
"Nearly at Issy, I should calculate--travelling at eighty miles an hour.
Impossible now to catch up with her in time to see her do the last
stunt. Can choose my own pace for going, anyhow," said the
motor-cyclist ruefully. "Nothing left to do but take the Bird over and
fly her back to the Drancy hangar."
He tried to laugh, but his wrung face gave the lie to the plucky
pretence of indifference. He went on, still doggedly mopping away at
his bleeding chin:
"I was lucky in getting a hearing on this side of the Channel. The
bigwigs at Whitehall simply referred me to the Superintendent of the
Royal Aircraft Factory at Frayborough, and as I'd tried him twice
already, I knew what _he'd_ got to say. The Commander of the Central
School of Military Aviation was a brick--I'll say that for him. He sent
a French flying officer to look me up at Hendon, who got me in touch
with the Inventions Bureau of their _Service Aeronautique_.... Well!
the big test's over by this time. I shall know my fate in a week or
two--or possibly in a year?"
"Oh! You don't mean----"
The horrified cry broke from Margot. Franky yelled:
"By the Great Brass Hat! ... You're the inventor! The whole thing was
your show!"
"Yes, I'm the inventor," the tanned young man in the dusty overalls
answered rather contemptuously: "What did you take me for? ... A French
medical student having a joy-ride, or a _commis voyageur_?"
"Can't say. Never thought! ... Fact is--my wife had frightened me
horribly. When your machine bore down on her--posted right in the
middle of the gravel--I was scared stiff--give you my honour!--you might
have sunk a brace of Dreadnoughts in the palms of my hands!"
Franky made this absurd statement with so sincere an air, and clinched
it so effectually by displaying a lovely silk-cambric handkerchief in a
state of soppy limpness, that the abrased inventor nearly laughed.
But his thick, silvery, fair eyebrows settled into a straight line
across his tanned forehead. He said with a directness that seemed to
belong to his lean, keen, hatchet-faced type:
"Once more, I am glad that no harm has happened to the lady. The delay
caused by the--mishap can hardly have prejudiced my success. For all I
know, the test of my hoverer may have favourably impressed the judges.
If it has done otherwise I have no right to blame man, dog, or devil,
for a failure that may be my own."
He lifted his goggled cap to Margot with a good air, pulled it down, and
was in the act of lowering the visor, when Margot's voice arrested the
big-boned hand. That voice Franky knew could be wonderfully coaxing.
It pleaded now, soft as the sigh of a Mediterranean breeze:
"Whether the test is successful or isn't, will you promise that we shall
hear from you? ..."
"Good egg!" joined in Franky. "Do let us know! ... We're stopping at
the Spitz, Place Vendome." He warmed and grew expansive in the light of
Margot's smile of approval. "Drop in on us there," he urged, "as soon
as you've found out. Come and dine with us in any case.... No!--we're
engaged to-night, but come and lunch at two sharp to-morrow, and tell us
all about your hoverer over a bottle of Bubbly. Suite 10, Second Floor.
Name of Norwater. Stick this away to remind you," he ended, tendering
his card.
"You're awfully good. But at the same time I hardly----"
The voice broke off. A glance at the proffered pasteboard had dyed the
inventor flaming scarlet from the collar of his dusty gabardine to the
edges of his goggled cap. He dropped the card quietly upon the gravel,
and said, looking Franky straight between the eyes:
"Even if I were able to accept I'd have to decline your invitation. My
name's Sherbrand--I'm your Uncle Alan's son." He settled himself in the
saddle and finished before he pulled up the starting-lever.
"Understand--I'd no idea who you were until I saw the name on your card.
It has been a queer encounter--I can't say a pleasant one. Let me end
it by saying 'Good-day!' ..."
Franky's new-found cousin touched the goggled cap and pulled up the
starting-lever. With the customary bang and snort, the motor-bicycle
leaped away. Margot had uttered a little gasp at the moment of
revelation. Now she turned great eyes of dismay on Franky, and withdrew
them quickly. For Franky's eyes had become circular and poppy, his mouth
tried to shape itself into a whistle, but his expression was merely
vacuous. He continued to explode with "Great Snipe!" at intervals, as
he and Margot made their way back to more populous avenues, chartered a
fortuitously passing taxi, and were driven back via the Porte Dauphine
to Spitz's gorgeous caravanserai in the Place Vendome, when Margot
vanished into her own bower, sending her French maid to intimate to
Milord that Miladi would take tea alone in that apartment, and did not
intend to dine.
Thus Franky, relieved from duty, presently found himself, in company
with a cigar, strolling bachelor-fashion through the streets of Paris.
No very clear recollection stayed with him of how he spent the
afternoon. At one time he found himself with his features glued against
the plate-glass window of a celebrated establishment dedicated to the
culture and restoration of feminine beauty, contemplating divers gilt
wigs on stands--porcelain pots of marvellous unguents, warranted to
eliminate wrinkles; sachets of mystic herbs to be immersed in baths;
creams guaranteed to impart to the most exhausted skin the velvety
freshness of infancy.
Later he strayed into a sunny, green-turfed public garden, full of white
statues, sparkling fountains, and municipal seats whereon Burgundian,
Dalmatian, and Alsatian wet-nurses dandled or rocked or nourished their
infant charges, and bonnes or governesses presided over the gambols of
older babies, who played with belled Pierrots, or toy automobiles, or
inflated balls of gorgeous hues.
There is nothing profoundly moving in the sight of a stout, beribboned
wet-nurse suckling her employer's infant. But into the company of these
important hirelings came quite unconsciously a young working-woman in a
shabby brown merino skirt and a blouse of white Swiss. Her shining
black hair was uncovered to the sunshine. On one arm she carried a
bouncing baby, on the other a basket containing cabbages and onions, and
a flask of cheap red wine, which receptacle its owner, having taken the
other end of the seat Franky occupied, set down between herself and the
young man. She was a healthy, plump young woman with too pronounced a
moustache for beauty. But when, having methodically turned the baby
upside down to rearrange some detail of its scanty dress, she reversed