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That Which Hath Wings: A Novel of the Day

Richard Dehan

His hard, bright glance encountered Franky's, and he lifted his full glass of champagne and drank to him, smiling pleasantly. Of course the German was rotting, reflected Franky. If he wasn't, the combined insolence and brutality of such a menace, uttered at the table of one of the Britons in whose gore von Herrnung and his comrades yearned to dip their preposterous two-inch thumb-nails, took the bun, by the Great Brass Hat! He was perfectly cool, as his muscular white hands--for the dinner had arrived at the dessert stage--manipulated the silver knife that peeled a blood-red nectarine. What a splendid ring, a black-and-white pearl, large as a starling's egg, and set in platinum, the fellow sported on the little finger of that clawed left hand. What was he asking, in the suave voice with the guttural Teutonic accent? "You were in the Bois, I believe, Lord Norwater, early in the midday. Did you see any _avions_ of the _Service Aeronautique_? Did the invention they were testing come up to expectations? .... Did the English aerial stabiliser answer well? ..." Franky knew, as he encountered the compelling stare of the hard blue eyes, that he objected to their owner. He returned, in a tone more huffy and less dignified than he would have liked it to be: "Can't say.... I was merely walking in the Bois with a lady. Wasn't on the ground as--an investigator of the professional sort." "_So!_" Von Herrnung's face was set in a smile of easy amiability. The shot might have missed the bull for anything that was betrayed there. "And the name of the inventor? It has escaped my memory. Possibly you could tell me, eh?" "Certainly," said Franky, planting one with pleasure. "He happens to be a cousin of mine. Would you like me to write down his address?" "_Gewiss_--thanks so very much. But I will not trouble you!" Nobody had heard the verbal encounter. Lady Wathe was holding the table with another anecdote punctuated with staccato peals of laughter, tinkling like the brazen bells of a beaten tambourine. Mademoiselle Nou-Nou, a Paris celebrity, belonging to the most ancient if not the most venerable of professions, had promenaded under the chestnuts at Longchamps that morning, attired, as to the upper portion of her body, in a sheath of spotted black gauze veiling, unlined--save with her own charms. And a witty Paris journalist had said that "the costume was designed to represent Eve, not before nor after, but behind the fall"; and Paillette, who was there, working up her "Modes" letter for _Le Style_, had answered---- Everybody at table was leaning forward and listening, as the Goblin quoted the _riposte_ of Paillette. Von Herrnung, showing his big white teeth in a smile, chose another nectarine from the piled-up dish before him, seeming to admire the contrast between his own muscular white fingers and the glowing fruit they held. But Franky saw that he was angry as he neatly peeled the fruit, split the odorous yellow flesh, tore the stone out crimson and dripping like a little human heart, and swallowed both halves of the fruit in rapid succession, dabbing his mouth with the fine serviette held up before him in both hands. Then, with an air of arrogant self-confidence peculiar to him, he said loudly, addressing the whole company: "Madame Paillette certainly deserves the Croix d'Honneur for so excellent a _bon-mot_. As for Mademoiselle Nou-Nou, I do not myself admire her, but my brother Ludwig, when he was alive, paid intermittent tribute to her charms." He added: "He was killed in the charge by a fall with his horse in the Autumn Manoeuvres of last year, while the Emperor was being entertained by command at a shooting-party upon a forest property of my father's that is about fifty kilometres from Berlin." *CHAPTER X* *A SUPERMAN* "Do tell what the Kaiser said when he heard of the accident!" came in the voice of Lady Beauvayse, pitched now in a high, nasal tone that was a danger-signal to those who knew her, like the mischievous twinkle in her beautiful eyes. "I guess he must have been real upset!" "_Ja, ja, gewiss_," returned von Herrnung, slightly shrugging his broad, square shoulders. "Of course the Emperor was greatly grieved for my father's loss. But naturally the programme had to be carried out. There is another day's Imperial shooting; the business is concluded--very satisfactorily--and _Seine Majestaet_ takes leave..... But of course he sent to my mother a sympathetic message, which greatly consoled her. And his Chief Equerry, Baron von Wildenberg, represented him at my brother's funeral. And shortly afterwards he graciously conferred upon my father the Second Class of the Order _Pour le Merite_." "How nice! But what for?" demanded the downright American, with astonishment so genuine that Brayham strangled with suppressed chuckles, and the bearded mouth of Commander Courtley assumed the curve of a sly smile. "What for?" exclaimed von Herrnung. He stiffened his big body arrogantly, reddening with evident annoyance, and thickly through his carefully-accentuated English the Teutonic consonants and gutturals began to crop. "_Gnaedige Graefin_, because that so coveted decoration is the reward of special service rendered to the Emperor. And my father in his-personal-sorrow-conquering that it upon the amusements of Imperial Majesty-might-not-intrude--had the noblest devotion and courage exhibited--in the opinion of the All-Highest." "My land!" exclaimed Lady Beauvayse, stimulated by the undisguised enjoyment of Brayham, Courtley, and Franky, "if that don't take the team and waggon, with the yella dog underneath it, an' the hoss-fly sittin' on the near-wheel mule's left ear!" She added: "No wonder your Kaiser thinks himself the hub of this little old