That Which Hath Wings_ A Novel of the Day Richard Dehan 65626 downloads.pdf

The Project Gutenberg eBook of That Which Hath Wings: A
Novel of the Day

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you
will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: That Which Hath Wings: A Novel of the Day

Creator: Richard Dehan

Release date: March 12, 2016 [eBook #51428]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/51428

Credits: Produced by Al Haines

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THAT WHICH
HATH WINGS: A NOVEL OF THE DAY ***

Cover art

"His arm was round her, her cheek was pressed to
his, her bosom heaved against him."

THAT WHICH HATH
WINGS
A NOVEL OF THE DAY

BY
RICHARD DEHAN
AUTHOR OF "THE DOP DOCTOR," "BETWEEN TWO THIEVES," ETC.

"For a bird of the air shall carry the voice,

and that which hath wings shall

tell the matter."—ECCLESIAS. x., 20.

S. B. GUNDY
TORONTO

COPYRIGHT, 1918

BY
G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS

The Knickerbocker Press, New York

THESE LEAVES IN
DEAR REMEMBRANCE
FOR YOUR GRAVE
ACROSS THE SEA.

SIDMOUTH, DEVON,
January, 1918.

CONTENTS
CHAPTER

I.—PRESENTS TWO YOUNG PEOPLE
II.—DAME NATURE INTERVENES
III.—FAIR ROSAMOND'S CHOICE
IV.—RAYMOND OF THE S. AË. F.
V.—THE BIRD OF WAR
VI.—SHERBRAND
VII.—THE CONSOLATRIX
VIII.—MONSEIGNEUR
IX.—SIR THOMAS ENTERTAINS
X.—A SUPERMAN
XI.—PATRINE SAXHAM
XII.—THE GATHERING OF THE STORM
XIII.—THE SUPERMAN
XIV.—A PARIS DANCE-GARDEN
XV.—THE BITE IN THE KISS
XVI.—THE WIND OF JOY

XVII.—INTRODUCES AN OLD FRIEND
XVIII.—SAXHAM PAYS
XIX.—BAWNE
XX.—THE MODERN HIPPOCRATES
XXI.—MARGOT LOOKS IN
XXII.—MARGOT IS SQUARE
XXIII.—A MODERN CLUB
XXIV.—DISILLUSION
XXV.—THREE MEN IN A CAR
XXVI.—A PAIR OF PALS
XXVII.—SIR ROLAND TELLS A STORY
XXVIII.—THE GOD FROM THE MACHINE
XXIX.—A SECRET MISSION
XXX.—THE REAPING
XXXI.—VON HERRNUNG BAITS THE HOOK
XXXII.—ADVENTURE IN THE AIR
XXXIII.—BAWNE LEARNS THE TRUTH
XXXIV.—THE BROWN SATCHEL
XXXV.—NUMBER EIGHTEEN
XXXVI.—HUE AND CRY
XXXVII.—PATRINE CONFESSES
XXXVIII.—THE REBOUND
XXXIX.—A NIGHT IN JULY
XL.—MACROMBIE IS SACKED
XLI.—SAXHAM LIES
XLII.—SAXHAM BREAKS THE NEWS
XLIII.—THE PLUNDERED NEST
XLIV.—PATRINE REMEMBERS

XLV.—FLOTSAM FROM THE NORTH SEA
XLVI.—AT NORDEICH WIRELESS
XLVII.—THE MAN OF "THE DAY"
XLVIII.—PATRINE IS ENGAGED
XLIX.—THE WAR CLOUD BREAKS
L.—THE EVE OF ARMAGEDDON
LI.—THE INWARD VOICE
LII.—KHAKI
LIII.—FRANKY GOES TO THE FRONT
LIV.—OFFICIAL RETICENCE
LV.—NEWS OF BAWNE
LVI.—LA BRABANÇONNE
LVII.—THE BELGIAN WIFE
LVIII.—SHERBRAND BUYS THE LICENCE
LIX.—THE WOE-WAVE BREAKS
LX.—KULTUR!
LXI.—LYNETTE DREAMS
LXII.—WOUNDED FROM THE FRONT
LXIII.—BAWNE FINDS A FRIEND
LXIV.—AT SEASHEERE
LXV.—GOOD-BYE, DEAR LOVE, GOOD-BYE!
LXVI.—MORE KULTUR
LXVII.—THE QUESTION
LXVIII.—THE DEVIL-EGG
LXIX.—A MENACE; AND GOOD NEWS
LXX.—A LOVER'S JOURNEY
LXXI.—LIVING AND DEAD
LXXII.—LOVE THAT HAS WINGS

That Which Hath Wings

CHAPTER I
PRESENTS TWO YOUNG PEOPLE

In January, 1914, Francis Athelstan Sherbrand, Viscount Norwater, only son
of that fine old warrior, General the Right Honourable Roger Sherbrand,
V.C., K.C.B., first Earl of Mitchelborough, married Margot Mountjohn,
otherwise known as "Kittums," and found that she was wonderfully
innocent—for a girl who knew so much.
It was a genuine love-match, Franky being a comparatively poor
Guardsman, with only two thousand a year in addition to his pay as a
Second Lieutenant in the Royal Bearskins Plain, and Margot a mere
Cinderella in comparison with heiresses of the American canned-provision
and cereal kind.
It had seemed to Franky, standing with patent-leathered feet at the
Rubicon dividing bachelorhood from Benedictism, that all his wooing had
been done at Margot's Club. True, he had actually proposed to Margot at the
Royal Naval and Military Tournament of the previous June, and Margot,
hysterical with sheer ecstasy, as the horses gravely played at push-ball, had
pinched his arm and gasped out:
"Yes, but don't take my mind off the game just now; these dear beasts
are so heavenly! ..."
And theatres, film-picture-shows and variety halls, race-meetings,
receptions, balls and kettledrums, polo and croquet-clubs, had fostered the

courtship of Franky and Margot; but all their love-making had been carried
out to the accompanying hum of conversation and the tinkle of crystal and
silver-plate in the dining-room of the "Ladies' Social," where Margot had
her favourite table in the glass-screened corner by the fire-place; or in the
circular smoking-room with the Persian divan and green-glass dome, that
Margot had given the Club on her nineteenth birthday; or in the boudoir
belonging to the suite she had decorated for herself on the condition that no
other member got the rooms if Margot wanted them, which Margot nearly
always did....
There was a big, rambling, ancient red-brick Hall, stone-faced in the
Early Jacobean manner, standing with its rare old gardens and glass-houses,
lawns and shrubberies, about it, within sight and sound of the Channel,
amidst pine and beech-woods carpeted with bilberry-bushes, heathery
moors, and coverts neck-high in July with the Osmunda regalis fern. The
Hall belonged to Margot, though you never found her there except for a
week or two in September and three days at Christmas-tide. The first
fortnight with the birds was well enough, but those three days at Christmas
marked the limit. Of human endurance Margot meant, possibly. She never
vouchsafed to explain.
She also possessed a house in town, but just as her deceased father's
spinster sister lived at the Hall in Devonshire, so did her dead mother's
brother Derek, with his collection of European moths and butterflies and
other Lepidoptera, inhabit the fine old mansion in Hanover Square.
Devonshire at Christmas marked the limit of dulness, but Hanover Square
all the London season through beat the band for sheer ghastly boredom....
Not that there were any flies on little old London.... Paris and Ostend were
ripping places, and you could put in a clinking good time at Monte Carlo....
Margot had tried New York and liked it, except for the place itself, which

made you think of illustrations to weird Dunsany legends in which towering
temples climb up unendingly upon each other into black star-speckled skies.
But the Club and London, with Unlimited Bridge and Tango, constituted
Margot's idea of earthly happiness. She never had dreamed of marrying
anybody—until Franky had arrived on the scene.
Perhaps you can see Franky, with the wholesome tan of the Autumn
Manoeuvres yet upon him. Twenty-seven, well-made and muscular, if with
somewhat sloping shoulders and legs of the type that look better in Bedford
cords and puttees, or leathers and hunting-tops, than in tweed knickers and
woollen stockings, or Court knee-breeches and silks. Observe his well-
shaped feet and slight strong hands with pointed fingers, like those of his
ancestors, painted by Vandyke; his brown eyes—distinctly good if not
glowing with the fire of intellect, his forehead too steep and narrow; his
moustache of the regulation tooth-brush kind, adorning the upper-lip that
will not shut down firmly over his white, rather prominent, front teeth. Cap
the small rounded skull of him with bright brown hair, brushed and
anointed to astonishing sleekness, dress him in the full uniform of a Second
Lieutenant in the Bearskins Plain, and you have Franky on his wedding-day.
Photographs of the happy couple published in the Daily Wire, the
Weekly Silhouette, the Lady's Dictatorial, and the Photographic Smile,
hardly do the bridegroom justice. In that without the busby his features are
fixed in a painful grin, while in the other there are no features at all. But
Margot—Margot in a hobble-skirt of satin and chiffon, with a tulle turban-
veil, starred with orange-flowers in pearls and diamonds, and a long
serpent-tail train of silver brocade, hung from her shoulders by ropes of
pearls, was "almost too swee," to quote Margot's Club friends. Search had
been made, amongst the said friends, many of whom were married, for a
pair of five-year-old pages to carry the bride's train; but there being, for

some reason, a dearth of babies among Margot's wedded intimates, the idea
had to be given up.
The wedding was quite the prettiest function of the season. The eight
bridesmaids walked in moss-green crêpe de Chine veiled with silver-
spotted chiffon. On their heads were skull-caps of silver tissue, each having
a thirty-inch-high aigrette supported by a thin bandeau of gold, set with
crystals and olivines, the gift of the bride.... Their stockings were of white
lace openwork, the left knee of each being clasped by the bridegroom's
souvenir, a garter of gold, crystal, and olivines. Silver slippers with four-
inch heels completed the ravishing effect.
O Perfect Love! was sung before the Bishop's Address, and the
ceremony concluded with The Voice that Breathed and Stainer's Sevenfold
Amen. The bridal-party passed down the nave to the strains of the Wedding
Chorus from Lohengrin. And there was a reception at the Werkeley Square
house of one of the dearest of Margot's innumerable dearest friends, and the
happy pair left in their beautiful brand-new Winston-Beeston touring car en
route for the old red-brick Hall in Devonshire. Decidedly the honeymoon
might have been termed ideal—and four subsequent months of married life
proved tolerably cloudless—until Fate sent a stinging hailstorm to strip the
roses from the bridal bower.
An unexpected, appalling, inevitable discovery was made in Paris in
the Grande Semaine, at the end of the loveliest of June seasons. It utterly
ruined—for two people—the Day of the Grand Prix, that marks the climax
of the Big Week, when the Parisian coaching-world tools its four-in-hands
to Longchamps Racecourse, and the smartest, richest, and gayest people,
mustered from every capital of Europe, parade under the chestnut-trees that
shade the sunny paddock, to display or criticise the creations of the greatest
couturiers.

Margot had put on an astonishing gown for the occasion.... You will
recall that the summer dress designs of 1914 were astonishing; the autumn
modes promised to be even more so, according to Babin, Touchet, and the
Brothers Paillôt. Skirts—already as short and as narrow as possible—were
to be even narrower; the Alpha and Omega of perfection would be
represented by the Amphora Silhouette. And Margot, revolving before her
cheval-glass in a sheath of jonquil-coloured silk lisse, embroidered with
blue-and-green beetle-wings, found—to her horror and consternation——
Shall one phrase it that Dame Nature, intent upon her essential,
unfashionable business of reproduction, was at variance with Madame
Fashion re the Amphora Silhouette? The slender shape was not yet spoilt,
but long before the autumn came, no art would mask the wealthy curves of
its maternity.

CHAPTER II
DAME NATURE INTERVENES

"I can't bear it!—I won't bear it!" Margot reiterated. With her tumbled hair,
swollen eyes, pink uptilted nose, and the little mouth and chin that quivered
with each sobbing breath intaken, she looked absurdly babyish for her
twenty years, as she vowed that wild horses shouldn't drag her to
Longchamps, and railed against the injustice of Fate.
"None of my married friends have had such rotten luck!" she asserted.
She stamped upon the velvety carpet and flashed at Franky a glance of
imperious appeal. "Not Tota Stannus, or Cynthia Charterhouse, or Joan
Delabrand, or anybody! Then, why me? That's what I want to know? After

all the mascots I've worn and carried about with me.... Gojo and Jollikins
and the jade tree-frog, and the rest! ... Every single one given me by a
different woman who'd been married for years and never had a baby! This
very day I'll smash the whole lot!"
"By the Great Brass Hat! ..."
Franky exploded before he could stop himself, and laughed until the
tears coursed down. So "Gojo," the black velvet kitten, and "Jollikins," the
fat, leering, naked thing that sat and squinted over its pot-belly at its own
huge, shapeless feet, and all the array of gadgets and netsukis crowding
Margot's toilette-table and secrétaire, down to "Pat-Pat," the bog-oak pig,
and "Ti-Ti," the jade tree-frog, were so many insurances against the Menace
of Maternity. By Jove! women were regular children.... And Margot ...
Nothing but a baby, this poor little Margot—going, in spite of Jollikins and
Gojo, to have a baby of her own.
"What is one to believe? Whom is one to trust in? ..."
"'Trust in.' ... My best child, you don't mean that you believed those
women when they told you that such twopenny gadgets could work charms
of—that or any other kind?"
"Indeed, indeed they do! Tota Stannus was perfectly serious when she
came to my boudoir one night at the Club, about a week before our—the
wedding.... She said—I can hear her now; 'Well, old child, you're to be
married on Wednesday, and of course you know the ropes well enough not
to want any tips from me.... Still——'"
"That wasn't overwhelmingly flattering," Franky commented, "from a
married woman twice your age. What else did she say?"
"She said I must be aware," went on Margot, "that a woman who
wanted to keep her friends and her figure, simply couldn't afford to have
kids."

"And you——"
Franky no longer battled with the grin that would have infuriated
Margot. Something had wiped it from his face.
"I said she was frightfully kind, but that I was quite well-posted—
everything was O.K., and she needn't alarm herself.... And she said, 'Oh! if
you've arranged things with Franky, jolly sensible of him! Too often a man
who is open and liberal-minded before marriage develops gerontocracie
afterwards, don't you know? ...' And I told her that you were the very
reverse of narrow-minded—and she kissed me and wished me happiness,
and went away. And the maid knocked later on to say Mrs. Stannus sent her
apologies for having forgotten to leave her little gift. And the little gift was,
Jollikins. And my special pals joined in to stand me a farewell dinner, and
they drowned my enamel Club badge in a bowl of Maraschino punch, and
fished it up and gave me this diamond and enamel one, mounted as a tie-
brooch, instead. And every married woman brought me a mascot.... I had
Gojo from Joan Delabrand, and Ti-Ti from Cynthia Charterhouse, and the
jade tree-frog from Patrine Saxham, and the carved African bean from
Rhona Helvellyn, and——"
Franky objected:
"Neither Patrine Saxham nor Rhona Helvellyn happen to be married
women!"
"Perhaps not; but Patrine is an Advanced Thinker, and Rhona
Helvellyn is a Militant Suffragist."
Franky commented:
"As for Suffragists, that Club of yours is stiff with 'em. Gassing about
their Cause.... I loathe the noisy crowd!"
"Then you loathe me! I share their convictions!" Margot proclaimed. "I
hold the faith that Woman's Day will dawn with the passing of the Bill that

gives us the Vote...."
"My best child, you wouldn't know what to do with the Vote if you had
it."
Margot retorted:
"I cannot expect my husband to treat me as a reasonable being while
the State classes his wife with infants and imbeciles."
It will be seen that a very pretty squabble was on the point of
developing. Fortunately, at this juncture a valet of the chambers knocked at
the door to say that a waiter from the restaurant begged to know whether
Milord and Miladi would take lunch à la carte, or prefer something special
in their own apartments?
"Tell him no!" wailed Miladi, to the unconcealed consternation of
Milord, who had a healthy appetite.
"Must keep up your pecker—never say die!" Franky, stimulated by the
pangs of hunger, developed an unsuspected talent for diplomacy. "Look
here! We must talk over things quietly and calmly. I'll order a taxi, and we'll
chuff to that jolly little restaurant in the Bois de Boulogne—where you can
grub in the open air under a rose-pergola—and order something special and
odd——"
Since Eve's day, this lure has never failed to catch a woman. Margot
began to dry her eyes. Then she asked Franky to ring.
"Three times, please.... That's for Pauline; I want another
handkerchief."
"Have two or three while you're about it," advised Franky, obeying,
returning, and perching on the arm of the settee. "And bathe your eyes a bit,
have a swab-over of the pinky cream-stuff, and a dab of powder." He
brushed some pale mealy traces from his right-arm sleeve and coat-lapel,
ending, "And put on your swankiest hat and come along to Nadier's."

"Could we get anything to eat at Nadier's that we couldn't get here—or
in London, at the Tarlton or the Rocroy? ..."
"Stacks of things! For instance—Canard à la presse.... They squeeze
the juice out of the duck, you twig, with a silver kind of squozzer, and cook
it on a chafing-dish under your nose. Look here! ..." Franky, now desperate,
produced his watch. "All the cushiest little tables will be taken if you don't
look sharp."
"Not on the day of the Grand Prix!"
Franky retorted, spurred to maddest invention by the pangs of hunger:
"My best child, there are about a hundred thousand wealthy Americans
in Paris who don't care a red cent about racing, while with most of 'em—to
eat canard à la presse at Nadier's in the Bois de Boulogne in the June
season—is a—kind of religious rite!"
So Margot disappeared to dab her eyes and apply the prescribed
touches of perfumed cream and powder, and duly reappeared, crowned with
the most marvellous hat that ever promenaded the ateliers of the Maison
Blin on the head of a milliner's mannequin.
You are to imagine the tiny thing and her Franky seated—not in one of
the smart automobiles that wait for hire outside Spitz's, but in a little red
taxi, borne along with the broad double stream of traffic of every
description that ceaselessly roared east and west under the now withering
red-and-white blossoms of the chestnut-trees of the Avenue of the Champs
Elysées, inhaling the stimulating breezes—flavoured with hot dust and
petrol, Seine stink, sewer-gas, coffee, patchouli, fruit, Régie tobacco and
roses—of Paris in the end of June.

