That Which Hath Wings: A Novel of the Day
"A whole nation!"
The bright eyes held Franky's sternly. He lifted his right arm, and the
withered hand still shut upon the battered snuff-box shot up two fingers
in vigorous protest. "Pardon, Monsieur--you are very seriously
mistaken. France was never more Catholic at heart than now. How
strange!--when but twenty-one miles of salt water divide Calais from
Dover--when the Entente Cordiale has established between your country
and mine nominally close and intimate relations; that so complete an
ignorance as to the French Nation, its Government, its mode of thought,
its moral, religious, and social conditions, should be found prevailing
in Great Britain to-day!"
"My dear sir, you're off the bull--completely off!" protested
Franky--Franky whose second sister was married to a Frenchman, Franky
who knew Paris as well as the inside of his week-end suit-case, by Jove!
A deprecating shrug and a supple outstretched hand cut short the
speaker.
"Pardon, Monsieur l'Anglais--I know what you would say to me! There is
much force in the argument.... It is _tres sensee_--and there is truth
in it, and yet it is false--to be guilty of a paradox. The aristocracy
of Great Britain, like her plutocracy, set high value upon much that
comes from France. British gold is poured into my country in return for
the newest and most fanciful modes in costume, millinery, and jewellery.
And not only do your beautiful women adorn themselves with the
inventions of our bold and original genius for ornament, but for your
_menus_, your pleasures, the novels and plays that paint in intoxicating
colours the joys of unchaste love and illicit passion, for the sensuous
poetry that is garlanded with the flame-hued flowers of Evil, you are
ready to praise and pay us lavishly, as though no nobler growth than
this rank luxuriance sprang from the intellectual soil of France. Our
vices--alas!--with the appalling diseases that spring from them, and the
combinations of drugs that alleviate these--all find with you a ready
market. And you attend our race-meetings at Longchamps and Auteuil,
where English jockeys ride French and Irish horses--and you believe,
you!--that you know the social life of France. No!--but you are
ignorant--profoundly ignorant! May GOD be thanked that you misjudge us
thus cruelly. For if my country were no better than Great Britain and
other foreign nations believe her to be, it were time indeed for a rain
of fire from Heaven!"
Hardly raising his voice above a clear whisper, the emotion and
vehemence with which he spoke, and the swift and fiery gesticulations
with which he illustrated utterance, made the sweat start out in beads
upon his wrinkled forehead and cheeks. He wiped these off with the blue
checked handkerchief, saying:
"Pardon! I grow warm when I speak of these things. I recognise that if
in the judgment of other nations France is a courtesan drunk with
lechery, or at the best _un esprit follet_, she has brought this
judgment upon herself. Flippancy, the desire to _faire de l'esprit_
under any circumstances--the bold and brilliant gaiety that is her
exclusive and most beautiful characteristic--these have caused her to be
misunderstood. But whatever else she be, she is not Pagan nor Agnostic.
To believe that is to wrong her cruelly, Monsieur!"
Franky, by now hopelessly at sea, endured the hailstorm of swift,
vehement sentences with an expression of amiable vacuity, his stiffly
pendent hands plainly yearning for the refuge of his trousers pockets,
his mind rocking on the waves of the stranger's passionate eloquence
like a toy yacht adrift on the bosom of the Atlantic. And the resonant
Gallic voice went on:
*CHAPTER VIII*
*MONSEIGNEUR*
"The masters of France to-day are hostile to Christianity. They are
Freemasons (Freemasonry in England is not Freemasonry as it is
understood here); they are Freethinkers, Socialists, Internationalists,
and Hedonists, the avowed enemies of the Catholic Faith. Hence,
churches, seminaries, and schools have been closed by Government,
communities of religious men and women have been uprooted and exiled.
Priests have been banished, ecclesiastical and private property has been
appropriated and confiscated, churches have been desecrated, the symbols
of Christianity and religion everywhere torn down. In France upon Good
Friday the standard of the Republic waves proudly, while the flag of
every other Christian nation hangs at half-mast high. And yet--the
great mass of the French people are--Catholic and nothing but Catholic!
The light may be hidden, but the fire of devotion still burns in
millions of faithful hearts gathered about the Church's altars, beating
beside the hearths of innumerable homes in France. Blood--torrents of
blood--would not quench that sacred fire. When the Day of Expiation
comes, as it will come, most surely, the Catholicism of France will
prove her salvation yet!"
With the final sentence, the hand that had been lifted in gesture
dropped to the side of the speaker. The flashing glance took in Franky
from the top of his sleek bewildered head to the tips of his beautiful
patent-leathers. He said with a smile of irresistible amusement:
"Monsieur, I fear I have fatigued you. Let me thank you for your
admirable patience. _Au revoir_, or if you prefer it--_Adieu_!"
Another of the quick little bows, and he had covered himself and passed
on rapidly. Franky reflected, staring after the short black figure in
the caped soutane with the worn purple sash and shabby beaver
shovel-hat, as it receded from his view.
"Fruity old wordster, 'pon my natural! Toppin' fine talker! Wonder who
he is? Head of a Public School, swottin' an address for the beginning
of the Midsummer Half term--a Professor of Divinity gettin' up a
lecture--the Archbishop of Paris rehearsin' a sermon. Whichever they
call him, why don't he pitch his language at a man of his own size?"
