That Which Hath Wings: A Novel of the Day
spun giddily round her with the mob of dancers. Dazed, she had shut her
eyes. She had felt herself being hurried somewhere--out of the pillared
dancing-hall....
She shivered, lying there in the sunshine remembering.... She recalled
von Herrnung's face as they had passed out of velvet-curtained,
soundless darkness into a tapestry-hung, softly-carpeted corridor. The
inner angles of the eyebrows were lifted, the laughing mouth under the
red-rolled moustache displayed the big white teeth in a tigerish way.
The pupils of his eyes were dilated, the irises pale as water. He had
looked at her curiously, and said with a strange accent:
"So, Isis, you are mine now!"
"I suppose so!"
"I did not suppose so. The experience has been very real for me. Shall
we go back--or would you prefer----"
She said with her face turned from him sullenly:
"I should prefer to go--to where I live!"
He had been loth to let her go. Then under a promise of renewal of
those strange, shameful, secret relations, he had wrapped her
theatre-mantle about her, and helped her arrange her lace scarf about
her head, and taken her through a passage back to the vestibule where
the three ambiguous statues stood about the central fountain, upon whose
restless jet of water played shifting lights of different hues. By some
arrangement of those who had planned the Upas, there faced you as you
issued with your companion from the furtive side-passage the figure that
had its finger on its smiling, carmined lips....
And then--the stale air of London at dawn in midsummer. In the shabby
side-street where long ranks of private cars stood waiting, von Herrnung
had signalled the chauffeur of one of them--could the man have been the
German who had leered at her that day at Hendon?--and then he had put
her in, and followed her, and taken her back to Berkeley Square....
It irked her to remember that she had told to the sleepy manservant who
had admitted her at 3 A.M. an absolutely supererogatory falsehood to
account for her return at that belated hour. For Lady Beau wouldn't
have bothered if you'd arrived with the milkman, so long as you turned
up smiling at her bedside with your fountain-pen, and her coroneted
paper-pad, when she'd had her early grape-fruit, and roll, and coffee,
and was ready to tackle her morning mail.
Patrine must be discreet. Cautious. Must tell no lies of the
unnecessary kind. For even though von Herrnung had been removed, just
when his attitude had become formidable and menacing--there might yet be
pitfalls of her own digging to brave and shun.
Pitfalls ... Perils ... As she lay wakeful, conscious through shut
eyelids of the white mouldings of the ceiling her face was turned to,
suddenly a keen sharp terror ran her through. She had heard her own
voice say to von Herrnung:
"My God! Can't you understand that I ask nothing better than never to
see nor hear of you again!"
He had mocked her with his hateful smile, and she had not understood.
"Under no--possible conditions? Just think a bit, my dear! Because--to
burn one's boats behind one--that is not prudent at all!"
And later:
"You give me to understand that whatever happens--_whatever
happens_--you will have nothing more to do with me?"
Idiot!--besotted idiot! She leaped up in the bed, visualising the
peril, clearly as though a shutter had snapped back within her brain.
Horror froze her, realising the shame she might live to bring upon those
who loved Patrine. Uncle Owen ... Lynette ... Bawne....
Mildred and Irma were minor considerations, shadowy silhouettes,
negative quantities. Neither Irma nor Mildred had ever loved Patrine.
Dad had though. Poor, dear Dad! She was glad he wasn't alive now. And
Margot ... Would Kittums cut one if--that happened? And--Sherbrand! A
blush burned over her, and she flung herself face downwards, burying her
scorching face among the pillows, stifling the scream that the sheer
torture wrung from her, by nipping a fold of the smooth linen in her
teeth.
So she lay and writhed on the red-hot griddle of her anguished
recollection, until a neat housemaid knocked at the door and brought her
morning tea. And as she set down the emptied cup, someone else knocked,
and opened the door softly, and Patrine turned--to meet the look of
Lynette.
And then, though her struggling conscience warned her that she was
unworthy to be held in arms so pure, she cried out wildly, and felt
herself enfolded, and the fierce emotional tumult within her broke forth
in wild sobs and drenching tears. She heard herself saying:
"I would have given my life over and over to have saved you from grief
like this!"
And yet these were not the words she would have spoken. We are actors
often and often when we least suspect ourselves, even when Calamity with
one swift stroke of the scalpel has divided the palpitating flesh and
quivering nerves down to the living bone.
"I would have given my life!" she wept, and Lynette seated by the
bedside and bending over her, answered tenderly:
"I know it, my kind heart! You have always loved him. You wished him
not to go--you begged Owen not to allow----"
There was unutterable loyalty in the breaking of the sentence: "He
thought it best. I trust my husband," said the sweet voice. "But yet I
thank you, dear one, for your loyalty to me."
"Don't touch me! I'm not fit!" Patrine stammered, resisting the
mothering, encircling embrace. But the cup of pure sweetness was held
to her feverish lips, she craved it too much to thrust it from her. You
can see her coming out of the bed in a galumphing outburst of
passionate, remorseful tenderness:
"Here is my place!--here!" she gulped out brokenly, hiding her wet face
on the elder woman's knees. Together they made a group not unlike
Bouguerau's great canvas of the Consolatrix, save that there was no
dead, lovely boy lying amidst the scattered petals of the fallen roses
on the stone. Perhaps if there had been and the worst known, Bawne
Saxham's mother could hardly have suffered more.