All the world and his wife might be at Longchamps, but here were people
enough and to spare. Luxurious people in costly automobiles or carriages

drawn by shiny high-steppers. People in little public taxis, men and women
on motor-bicycles and the human-power kind. People of all stamps and
classes, clustered like bees outside the big, smelly, top-heavy auto-buses,
soon to vanish from the Paris avenues and boulevards, with the red and
yellow and green-flagged taxis, to play their part in the transport and
nourishment of the Army of France. People of all ranks and classes on foot,
though as of old the midinette with her big cardboard bandbax, the military
cadet, or the student of Art or Medicine, the seminarist and the shaggy-
haired and bearded man with the deadly complexion, the slouch hat, the
aged paletôt and the soiled and ragged crimson necktie that distinguish the
milder breed of Anarchist, made up the crowd upon the sidewalks, liberally
peppered with the sight-seeing stranger of British, American, or Teuton
nationality—the brilliantly-complexioned, gaily-plumaged, loudly-
perfumed lady of the pavements; the gendarme and the National Guard, and
—with Marie or Jeannette proudly hanging on his elbow—Rosalie in her
black-leather scabbard dangling by his side, his crimson képi tilted rakishly
—the blue-coated, red-trousered French infantryman, the poilu whom we
have learned to love.
The Bois was not seething with fashionable life as it would be towards
the sunset hour. The dandy Clubmen, the smart ladies, had gone to
Longchamps with the four-in-hands. Polo was going on near the Pont de
Suresnes, the band of a regiment of Cuirassiers was playing in the Jardin
d'Acclimatation, and Hungarian zithers and violins discoursed sweet music
on a little gilded platform at the axial point of Nadier's open-air restaurant
—which is shaped like a half-wheel, with pergolas of shower-roses and
Crimson Ramblers radiating from the gilded band-stand to the outer circle
of little white tables at which one can lunch or dine in fine weather under a

light screen of leaves and blossoms, beneath which the green canvas
awnings can be drawn when it comes on to rain.
The tables were crowded with French people taking late déjeuner, and
English, Germans, and German-Americans having lunch. The gravelled
courtyard before the terrace was packed with showy automobiles.
If canard à la presse did not grace the meal supplied to Franky and
Margot on Nadier's terrace, the potage printanière and écrevisses and a
blanquette d'agneau were exquisitely cooked and served. Asparagus and a
salad of endive followed, and by the time they had emptied a bottle of
Chateau Yquem and the omelette soufflée had given place to Pêches Melba,
Margot had smiled several times and laughed once.
She was so dainty and sweet, so brilliant a little human humming-bird,
that the laughing, chattering, feasting crowd of smartly or extravagantly
dressed people gathered about the other trellis-screened tables under
Nadier's rose-pergola sent many a curious or admiring glance her way. And
Franky was very proud of his young wife, and theirs had been undeniably a
love-match; yet in spite of the good dishes and the excellent Château
Yquem, little shivers of chilly premonition rippled over him from time to
time. He had got to speak out—definitely decline, in the interests of
Posterity, to permit interference on the part of Margot's Club circle in his
private domestic affairs.... How to do it effectively yet inoffensively was a
problem that strained his brain-capacity. Yet—again in the interests of
Posterity—Franky had never previously interested himself in Posterity—the
thing had to be done. He refused Roquefort, buttered a tiny biscuit absently,
put it down undecidedly, and as the waiter whisked his plate away—
conjured crystal bowls of tepid rose-water and other essentials from space,
and vanished in search of dessert—he spoke, assuming for the first time in
his five months' experience of connubial life the toga of marital authority.

"I think, do you know, Kittums"—Kittums was Margot's pet name
—"that it will be best to face the music!"
"Connu!" Margot shrugged a little, widely opening her splendid brown
eyes, "But what music?"
"The"—Franky took the plunge—"the cradle-music, if you will have
it!"
Margot's gasp of dismay, and the indignant fire of a stare that was
quenched in brine, awakened Franky to the fact of his having failed in
tactics. The return of the waiter with a pyramid of superb strawberries and a
musk-melon on cracked ice alone stemmed the outburst of the pent-up flood
of reproach. Entrenched behind the melon, Franky waited. The waiter again
effaced himself, and Margot said from behind another handkerchief:
"Oh, how could you! ... I never dreamed that I should live to hear you
speak to me in that way."
Over the melon, whose rough green quartered rind had delicate white
raised traceries all over it, suggesting outline maps of countries in
Fairyland, Franky curiously regarded his wife. He said:
"Why are you and all your friends so funky of—what's only a natural
phe—what do you call it? ... What do men and women marry for, if it isn't
to have—children? ... Perhaps you'll answer me?"
"What do people marry for?" Margot regarded him indignantly over
the neglected pyramid of luscious, tempting strawberries, "To—to be happy
together—to have a clinking time!" Her voice shook. "And this is to be a
gorgeous season. Balls—balls! right on from now to the end of July—then
from the autumn all through winter. Period Costume Balls, reviving the
modes, music, and manners of Ancient Civilisations—Carthagenian,
Assyrian, Babylonian, Gothic—got up and arranged by the Committees of
the Cercle Moderne, here in Paris, and in London by the New Style Club....

Tony Guisseguignol and Paul Peigault and their set are busy designing the
dresses and decorations—nothing like them will ever have been seen! And
—Peigault says—Tango and the Maxixe are to be chucked to the little
cabbages. A new dance is coming from São Paulo that will simply wipe
them out.... And now—just when I was looking forward—when everything
was to have been so splendid——"
The shaking voice choked upon a note of anguish. Franky had picked
up the melon, quite unconsciously, and was balancing it. At this juncture he
gripped the green globe with both hands, and said, summoning all his
courage to meet the agonised appeal of Margot's tear-drenched eyes:
"Look here. This is—strict Bridge.... Do you loathe 'em—the kiddies
—so horribly that the idea of having any is hateful to you? Or is it—not
only the—the veto it puts on larking and kickabout and—the temporary
disfigurement—you're afraid of—but the—the—the inevitable pain?" He
glanced round cautiously and looked back again at his wife, saying in a low
voice: "Nobody's listening.... Tell me frankly...." He waited an instant, and
then said in an urgent whisper. "Answer me! ... For God's sake, tell the
frozen truth, Margot!"

CHAPTER III
FAIR ROSAMOND'S CHOICE

The terrace under Nadier's roses—dotted with little tables covered with
napery, silver, crystal, and china, surrounded with laughing, chattering
feasters—the terrace was no longer a scene out of a comedy of the lighter
side of Parisian life.... Tragedy, pale and awe-inspiring in her ink-black

mantle and purple chiton, had stepped across the gravel in her gold-buckled
leather buskins, to offer to the girlish bride—a piece of human porcelain,
prinked in the height of the fashion, and lovely—with her wild-rose cheeks
and little uptilted nose, her floss-silk hair and wide, dark, lustrous deer-eyes
—Fair Rosamond's choice, the dagger or the bowl....
"Yes—yes.... It is the ugliness of the thing! ..." The little mouth was
pulled awry as though it had sipped of verjuice. The tiny hands knotted
themselves convulsively, and the colour fled in terror from her face. "The
grotesque ugliness.... And the"—the last two words came as though a pang
had wrung them from the pale lips—"the pain—the awful pain! And
besides—my mother died when I was born!" Margot's voice was a
fluttering, appealing whisper; her great eyes were dilated and wild with
terror. "Perhaps that is why I am so deadly afraid"—she caught her breath
—"but there are heaps, heaps, heaps of married women who fear—that—
equally! And they arrange to escape it—I don't know how! ... For I knew—
nothing—when I married you! ..." She lifted her great eyes to Franky's, and
he realised that it had been so, actually. "I've been ashamed ever to confess
that I was—ignorant about these things! ... I've talked a language—amongst
other women—that I didn't understand! ..."
There are moments when even the shallow-brained become
clairvoyant. Franky's love for her made him see clear. He looked back down
the vista of Margot's twenty years of existence, and saw her the motherless
daughter of a self-absorbed, cultivated, Art-loving valetudinarian, who
habitually spent the chillier part of each year in ranging from French to
Italian health-resorts, occupying the spring with Art in Paris—returning to
London for June and July, generally spending August and September in
Devonshire—to take flight Southwards before the migrating swallows, at
the first chill breath of October frosts.

Margot had been educated at home, down in Devonshire, by a series of
certificated female tutors. The spinster aunt, the younger sister of her father,
extended to her niece for a liberal remuneration a nominal protection and an
indifferent care.... And Mr. Mountjohn had died when the girl was sixteen,
leaving her unconditionally heiress to his considerable fortune, and the aunt
had let Margot have her head in every imaginable way. She had allowed her
to take up her residence at the "Ladies' Social" Club three years
subsequently, on the sole condition that a responsible chaperon
accompanied Margot to Society functions. Hence, Mrs. Ponsonby Rewes,
the irreproachable widow of a late King's Messenger, was evoked from
Kensington Tower Mansions upon these occasions—by telephone—to
vanish when no longer wanted, in the discreetest and most obliging way.
"Poor little Margot! .... Poor little woman!..." Franky could see how it
all had happened by the wild light of the great deer-eyes, so like those in the
portrait of the girl's dead mother—half Irish, half Greek by birth.
While Franky reflected, the tables had been emptying. People were
hurrying away to hear the band of the Jardin d'Acclimatation or to fulfil
other engagements of a seasonable kind. Some remained to smoke and
gossip over liqueurs and coffee. The light blue wreaths of cigar and
cigarette smoke curled up towards the awning overhead. Franky
mechanically produced his own case and lighted up. And Margot, stretching
a slender arm across the table, was saying:
"Give me one!—I've forgotten mine! ..."
"Ought you? ... Is it wise? ..." Franky was on the point of asking, but
his good Angel must have clapped a hand before his mouth. He silently
gave Margot a thick, masculine Sobranie and supplied a light; and as their
young faces neared and the red spark glowed, and the first smoke-wreath

rose between the approximating tubes of delicate tobacco-filled paper, his
wife whispered as their eyes met:
"You're hurt! But now you know—you're sorry for me, aren't you?" It
was a dragging, plaintive undertone, not at all like Margot's voice.
"Frightfully! All the more because"—Franky drew so hard at his
cigarette that it burned one-sidedly—"I can't help being thundering—glad!"
"I—see! ..."
She breathed out the words with a thin stream of fragrant Turkish
vapour crawling over her scarlet under-lip, it seemed to Franky, like a pale
blue worm. And he bit through his Sobranie and threw it on his dessert-
plate, saying desperately:
"Not yet. Will you listen quietly to what I've got to say?"
She nodded. Franky launched himself upon the tide of revelation.
Nearly everybody who had been eating when he had come into Nadier's
with Margot had got up and gone away. And the Cuirassiers band was
playing the love-music from Samson et Dalila on the terrace of the Jardin
d'Acclimatation, as melodiously as only a French military band can play.
"It's got to do with the Peerage. Only a Second Afghan War-Earldom
dating from 1879—tacked on to the Viscounty they gave my great-
grandfather after Badajos—but worth having in its way, or the Dad wouldn't
have accepted it. And, naturally enough—I want a boy to take the Viscounty
when I succeed my father, and have the Earldom when I've absquatulated,
just as the kiddy'll want one when his own time comes."
Margot was burning a strawberry-leaf on her plate with her cigarette-
end. She asked, impressing another little yellow scorched circle on the
surface of rough green:
"Would it matter so very much if there wasn't any boy?"

Franky jumped and turned red to the white, unsunned circle left by the
field-cap on the summit of his high forehead.
"It would matter—lots! For my Uncle Sherbrand, a younger brother of
my father's, would come in for the Viscounty when I succeeded the dear old
Dad. And my Uncle Sherbrand is a blackguard! Got cashiered in 1900,
when he was an Artillery officer in a gun-testing billet at Wanwich. Kicked
out of the Army—in War-time, mind you!—for not backing up his C.O.
And the brute has got a son, too, an apprentice in an engine-shop, if he isn't
actually a chauffeur. Probably the young fellow's respectable, and of course
it ain't the pup's fault he's got such a sire. But my Dad would turn in his
grave at the idea of being succeeded by the brother who disgraced him—
and as for his grandfather—the jolly old cock 'ud bally well get up and
dance, I should say.... So, you see, I can't—sympathise with you as you
want me to do in this, darling! I want you to buck up and be cheerful, and
face the music like a brick.... As for what you've told me—about your
mother——" In spite of himself, Franky gulped, and little shiny beads of
sweat stood upon his cheeks and temples. "That sort of thing doesn't run in
families, like rheumatism"—he was getting idiotic—"or Roman noses! Be
plucky—and everything will turn out all right. Can't possibly go wrong if
we call in Saxham ... Saxham of 000, Harley Street—man my sister Trix
simply swears by. Brought her boy Ronald into the world thirteen years
ago, and successfully operated on him for appendicitis only the other day!
..."
Margot looked at Franky attentively and bent her head slightly. Had
she understood? She must have.... Had she tacitly agreed? Of course....

CHAPTER IV

RAYMOND OF THE S. AË. F.

The Masculine Will had conquered. You had only to be firm with women—
bless their hearts! and they caved directly.... Couldn't hold out.... Not built
that way.... Franky's sternly-clamped upper-lip relaxed. He beamed as he
proposed a noonday stroll in the Bois. In the direction of the bigger Lake,
by one of the narrower avenues, or if Margot preferred a look-in at the Polo
Club, another avenue, intersecting the Allée de Longchamps and skirting
the enclosure of the Gun Club, would take them there in a jiffy, via
Bagatelle.
Margot assented to the latter proposition, and, with a little flutter of the
lips Franky accepted as a smile, reached for her egret stole, a filmy feathery
thing she had removed on entering Nadier's, and drew on her long
mousquetaire gloves and pulled down her veil of sunset chiffon, half shaded
red, merging into jonquil yellow matching the shade of her marvellous
gown. And Franky paid the bill in plump English sovereigns (invariably
exchanged as good for louis of twenty francs by the suave and smiling
waiter) and tipped the said waiter extravagantly, and took his hat from the
second waiter (who invariably starts up by the side of the first when you are
going) and tipped him, and got his stick from the third waiter (who came
forward with this, and the en tout cas of Madame—a lovely thing in the
latest dome-shape, of black net over jonquil colour, with a flounce, and an
ivory stick, upon the top of which sat a green monkey in olivines, eating a
ruby fruit), and lighted another cigarette, and returned the elaborate bow of
the manager with a nod of the cheerful patronising order as he followed
Margot through the Rambler-wreathed archway leading by a flight of
shallow steps from Nadier's terrace to the wide carriage-sweep that links the
broad Allée de Longchamps with the narrower Route de Madrid. And the

towering plume of her astonishing hat brought down a shower of red rose-
petals as she passed out before him—and Franky, with some of these on his
top-hat-brim and others nestling in the front of his waistcoat, was
irresistibly reminded of their wedding-day.
Unconsciously, Franky and Margot quitted the broader, more
frequented avenue, crowded with people in carriages, people in
automobiles, people on motor-bicycles and bicyclettes, and followed
narrower pathways, stretching between green lawns adorned with
shrubberies and clumps of stately forest trees, and chiefly patronised by
sweethearting couples, nursemaids in charge of children, children in
domineering but affectionate charge of white-haired ladies, while venerable
gentlemen dozed on rustic benches over the columns of Figaro or Paris
Midi.
When even these figures became rare, it was borne in upon Franky that
he and Margot were not upon a path that led to the Grounds of the Polo
Club. Reluctantly, he admitted himself lost.
"Does it matter? ..." Margot's voice was weary. "If you're absolutely set
on it, we could ask one of those men in cocked hats and waxed moustaches
and red-and-yellow shoulder-cords to give us the straight tip. But I don't
feel the least bit keen about the Polo Club any more than the Lakes. These
alleys are quiet, and the grass is nice and green. I vote we go on."
"Madame cannot pass this way. It is not open for strangers."
A Republican Guard, a good-looking sous-officier, had spoken,
comprehending the tone rather than the English words.
"Why not?" Margot's eyes suddenly brightened. She eagerly sniffed
the air of the forbidden avenue. The corporal, indicating with his white-
gloved hand other Republican Guards posted at equal distances down the

prohibited alley, and at its intersection with another some two hundred
yards distant, brought his eyes back to Margot to answer:
"Madame, for the reason that certain military operations are taking
place here to-day."
"But my husband is an English officer—" Margot was beginning,
when Franky, reddening to his hat-brim, exhorted her to be quiet, and the
Republican Guard, civilly saluting, stepped upon the grass and moved
away.
"All the same, you are an English officer," Margot persisted, "and what
use is the Entente if that doesn't count?"
"Best child, don't be a giddy goose!" Franky implored her. "You don't
suppose the Authorities care a bad tomato for an English Loot—what they'd
cotton to would have to be a British Brass Hat of the very biggest kind.
Look there!—more to your left, little battums!" He indicated yet other
Republican cocked hats strung at equal distances down the length of a
neighbouring alley, precisely outlining the farther border of the sandwich-
shaped halfacre of greensward by which their particular avenue ran. "And
there!" His professional eye had noted a big, grey-painted military motor-
lorry, numbered, and lettered "S. Aë. F." Behind the driver's seat towered
the slender T-shaped steel mast of a Field wireless, whose spidery aerials,
pegged to the turf, were in charge of men in képis and blue overalls, while a
non-commissioned officer, wearing the telephone head-band of the
operator, leaned on the elbow-rest of the tripod supporting the apparatus, his
finger on the buzzer-key. Near him his clerk squatted, pencil and pad in
readiness, while at a respectful distance from two oblong patches of white
in the middle of the green plat of turf, several active upright figures in dark
uniforms stood conversing, or walking to and fro.

"Officiers Aviateurs, telegraphists and mechanics of the French Service
Aëronautique"—you are listening to Franky—"tremendously well-
organised compared with our little footling Flying Corps, tinkered fourteen
months ago out of the old Air Battalion of the R. E. These chaps are
Engineers—goin' by the dark red double stripes on their overalls and their
dark blue képis. Some of their machines'll be out for practice. Despatch-
droppin' or bombs. Here's a man with brass on his hat, coming our way....
Takes me for a German soger-orficer I shouldn't wonder!—lots of 'em get
their clothes cut in Bond Street. But though you can hide Allemand legs in
English trousers"—Franky was recovering his customary cheeriness—"and
some of 'em do it uncommon cleverly—you can't deodorise an accent that
hails from Berlin."
The officer approaching—a youthful, upright figure walking quickly,
with the short, springy steps of a man much in the saddle—proved to be
grey-haired and grey-moustached. The double-winged badge of his Service
was embroidered in gold upon the right sleeve of his tunic, and upon the
collar, a single wing in this case, ending in a star. He carried binoculars
suspended from his neck by a rolled-leather thong, and a revolver in a
black-leather case was attached to the belt about his middle. There was
thick white dust upon the legs and uppers of his high polished black boots,
which the grass had scoured from the toes and soles. His bright blue-grey
eyes ran over Franky as the slight soldierly salute was exchanged. He said,
speaking in excellent English:
"If Monsieur, the English officer, will obligingly mention his name,
rank, and regiment, it might be possible to allow him to continue his
promenade with Madame, the invention we are testing being the patent of
his countryman, and already familiar to the Authorities at the British War
Office."

Thus coerced, Franky produced his card, Margot dimpled into smiles,
the polite officer saluted again, introduced himself as Raymond, Capitaine-
Commandant pilot of the —th escadrille, wheeled and walked away. But he
returned to say, this time directly addressing Margot:
"Should Madame la Vicomtesse desire to witness the test of her
countryman's—apparatus, there can be no objection to her doing so. But
that Madame should keep clear of the vicinity of the"—he pointed to the
two oblong strips of white canvas adorning the middle of the expanse of
green,—"the signal, intended for the guidance of the aviator, is of absolute
necessity, Madame must understand!"
"There won't be any...?" Margot was beginning, nervously.
"Mais non, Madame. Pas d'explosion," the officer assured her, and
stiffened to attention facing eastwards, and scanning the sky with eyes that
blinked in the dazzling glare of early noon. For the droning whirr of a plane
just then reached them, drowning the sign of the hot south breeze that
rustled in the tops of the acacias and oaks, ilexes and poplars, that rose
about the arena of open ground....