universe--being nourished from infancy on flapdoodle of that kind." She added, dropping the saw-edged artificial accent, and reverting to the agreeable, drawling tones familiar to her friends: "But, last fall, when King George and Queen Mary were allowing to spend the day with us at Foltlebarre Abbey, and see the Gobelins tapestries after Teniers that were restored by our great American dye-specialist, Charlotte B. Pendrill of New York--and I had a dud head with neuralgitis, and couldn't have bobbed a curtsey without screaming like peacocks before a wet spell--Lord Beauvayse just sent a respectful note of excuse over by fast car to the place in our county where their Majesties were spending a week-end, and got a kind, cosy little line by return, making an appointment for a more convenient day." "_Es mag wohl sein_," said von Herrnung stiffly, repeating an apparently favourite phrase. "It may be so--in Great Britain. But in Germany the trivial happenings of ordinary existence are not permitted to interfere with the Imperial plans." "Mustn't spoil Great Caesar's shoot by letting a natural sorrow dim your eye, in case you're unexpectedly informed of a family bereavement," said Brayham to Lady Beauvayse. "So now you know what to expect in case the Kaiser should take it into his head to pop in on you at Foltlebarre somewhere about July." "I surmise I'd expect a visitor of mine, whether he's the Kaiser, the King, or the President," retorted Lady Beauvayse, "to be a gentleman!" Her beautiful eyes blazed with genuine ire as she gave back von Herrnung's dominating stare. She continued, reverting more purposefully than ever to the exaggerated New York accent, mingling cutting Yankee humour with bitter irony in the sentences that twanged, one after another, off her sharp American tongue: "And I guess, Count von Herrnung--though between your father and Amos J. Sculpin of Madison Avenue, New York, and Sculpin Towers, Schenectady, there's considerable of a social gulf--if your Emperor had been a house-guest of my parpa's, and my elder brother"--she lifted an exquisite shoulder significantly ceilingwards--"had happened to get the hoist--parpa'd just have said: 'Your Imperial Majesty, I am unexpectedly one boy short, and far from feeling hunkey. My cars are waiting at my door to convey you right-away to your hotel. Look in on us after the interment, when Mrs. Sculpin has had time to get accustomed to her mourning. And as my _chef_ had orders to serve a special dinner in honour of your Majesty, I shall be gratified by your taking the hull menoo along--outside instead of in!'" The Goblin cackled. Ecstatic Brayham shrieked: "Magnificent, by Gad! He ought to know your father!" Franky and Courtley yielded unrestrainedly to mirth, as did the Saxham girl. While her teeth, dazzling as those of a Newfoundland pup, gleamed in her wide red mouth, and her long eyes glittered between their narrowed eyelids, von Herrnung gave her a quick sidelong glance of anger. She caught the look, and suddenly ceased to laugh, as the young Newfoundland might have stopped barking. She said below her breath: "Vexed? ... Why, you're really! ... And Lady Beau wasn't joking about your brother.... She wouldn't dream of such a thing! .... She's tremendously kind and sympathetic. Was he--your brother--nice? ..." "Most women thought so." "Would I have thought so? What was he like?" the girl persisted. Von Herrnung turned in his chair so as to face her, answering: "You see him now, with one difference. He was as black as I am red." The blue eyes of the man and the long agate-coloured eyes of the young woman encountered. She said slowly in her warm, deep voice, less like a feminine contralto than the masculine baritone: "I like--red men--best!" "So! Then it was lucky that, instead of me, my brother Ludwig died!" said von Herrnung, so loudly that Lady Wathe's quick ear caught the final words. She shrilled out her laugh: "But you're a wretch, Tido!" She shrugged her thin vivacious shoulders under their glittering burden. "A heartless wretch!" "Of course I was regretting my brother, yes!" said von Herrnung. "But I do not pretend that his death did not improve what you English would call my worldly prospects. That is the cant of Christianity--particularly the sentimental Christianity of England. One world is not enough for your greed of possession. You must eat your cake here and hereafter. But for the robust super-humanity of Germany, this world is both Hell and Heaven. It is Hell for the man who is stupid, weakly, poor, and conscience-ridden. It is Heaven for the man who has knowledge, power, health, wealth, the craft to keep his riches, and the capacity to enjoy to the fullest the pleasures they can procure him, with the courage to free himself from the bonds of what Christians and Agnostics term Morality, and live precisely as Nature prompts. So when my brother fell in the charge," continued von Herrnung, with perfect seriousness, "he opened for me the gates of Heaven. Since then I am a god!" "A mortal god," called out the chuckling Brayham; "for you've got to die, you know, when your number's up." "When the time comes, of course I shall die," acquiesced von Herrnung, "in the vulgar sense of the word. But not so those who come after. Our bacteriologists will have discovered the microbe of old age and its antitoxin, and then we shall die no more." "Dashed if I know the difference between the vulgar way of dying and the other style!" Brayham snorted apoplectically, feeling in his waistcoat-pocket for the box of digestive tabloids that showed in a bulge. "Dashed unpleasant certainty--however you look at it! And a man who weighs eighteen stone at fifty has _got_ to look at it, every time his tailor lets out his waistcoats, and his valet asks him to order more collars because the last lot have shrunk in the wash."