Not to understand ... not to be sure. To be bereaved, and never to know
just how the Beloved was taken from you.... Can there be anything more
fantastically horrible than this, the fate of thousands of sorrowing
women since the beginning of the Great War?
It was Sunday morning, brilliant and hot even for July weather. The
clangour of church-bells mingled with the clashing of milk-cans, and the
scent of pot-roses mingled with the hot smell of London in midsummer.
Lynette shivered in spite of the sultriness, and looked down at the
girl, spilt out at her knees under the meretricious splendour of her
dead beech-leaf hair. She did not--how could she?--fathom the secret of
such wretchedness, but love and pity flooded her heart, thawed out of
its frozen misery by the vital warmth of the contact. She drew the
unresisting arms upwards and about her, and lifted the prone head and
took it to her bosom, saying:
"My poor girl! My dear Patrine!"
They were silent awhile. Then Lynette asked, her soft breath stirring
the heavy tresses:
"Why did you do this, dearest? Wasn't it sufficiently beautiful?"
Patrine choked out, blazing crimson to the tips of her little ears:
"No! At least!--It is hideous now and he hated it! I--I had to tell
him," a sob and a laugh tangled together, "it was the effect of Paris
air!"
Lynette smiled, though the golden eyes were running over: "Bawne thinks
so much of you, always!"
"I don't deserve that any one should!"
"Nobody shall speak ill before me of any one I care for! Why did you
start?"
For a vision had flashed into the brain of Patrine, of all the world
mocking and jeering and vilifying, and Saxham and Lynette upholding and
defending David's daughter, who had brought disgrace upon them. She
lifted her head and released herself almost roughly from Lynette's
embrace. She stooped down and took the hem of Mrs. Saxham's gown and
kissed it, and rose up looking wonderfully big and stately, and
extraordinarily tall.
"I love you!" she said in her large warm voice. "You are the best woman
I ever met or shall meet, and I am a rotten bad hat! Not worth a
penn'orth of monkey-nuts, take my word for it! But--if somebody like
you had been my mother--perhaps there'd have been something to show for
it to-day."
Lynette might have replied, but just then through the quiet house,
unnaturally still without the boyish voice and the boyish laughter, and
the clumping of little thick-soled brogues upon the stairs and in the
passages, there sounded the sharp whirring ting-a-ting of the hall
telephone-bell. She turned and was gone with no more noise than a thrush
makes in departure. Left alone, Patrine threw on her bathrobe over the
thin nightgown of revealing transparency, lined with the opulent beauty
that captures the desires of men, and looked at her fair reflection in
the long cheval-glass, smiling with something of the subtlety of the
androgynous genius of the Upas Club fountain--the figure that faced the
guests as they entered, tying a vizard over its mocking eyes.
"You're worse even than I thought you!" Patrine said calmly to Patrine,
"but now you know what he meant by what he said, you're not going to
trust to Chance and Luck. You're going--for Uncle Owen's sake, and Aunt
Lynette's, and Bawne's--and Mother's and Irma's and your own--don't
pretend you're a victim!--to marry Sherbrand, the Flying Man!"
Not a notion of any possible or eventual wrong or injury to Sherbrand
troubled her conscience. She had yet to develop on the side of moral
sensitiveness. Responsibility towards God, and duty towards her
neighbour--the sense of these two obligations that are the foundation
and cornerstone of Christianity--had not as yet awakened in Patrine.
She liked Sherbrand. It troubled her more that he had not the _cachet_
of one of the great public Schools, than to know him poor, with his four
hundred _per annum_--as the proverbial church-mouse. But she herself
was not altogether penniless. There would be a hundred and fifty pounds
a year for Patrine when she married; derived from moneys bequeathed to
his daughter's children by Grandpapa Lee Hailey, strictly tied up and
protected by various legal provisos, from depredations on the part of
the unknown possessive male.
Five hundred and fifty between them. Anyhow, she told herself, that was
better than a jab in the eye with a burnt stick. How soon might the
marriage be brought off? One must bend one's energies to the solving of
that question. How many sleepless nights--they were horribly
unbecoming!--lay between Patrine and Security? The Fear that lurked in
her dried her palate at the question. She felt like the runner of a
Marathon fainting in sight of the goal.
*CHAPTER XLV*
*FLOTSAM FROM THE NORTH SEA*
On Monday morning, July 20th, under a flying double-column of Naval
Goody Two Shoes and aeroplanes, the King led forth his Fleets for
tactical exercises in the Channel. There were pictures on the screens at
the music-halls that night and for many nights after, that evoked from
huge audiences tremendous outbursts of patriotic clapping. Hence first
blood in the Great War scores to Lil, belonging to the most ancient of
all professions--who had accepted the invitation proffered by a Teutonic
stranger to join the familiar crowd on the Empire Promenade.
The German paid for drinks. A friend joined him. There were more
drinks, and the two men began to talk, discussing the _ultimatum_
expected from Austria-Hungary, and the inevitable refusal of Belgrade to
eat Vienna humble-pie. War with Russia must ensue. They were cheering
in Berlin that night for _Krieg mit Russland_.