CHAPTER V
THE BIRD OF WAR

"The avion comes from Drancy." The speaker looked back at Margot as he
focussed his binoculars. "It is not one of our Army machines, but a British
monoplane built by your countryman and fitted with the invention whose
usefulness we are here to test." He continued: "Should the officier-pilote in
charge of the—apparatus—and who for the time being represents an enemy

—succeed in poising"—he hesitated a bare instant—"for a stipulated
number of moments over the target—those two lengths of white canvas
approximating on the grass represent the target—he scores a bull's-eye."
He blinked a little, and before Franky's mental vision rose the
aggregation of Government buildings near the Carrefour des Cascades,
marked "Magazins et depôts" on Bædeker's maps.
"He scores a bull's eye," resumed the speaker. "He has already paid
one visit of the requisite duration to an address near the Porte
d'Aubervilliers." Franky had a mental vision of the array of big, bloated
gasometers pertaining to the Strasbourg Railway Yards. "He has made a
similar call at a point indicated between the station of the Batignolles and
the station of the Avenue de Clichy"—the well-preserved teeth of the officer
showed under the grey moustache as he smiled, and Franky had another
vision of the huge Gare aux Marchandises tucked in the angle between the
Railway of the Geinture and the Western Railway lines, as the speaker went
on suavely "and the target succeeding this will be the last. It is situated on
the Champ de Manoeuvres at Issy. The wireless-telegraph operator of my
escadrille informs me that two bull's eyes have already been registered—
which for your countryman's invention presages well."
Franky, with British plumpness, queried:
"And the invention? Some new bomb-dropping device—planned to get
rid of the way the engine always puts on 'em? If the English inventor-fellow
has done that, his goods are worth buying, I should say!"
Raymond, Capitaine-Commandant, answered as the droning song
from the sky grew louder:
"Of certainty, Monsieur, if his invention prove worth buying, my
Government will undoubtedly purchase what has already been unavailingly
offered to yours. It is our custom to examine and test, closely and

exhaustively, new things that are offered. But what would you? We seek the
best for France."
"He isn't flying his aëroplane himself, is he? Or working his own
invention, whatever it may be?"
"But no, Madame! One of our* Officiers-Aviateurs* is acting as pilot,
a skilled mechanic of our Service occupies the observer's place. Despite the
Entente Cordiale—the happy relations prevailing between my country and
England—it would hardly be convenable or discreet to permit even an
Englishman"—the tone of graceful, subtle irony cannot be conveyed by pen
or type—"even an Englishman to fly over Paris, or any other fortified city
of France. But see! In the sky to the north-east—above that silvery puff of
vapour—arrives now the avion built and christened by your countryman."
Margot asked, narrowing her beautiful eyes as she searched out the
darkish speck upon the hot blue background:
"The plane, you mean. What does he call it?"
Raymond answered without removing his eyes from his binoculars:
"Madame, he calls it 'The Bird of War.'"
The tuff-tuff of a motor-cycle sounded faintly in the distance, as the
resonant vibrating noise of the aëroplane came more triumphantly out of the
hot blue sky. Save for a scintillating white reflection to the north that might
have been the crystal dome of the great big Palm House in the Jardin
d'Acclimatation, and that unavoidable, useful ugliness, the gilded lantern of
the Tour Eiffel, thrusting up into the middle distance over the delicately-
rounded masses of new foliage upon the right-hand looking east, the glory
and shame and magnificence and squalor of the Queen City of Cities might
have lain a hundred leagues away, so ringed-in by delicate austere brown of
serried tree-trunks, rising above rich clumps of blossoming lilac, syringa,

yellow azalea, and pink, mauve, and snowy rhododendron, was the spacious
green arena wherein Franky and Margot were destined to play their part.
Now, followed by the wide-winged shadow that the sun of high noon
threw almost directly beneath her, darkening drifting cloud, and open city
spaces, passing over breasting tree-tops and wide stretches of municipal
greensward, the Bird of War drew nearer and more near.... And glancing up
as the portentous flying shadow suddenly blotted out the sunlight, Franky
realised that the two-seater monoplane was hovering, and buzzing as she
hovered, like a Brobdingnagian combination of kite-hawk, dragon-fly, and
bumblebee.
He pulled out a pair of vest-pocket field-glasses and scanned her as she
hung there, gleaming in the sunlight, at a height of perhaps five hundred
feet above the white cloths on the grass. He could make out the Union Jack
on her underwings, the huge black raking capitals of her name 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
aëroplane.

"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 aëroplane
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 aëroplane.... 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
Aëronautique, and stowed away behind the big grey telegraph-car, in the
recesses of which the telescopic steel mast and aërials of the wireless had
been snugly tucked away. The mechanics in képis and overalls had stowed

themselves away inside the camion; the wireless operator, a képi 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
Aëronautique 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 aëroplane...." 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 Aëronautique.... 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 Vendôme." 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 Vendôme, 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 it and bared her
breast to the eager mouth, a strange thrill went through Franky. A dimness
came before his vision, and it was as though those dimpled hands plucked
at his heart. He suffered a sudden revulsion strange in a young man so
modern, up-to-date, and beautifully tailored. He knew that he longed for a
son most desperately. And the devil of it was—Margot did not.

CHAPTER VII
THE CONSOLATRIX

Thus, Franky got up and moved away, driven by the stinging cloud of
thoughts that pursued and battened on him, and presently found himself
following a stream of people up a flight of marble steps, and under an
imposing portico that ended in a turnstile and a National Collection of
Paintings and Sculptures.
Wandering through a maze of long skylighted galleries where the
master-works of Modern Art are conserved and cherished, he was to
encounter the thought that haunted him in a myriad of images, wrought by
the chisel, the brush, the burin, and the graving-tool in marble or bronze,
upon canvas or panel, in ivory, or silver, or enamel, or gold.
A sculptured Hagar mourning by the side of her dying Ishmael caught
his eye as he entered the first gallery. Farther on, Eve after the Fall lifted the
infant Cain to receive the kiss of Adam, homing to his shack of green
branches at the end of the labouring day. And a shag-thighed, curly-horned

Pan romped with a litter of sturdy bear-cubs, and medallions and panels of
childhood were everywhere.
It was the same in the galleries devoted to painting. A Breton
christening-party, depicted with the roughness that hides consummate
mastery of technique, trudged along a snowy coast-road towards a little
chapel near the seashore. The young mother in her winged starched cap and
bodice of black velvet, yet pale from the ordeal of anguish, walked between
her smiling gossips, carrying her new-born infant, chrysalis-like in its linen
swaddlings, to be made into a good Christian by M. le Curé. And seated on
a broken throne of red granite beneath the towering propylæum of a ruined
Egyptian temple, whose colonnades of lotus columns, and walls painted
with processions of hierophants offering incense to bird or beast-headed
deities, and bewigged dancers and musicians ministering to the pleasures of
long-eyed kings, receded down long perspectives into distance, a Woman,
young and slender and draped in a long blue cloak over a white robe, gazed
downwards at a naked Child sleeping upon her knees. And about the downy
temples of the Child shone a slender ring of mystic brightness, and another,
more faint, haloed the chastely beautiful head of the Mother bending above.
Another canvas, austere and gorgeous, with the marvellous blues and
emeralds and rich deep crimsons of old Byzantine ornament in relief against
a background of dull tawny gold, showed the same maternal figure, far
older and in darker draperies, seated upon a chair of wrought ivory upon a
daïs, looking outward and upward with deep eyes of unfathomable
tenderness and sorrow, and pale hands lifted in supplication to that Heaven
whither Her Son ascended after His Victory over Death. Across the knees of
the Consolatrix Afflictorum a mourning mother lay prone and tearless. And
at the feet of the Virgin, outstretched amidst the scattered petals of some

fallen roses, you saw the nude, beautiful body of a male child of some three
years old.

But little of the inner meaning of Bouguereau's great picture filtered
through Franky's honest brown eyes to the mind that lay somewhere behind
them. But he realised that for the grieving woman who had borne a son and
lost him there was no more joy in the world.
The Child of that Woman upon whose knees she leaned her breaking
heart had lived to attain to the perfect ripeness of glorious Manhood. But
then.... Franky followed the lines of the dark, downward-drifting veil up to
the rapt Mother-face with the sorrowful, close-folded mouth and the deep,
fathomless eyes, and remembered what had happened to Her Son.

"Beg pardon!" he found himself muttering between his teeth. His hand went
up, and he had bared his sleek brown head before he knew. This wasn't a
Roman Catholic Church, anyway ... there was no obligation even to appear
respectful; France had long ago kicked over the traces of Religion—all
French people were Freethinkers in these days. Telling himself this, Franky
did not replace the shiny topper. One rapid glance to right and left had
shown him that the gallery was nearly empty; the few visitors it contained
were too far distant to have observed the action. Except, possibly, one
person, a lean, short, elderly man in shabby black, who stood some paces
behind, a little to the left of Franky, holding a shovel-brimmed round-
crowned beaver with both hands against his sunken chest as he gazed with
bright, absorbed eyes at the wonderful rapt face of the Consoler; his lips
moving rapidly as he whispered to himself, not breaking off or twitching a
muscle because Franky had glanced round:

Franky glanced round again, and this time encountered the oddly
young eyes of his neighbour, looking from a brown, deeply wrinkled visage
framed in thickly growing, straight black hair, heavily streaked with white.
"Monsieur is a lover of Art?"
Undoubtedly a Frenchman, he addressed Franky in cultured English,
with a tone and manner excellently graced. The vivid clearness of his
amber-coloured eyes, set in the now smiling mask of walnut-brown
wrinkles, was attractive. And Franky answered, unconsciously warming to
the look and smile:
"Must say I hardly know. Things that clever, intellectual people go into
raptures over, bore me simply stiff. Other things—things they howl down—
go straight to the spot, you see. And all I can say when I'm hauled over the
coals for liking rubbish is, that the rubbish is good enough for this child."
"I comprehend. Monsieur has the courage of his convictions. It is a
quality rare in these days. And—this painting particularly appeals to
Monsieur? May one be pardoned for asking why?"
The voice was suave, but it somehow compelled an answer. Franky,
with an indistinct remembrance of viva voce examinations awakening in
him, cleared his throat and fell back a pace or two.... Well set up and well-
bred, well-groomed and well-dressed, his figure, beside that other in the
priestly soutane of rusty alpaca, short enough to reveal coarse ribbed
stockings of black yarn, and cracked prunella shoes with worn steel
buckles, made a contrast sufficiently quaint to provoke a stare of curiosity,
had any observer passed just then. But standing together on the beeswaxed
floor at the upper end of the long, bright, skylighted gallery, the Guardsman
and his temporary acquaintance were as private as it is possible to be in a
public place.

Thus, at the cost of a heightened complexion and an occasional
stammer, Franky explained himself. The painting appealed to him because
it recalled a Bible story—made familiar to Franky by reason of having
swotted it at School for Sunday Ques. with other fellows of the Fifth in
Greyshott's time. Also, on the wind-up Sunday of his, Franky's, Last Term,
having passed for the Army with the dev—hem!—of a lot of trouble—a
beastly epidemic of diphtheria and scarlet fever having broken out among
the children of the Windsor poor, the Head had preached from the text in
Big Chapel. And the text went something like this:
"A Voice in Rama was heard, of lamentation and mourning: Rachel
bewailing her children: and would not be comforted because they are not."
The haggard, beautiful, tearless Rachel of the picture hadn't bucked at
the disfigurement and the pain and the danger of child-bearing. She had
welcomed them for the sake of the kid.... It was a thundering pity he hadn't
lived—in Franky's opinion; "woman jolly well deserved to have been let
keep that clinking fine boy to rear."
"I comprehend." The clear eyes flashed into Franky's, the withered
brown mask was alight with sympathetic intelligence. "To Monsieur, an
English officer and a member of the Protestant Church of England, that
woman who leans her bursting heart upon the knees of the Mother of
Consolation is Rachel." He quoted:
"'Vox in Rama audita est, ploratus el ululatus: Rachel plorans filios
suos: et noluit consolari, quia non sunt.'"
"That's it!" Franky nodded, admitting candidly: "Though I always was
a duffer at Latin, and we weren't taught at School to pronounce it—quite in
that way."
Said the clear-eyed old man, whose dark wrinkled throat displayed no
edge of linen above the plain circular collar of the soutane, only a

significant border of purple from which two widish lappets of the same
colour depended beneath the peaked and mobile chin, and who might have
been a prelate of sorts, had it not been understood of simple Franky that the
State had abolished the Catholic religion and banished all priests, monks,
and nuns from France.
"The Italianate Latin puzzles you.... It is—slightly different to the
Latin they taught you at Eton? Hein? When I lived in England—not so long
ago—I counted several brave Eton fellows among my acquaintances. And
their mental attitude with regard to the language of Virgil, Horace, and
Tacitus was precisely that of Monsieur."
He chuckled, and his oddly young eyes twinkled quite gaily as he
pulled out a battered little silver snuff-box and helped himself, wrinkling his
thin hooked nose with evident enjoyment. As he dusted the pungent brown
grains from his lappets with a coarse blue-checked cotton handkerchief, an
amethyst ring on the wrinkled hand flashed pink and violet in the light.
"To Monsieur who is doubtless familiar with the Scriptures in
Tyndall's translation, I might suggest that the Latin of the Ancient Romans
should be pronounced in the Roman style! But Monsieur will pardon this
tone of the pedagogue. I will not 'bore you stiff' with a classical disquisition.
Permit me to thank you for your amiable compliance with the request of an
old man, and to wish you good-day."
He combined apology, farewell, and dismissal in a courtly little bow,
and as though undoubting that the other would pass on, plunged again into
the picture. But Franky lingered to say, awkwardly:
"Perhaps ... If you don't mind...."
"Hein? ..."
The keen eyes reverted to his embarrassed face instantly.
"What if I do not mind? ... There is something you desire to ask me?"

"Well, yes!" Franky admitted. "Don't quite pipe why, but I rather
cotton to hearing your version.... Of the meaning of that picture, you know!
..."
"Yes—yes! I understand! ..." The vivid eyes flashed piercingly into
Franky's, and leaped back to the great glorious canvas within the stately
frame. "To you who were once a boy at Eton that woman who has no more
tears to shed is Rachel of Rama.... To me, once Seminarist of the Institut
Catholique, as to others of my holy faith and sacred calling—she is France
—our beloved France, who leans upon the knees and against the bosom of
the Catholic Church in her bereavement—mourning with anguish
unutterable her children who are dead.... Dead to Faith, dead to the Spiritual
Life—members separated from the Body of Christ by their own choice as
by the act of Government. Lost!—unless the ray of Divine Grace find and
touch them in their self-made darkness, and they repent, and turn
themselves to Christ again!"
Franky said, with wholly lovable banality:
"Rather sweepin', but natural conclusion, from a religious point o'
view. Still, when a whole nation gets up like one man and bally well chucks
a Religion, there must be something jolly off-colour and thundering rotten
about that Religion, don't you know?"
"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 très sensée—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 Bergère
or the Théâtre 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 tempt
the yellow-and-black marauders to the board. And yet from the soup to the
entremets, Franky listened in dour and smileless silence, unable to conjure
up a grin at the sharpest of the Goblin's witticisms, or swell the guffaw that
invariably followed the naughtiest of her double-entendres.
"Off colour, what? ..." his crony Courtley queried in a sympathetic
undertone, catching a glimpse of Franky's cheerless countenance behind the
bare, convulsed back and snowy heaving shoulders of Lady Beauvayse,
who occupied the intervening chair.
"Putridly off colour.... Walked in the Bois, and got a touch of the sun, I
fancy!" Franky whispered back too loudly, drawing upon himself the
Goblin's equivoque:
"The sun or the daughter, did you say, Lord Norwater? Dear me!" the
Goblin shrilled; "you're actually blushing! You've revived a long-lost Early
Victorian art."
"Was blushing really an art with the ladies of that dim and distant era?"
asked the friendly Brayham, not in the least comprehending Franky's
discomfiture, yet desirous of diverting the Goblin's glittering scrutiny from
her victim's scarlet face.
"It was the art that concealed Heart—or assumed it!" Lady Wathe
retorted, with a peal of elfish laughter, turning her tight-skinned, large-eyed,
wide-mouthed ugliness upon the speaker, and nodding her little round head

until the huge and perfectly matched diamonds of the triple-rayed tiara that
crowned her scanty henna-dyed tresses flashed blinding sparks of violet and
red and emerald splendour in the mellow-toned radiance of the electric
lights.
The Goblin had meant nothing, Franky assured himself, as the angry
blood stopped humming in his ears, and his complexion regained its normal
shade. The bad pun that had bowled him over had possibly been uttered
without malicious intent.... Yet Lady Wathe rented a gorgeous suite upon
the floor below the Norwater apartments, and one of her three lady's-maids
might have been pumping Pauline.... What was she saying? ... Why was
everybody cackling? ...
The Goblin was launched upon a characteristic story. Its dénouement
—worked up with skill and related with point—evoked peal upon peal of
laughter from the guests at Brayham's table, with the sole exception of
Franky, whom the anecdote found sulky and left glum. He said to himself
that if Lady Beauvayse, née Miss Sadie J. Sculpin of New York, sole child
and heiress of a Yankee who had made millions out of Chewing Gum, chose
to forget her position as the wife of a British Peer, and mother of his
children, by Jove! and scream at such nastiness, it was her look-out. If the
big red-blond man who sat on Franky's right shook with amusement, as he
recapitulated the chief points of the story for the benefit of the girl who sat
next him, it was his affair. But that the Saxham, an unmarried girl, who
oughtn't to see the bearings of such a tale, should openly revel in its
saltness, made Franky feel sick—on this particular night.
He realised that he detested the Saxham girl, one of Margot's chosen
Club intimates, more fervently than even Tota Stannus or Joan Delabrand;
more thoroughly than Rhona Helvellyn; only little less heartily than he
hated Cynthia Charterhouse. Big, bold, galumphing, provocative—in fact,

so much IT that you couldn't overlook her—he found her more unpleasantly
attractive than usual, in a bodice that was no more than a fold of
shimmering orange stuff above the waist—tossing the panache of ospreys
that startlingly crowned her, offering up her persistant illusion perfumes for
the delectation of the appreciative male.
Only look at her, ready to climb into her neighbour's pocket. Leaning
her round white elbows on the guipure table-cloth, half-shutting those long
greeny-brown Egyptian eyes of her, wreathing her long thick white neck to
send a daring challenge into the face of the laughing man. A big man, bright
red-haired, blue-eyed, and broad-chested, showing every shining tooth in
his handsome grinning head....
"She's screaming, isn't she, dear Lady Beau?" Thus the Saxham to her
employer, friend, and ally, across the silver bowls of Rayon d'Or roses, her
naked shoulder brushing the coat-sleeve of her neighbour, the big rufous
man. And Lady Beau gushed back:
"In marvellous form to-night.... Don't you think so, Count? Do agree
with us!" and the big man agreed, with the accent of the German
Fatherland:
"She is kolossal.... Wunderlich! ..."
"Who's the German next me—big beggar Lady Beau and Miss Saxham
are gushing over?" Franky presently telegraphed to Courtley behind the
charming American's accommodating back. And Courtley signalled in
reply:
"Von Herrnung. German Count of sorts—Engineer and Flieger officer.
Son of an Imperial Councillor, and cousin to Princess Willy of Kiekower
Oestern—really rather an interestin' beast in his way. Made a one-stop flight
to Paris from Hanover in April, with an Albatros biplane. Previously won an
event in the Prinz Heinrich Circuit Competition." He added: "We can't