And he went back to the Spitz through the boulevards that were surging
with the afternoon life of Paris, and heard from Pauline that Miladi had
retired to bed. She had already dispatched a billet of excuses to Sir
Brayham, with whom Miladi and Milord were engaged to dine downstairs
that evening, explaining that a headache prevented her from accompanying
Milord. He--Milord--must be sure to make no noise in changing for
dinner, as Miladi, after a crisis of the nerves of the most alarming,
was now sleeping like an angel, having taken a _potion calmante_ of
orange-flower syrup with water, not the veronal so heartily detested of
Milord....
"Sleepin' like an angel, is she? ... Good egg!--though I thought angels
never went to bed--flew about singing all the giddy time. Righto,
though! I won't disturb her ladyship.... When she wakes, give her my
love...."
And Franky entered his dressing-room on cautious tiptoe, lighted a
cigarette, rang the bell for his valet, and began to reflect.
It was to have been a dinner of eight people--Brayham the host, with
Lady Wathe, skinny little vitriol-tongued woman!--a man unknown who was
to have sat next Margot; Commander Courtley--ripping good fellow old
Courtley! no better sailor walked the quarter-deck of a First-Class
Cruiser--damn shame those Admiralty bigwigs denied such a fellow
post-rank; and Lady Beauvayse, formerly Miss Sadie Sculpin of New
York--pretty American with pots of boodle, married to that ghastly
little bounder who'd stepped into the shoes a better man would be
wearing if his elder brother (handsome fellow who married an actress,
Lessie Lavigne of the Jollity--good old Jollity!) hadn't got pipped in
that scrum with the Boers in 1900-1901.
Lessie, Lady Beauvayse, the widder called herself on the posters and
programmes. Come down to second-rate parts in Music Hall Revue--gettin'
elderly and stout. Must see red when she happened to spy the present
Lord Beauvayse's pretty peeress in the stalls or boxes.... Wonder why
the P.P. made such a pal of Patrine Saxham? Niece of Saxham of Harley
Street--handsome as paint, proud as the devil, and an Advanced
Thinker--according to Margot. Remembering the gift of the jade
tree-frog, Franky involuntarily wrinkled his nose.
With Lady Beau and the Saxham girl, there would be a party of seven,
counting the man unknown.... Might go on afterwards to the Folies
Bergere or the Theatre Marigny--or perhaps the Jardin de Paris. Why
hadn't Jobling answered his master's bell? Why had he deputised a
waiter to enquire whether his lordship wished his valet? Did he think
waiters were paid to do his, Jobling's, work for him? Or did he,
Jobling, suppose he was kept for show?
The strenuous stage-whisper in which Franky addressed the recalcitrant
Jobling penetrated the door-panels of the adjoining bower, as such
whispers usually do. But Margot was really sleeping--the orange-flower
water had had a few drops of chloral mingled with it. Milord had never
prohibited chloral, as Pauline had pointed out. But unsuspicious
Franky, unrigging (as he termed the process), while the tardy Jobling
prepared his master's bath and laid out his master's "glad rags," plumed
himself upon having made a notable advance in the science of
wife-government. Even the blameless potion of orange-flower testified
to his masculine strength of will.
*CHAPTER IX*
*SIR THOMAS ENTERTAINS*
You are invited to follow Franky, and sit with him at his friend Tom
Brayham's circular board, decorated with great silver bowls of
marvellous Rayon d'Or roses, that seemed to exhale the harvested
sunshine of summer from their fiery golden hearts.
You remember the famous dining-room of the big Paris caravanserai, with
its archways supported by slender pillars of creamy pink Carrara marble,
wreathed with inlaid fillets of green malachite and lapis lazuli, and
its electric illuminants concealed behind an oxidised silver frieze.
And possibly you need no introduction to the deity--plain and
middle-aged--in whose honour Brayham--the Hon. Sir Thomas Brayham, an
ex-Justice of the King's Bench Division--in the remote mid-Victorian era
a famous Q.C.--made oblation of luscious meats and special wines. The
clever, sharp-tongued, penniless niece of a famous Minister for Foreign
Affairs, she had made a love-match at twenty with Lord Watho Wathe, a
handsome and equally impecunious subaltern in a famous Highland
regiment, who was killed upon Active Service twenty years later, while
travelling upon a special mission to the Front Headquarters during the
South African War of 1900.
Two years later his widow conferred her hand upon Mr. Reuben Munts, of
Kimberley and South Carfordshire, a diamond-mining magnate who had made
his colossal pile before the War. She had never borne her second
husband's name, and when he died, leaving her sole mistress of his
millions, Lady Wathe resumed her place in Society, thenceforwards to
sparkle as never before.
"The '_Chronique Scandaleuse_' in a diamond setting" some phrase-maker
clever as herself had aptly termed her. Without her riches, stripped of
her wonderful diamonds, Society might have found her to be merely a
little chattering woman, avid of the reputation of a humorist and
_raconteuse_, unflagging in her relish for stories, not seldom of the
broadest, related at her own expense or at the cost of other people, and
over-liberally garnished with nods and becks, darting glances, and
wreathed smiles.
Upon this night of the Grand Prix--won, you will remember, by Baron M.
de Rothschild's "Sardanapole"--the little lady's jests fizzled and
coruscated like Japanese fireworks. Her gibes buzzed and stung like
wasps about a lawn-set tea-table, when new-made jam and fragrant honey