decently blink their progress in military aviation. It's one o' them there fax
which the brass-hats at the War Office pretend to regard as all my eye. Yet
they know the Fatherland—or if they don't they oughter! Good-lookin' chap
this. Not over thirty, I should guess him. Always dodging in and out of the
German Embassy. The Goblin frightful nuts on him.... Goin' to steer him
through the next London Season—suppose he's lookin' out for a moneyed
wife!"
"Hope he gets her!" Franky mentally commented. But he looked with
new interest at his big blond German neighbour, mentally calculating that
with all that bone, brawn, and muscle, von Herrnung couldn't tip the scale at
less than sixteen stone.
Small-boned himself and of stature not above the medium, Franky
appreciated height and size in other men. And von Herrnung was
undeniably a son of Anak. The noiseless, demure waiters who paused
beside his chair to refill his glass or offer him dishes were dwarfed by his
seated presence to the proportions of little boys.
Once, when there was a momentary bustle at the principal entrance to
the now crowded restaurant, and a party of men, ceremoniously ushered by
M. Spitz in person, passed up the central gangway between the rows of
glittering tables, shielded by glass-panelled screens framed in oxidised
silver, and crowded now with gossiping, laughing, gobbling patrons—men
and women of varied nationalities, representing the elite of the fashionable
world, von Herrnung rose and remained imperturbably standing at the
salute, his eyes set and fixed, his head turned rigidly towards the personage,
semi-bald, stout, with a prominent under jaw and a hard official stare
rendered glassier by a frameless square monocle, and showing beneath the
open front of a loose military mantle a star upon the left side of his evening

dress-coat, and the glitter of an Order suspended from a yellow riband about
his thick bull-neck.
"The German Ambassador, Baron von Giesnau," Lady Wathe returned
to a question from Lady Beauvayse, as the portly official figure creaked by,
leaving a whiff of choice cigars and a taint of parfum très persistant, lifting
three fingers of a white-gloved hand in acknowledgment of his
countryman's salute, and von Herrnung unstiffened and dropped back into
his chair. "No! ... I'm not sure where the Emperor is...." She added, with one
of her laughs and a shrug of her thin vivacious shoulders: "Ask Count von
Herrnung—he's sure to know!"
"Gnädige Gräfin," von Herrnung returned when interrogated, "I am
not able to answer your question." He shrugged his broad shoulders and
showed his white teeth. "Unser Kaiser is—who shall say where? At the Hof
... possibly at Homburg.... Stop! ... Now I remember! Seine Majestät is at
Kiel...." He continued, arranging with a big white hand displaying a
preposterously long thumb-nail a corner of his glittering, tightly rolled
moustache: "At Kiel ... ach, yes! he has been there since the 25th of June.
Entertaining the British and American Ambassadors, visiting the
Commander-in-Chief of your British Squadron, superintending the
armament of one of our own new battle-cruisers,—seeing put into her those
great big Krupp guns that are to sink your super-Dreadnoughts by-and-by!"
The deliberately-uttered words of the last sentence dropped into a little
pool of chilly silence. He had spoken with perfect gravity, and the
Englishmen who heard him stared before they grinned. Then the women
shrieked in ecstasies of amusement—the Goblin's laugh overtopping all.
"For he hates us! ... You can't think how he hates us! ..." she crowed,
writhing her lean little throat, clasped by seven rows of shimmering stones,

wagging her Kobold's head, crowned by its diadem of multi-coloured fire.
"Tell us how you hate us, Tido! ... Do—pray do!"
"I hate you, ach yes! ... All German officers are like that—particularly
the officers of our Field Flying Service," gravely corroborated von
Herrnung. "We have many pleasant acquaintanceships with men and
women of British nationality, but your race—the Anglo-Saxon branch of the
great Teutonic oak-tree, it is natural that we should hate! For that Germany
must expand upon the west and north-west as well as south and east, or
suffocate, is certain. She must wield the trident of Sea Power; she must
transform the map of Europe. She must exploit and disseminate German
trade and German Kultur; therefore, as the British, more than any other
nation, stands in the way of German development, we look forward to the
Day when we shall exterminate you and take our right position as masters
of the world!"
The women screamed anew at this. The men were now laughing in
good earnest. Franky found it impossible to restrain the convulsions that
shook him in his chair. Purple-faced Brayham tried to speak, but broke
down wheezing and spluttering. The Goblin shrilled:
"Tell them, Tido.... Please tell them! ... Do—ha! ha! tell them how
you're spoiling for a scrimmage with us! Show them your thumb-nail, pray
do!"
Thus adjured, the big German solemnly extended his left hand for
general inspection. The pointed, carefully-manicured thumb-nail was at
least two inches long. Its owner said with perfect gravity:
"This is the badge of a Society of England-haters, chiefly Prussian
military officers, young men of noble birth, bound by an oath of blood. This
mark we carry to distinguish us. It is a sign of our dedication, to remind us
of the purpose for which we are set apart." He added: "Count Zeppelin

himself set the fashion of the uncut thumb-nail. It will be cut when the Day
comes, and it has been dipped in blood!"
"In blood—how beastly!" said the Saxham girl, curling the corners of
her wide red mouth contemptuously. "What a horrid crowd your noble
young Prussian officers must be! And when is the dipping to come off?"
Her voice was deep and resonant as a masculine baritone, and of so
carrying a quality that Franky started as though the words had been spoken
at his ear.
"Gnädige Fräulein," von Herrnung answered, "I have already told you.
When the Day comes for which we are preparing. When the great German
nation shall abandon Christianity—cast off the rusty fetters of Morality and
Virtue—call on the Ancient God of Battles—and beat out the iron sceptre of
World Power with sword-blows upon the anvil of War."
"When we're all to be exterminated, he means!" Lady Wathe gasped
behind her filmy handkerchief. "Tido, you're too absolutely screaming! Do
say why your noble young Prussians keep us waiting? ..." And von
Herrnung answered composedly:
"Because we are not yet ready. We shall not be perfectly ready before
the spring of 1916."
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 Aëronautique? Did the invention they
were testing come up to expectations? .... Did the English aërial 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 Majestät 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 Mérite."
"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. "Gnädige Gräfin, 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 Cæsar'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."
"Ah, yes, to die is a hellish bore!" agreed von Herrnung, contemplating
his obese and purple host with a cruel smile. "But I and my friends have no
Hell, and we have done away with the myth of Heaven. To dissolve and be
reabsorbed into the elements—that is the only after-life that is possible for a
Superman."
"You'd hardly call it Life, would you?" came unwillingly from Franky.
For von Herrnung's eyes seemed to challenge his own.
"'Imperial Cæsar, dead and turned to clay,' what?" quoted Courtley, to
whom von Herrnung transferred his smiling regard.
"I venture to hope that my clay may serve a more patriotic purpose
than stopping a draught-hole," said the German, carefully fingering the tight
roll of glittering red hair upon his upper-lip. "It may be baked into a
sparking-plug for the aëro-motor of one of our Zeppelin dirigibles—the
mysterious Z. X., for instance, in whose trial trip from Stettin across the
Baltic to Upsala in Sweden you were so keenly interested some months ago.
Or some of my body's chemical constituents may pass into the young tree
beneath which my ashes will be deposited. If beech or spruce, then I may
furnish ribs or struts for an Aviatik or a Taube. But the best way of
continuing to exist after one is dead is to leave plenty of vigorous sons
behind one. To perpetuate the race"—he continued speaking to Lord
Norwater, who had flushed and moved restlessly—"that is the high and
noble obligation Duty imposes upon the German Superman."

"You'll have to hurry up your matrimonial arrangements, Tido,"
interposed the Goblin, with her cackle, "if your family is to tot up to a
respectable number before the year 1916."
"You mean that I may get killed in our great War of Extermination?
That is possible," agreed von Herrnung. "Our Flying Service is not a
profession conducive to long life. Many of our keenest officers remain
unmarried for that reason. The Emperor would prefer each of us to marry,
or at least adopt a son. For myself, I would like to steal one of your splendid
British boys and rear him up as a true German——"
Something sharp and keen and burning stabbed through Franky's brain
to his vitals. It would have been a relief to have insulted von Herrnung. He
set his teeth, fighting with the desire, as the guttural voice went on:
"I would teach him to hate you...." The speaker sucked in his breath as
though he relished the idea exceedingly. "You cannot think how he would
hate you!—my German-British Superman."
"By-the-by, the literary genius of Dreadnought type who invented the
Superman," began Courtley, who had been peaceably nibbling salted
pistachios, "can't pronounce his name for ginger-nuts, but it sounds
something like a sneeze——"
Von Herrnung said stiffly:
"You doubtless speak of our great Nietzsche, whose triumphant
thought has crushed all other mental systems."
"Quite so. Must be the chap!" said Courtley. "That is, if he died a
lunatic.... But possibly I'm mixing him up with some other philosopher of
the crushing kind?"
"No, no. It is true," corroborated von Herrnung. "The brain of
Nietzsche gave way under the terrific strain of incessant creation. How
should it be otherwise?" He became ponderous, even solemn, when he

descanted upon the literary idol of Modern Germany. "How should it indeed
be otherwise?" he demanded. "And was it not the fitting crown of such a
career—the appropriate end to such a life-work?—to evolve the Superman
—and die!"
"Quite so, quite so!" Courtley agreed. He smoothed his well-trimmed
beard with his broad hand, and his eyes assumed a meditative expression.
"Rather tantalising—always hearing about Germany's Supermen and never
seeing any. What sort of chaps are they? I'm really keen to know."
"You have not to go far," returned von Herrnung. His fine florid
complexion had suffered a deteriorating change. Savage anger boiled in his
blood. He had thrown the iron gauntlet of German military preparedness in
the faces of these cool, well-bred, smiling English, and brandished the iron
thunderbolt of German intellectual supremacy—and with this result—that
they took his deadly earnestness as jest. "Kreutzdonnerwetter! these English
officers.... The pig-dogs! the sheep's heads! ..." He swallowed down the
abusive epithets he would have liked to pitch at them, and stiffened his huge
frame arrogantly as he stared in Courtley's simple face:
"Aber—you have not far to go, to visualise the type conceived by
Nietzsche. I and my comrades—we are Supermen!"
"Thanks for explaining, frightfully!" said Courtley with artless
gratitude, as Brayham purpled apoplectically and even the Goblin tittered
behind her fan. "Shall know what to ticket you now, you know. Thanks very
much!"
"You have read Nietzsche?" the sailor's victim queried.
Said Courtley, with his best air of frank simplicity:
"His works were recommended to me by my doctor, when I had a bad
attack of insomnia, about a year ago. Ordered a volume of 'Thus Spake Zara
Somebody.' Half a chapter did the business. No insomnia since then. Sleep

like a mite in a Gorgonzola, the instant my head touches the pillow—never
read another word. But heaps of friends in the Fleet'll be wanting to borrow
the book presently, depend on it. For we'll all be too scared of Germany to
sleep—in the year 1916."
Laughter broke forth. Lady Wathe gasped, dabbing her tearful eyes
with a lace-bordered handkerchief:
"Oh, Tido! will you dead-in-earnest Germans never learn what pulling
a leg means?"
"Ach ja! I should have understood!" He had stared, frowned, and
reddened savagely. Now, with a palpable effort, his equanimity was
regained. He turned with a smiling remark to Patrine Saxham, as Lady
Beauvayse breathed in Courtley's ear:
"You perfect pet! How I love you for that!"
"Man simply suffering for a set-down. Good egg, you!" murmured
Franky in the other ear of the Commander.
"Felt sorry for him. Had to do something—common humanity!"
rejoined Courtley, eating more and more pistachios. "Seems as over-
crammed with their Kultur as a pet garden-titmouse with coco-nut. Vain
too, but that's the fault of the women. Lord! how they gush at those big,
good-looking blighters. See the Saxham!—ready to climb into his
waistcoat-pocket and stop there. Would, too, if she wasn't built on
Dreadnought lines herself."
She was laughing into von Herrnung's smiling visage as he offered her
a light from his cigar. For with the arrival of coffee and liqueurs, the
fragrance of choice Havana and Turkish had begun to mingle with the tang
of Mocha, the heady bouquet of choice wines, and the odours of fruit and
flowers. The screens of frosted glass were rearranged,—the ladies had
produced their cigarette-cases,—of gold with the monogram of the Goblin

set in diamonds; of platinum adorned with turquoises and pearls wrought
into the Beauvayse initial and coronet; and of humbler tortoiseshell, bearing
in fanciful golden letters the name "Patrine"——
"Patrine..."
"The Saxham girl" had taken the tortoiseshell cigarette-case from the
front of her low-cut, sleeveless bodice. Von Herrnung had leaned towards
her, boldly exploring with his eyes the bosom where the trinket had been
hiding, and read the golden letters. He smiled as he met her puzzled eyes,
saying:
"'Patrine' is your name.... Now I know it I will not forget it! Tell
me!"—he spoke in lowered tones—"why do you carry your cigarette-case
just in that place?"
She laughed, half-shutting her long eyes and slightly lifting her big
white shoulders. "Simply for convenience—when I'm in evening kit.
Dressmakers don't allow us poor women pockets in these days."
"It may be so!" As von Herrnung spoke with a calculated roughness
that he had found useful in dealing with many women, he took the
cigarette-case from her, momentarily covering her hand with his own. As
his curving fingers touched her palm, he felt the soft warm flesh wince at
the contact. Her black brows drew together, her sleepy agate eyes shot him
a hostile sidewise glance.
"I have not offended?" he whispered in some anxiety. And she
answered in a louder tone, under cover of the talk, and laughter of the
others:
"No! ... Only—I hate to be touched, that's all."
He smiled under the crisp tight roll of his red moustache, and his large,
well-cut nostrils dilated and quivered.

"One day you will not hate it. I will wait for that day. But—about your
cigarette-case—you do not now tell me the truth! ... The real reason is more
subtle. You carry that thing there—under your corsage—to make live men
envious of an object that cannot feel!"
"Really! ... What a lot you must know about women!"
The words were mocking, but the voice that uttered them was big,
warm, and velvety. Far above the ordinary stature of womanhood—you
remember that Franky regarded her as a great galumphing creature—her
head would yet have been much below the level of von Herrnung's, but for
the height of the extraordinary diadem or turban that crowned her masses of
dull cloudy-black hair. Folds of vivid emerald-green satin rose above a wide
band of theatrical gilt tinsel, set with blazing stage rubies, and above the
centre of the wearer's low, wide brow a fan-shaped panache of clipped
white ospreys sprang, boldly challenging the eye. Thrown with royal
prodigality upon the back of the chair she occupied was an opera-mantle of
cotton-backed emerald-green velvet lavishly furred with ermine and sables
that were palpably false as the garish gold and jewels of the diadem that
crowned her, yet became her big, bold, rather brazen beauty as well as
though the Siberian weasel and the Arctic marten had been trapped and
slain to deck and adorn her, instead of the white rabbit of ordinary
commerce and the domestic pussy-cat.

CHAPTER XI
PATRINE SAXHAM

Who was the girl—the woman rather—who diffused around her so
powerful a magnetic aura, whom prodigal Nature had dowered with such
opulence of bodily splendour, that cheap, tawdry clothes and ornaments
borrowed from her a magnificence that conjured up visions of the
Salammbo of Flaubert, gleaming moon-like through her gold and purple
tissues—of Anatole France's Queen of Sheba treading the lapis-lazuli and
sardonyx pavements of King Solomon's palace in her jewelled sandals of
gilded serpent-skin, darting fiery provocations from under the shadow of
her painted lashes towards the Wise One rising from his cushions of purple
byssus, between the golden lions of his ivory throne?
What a voice the creature had! thought von Herrnung. Soft and velvety
like that dead-white skin of hers. The tortoiseshell case he held in his big
palm still glowed with the rich vital warmth of her. His blood tingled and
raced in his veins; his hard, brilliant stare grew languorous, and his mouth
relaxed into sensuousness. He said almost stupidly, so keen was his
enjoyment:
"You English ladies smoke a great deal, I think."
"Why should we leave all the pleasant vices to the men?"
She asked the queer question, not defiantly, but bluntly. Her strange
eyes laughed a little, as she saw Franky wince. "Lord Norwater hates me.
Well, that's about the limit!" she told herself. "And I helped on his love-

affair for little Margot's sake!" "I beg your pardon, Lord Norwater! You
were saying something? ..."
"You're an Advanced Thinker, aren't you, Miss Saxham? At least, my
wife tells me so," Franky began. "Well, I'm not! But I've got my doubts as
to whether vice is pleasant, for one thing—and for another, whether the
general run of women in these days aren't quite as vicious as the men?"
"He wants to be nasty.... Poor boy, what have I done to him?" passed
through the brain topped by the bizarre diadem. But before its wearer could
reply, von Herrnung interposed:
"Naturally they are vicious—if they desire to please men. A dash of
vice—that is the last touch to perfect an exquisite woman. It is the chilli in
the mayonnaise, the garlic and citron in the ragoût, the perfume of the
carnation, the patch of rouge that lends brilliance to the eye, the bite in the
kiss! ..."
"The bite in the ... Great Snipe! what an expression!" thought Franky,
whose attack of propriety had reached the acute stage. Patrine Saxham
repeated slowly, and with brows that frowned a little:
"'The bite in the kiss'...."
"You pretend not to understand..." said the guttural voice of von
Herrnung, speaking so that his wine- and cigar-scented breath stirred the
heavy hair that hid her small white ear. "But you are wiser than you would
have me believe. Are you not? Tell me!—am I not right?"
He bent closer, and she broke a web that seemed in the last few
moments to have been spun about her, invisible, delicate, strong, making
captive the body and the mind. Her odd agate-coloured eyes laughed into
his jeeringly. Her wide red mouth curved and split like a ripe pomegranate,
showing the sharp white teeth that, backed by a vigorous appetite and

seconded by a splendid digestion, had done justice to every course of
Brayham's choice menu.
Men always waxed sentimental or enterprising towards the close of a
rattling good dinner. Patrine didn't care, not a merry little hang! They might
say and look what they liked, as long as they kept their hands off. At a
touch, the quick revulsion came.
"You are amused.... I understand...." Von Herrnung spoke between his
teeth, in a tone of stifled anger. "Always to rot; it is your English fashion....
When you encourage a man to make love to you, you are rotting. When you
say sweet things to him—possibly you are rotting too?"
She turned her face away from him, striving to control her irresistible
laughter. In vain; it took her as a sudden gale takes a pennant at the
masthead—seized and shook her—as von Herrnung could have shaken her
had they been alone. He turned savagely from her; she heard him speak to
Brayham, who responded with what-whattings, his fleshy hand to his
deafest ear. Von Herrnung repeated his utterance. Brayham goggled in
astonishment. Courtley murmured to Franky:
"Hear what the blighter's saying.... No keeping him down, is there? ...
Buoyant as one of his own Zeppelins!"
They looked and listened. Brayham's thick bull-neck was shortening as
his shoulders climbed to his mottled ears. They caught a sound between a
snort and a bellow. Then Lady Wathe's diamonds flashed all the colours of
the rainbow as she turned vivaciously to her friend.... Count Tido wanted to
propose a toast, the custom in dear, sentimental Germany.... Why shouldn't
he? Rather amusing. She begged him to go on. Said von Herrnung:
"To-night the laugh goes much against me. I have been most
frightfully rotted. Now, in my country it is the custom when a guest has

been made game of that those who have laughed at him must drink a toast
with him—to show there is no ill-will."
"Never heard of such a custom—and I've lived in Germany a good
deal."
This from Brayham. The German persisted:
"Still, it is a custom, and it may be you will gratify me?" He went on,
now addressing the company generally: "Here at the Spitz they have a
Tokayer that is very old and very excellent. If I might order some? It would
be amusing if you would all join me in drinking to The Day! ..."
The speaker, without waiting consent, beckoned to one of the
attendants. Brayham, his cockatoo-crest of stiff grey hair erect, stared, as at
a new and surprising type of the human kind.
But the words Brayham might have uttered were taken out of his
mouth. A swift glance had passed between the English Naval officer and the
rather stupid, titled young Guardsman occupying the seat left of von
Herrnung. And while the Commander coolly intimated to the advancing
waiter by a sign that his services were not needed, Lord Norwater, lobster-
red and rather flurried, turned to von Herrnung and said, not loudly, yet
clearly enough to be heard by every guest at the table:
"Stop! Sorry to swipe in, Count, but you'd better not order that wine, I
think!"
"You think not?" asked von Herrnung, with coolest insolence.
"I—don't think so. I'm dead-sure!" said Franky, getting redder. "We
Britons laugh at brag and bluffing, and the gassy patriotism shown by some
foreigners we're apt to call bad form. We abuse our Institutions and rag our
Governments—we've done that since the year One—far as I can make out.
And when other people do it we generally sit tight and smile. We've no use

for heroics. But when the pinch comes—it ain't so much that we're loyal.
We're Loyalty. We're IT!"
With all his boggling he was so much in earnest, and with all his
earnestness so absurdly, quaintly slangy, that the listeners, men and women
of British race, whose blood warmed to something in his face and utterance,
were forced to struggle to restrain their mirth. Some inkling of this
increased the speaker's confusion. He cast a drowning glance at his bulwark
Courtley, and Courtley's eye signalled back to his, "Good egg! ... Drive on,
old son!"
"You're a foreigner here, of course ..." Franky pursued before the
German could interrupt him. He appeared oblivious to his own analogous
case. Perhaps for the moment the Hotel Spitz in the Place Vendôme, Paris,
and its gorgeous namesake in the London West End, were confused in his
not too intellectual mind. He went on: "We're ready to make allowances—
too rottenly ready sometimes.... But I read off the iddy-umpties to Full Stop,
a minute back.... Count von Herrnung, when you ask English ladies and
Englishmen—two of 'em in the Service—to drink that toast with you—you
must know you're putting your foot in your hat!"
"Especially," said Courtley, as Franky collapsed, dewy all over and
wondering where his breath had gone to—"especially as—a friend of mine
happens to have heard that toast proposed rather recently during a Staff
banquet at a military headquarters in Germany. And the words, are—not—
quite exactly flavoured to suit the British taste."
"'To the Day of Supremacy. On the Land and on the Sea, under the Sea
and in the Air, Germany Victorious for ever and ever!'" said von Herrnung,
who had got upon his legs, and loomed gigantic over the lace-covered,
flower-decked table, now in the after-dinner stage of untidiness, with its
silver-gilt and crystal dishes of choice fruit and glittering bonbons

disarranged and ravaged, its plates littered, its half-emptied wine-goblets
pushed aside to make room for fragrant, steaming coffee-cups in filigree
holders, and tiny jewel-hued glasses of Maraschino Cusenier, and Père
Kermann. There was a rustle, and a general scraping-back of chairs.
Courtley had also risen, and Lord Norwater. A susurration of excitement
had passed through the long, lofty, brilliant dining-room. People were
getting up from the tables—the pink-and-yellow sheets of Paris Soir, the
late edition of the Daily Mail, and another of the Liberté, were fluttering
from hand to hand.... And the shrill voice of Lady Wathe was heard.

CHAPTER XII
THE GATHERING OF THE STORM

"Sit down, Tido!" said Lady Wathe. "What is the matter with everybody?
What are they talking about? Tell a waiter to get us a paper! What do you
say, Sir Thomas? Of course! Stupid of me to forget. To-day was to be the
official summing-up of the evidence in the Perdroux Murder Case. A French
Jury won't guillotine a woman—you said they wouldn't, Sir Thomas, from
the beginning. But of course the verdict's 'Guilty' for Madame! ..."
Brayham, with a King's Bench cough, admitted that he had few
misgivings as to the ultimate upshot. Upon the waiter's return without a
newspaper, affirming a copy not to be procurable, judicial inquiries elicited
from the man that the general furore for news was less due to popular
interest in the famous cause célèbre than to popular thirst for details with
reference to the Assassinations at Serajevo. Which brought from Lady
Wathe the shrill query:

"Sarajevo—where's Sarajevo? Ask him about the Verdict—I simply
must know!"
The Verdict had been "Not Guilty," according to the waiter.... The
Goblin screamed:
"But she is!—she is! Good heavens, my dear Sir Thomas! Isn't it
murder to riddle an editor to death in his own office, before his
subordinates, with bullets from a revolver you've hidden in your muff?"
Brayham summoned up his best King's Bench manner to answer:
"If he dies—and a jury don't happen to decide that you're innocent—
the evidence is against you, my dear ma'am!"
Lady Wathe's vivacious gestures provoked astounding coruscations
from her panoply of jewels. She had been certain from the first that there
would be no capital sentence. But "Not Guilty." ... Surely it should have
been Mazas for life. Or New Caledonia—didn't they send murderesses to
New Caledonia?
Brayham, with a tone and manner even more deeply tinged with the
King's Bench, begged leave to correct—arah!—his very dear friend's
impression that the blameless and much-tried lady, now probably—aha—
arah!—supping in the company of her husband and her advocate in her own
luxurious dining-room, might, without libel, be called a murderess. Like—
aha!—many other highly-strung women, Madame Perdroux had had
recourse to the revolver as the ultima ratio. But the Verdict pronounced by
the President of the Paris Court of Assize that afternoon had—arah!—
purged——
"Bother the Verdict!" snapped the Goblin.
Brayham, incensed at this irreverence, replied with acrimony. The pair
wrangled as Paris had wrangled since March 16th, while the great, crowded

restaurant buzzed with the name of an obscure town in Eastern Europe
—"Sarajevo, Sarajevo"—tossed and bandied from mouth to mouth.

We have learned to our bitter cost the appalling significance of this crime of
Sarajevo, which had dwarfed in the estimation of the keen-witted Parisians
the most sensational cause célèbre ever tried before a French Criminal
Court.
The Perdroux trial and its probable result had split Paris into hostile
factions. The Press had attacked or defended, lauded or vilified the chief
personages of the drama with tireless energy for weeks. The Verdict of "Not
Guilty" would have caused fierce rioting upon the boulevards this sultry
night of July. Blood would have been spilt between the partisans of
Madame Perdroux and her opponents, but for this unexpected bolt from the
blue.
Berlin had had the story of the assassinations with its breakfast-rolls
and hot creamed coffee. Now, in the blue-white glare of the great electric
arc-lamps of the Paris boulevards, men and women leaned over one
another's shoulders to get a whiff of the big black letters on the displayed
contents-bills; at every kiosk and bookstall the newspaper-vendors were
sold out; much-thumbed copies of the papers were bought by knowing
speculators, to be sold and bought and sold again.
The Kaiser at Kiel was racing his own clipper when the operator of the
Imperial private wireless read a story from the notes of the singing spark
that smote him pale and sick. When his anointed master heard the gory
news, his chief regret seems to have concerned the untimely decease of the
partner of his "life-work." "It will have," he said with bitterness, "to be
begun all over again!"

One wonders, in the blood-red light of four years of dreadful carnage,
seeing Hell and its dark Powers still unchained, and raging on this War-torn
earth of ours—what would have been the nature of the edifice reared by
these two Imperial craftsmen, had the younger not been removed by a
violent and sudden death?
Did the prospect of unlocking—with one touch on an electric button
and the scrawl of a wet pen—the brazen gates of Death and Terror ever
strike cold to the heart of the rufous Hapsburg Archduke? Madness, we
know, is in the blood of his evil-fated House. But, when the shots from a
Bosnian High School student's revolver pierced Franz Ferdinand's brain and
body, was he sane enough to realise that the crime of the Anarchist had
saved his own name from foul, indelible, and hideous infamy? We shall
know when the trumpet of the Archangel sounds the Last Réveillé, and the
grave gives up its dead, and the Sea spews forth its victims, and the secrets
of that deeper abyss, the human heart, are revealed in the sheer, awful Light
that streams from the Throne of God.

CHAPTER XIII
THE SUPERMAN

People had for some time been rising, passing out through the oxidised
silver-framed glass doors of Spitz's big brilliant dining-room; beyond these
the vestibule was now full to the walls, so that its palms and tree-ferns
rocked amidst the billows of a heaving human sea. Many guests lingered in
conversation, standing in groups near the vacated tables. The glitter and
blaze of jewels, adorning bizarre coiffures, bare and powdered throats,

bosoms, arms, and backs,—the dazzling display of brilliantly-hued toilettes,
made an ensemble marvellously gay. And now, returning as they had
arrived, but unattended by M. Spitz, came the party of notables from the
German Embassy, talking together in loud, harsh, Teutonic accents. Von
Herrnung, erect, stiffening to the salute as previously, remained in the rigid
attitude until the Ambassador had passed. But this time the official finger
beckoned. He turned, pushed back his chair, and in a stride, joined the
squat, elderly figure. The yellow-white, heavily-featured face with its stiff
brush of white hair above the square brain-box turned to him, the deeply-
pouched, shrewd grey eyes looked past him to the table he had left. The
coarse mouth under the white moustache with the brushed-up points,
uttered a few emphatic words. Then, with a slight nod, the representative of
the All Highest at Berlin passed on. The swing-doors opened and shut
behind him and his following. And von Herrnung rejoined his party, saying
with a queer, excited breathlessness:
"The ladies will pardon.... His Excellency had something to say!"
The ladies were rising, looking for their theatre-wraps. He deftly lifted
the barbaric garment of green velvet and sable-edged ermines from the back
of Miss Saxham's chair, and, opening it, held it to receive her tall, luxuriant
person, mentally commenting:
"With such hips, such a bosom, and such shoulders, the jade must be
twenty-eight or nine." And remembering how boldly she had said to him
that she liked red men, he thought: "Amusement here.... Nothing needed but
time and opportunity—which this Bosnian affair reduces to a minimum."
"Gnädiges Fraulein will you not put on your mantel?"
She told him that she was too hot. He insisted, with all the Teuton's
dread of chill:

"But it will be cooler in the vestibule, and cooler still when we are
driving. Do we not go on to a theatre? I think Lady Wathe has told me so?"
She shrugged her splendid shoulders.
"Nothing so proper. The Jardin des Milles Plaisirs, on the Champs
Elysées. We're all dead nuts on seeing the new dance from São Paulo. The
thing that has exploded Tango and Maxixe, you know. Look!—the others
are moving. Don't let's lose them! No! I won't take your arm. Please carry
my wrap with your coat."
"I will put my coat on. Then I shall better carry your mantel."
An attendant deftly hung von Herrnung's thin black, sleeveless
garment over his broad shoulders, and gave him his white silk wrap and soft
crush felt. He slipped a coin into the man's palm, its small value being
instantly reflected in the features of the receiver, and moved towards the
swing-doors with Patrine. She said, as a slight block momentarily arrested
their progress:
"What are they all jabbering about? Who has been assassinated? What
has happened at this place with the crack jaw name? ..."
"Sarajevo..." came in von Herrnung's guttural accent.
"Sarajevo.... Not that I know where it is," said the deep warm voice,
that was more like a young man's baritone than a young woman's contralto.
And von Herrnung answered, with a renewal of that tingling thrill:
"Sarajevo is the capital of Bosnia in Eastern Europe. When Austria
annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1909, she made her seat of
Government at Sarajevo. The Slavs grumbled. They wished for union with
Servia—that little nation of pig-breeders! ... They themselves—the
Bosnians—are stupid peasants, dümmer Teufels!—Schafskopfs! They
cultivate their land with the wooden ploughs that were used at the date of
the Trojan War.... But this does not interest you at all, I think?"

"How do you know it doesn't interest me?"
"Because dress and jewellery and amusement are the chief things in
your life, gnädiges Fräulein. You are not even interested in der Politik, or in
the higher Kultur. The social progress of your own country is nothing to
you. You are too——"
"Too frightfully stupid.... Thanks!"
"I did not say too stupid," von Herrnung contradicted. "But if you were
stupid, you are too hellishly handsome for that to matter in the least."
To be called hellishly handsome pleased her. Her eyes gave him a
flashing side-glance. As a surge in the crowd pressed her curving hip
against his tall, muscular body, she took his offered arm with a rough,
brusque grace. They were near the swing-doors when she spoke:
"Tell me about the Sarajevo business.... Who is the official swell the
Trojan ploughmen have hoisted—as Lady Beau would say?"
"I will tell you. It has happened only this morning——"
She felt the man's powerful muscles thrill and become rigid with
suppressed excitement under the hand that rested on his arm.
"Two personages of the highest rank have been horribly assassinated.
The Archduke Franz Ferdinand, Kronprinz of the Imperial House of
Austria, and his wife; you have heard of the Gräfin Sophie Chotek, created
Duchess of Hohenberg? Virtually she was Erzherzogin—Archduchess—but
the wife of the Archduke by a mariage de la main gauche. A morganatic
marriage—such unions have been heard of in your virtuous England."
They had passed the swing-doors now, and mingled, with the crush in
the vestibule. Patrine said, signalling with a pair of long black suéde gloves
and a vanity-bag of gilded metal chain-mail:
"There's Lady Beau. Behind the second column right of the entrance.
And here's Captain Courtley coming to hurry us up!"

Courtley, smiling and unruffled as ever, dodged under the huge roseate
elbow of an immense lady in Oriental kincob tissues. He gave his message,
turned and dived back again. The rich, womanly baritone of Miss Saxham
said, addressing von Herrnung:
"Lady Wathe and Sir Thomas Brayham have gone on in Lady Wathe's
auto-brougham. Lord Norwater has done a bunk. Pretended he had an
appointment; he's been frightfully fed up with all of us this evening. Lady
Beauvayse says her chauffeur is on the string all right, but about a million
cars are ahead of him. Why did your Austrian Archduke and his wife go to
that place in Bosnia if it wasn't healthy for Royalties? Fancy!—they went to
their deaths this Sunday morning! Why does one always forget it's Sunday
in Paris?"
"That English Sunday of yours," exclaimed von Herrnung, "is very
good to forget, I think!"
She gave her deep, soft laugh. He went on rapidly:
"Of the Archduke and the Duchess I tell you, since you have asked
me.... They inspected the troops—regiments of the Austrian garrison. Then
they drove in their automobile along the Appel Quay, towards the Sarajevo
Town Hall. They are passing beneath the shade of an avenue of tamarind
and oak trees when a bomb is thrown at them by a man hidden among the
branches.... The Archduke is very prompt—he wards off the bomb with his
arm. He is not then hurt, nor is the Duchess. But his Adjutant—in the car
behind them—is wounded in the neck. When they arrive at the Town Hall
the Mayor commences the address of welcome. To him Franz Ferdinand
says angrily: 'Halt den Mund! ... Shut up, you silly fellow! What the big
devil is the use of your speeches? I came to Sarajevo on a visit, and I get
bombs thrown at me.... It is too damned rotten for anything! ..."

"Yes, yes! ... Go on!" She bit her lips, fighting a nervous impulse to
laugh.
"So the Imperial cortège drove away, and a student threw at the
Archduke another bomb. It did not explode, so he shot him with an
automatic revolver, an American Browning. The Duchess tried to cover him
with her body, and the assassin shot her also. The Archduke begged her to
live for their children, but both victims died as they were being taken to the
Governor's house.... They have arrested the assassins, he who tried to kill,
and the fellow who succeeded.... They are both young, and men of Serb
race. They are rebels all—they hate their Austrian rulers. Sarajevo is
swarming with fellows of the same breed...."
"What will the Austrian Government do to them, now they've caught
them?"
"To the regicides," von Herrnung returned harshly, "Austria will do—
nothing that very much matters. It is not an important thing to destroy two
trapped rats. But I think there will be an ultimatum from Vienna to the
Servian Government; and if the terms of that are not complied with, then
the Emperor of Austria may give the signal for his monitors upon the Donau
to open fire upon the capital of Belgrade."
Patrine asked negligently, as a new surge of the crowd thrust her tall,
lithe figure away from her companion's, forcing her to tighten her hold upon
his arm:
"'Monitors?' ... I used to think monitors were big schoolboys and
schoolgirls. Senior pupils told off to keep order. I was one myself once....
Chosen because I was bigger, and noisier, and naughtier than any other girl
in my class...."
"Ha, ha, ha! ... Prächtig! ... That is capital!" She could feel the laughter
shaking his big ribs. "That is just what they are—those monitors of the

Donau. Each is a big girl who keeps order von anderen Sorte. But they have
turned-up noses, not Egyptian and beautiful like yours!"
He added, with the calculated roughness that had previously pleased
her:
"You shall now put on your mantel. For the car, I see, is open." He
shrugged his broad square shoulders closer into his overcoat and pulled up
the collar about his throat, saying ill-temperedly: "Always does one find it
with the English. It is lächerlich—that passion for the air."
"Lovely, did you say? ..."
Ignorant or careless that he had said "ridiculous," Patrine suffered him
to wrap her mock ermines about her, seeing above the frieze of waiting
figures that filled in the lower part of the picture framed by the portico, the
emerald-green bird-of-Paradise plume of Lady Beauvayse whisk into the
big white Rolls-Royce, past the neat black-haired head of Courtley, and the
peaked cap and pale Cockney profile of Morris, the chauffeur. She threw
back a jest as she passed out:
"I'm glad you think it lovely. It's one of the nicest things about us—that
we're keen on soap and water and can't do without lots of fresh air."
She was in the car before his outstretched hand could touch her. He
followed, letting Courtley precede him because he wished to sit opposite,
and the great Rolls-Royce purred out of the jam beneath the illuminated
glass archway, and in a moment was out of the Place Vendôme and moving
with the stream of vehicles down the Avenue of the Champs Elysées. In the
mingling of moonlight and electric light the tawdry paste jewels of Patrine's
preposterous diadem rivalled the costly splendours of the jewelled fillets
adorning Lady Beauvayse's coiffure, her panache of white osprey flared
above her broad, dark brows as insolently as though they crowned a
Nitocris or a Cleopatra. But—and here was a titillating discovery—the

strange face with its broad brows, wide, generously-curving cheeks, and
little rounded chin, did not belong to a woman of thirty, or even twenty-
five. She was much younger than the German, who plumed himself upon
his flair for the accurate dating of women, had at first credited. It would be
amusing—he told himself again—hellishly amusing, to cultivate this
curious hybrid, half hoyden, half femme-du-monde.
Sarajevo—still Sarajevo. You caught echoes of the crime of that
morning in the tongues of twenty nationalities upon the Paris boulevards
that night. People in automobiles and open carriages, people in the little red
and blue flagged taxis, people crowding the auto-buses and Cook's big open
brakes, the army of people on foot, endlessly streaming east and west along
the great splendid thoroughfares, tossed the name of the Bosnian capital
backwards and forwards, as though it had been a blood-stained ball.
A gay masculine voice called from a knot of chatterers standing near
the wide illuminated archway of electric stars and crowns and flowers under
which streamed a variegated crowd of pleasure-seekers as the big Rolls-
Royce deposited its load:
"Nom d'un chien! What a pack of assassins these Serbians! ... And yet
—what if the whole show were got up by Rataplan at Berlin? ... His bosom
friend, you say—the big Franz Ferdinand? Zut! what of that? ... Sometimes
one finds inconvenient the continued existence of even a bosom friend."

CHAPTER XIV
A PARIS DANCE-GARDEN

By "Rataplan" was meant the Kaiser, Patrine comprehended, as her
companion glanced over his shoulder at the candid speaker, muttering
something that sounded like a German oath. But Lady Beauvayse was
twittering through a filmy screen of verd-blue chiffon, now discreetly
enveloping her lovely Romney head:
"We're going to hunt up Lady Wathe and Sir Thomas. Take care of
Miss Saxham, Count von Herrnung, in case we get separated in the crush....
Don't forget our programme, Pat. A whiff of Café Concert ... Colette Colin
is billed to sing some of her old songs and the very newest of the new
ones.... Then we're coming to the Pavilion de la Danse to see the São Paulo
sensation.... La Rivadavia and Herculano, and all the rest of the crowd....
Meet you there.... So long! Mind, you're not to get lost!"
"In London you often hear La Colette," said von Herrnung, as he paid
the lean-jawed functionary in the gold-laced light-blue uniform—the usual
notice of free entry having vanished from the entrance—and passed with his
companion into the gravelled promenade of the open-air concert-hall. "But
to-night you will hear no songs of old France, no Chansons Pompadour nor
Chansons Crinoline. She comes to this place from her own theatre to oblige
an old comrade. There is Nou-Nou in that box with some smart women and
the Turk who wears our Prussian Order of the Red Eagle with the Star and
Crescent of the Medjidie. He is Youssouf Pasha, the Sultan's Envoy-
Extraordinary. Nou-Nou has brought him to hear La Colette. Shall we not
sit here?"
"Who is Nou-Nou?" Patrine asked, as she settled her tall, luxuriant
person on one of the little green-painted iron chairs.
"Who is Nou-Nou?" her companion echoed. "You saw her to-day at
Longchamps in her black confection. Everybody was looking.... She is
wonderfully chic—Nou-Nou! May I be permitted to light a zigarre? ..."

"Do! ... But—why is she so much the rage? She isn't even pretty, your
Mademoiselle Nou-Nou." Patrine said it with her bright gaze fastened on
the famous Impropriety who had paraded under the chestnuts of
Longchamps in the sheath of black gauze unlined, save with her own
notorious attractions—both irresistible and fatal, judging by their recorded
effects upon excitable Parisian viveurs and gommeux. She saw a triangular
and oddly-crumpled face, rouged high upon the cheek-bones in circular
patches, a pair of almost extinguished eyes, indicated by streaks of blue
pencil, and caught a sentence screamed at the stout Turk in a voice like a
hoarse cockatoo's. Boldly erect upon the skull adorned by a scanty thatch of
lemon-yellow balanced a black feather, long and attenuated as the wearer.
Nou-Nou's stick-like, fleshless arms, the cadaverous and meagre torso
unblushingly revealed by the transparent casing of her upper person, might
have enthralled a keen student of anatomy. But of feminine charms, in the
accepted sense of the word, she possessed not one, it seemed to Patrine.
"Do not look at her too hard, or she may send round and invite you to
supper," warned the laughing voice of von Herrnung speaking close to her
ear. "She has all the vices—the good Nou-Nou!"
"Including the vice of indiscriminate hospitality," Patrine laughed; but
a little uncontrollable shudder rippled over her as she withdrew her eyes
from the painted, crumpled visage, leering with half-extinguished eyes from
under the canary-coloured wig.
"That is so. Tell me—you and Lady Beauvayse seem great friends—
quite inseparable...." He leaned nearer, his bold eyes closely scrutinising her
face. "How comes it that she leaves you alone in a Paris dance-garden: with
me, whom you have met to-night—for the first time?"
"She knows I can take jolly good care of myself, wherever and with
whomsoever I may happen to be!" Her black brows frowned; it was evident

she resented his criticism. "And—what are you getting at? What's the
matter with poor old Paris? You know—perhaps it sounds odd!—but I've
never been in Paris before.... And I love it! Down to the ground—it suits
me! It's so gay and brightly-coloured and pagan. The public buildings and
parks are dreams; the shops—too entrancing for anything! And this place,
with its jabber and music and stagy illuminations, trellises where real roses
mix up with artificial ones—ornamental beds of geraniums and calceolarias
and thingumbobs bordered with smelly little oil lamps, gilt band-stands,
concerts, and lovely trees in blossom.... Is it so luridly awful? To me, it's
rather sweet! Of course the dancing—everybody knows the dancing is
pretty well the limit. But one has seen such a lot of Tango in London—the
bloom will be pretty well rubbed off!"
"Yet some lingers. You have still something to learn from Herculano
and La Rivadavia! ..."
"Do I strike you as such a perfect daisy of inexperience?" Something
in his tone stung, for the full white cheeks coloured faintly. "You didn't talk
to me at dinner as though I were one!"
"How could I help that?" he asked, with the roughness that had
previously intrigued her. "Am I to blame that you look like Phryne or
Aspasia when you are only Mademoiselle de Maupin—before she set out
upon her travels? For you have only got as far as Paris with your friend
Lady Beauvayse. Why does she bring you? I am curious to know."
"Because I am her paid secretary and amanuensis." Patrine brought the
words out with a rush; it was clear that she thought the candour a necessity,
but hated it. "She can't get on without one, and her husband, Lord
Beauvayse—awful little bounder!—won't stand her having a man. Don't
great ladies have secretaries in Germany? Can't you see me doing Lady
Beau's correspondence in my fearful fist—enclosing cheques to people who

solicit donations for charities with a committee and Hon. Treasurer—
tearing up the begging letters full of howlers in the spelling-line—smelling
of bad tobacco and beer or gin? Then I have to keep her posted in her
engagements, go to shows, and functions, and kettledrums with her when
she hasn't a pal handy—that's where my share of the fun comes in. Just as
I'm visiting Paris, as I dare say I shall visit other centres of lively iniquity—
in the character of the sheep-dog that doesn't bow-wow at the wrong man!"
"You should bow-wow at me." His teeth were hidden, but his eyes
were crinkled up with soundless laughter. "For I am a very wrong—a very
wicked man!"
"How sad!" Her brows were still frowning, but her wide red mouth
was beginning to curl up at the corners. "Couldn't you reform? Is it too
late?"
"I hope so!" he answered her. "For if I were good I should possess no
attraction for a woman of your type. And to charm you I would give my
soul—if I had a soul!"
"Great Scott! You're candid.... Modest too.... And complimentary!"
"I am candid, because I cannot help myself."
Three comedians had come upon the stage. She told him not to talk to
her. She wanted to see the turn; she liked music-hall stuff. He obeyed,
mentally congratulating himself on having ascertained her social status,
something better than a typist, hardly on the same level with his sister
Gusta's dame de compagnie.
While his bold eyes read the book of her provoking beauty, the
performance on the stage, backed by the deep green palmate foliage and
white or ruddy candelabra-like blossom-sprays of the chestnuts, framed by
a broad band of electric lamp-flowers, was culminating to its final gag. A
preposterously fat man attired in the historic low-crowned hat, Union Jack

waistcoat, brass-buttoned blue tail-coat, leathers and hunting-tops of the
traditional John Bull, another comedian in the legendary costume of M.
Jacques Prud'homme, and a truculent-looking personage whose Teutonic
French accent, spiked silver helmet with the Prussian eagle, First Imperial
Guards cuirass and tunic, breeches and spurred jack-boots, in combination
with a well-known moustache with upright ends, a huge Iron Cross, and a
great many other property decorations, left no doubt as to the political bent
of the scrap of pantomime.
It was an ordinary bit of comic knockabout, to which the tragic
circumstances of the day lent a peculiar tang. One has seen it before, played
by the three comedians, in the green-baize aprons, brown duffel knee-
breeches, and shirt-sleeves sported by the waiters of low-class Paris or
Munich brasseries.
In the centre of the stage, instead of a bright-hooped beer-barrel on a
wooden cellar-stand, was a revolving globe representing the World. And
each of the three comedians, being armed with a tumbler, a spile-awl, and a
spigot-tap, proceeded, with appropriate patter, gesture, and grimaces, to
insert his spigot, draw, and drink. John Bull turned the globe to the United
Kingdom, and tapped the big black patch in East Middlesex. Creamy-
headed London porter filled his glass. He held it up, nodded a "Here's to
you!" and toped off. M. Prud'homme punctured France in the rich vine-
growing district of Epernay. Champagne crowned the goblet, and he drank
in dumb show to Gallia, the land of love, laughter, and wine. It was then the
turn of the Teuton. He bored, and Brandenburg yielded a tall bock of
foaming blonde lager. He sucked it down with guttural Achs of delight.
But this was not all. John Bull exploited the East Indies. A stream of
rubies and emeralds filled his glass. He bored deep in the Union of South
Africa—diamonds and gold-dust heaped the vessel. Fired by his success,

M. Prud'homme inserted his spigot into wealthy Bordeaux, whipped it out,
applied his lips, and drank deep. He corked the oozing spot and tapped
Algerian Africa. Coffee rewarded him, fragrant and richly black. He next
exploited Pondicherry, Chandernagore on the Hooghly, French Equatorial
Africa, and New Caledonia. Nothing came. He tried Cochin China, and
drew off a glass of yellow tea at boiling-point. Encouraged to drink the
strange beverage by the appreciative pantomime of his British neighbour, he
swallowed it, with results of a Rabelaisian nature, at which everybody
laughed heartily, including Patrine.
It was now the turn of the Teuton. He drew German beer from
Togoland, Cameroon; German South-West and South-East Africa yielded
an indifferent brand of the beverage. German New Guinea in the Pacific,
the Solomon, Caroline, and other islands, with Asian Kiao-Chao, merely
wetted the bottom of the glass with a pale fluid, German beer by courtesy.
"Sapperlot! Der Teufel! Kreuzdonnerwetter!" He tasted, spat, stamped, and
sputtered forth strange expletives, M. Prud'homme's terror at these
unearthly utterances being provocative of more humour of the Rabelaisian
kind. Then he decided to try again, excited to envy by the spectacle of the
stout Briton drawing gold from Australia, gold from Canada, gold from
New Zealand and the West Indies, and gold from Ceylon, gold from the
Crown Colonies in China, gold from the Gold Coast, gold from Rhodesia
and Nigeria, gold from everywhere; filling the capacious pockets of his blue
brass-buttoned coat, of his tight breeches, of his nankeen waistcoat, until he
bulked enormously, a Bull of Gargantuan size.
Such wealth roused respect in Prud'homme, who esteems the yellow
metal. He embraced the Briton, heartily congratulating him. This roused the
Teuton's ire. He seized the spigot and once more plunged it into Germany,
Prussia, Bavaria, Saxony—each of the States yielding beer, beer, BEER. He

went on, tapping, filling, and guzzling.... Twelve full tumblers and he had
begun to swell most horribly. Fifteen—and his rotundity equalled that of
John Bull. But one State remained untapped. He swilled down the twenty-
fourth bock, drawn out of Lubeck—plunged the spigot into the Reichsland
—once Alsace-Lorraine——
And the big glass crimsoned with a sudden spurt of blood.
It was over in an instant, the comedians had skipped nimbly from the
scene, the globe had developed a pair of very thin human legs and followed
them off at a proscenium-wing, before many of those who had witnessed,
clearly understood. Only the men and women of Gallic race among the
cosmopolitan, polyglot audience answered with a deep, inward thrill to the
ruby gush that told how the blood of France still ran red in the throbbing
arteries of the beloved, reft, alienated province, in spite of her forty-five
years of separation, in defiance of the loathed laws, customs, language,
service, all the gyves rivetted on her by the Teuton, her conqueror. Now
round after round of applause signified their comprehension. But the
comedians did not answer the call.
Von Herrnung, who had worn the same contemptuous smile for every
phase of the clumsy by-play, relaxed his stiff features. A stout tenor from
the Opera appeared and sang a Spring song by Tchaikovsky, following it
with the exquisite Serenade of Rimsky Korsakov, "Sleep, Sad Friend."
The tenor was recalled. Colette Colin succeeded him. She sang "Notre
Petite Compagnon" and "La Buveuse d'Absinthe" to the accompaniment of
a pale, lean, red-nosed man with a profile grotesque as ever adorned a
comic poster; who touched the piano-keys as though they were made of
butter; and had a way of sucking in his steep upper-lip and cocking his eye
at the star as he waited on her famous efforts, that made Patrine shake with
suppressed laughter on her green iron chair.

The last ironic line of Rollinat's ballad, marvellously uttered rather
than sung, died out upon a stillness. A storm of approval broke. Men and
women stood up applauding in their places, and the singer came back, to
sigh out the bitter-sweet lyric of Jammes, "Le Parle de Dieu." Then, while
her name still tossed on the surges of human emotion, backwards and
forwards under the electrics, Colette Colin, the pet of Paris, the eclipser of
the famous Thérésa, was gone. Something of the yearning anguish of
Jammes, who sees Religion as a dusty collection of ancient myths and folk-
tales; to whom Faith is mere superstition, but who would give his all to be
able to pray once more as in childhood, had given the girl lumps in the
throat as she listened to Colette Colin. Though, unlike the sad, Agnostic
poet, Patrine had no tender, sentimental memories in connection with a
mother's knee.
Not from Mildred Saxham had she learned her first childish prayer, but
from a procession of nurses; beginning with "Now I Lay Me Down" and
"Gentle Jesus," instilled by Hannah, a Church of England woman,
continuing with the Lord's Prayer, insisted on by Susan, a Presbyterian;
culminating in the "Our Father" "learned the childer" by Norah the Irish
Catholic, a petition which—minus the final line—was just the same as the
Lord's Prayer. Also the Creed in English, and a surreptitious "Hail Mary"
which brought about the sudden exit of Norah from the domestic scene.
For teaching Patrine and Irma about God and Heaven and all that, was
sufficiently interfering, said Mrs. Saxham, but when it came to Popery, rank
Popery, it was time the woman went. So Norah ceased to be, from the point
of view of the little Saxhams—and He who had risen above the horizon of
childish intelligence, a Being vaguely realised as all-powerful and awful,
great and beneficent, stern and tender, sank and vanished at the same time.

But the Idea of Him remained to be merged in the personality of the
child Patrine's dada. Dada, so handsome and jolly, and nearly always kind
to his rough little romping Pat. The boy, Patrine's senior by sixteen months,
had died in infancy. Captain Saxham was always gloomy on the deceased
David's birthday. Mildred reserved a nervous headache of the worst for the
anniversary, the kind that is accompanied by temper and tears.
She was indifferent to Patrine, who resembled the Saxhams. But she
was devoted to Irma, her own image bodily and mentally. Thus nothing
interfered with Patrine's adoration of her father. The handsome, genial, ex-
officer of cavalry was his daughter's god, until Mildred tore away the veil of
Deity, broke the shrine and cast down the idol, one day when Patrine was
fourteen years old.
The girl learned that Captain Saxham's noisy fun and alternating fits of
rage were due to over-indulgence in brandy-and-soda. That he gambled
away Mildred's income over cards and Turf speculations, as he had wasted
the sum of money for which his Commission had been sold. That he was
"not even faithful"—that he spent week-ends "at hotels with fast women";
that he was not worthy the sacrifice Mildred had made for him.
Had she not for his sake jilted his younger brother, Owen! Even on the
verge of their marriage; the presents received; the house taken and
furnished; the trousseau ready, everything perfect to the last pin in the
wedding veil. Nobody could resist David when he chose to woo, but why,
why had Mildred yielded? So fierce a sense of shame awakened in the
daughter as she listened, that it seemed to her as though her face and body
scorched in the embrace of an actual, material flame.
"How could he? ... How could you? ... Betray Uncle Owen.... One of
you was as low-down as the other, to play a beastly, sneaking game like
that!"

"You insult your mother and father. Leave the room!" commanded
Mildred. And Patrine left it, vigorously slamming the door.
Captain Saxham, who had sold out of the Army when Patrine and Irma
were respectively seven and six years old, never knew what he had lost in
the esteem of his elder daughter. She loved him still, but he had ceased to be
her god. They lived at Croybourn and occupied three sittings at one of its
several Anglican Churches. The Vicar, a strenuous man, whipped in Patrine
and Irma for Confirmation classes. They studied the Thirty-Nine Articles,
the Athanasian Creed, and dipped once more into the Protestant Church
Catechism, first instilled at the certified High School for the Daughters of
Gentlemen—an establishment they attended as day-pupils, and were to
leave, without passing the Oxford Secondary, in the following year when
Captain Saxham died.
For David, that cheerful, easy-going Hedonist, dropped off the perch
quite suddenly, in the smoking-room of his London Club. In life he had
been of the easy-going type of Christian, who avoids open scandal, and
hopes to die at peace with the clergyman.
An attack of cerebral effusion had anticipated the clergyman. Mildred
and Irma wept bitterly, Patrine sat dry-eyed. Even in the face of the new
tombstone at Woking Cemetery, testifying to the many virtues of David, as
soldier, husband, and father, her stiff eyelids remained unmoistened by a
tear. At the base of the scrolled Cymric Cross ran a text in leaded letters:

BLESSED ARE THE DEAD WHO DIE IN THE LORD.

The undertaker had recommended the text to the widow because it
contained the right number of letters required to fit in at the bottom. But did

it fit in, Patrine had sometimes wondered, quite so appropriately, at the
close of her father's life?
She treasured his portrait, taken at the age of thirty, the tinted
presentment of a handsome, stupid young officer, resplendent in the gold
and blue and scarlet of a crack Dragoon regiment. It had fallen to her
keeping when her mother had re-married. But she cherished no illusions
regarding the original. How often, since her own eyes had been opened to
the fact of their existence, had she not screened David's vices from
strangers' eyes.
She had made him her ideal, and Mildred had revealed him to her as
vicious, unprincipled. She could not forgive her mother for telling her those
horrors, she, Mildred—seemed to forget whenever she was pleased. But
Patrine had never forgotten. She would wake at night even now with the dry
sobs shaking her.... To have been able to believe in that dead father as
noble, chivalrous, good, would have been so sweet; she had shed big
surreptitious tears in sympathy with the anguish of Jammes, who would
have so loved to believe in the existence of Almighty God, and the dear
little Jesus, the Blessed Virgin, and the holy Angels, because Faith is so
restful, si paisible....

CHAPTER XV
THE BITE IN THE KISS

But von Herrnung was saying, as they moved with a straggling procession
of similar pleasure-seekers, over smooth sanded pathways between beds of

geranium and verbena and lobelia, ivy-leaved geranium and gaily coloured
foliage-plants, bordered with little twinkling lamps:
"Shall I tell you what I have just heard as those people passed us? The
tall man with the white moustache, and the chic little woman in the Spanish
mantilla. She told her friend that we make a handsome couple. Perhaps that
makes you a little angry? ... Shall I make you still more angry? Well then,
listen? ... If we were really a couple you would not have that so-black
hair...."
"Why not?" He had roused her curiosity. She put away the little damp,
laced handkerchief. "Would your cruel usage of me have turned it white?"
"Not that, but you would have added the one touch that makes
perfection. You are too sombre—too much like a night in October with all
that cloudy blackness.... You would have bleached and dyed your hair—not
yellow, nor yet orange—nor even flame.... The colour of beech-leaves in
winter, as one sees them burning against a snow-bank. And—all the women
would be crazy with jealousy—and all the men would be dying at your feet!
For you would be Isis then—you would be the Sphinx-woman of whom La
Forgue wrote and Colette has sung to us. You would be hellishly, divinely
beautiful!"
"Hellish again." She gave her low, deep laugh, prolonging it a trifle
stagily. "What do you bet me I don't—do what you said?"
"Bleach and dye...?"
"That's it." She nodded. "To the colour of—what was it? 'Beech-leaves
in winter.' ..."
"Against a snow-bank." He added: "The snow is your wonderful skin.
And I will bet you four hundred and twenty marks—that is twenty pounds
English. Is it agreed? ... Do you not say—Done? ..."

"Twenty pounds...." She shrugged her big white shoulders. "My dear
man, I haven't got twenty pounds in this blessed old world!"
He hesitated; finally said with reluctance:
"I will lend you twenty pounds—it will cost you twenty pounds to
have your hair done here in Paris.... But you will be sehr schön—the money
will be well spent. No? ..."—for she had shaken her head, frowning. "It is
offered—why will you not accept?"
"Because I won't.... There are some things I draw the line at.
Borrowing money's one of them."
"Then I will bet you my magpie pearl—you may have seen it"—he
displayed the ornamented little finger—"against that not-very-good
diamond you wear on your left hand."
She burst out laughing and repeated through her laughter: "'Not very
good.' I call that insulting.... When it cost me fifteen francs in the Palais
Royal. Well, done with you!"
"It is done! But you have not done with me." Von Herrnung's tone had
a new note of triumph. He urged: "You go back to London—when? ... The
day after to-morrow.... Gut! ... I have myself to visit London upon business
—I shall see Isis with her beautiful new hair. One thing more. An address
where I may call and see it. Be quick! We turn down here! ..."
Patrine protested, peering with narrowed eyes through the dusk-blue
twinkling semi-darkness. "But no! ... That big marquee-thing at the end of
this avenue—with all the festoons of lights and the ring of promenade about
it—surely that's the Pavilion de la Danse?"
"Halt den Mund!" His hand closed peremptorily on her arm: he hurried
her down the trellised vine walk that invited on the left of them, as light
measured footsteps padded on the gravel, and a man ran past calling, as it
seemed, to somebody ahead:

"Miss Saxham ahoy! ... Lady Beauvayse——"
"He's calling me. It's Captain Courtley...." Patrine persisted.
"Let him call! Are you not with me?" Von Herrnung's tone was
masterful. "You shall go to him when you have given me that London
address!"
She was amused and yet annoyed by his persistency.
"Oh, all right! 'The Ladies' Social Club, Short Street, Piccadilly, West.'
That's where I'm generally to be found when I'm in town."
"Sehr gut! Tell me once again, then I shall not forget, no!"
"Write it on your cuff!"
"It is written in a safer place," he told her. "We Prussian officers are
trained to remember without writing things down. A face, an address, a
conversation, the outlines of a country. Though for reconnaissance there is
nothing like die Photographie." He added: "When we meet in London I
shall be able to tell you everything you wore to-night."
"Really! ... How flattering! ... You've made a mental inventory?"
They were retracing their steps to the avenue recently quitted. He
walked with noiseless strides behind the tall, supple figure as it moved
between the trellised vines and roses, gowned with its flaunting diadem,
robed in the insincere splendours of the opera-mantle already described.
"As you say. I shall be able to tell you that the back of your mantel was
cut in a V-shape nearly reaching to your waist-line. Shall I tell you why?"
"If you're keen to...." She felt a scorching breath between her shoulders
and quickened her pace, making for the avenue. But he moved with her, his
voice came thickly: "Because your back is so superbly beautiful you cannot
bear to hide it from men!"
"Ah-h!"

She whirled about, glaring like an angry leopardess, her strong white
arm upraised to strike. Face, throat, and bosom glowed with painful
crimson. Between her violated, insulted shoulders, his furious kiss still
burned and stung.
"How dare you touch me!" she gasped. But he had shot past her even
as she turned. He was running towards the avenue, calling gaily:
"Were you looking for us, Lady Beauvayse? Here we are!"
"Cad, cad!" she stammered. "Insufferable! beastly!" Then, because a
scene was quite out of the question, she went forward with head held high,
and resentment heaving her broad bosom, to meet Lady Beauvayse.
"Pat! You needle in a haystack," cried her friend, "where did you get
to?"
"Nowhere. We missed you at the Café Concert," Patrine began.
"And then," von Herrnung explained, "we happened to take the wrong
turn. But we have not gone far before we are recalled."
"—To the path of probity," suggested Lady Beauvayse, adding: "And
in this instance the path of probity leads to the Pavilion de Chahut." She
explained to Patrine: "Chahut is the modern version of the can-can—
famous in the days of the Second Empire; when the great cocodettes of the
Court of the Tuileries—rivals of Cora Pearl and Skittles and other naughty
persons—did high-kicking under the rose here, and they called the place
Mabille."

It was not easy to get near the Pavilion, so dense and variegated a crowd
had congregated before its illuminated entrance. But the entrance fee was
doubled. Gold must be paid to see the famous São Paulo dance. Thus many
would-be pleasure-seekers of the less affluent kind turned back

disappointed from the row of gilt turnstiles under the blazing archway,
compelled to content themselves with the outer promenade.
Breasting the human eddy caused by these, Patrine and her party
passed the barrier, climbed a flight of shallow gilt marble stairs carpeted
with pink plush and decorated with roses and tree-ferns and reached the
elevated promenade. Set within the circumference of the outer one, it
commanded a complete view of the circular ball-room, to whose level
descended from it at intervals yet other flights of broad gilt stairs, similarly
carpeted and flower-decked for the convenience of those who wished to
join the dancers, or return from the ball-room to the level of the promenade.
The revels were in full swing. Standing upon the brink, looking down
as into a cockpit, you saw Patrine, superb in her false diadem and mock
ermines, leaning her bare white hand upon a velvet-covered rail. At first she
could only make out a giddying whirl of arms and heads and shoulders.
Presently, the picture began to clear.
To the wail, clang and clash of strange, discordant, exotic music,
rendered by an orchestra of coloured performers, two wide circles of
dancers rhythmically spun. The floors they danced on were set at different
levels, and rotated automatically,—each floor revolving in a different
direction. Coloured lights, flung at intervals from reflectors in the ceiling,
conveyed to Patrine the impression of staring down upon the whirling
planes of a huge gyroscopic top.
Only the central space of shining parquet was void within the double
circle of gyrating dancers. A crash from the orchestra and three couples,
oddly costumed, leaped suddenly out upon the floor. Patrine could not make
out where they had come from. They appeared, and there was a slight
commotion. A hedge of applauding spectators, four or five deep, formed

about the central, stationary patch of parquet. The music changed, the six
Brazilians began the famous dance.
They were not beautiful to look at it seemed to Patrine, the men,
familiarly styled by voices in the crowd as Lauro, Pedro, and Herculano,
being undersized, sleek-headed, lithe and sallow, attired in faultlessly fitting
evening dress-coats, white vests, black satin knee-breeches, black silks, and
buckled pumps. They wore shallow collars of curious cut, lawn-frilled shirts
and wide black neckties. Their female companions were swarthy as Indians,
even through their paint, and plain of feature. But their superb hair and
eyes, the rounded grace of hip and waist and limb, the slenderness of throat
and wrist and ankle, testified, like their tiny feet and high-arched insteps, to
a strain of Spanish blood.
"La Rivadavia, Alexandrina, and Silvana," the eager spectators named
them. They wore transparent sheaths, and brief, oddly bouffante overskirts,
like flounced muslin lamp-shades with a boldly suggestive forward tilt.
They began the dance with some familiar Tango figures. The poses, the
approaches, the hesitations, were well known to Patrine.
"Nothing very new.... But—the music made by those buck niggers!
'Bizzarramente' isn't the word for it. One expects to see gombos covered
with serpent-skin, trumpets of elephant-tusk, skull-rattles, and all the
paraphernalia of Obeah in the orchestra, instead of those huge, superb brass
wind-instruments, cymbals as big as table-tops and ten-foot silver trumpets,
like poor de Souza's.... Raised in the States, but wasn't he a Brazilian by
birth?" It was the voice of Lady Beauvayse, and von Herrnung's answered
from behind Patrine:
"It may be so. But the Blechinstrumente and the Blasinstrumente—for
the biggest of those they have to go to Germany. Nowhere else can they be
made as there.... Bravo! ... Bis—bis!"

He applauded.... Everybody was applauding. The gyroscopic whirl of
dancers had become stationary. All now were eager spectators. And the
three couples from São Paulo had reached the culminating point of a
uniquely curious and exotic figure. Savage and violent, sinuous and
creeping; suggestive of the nocturnal gambols of enamoured jaguars, in the
deep primeval forests of Brazil.
"Horrid! One expects them to lash tails and roar.... I've got what Mrs.
Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch called 'cold clams walking up my backbone.'"
Lady Beauvayse shuddered and made a pretty grimace. "All the same I
think I'll go down and look at them a little closer. Ah-h! ... Good grapes!
Why, he simply picked her up by the scruff of the neck with his teeth and
shook her.... I've just got to see that done over again!"
She was gone, with a whisk of the emerald bird of paradise and a waft
of parfum très persistant. Captain Courtley vanished in her wake. Patrine
made no motion to follow them.
The tense excitement, the pungent exhalations rising from the crowded
ball-room were affecting her brain. She felt giddy, and the steady pressure
of the crowd behind her was thrusting her to the very verge of the
promenade. She yielded automatically, unconscious of danger near.
You are to see her there, poised on the verge of the rose-carpeted
precipice, her hand gripping the velvet-covered railing, her wide nostrils
distended, her broad bosom heaving as she inhaled the sultry, vitiated
atmosphere, heavy with a myriad perfumes, tainted by a thousand breaths.
Her stare, lifeless as the enamelled, glittering regard of some Princess-
mummy of Old Egypt, was fixed upon the artists, of whom two couples had
retired, as though in despair of competition with the chief favourites,
leaving La Rivadavia and her comrade Herculano in possession of the floor.

And the passions expressed by the rhythmical, sinuous movements of
these dancers grew moment by moment less human, and more bestial. Art
of the most consummate was displayed and degraded. Beauty and Truth
shone pre-eminent in the hideous display. Now the woman sank towards the
ground, with supple limbs outstretched and her wild head thrown back in
fierce surrender. Her white fangs gleamed, her dumb mouth seemed to roar.
And as her conqueror crept stealthily towards her, the play of his great
muscles could be seen beneath his civilised attire, as though his supple body
had been clothed with the tawny-golden, black-dappled hide of the
Brazilian jaguar.
As Herculano crouched and sprang, La Rivadavia's muscles visibly
tightened. She bounded high, turned in the act.... Their gleaming fangs
clashed in mid-air. And from the massed spectators came a hiss of
excitement, "Th-h-h! ..." like the hissing of a thousand snakes.
"Great Scott!" Patrine heard herself saying. "Great—Scott!"
She no longer heard von Herrnung harshly breathing behind her.... He
had moved to the leftward. His tall, broad-shouldered figure now stood
against the railing some dozen feet away. His well-cut face, seen in profile,
was purplish-red to the crisp, scarlet waves topping his high square
forehead. The big white hands that held the glasses glued to his eyes,
jerked, and as he pressed against the railing Patrine knew that he was
shuddering. Now he looked at her, and his ravaged face was terrifying to the
girl.
"Will you not..." he began, thickly.
She quivered, cast a look about; saw the ugly emotion under which he
laboured reflected in every face within her range of vision, as round after
round of plaudits rose to the roof of the pavilion, escaping through the
wide-open spaces between its gilded, rose-twined pillars into the night. The

rafters vibrated with demands for a repetition of the popular sensation. The
dancers accepted the encore.
If von Herrnung beckoned now, asking Patrine to go down with him
amongst the acrid exhalations of that cockpit of variegated lights, thronged
with excited men and strangely-bedizened women, rent by devastating
emotions, drunk with strange excitements, would Patrine say Yes or No? ...
Ouf! but it was hot. How thick the air was with those illusion
perfumes. And from whence was that cool breeze blowing that suddenly
freshened the heavy air? ...

CHAPTER XVI
THE WIND OF JOY

Patrine drew back from the edge of the promenade. A stout, swarthy
Frenchman, a Southerner evidently, whose full brown face streamed with
little rills of perspiration, stepped nimbly into her vacated place. His female
companion instantly took his. The same movement was repeated—the
packed bodies seemed to melt before her. In a few more steps she had
merged from the crowd, upon the outer edge of the elevated promenade.
There was another velvet railing there, and steps leading down to the
promenade upon the ground-level. Against the background of starlit sky and
illuminated gardens stood the tall figure of a man. He was broad-shouldered
and lightly built, the poise and balance of his figure admirable. But for the
gleam of his living eyes in his tanned face, and the movements of his head
as he turned it from side to side, evidently seeking somebody, he might
have been a statue of Mercury cast in light-hued bronze.

For he wore loose, waist-high leggings strapped at the ankles, and a
belted gabardine of thin light brown material, while a cap with an upturned
brim and ear-flaps dangled from his sunburnt hand. And a uniformed
official, all lacquered moustaches and gold-laced blue cloth, stood
gesticulating a few paces from him, keen on defending from so
unceremonious an intruder the integrity of the Upper Promenade.
"Monsieur cannot possibly descend into the ball-room ... the costume
of Monsieur is not appropriate. It offends against good taste. It outrages the
proprieties.... It is peu convenable even that Monsieur should be here."
Patrine heard the protest, saw it driven home by swift expressive
Gallic gestures, caught a gleam of mirth in the eyes of the oddly-garbed
intruder, and the quirk of a smile at the corners of his mouth. No doubt the
suggestion of the proprieties in connection with the traditions of Mabille
had evoked it. She liked his face; it was lean and hard and rather hatchety,
with a brave outlook of clear light eyes under the marked eyebrows, thick
and straight and silvery-fair against his sunburnt skin. To her woman's eyes,
Fatigue was stamped upon it and anxiety, and a kind of rueful impatience,
as he apologised for the necessity of the intrusion in fragmentary but
excellently accentuated French. He came in search of a friend, who was
here and must be found; it was imperative...
"There is to-morrow!—there is always to-morrow!" the official stated
with a wave.
"That's just the point.... To-morrow! ..." The stranger's forehead was
ploughed with lines of anxiety. He spoke in English now—the well-bred,
modern, clipped English of the public school and the University. "No! you
don't understand"—for the official had vigorously disclaimed all knowledge
of the strange, barbarous tongue in which the other addressed him. "And I

don't believe I'd ever make you. If I could only hammer into you what sort
of a hat I'm in!"
He knitted his brows; pulled himself together for a crowning effort.
Patrine spoke, not as a stranger yielding to a sudden, helpful impulse, but
quite simply, with a little, joyful catching of her breath:
"Could I explain for you, do you suppose?"
"A—thanks! You're awfully good!"
He turned to her eagerly, if with a certain embarrassment.
"If you would.... There is a man here I have to get word to. And—what
French I have is simply technical.... You hardly find it in modern
dictionaries—the argot of the engine-shop and the Flying School."
"Now I understand...." She smiled in his perplexed face, drinking in
deep breaths of the fresh fragrant air that blew about them as they stood
together behind the thick wall of bodies that hid the cockpit from their view.
A deep dimple von Herrnung had never seen showed low down in one of
her pale cheeks. Their whiteness was slightly tinged with delicate pale rose.
And her eyes had lost their brilliant enamelled hardness. They shone like
dusky stars as she went on: "Now I know why I thought of wide green
spaces and a breeze blowing to me over gorse and heather as I looked at
you. Sub-conscious memories of Hendon and Brooklands and Upavon. For
you're a Flying Man!"
"Just that!" His ruefulness was banished. "And now you know how I
come to be in Paris with the clothes I stand up in and not another rag.... Two
of us flew the Channel yesterday morning.... If the weather holds decent, we
should be on the wing again by four A.M. And my mechanic's given me the
slip. To say he's taken French leave would be appropriate under the
circumstances. Left a line—the cool—beggar!—to say I'd find him here."

"Too bad!" she said, as fresh furrows dug themselves into the tanned
forehead. "Not fair to leave you in the cart like that. No wonder you
followed—hot upon his track."
"Combed the whole place—everywhere they'll let me in. But my
aviator's kit's against me. I've seen some rummy get-ups. But they draw the
line at Carberry's overalls."
One hand rested easily on his hip, in the other hand he swung the eared
cap with goggles. A pedestal in the moonlight would have suited him. It
occurred to her to ask:
"What was he like—your runaway mechanic?"
"I hardly ... Oh! ... Little black-avised Welshman—barely tips the scale
at eight stone. Has to be a light-weight, because I weigh all of eleven. And
with the hovering-gear—but that can't interest you."
"Indeed it does. What of the hovering-gear?"
His face darkened and hardened. He said:
"It's an invention of mine. And after no end trying—our own people at
Whitehall simply wouldn't have anything to do with me—the chiefs of the
French Service Aëronautique consented to give it a test."
"Sporting of them, wasn't it?"
He agreed:
"No end sporting. So I bucked the tiger over the Channel with Davis—
to find that an officer and mechanic of the S. A. were told off to try the
hoverer over the selected area. For us to engineer the thing ourselves wasn't
'l'etiquette militaire.' That's the French for Government red-tape."
"Bother etiquette! I'm beginning to sympathise with Davis!"
His vexation broke up in laughter.
"That's what she did. She sympathised with Davis and carried him off
here."

Patrine said, a light breaking in on her:
"Why, of course, there would be a girl.... He'd hardly come to a place
like this alone, would he?"
Some query in his look made her add hastily:
"What was she like?"
"Like.... The girl who's carried off Davis? ..." He reflected a moment.
"Pretty and plump and fluffy, with a pair of goo-goo eyes! She's daughter or
niece or something"—he boggled the explanation rather—"to the German
chap who hired us the hangar at Drancy—if you can give that name to a
ramshackle shed in a waste building-lot! And Davis—thundering good man,
but once on a spree..." He whistled dismally. "If I could only get my claws
on him! ..."
Here the uniformed official returned to the charge:
"Monsieur has found his friend—Monsieur has explained the situation.
To enter the Salon de Danse with Madame is not permissible—in the
costume Monsieur displays. No doubt Madame will understand!"
Patrine said, with a slight catch in her breath, as though some drops of
chilly pleasant perfume had been suddenly sprayed on her:
"He supposes ... he thinks ... that I'm ... your friend!"
"I'll explain." He reddened, turning to the official, saying in the French
of the British schoolboy, laborious, devoid of colloquialisms:
"Monsieur, vous n'avez pas compris. Madame elle—elle n'êtes qu'une
étrangère. Pour mon ami, je ne lui vois. Si vous permettre d'entrer, peut-être
——"
"Rototo! Voyez, man blousier, j'connais bien la sorte! Sufficit! Assez!
Ça m' fait suer, comprends?" The gold-braided arm described a magnificent
sweep, the large white kid-covered hand indicated remote distance
—"Sortez! ..."

The Briton, thus invited to retire, looked at Patrine.
"I can't quite follow, but it's plain he's telling me to hook it. The rest is
—pretty—strong?"
She nodded, biting her lip.
"Frightfully rude. Not that I know much Paris slang. But a friend of
mine—" She broke off to listen, as from under the functionary's waxed
moustache rattled another sentence:
"A l'instant, ou j'appelle l' sergent d'ville!"
"He's talking about sending for the police now!" She added hastily:
"Don't let him do that! Offer him a tip!"
The magic word must have been comprehended of the braided
functionary. He ceased to fulminate. He waited, his avid eye upon the pair.
The lean hatchety face of the aviator had flamed at Patrine's suggestion. He
said:
"Don't you think I'd have tipped him in the beginning—if I'd had the
wherewithal? But expenses have been frightful!—the waste lot with the
shed I've stalled the machine in costs as much as a suite of rooms at a
decent middle-class hotel would. Had to fork rent in advance too.
Proprietor's a German as well as a jerry-builder, and when I've paid his goo-
goo girl for our coffee and rolls to-morrow morning"—the speaker
exhibited a disc of shiny metal bearing the classical capped and oak-
wreathed head of the Republic, value exactly twopence-halfpenny—"I'll
have just one of these blessed tin things left."
"How rotten!" In the gilt metal vanity-bag, Patrine's inseparable
adjunct, lurked, in the company of a mirror, powder-puff, and note-book, a
tiny white silk purse. In the purse nestled two plump British half
sovereigns, the moiety of Patrine's salary for the previous week. "Would

you jump down my throat if I asked you to let me finance you?" she
pleaded, an eager hand in the depths of the receptacle. "Why not?"
"Because I'm a decent man!" If he had been previously crimson he was
now scarlet as a boiled lobster. "Thanks all the same, though! I can't wait
here, even to catch Davis.... I must bike back to Drancy, where I've left the
Bird—the machine—in the German's shed... Not a soul to keep an eye on
her! ... My heart's in my mouth when I think of what might hap—" He bit
off the end of the sentence and went on: "But if you'd be so awfully kind as
to take charge of this, in case you ... There's a message written on it...." He
offered her a soiled, bent card.
"I understand. If I should chance to come across your Davis.... A little
man ... looking like a Welshman.... But you haven't told me whether he's
dark or fair!"
"Black as a crow," he told her. "Not dressed like me!" His well-cut
mouth began to twist upwards at the corners.
"Quite a swell, in a silk-faced frock-coat, white vest and striped
accompaniments. A silk hat, too, rather curly brimmed, but still, a topper. I
suppose a friend of the lady's rented Davis the kit."
"Of the lady's? ..." She remembered. "Yes, yes! Of course! ... The
German's appendage.... Why! ... Look! ... Those two people who have just
passed the turn-stile at the other end of the Promenade.... If there's anything
in description, here comes Davis with the goo-goo girl!"
"By—gum! You've nailed me the pair of them." As the aviator's long
strides bore him down in the direction of the little sallow, black-avised
mechanic in the capacious silk-faced frock-coat, and his high-bosomed,
florid, flaxen-haired enchantress, and before the moustached guardian of the
Promenade could renew his indignant protest, Patrine had dropped the little
sovereign-purse in his deep, rapacious hand. And at that instant the music

ended with a crashing succession of barbaric chords. The São Paulo dance
was done.
"Merci millefois, Madame! ..."
Patrine turned from the hireling's thanks to see the high head and
powerful square shoulders of von Herrnung forging towards her, towering
above the polyglot, variegated crowd. He hailed her with:
"So you met a friend? Is that why I found myself deserted?"
She answered coldly:
"I did not desert you—and I did not meet a friend."
His face, still suffused with a purplish flush, pouched and baggy about
the eyes, told of the maelstrom of unhealthy excitement the dance of the
jaguars in the jungle had set whirling in his brain. She guessed that he had
taken advantage of their separation to descend into the ball-room, and that
as one of the spectators in the front rank he had revelled in the final thrill.
He persisted:
"Was? But what means it? I have lost you.... I think you must have
gone down into the ball-room after your friend.... I follow and you are not
there. I come back to find you.... Who was that dirty bounder I saw you
talking to?"
"He wasn't a dirty bounder!" His rudeness enraged her. "He was a nice,
clean, first-class, top-hole, plucky English boy!"
He sneered:
"'Boy' ... Men of forty are boys, in the mouths of you English ladies.
You borrow the term from women of the street-walking class."
"Then I'll call him a man. The best kind of man going! English—from
the top of his nice head to the very tips of his toes."
"How can you tell if he was not a friend of yours? What do you know
of him?" He fixed his eyes compellingly on hers.

She answered:
"Nothing but that he flew the Channel yesterday—with Davis—to test
his invention—and he has got to be on the wing for home at four."
"So! He has told you all this, and you do not know his name, even?
Perhaps it is on that card you hold in your hand?"
She started, and the card fluttered from her twitching fingers to the
carpet.
"Allow me...." Von Herrnung stooped as though to retrieve the bit of
pasteboard. "Curious! It has gone! ... It is not there!" he said.
"I think you have your foot on it." Her eyeballs ached, she felt weary,
and flat, and stale. "Please lift up your foot and let me see if it is there," she
urged, and grown suddenly obtuse, he lifted up the wrong foot. She was
trying to explain that he had done so when they were rejoined by Courtley
and Lady Beauvayse.
"Say, did you see she wore a head-band with a rubber mouth-hold at
the back of her neck? And waist-fixings under her frillies so's Herculano
could swing her around his head. My land! that man has jaw-power to whip
Teddy Roosevelt, and she's got vim enough for a nest of rattlesnakes....
Used up, Pat? ... If you aren't, you look it!" The speaker yawned prettily:
"I'm about ready to be taken back to by-by, though it's only two o'clock."
Von Herrnung escorted the wearer of the green bird of paradise as they
went through dark alleys and illuminated avenues back to the archway with
the blazing crowns and stars. Courtley accepted the offer of a lift back to
the hotel. The German declined, saying that he preferred to walk, as the car
was closed.
"Pardon! ..." His voice had arrested Morris on the point of starting the
Rolls-Royce. His handsome face had appeared in the frame of the car-
window. "Excuses! but this belongs to Miss Saxham!" His cuff shone white

in the semi-darkness, the great magpie pearl on his little finger gleamed
maliciously as he dropped the missing card upon Patrine's lap, and drew
back, uncovered and smiling, as the car moved away. Later on, when she
was safe in her room, she looked at the card, and read upon it in plain black
lettering:

+———————————————————————-+
| |
| ALAN SHERBRAND, |
| |
| PILOT-INSTRUCTOR AND BUILDER OF AËROPLANES, |
| FANSHAW'S SCHOOL OF FLYING. |
| |
| THE AËRODROME, |
| COLLINGWOOD AVENUE, |
| HENDON, N. W. |
| |
+———————————————————————-+

Something was scrawled in violet pencil on the upper blank space. Being a
girl with notions about squareness, Patrine would not at first read,
remembering that it was his private message to Davis, whom Chance had
brought within his master's reach. But later still, or earlier, when, after a
brief interval of silence, the traffic of Paris began to roll over the asphalt,
principle yielded to impulse. She switched on the electric light above her
pillow and read:

"This Sarajevo business spells War. Must get back at once to Hendon. I trust
to your Honour not to fail me. You know what this means to

"A. S."

So the young Mercury in gabardine and overalls was a professional, a
teacher; a pilot who helped men to qualify for the certificate given by the
Royal Aëro Club without breaking too many bones. She had seen the big
painted sign in the Collingwood Avenue, Hendon, that advertised Fanshaw's
Flying School.
"I trust to your Honour," he had written to his mechanic. The word
would have seemed big, and awful, and imposing, spelt like that, with a
capital "H," if the writer had been a gentleman.
Disillusioned, she tore the card into little pieces and sank into a heavy
sleep before the broad yellow sunshine of Monday outlined the pink velvet
brocade curtains unhygienically drawn before the open windows. And she
dreamed, not of the magic wind that had blown upon her that night, nor of
the Mercury-like figure in the suit of Carberrys, but of the supple bodies
that had bounded and whirled, and of the gleaming panther-fangs that had
clashed in mid-air. Then the dominant figure became that of von Herrnung.
Again the red mouth under the tight-rolled red moustache alternately
flattered, insulted, and cajoled. Again she felt that violation of her virgin
flesh, its moist, hot touch upon her naked shoulder. Its kiss bit and stung.
She awakened late from those poisoned dreams to a riotous blaze of
colour and a breath of musky fragrance. On the coffee-stand beside her bed
lay a great sheaf of long-stalked roses; deep orange-hearted, with outer
petals of ruddy flame. She plunged her face deep into the flowers. The
corner of a large square envelope thrust from amongst them. She caught it
between her teeth and pulled it out.
It was from von Herrnung, written on paper bearing the device of the
Société Aëronautique Internationale in the Faubourg St. Honoré. It was

brief enough.

"That I offended yesterday, Isis will pardon. The address I promised is
—'Atelier Wiber, 000, Rue de la Paix.' The good Wiber demands no fee for
making Beauty yet more beautiful. All has been arranged.

"Devotedly,
"T. v. H."

CHAPTER XVII
INTRODUCES AN OLD FRIEND

Saxham, M.D., F.R.C.S., M.V.O., Consulting Surgeon to St. Stephen's and
the Hospital of St. Stanislaus and St. Teresa, sat busily writing at the big
leather-topped table in the consulting-room, that, with the well-stocked
library adjoining, occupied the rearward ground-floor of the Harley Street
corner house.
The hands of the table-clock pointed to eleven A.M. Since nine the
doctor had sat at the receipt of patients, the crowd in the waiting-room had
melted down to half a dozen souls. Fourteen years had gone by since
Saxham, late Temporary Captain, R.A.M.C., attached Headquarters Staff,
H.I.M. Forces, Gueldersdorp, had taken over the lease and bought his
practice from the fashionable physician who had been ruined by the war
slump in South African mining-stocks.

The broken speculator's successor had struck pay-reef from the outset.
Society had taken Saxham up and could not afford to drop him again. He
was harsh and unconciliatory in manner—a perfect bear, according to
Society—but quite too frightfully clever; and as yet no speedier rival had
outrun him in the race.
Now as the July sunshine, its fierceness tempered by the short curtains
of pale yellow silk that screened the wide-open windows, came streaming
in over the fragrant heads of a row of pot-grown rose-trees, ranged on the
white-enamelled window-seat, it shone upon a man to whom both Time and
Fortune had been kind. The admirable structure of bone, clothed with tough
muscle and firm white flesh, had not suffered the degrading changes
inseparable from obesity. Nor had the man waxed lean and grisly in
proportion as his banking account grew fat. His scholar's stoop bowed the
great shoulders even more, disguising the excessive development of the
throat and deltoid muscles. The square, pale face, with the short aquiline
nose and jutting under-lip, was close-shaven as of old. The thickly growing
black hair was streaked with silver-grey and tufted with white upon the
temples. His loosely fitting clothes of fine silky black cloth were not the
newest cut, neither were they old-fashioned. They were suited perfectly to
the man.
While Saxham minutely copied his prescription, the patient who sat
facing the window in the chair on the doctor's left hand had not ceased from
the enumeration of a lengthy catalogue of symptoms, peculiar to the
middle-aged, self-indulgent, and tightly-laced. At the close of a thrilling
description of after-dinner palpitations, she became aware that her hearer's
attention had strayed. Following up his glance she ran him to earth in one of
three tinted photographs that stood in a triptych frame upon his writing-

table, and glowed with an indignation that tinged with violet a plump face
coated with the latest complexion-cream.
"How very charming your wife is—still!"
The speaker, her recent character of patient now merged in that of
visitor, plucked down her veil of violet gauze with a gesture that betrayed
her wrath. But her voice was carefully honeyed to match her smile—as she
continued:
"You have been married quite an age, haven't you?"
The anniversary of her own second honeymoon was due next week.
She went on answering her own query:
"Nearly fourteen years, I think?"
Saxham answered, not glancing at the silver table-almanac but at the
threefold photograph frame:
"To be precise, just fourteen years and six weeks. We were married on
the 6th of June, 1900."
"You have a good memory—for some things!"
The undisguised resentment in her tone pulled Saxham's head round.
He surveyed her with genuine surprise. She bit her lips and tossed her head,
waggling her tall feather, jingling her strings of turquoise and amber, coral
and onyx, kunzite and olivine, big blocks of which semi-precious stones
were being worn just then, strung on the thinnest of gold chains. Each
movement evoked a whiff of perfume from the scanty folds of her bizarre
attire. Her frankly double chin quivered, and her redundant bosom, already
liberally displayed through its transparent covering of embroidered chiffon,
threatened to burst its confining bands of baby-ribbon, as the Doctor said:
"Is it not natural that I should have a particularly clear recollection of
the greatest day of all my life—save one?"
"You're quite too killing, Owen!"

She laughed tunelessly, clanking her precious pebbles.
"Of course, we all know you're fearfully swanky about your wife's
beauty. I saw her yesterday at Lord's—sitting under the awning on the
sunny side, with the Duchess of Broads and Lady Castleclare. Your boy was
with them, jumping out of his skin over Naumann's bowling for Oxford.
Really marvellous! Your poor dear Cambridge hadn't a chance!
Tremendously like you he grows—I mean Bawne. Really, your very
image!"
"I should prefer," said Saxham, stiffly, "that my son resembled his
mother."
"Ha, ha, ha! How quite too romantic!" She threw back her head, its
henna-dyed hair plastered closely about it and fastened with buckles of
jade, set with knobs of turquoise. A kind of stove-pipe of enamel green
velvet crowning her, was trimmed with a band of miniature silk roses in
addition to the towering violet plume. The plume, carefully dishevelled so
as to convey the impression of a recent wetting, threatened the electric
globe-lamp springing from a standard near. Her crossed legs liberally
revealed her stockings of white silk openwork, patterned with extra-sized
dragon-flies in black chenille, and her laugh rattled about Saxham's vexed
ears like Harlequin's painted bladder, full of little pebbles or dried peas. "In
love with your wife—and after fourteen years and six weeks!" Her fleshy
shoulders shook, and her opulent bosom heaved stormily. She passed a little
filmy perfumed handkerchief under her violet gauze veil and delicately
dabbed the corners of her eyes. "You remind me of my poor David. I was
always the one woman on earth, in his opinion. To the last, he was jealous
of the slightest reference to you!"
"To me? Why should he have been?"

Mildred—for this was Saxham's faithless bride-elect of more than
twenty years previously—swallowed her wrath with an effort, and went on
with the mulish obstinacy of her type:
"Perhaps it was absurd. But men in love are unreasonable creatures,
and David was perfectly mad where I was concerned. He worshipped me to
the point of idolatry! He never could quite believe that I did not regret my
—my choice—that my heart did not sometimes escape from his keeping in
dreams, and become yours again, Owen! He never really cared for Patrine,
because she has a look of you.... Absurd, considering that she was born two
years after you disappeared into South Africa.... Though of course I could
not truthfully say that I did not—think of you a great deal!"
It seemed to the silent man who heard, that Mildred offended against
decency. His soul loathed her. She went on:
"Her brother—my darling boy who died—was the very image of
David!" Her tone was even womanly and tender in speaking of the dead
boy. "But Patrine—a year younger—Patrine is really wonderfully like you,
with her commanding figure and almost Egyptian profile, those long eyes
under straight eyebrows—and all those masses of dead-black hair!" As
Saxham writhed under the category she gave out her irritating laugh again.
"Ah!—I forgot! When Patrine was in Paris with Lady Beauvayse for the
Big Week—Lady Beau took her to the Atelier Wiber—the famous
hairdresser's establishment at 000, Rue de la Paix—where they specialise in
Chevelures des Teintes Moderne—all the newest effects displayed by
stylish mannequins—and really the change is astonishing—her sister Irma
and I hardly knew Patrine when she came to see us at Kensington—looking
superb, with hair—one might almost call it terra-cotta coloured—showing
up her creamy-white skin."

"Do you tell me that Patrine has bleached her splendid hair and stained
it with one of those vile dyes that are based on aniline—or Egyptian henna
at the best?"
Mildred retorted acidly:
"It was a very expensive process.... Five hundred francs—but I
understand that Lady Beauvayse was so good as to insist on paying Wiber's
charges herself."
Saxham answered brusquely:
"I would have given ten times the money to know my niece's hair
unspoiled. Whoever paid, the process will prove an expensive one to
Patrine when she finds herself excruciated by headaches, or when the
colour changes—as it will by-and-by!"
Mildred shrugged:
"She can have it re-dipped, surely? Or let it return to its original
black!"
"There are many chemical arguments against human hair so altered
returning to its original colour," came from Saxham grimly. "As these
women who have made coiffures of orange, pink, crimson, blue and green,
fashionable, had previously found to their cost. Do you not realise that from
mishaps of this kind resulted the chromatically tinted heads one sees at
public functions? Bizarre and strange in the electric lights, hideous in the
sun."
"Ha, ha, ha!" Mildred's laugh rattled about the Doctor's ears like a
shower of walnuts. "I shall certainly bring Patrine to call upon you, if her
hair happens to turn peacock-green or pinky-crimson. I would not miss
seeing your face for all the world! But seriously, my dear Owen, when a girl
is as handsome as my girl and has no dot to back her, she must make herself
attractive and desirable to eligible men."

"By trying to make herself look like a Parisian cocotte, she renders
herself neither attractive nor desirable—to the kind of man whom I should
like to see married to my niece. The cleanly kind of man, with wholesome
tastes, a sound constitution, and an upright character."
"My dear Owen, you might be composing an advertisement for a
butler or a chauffeur!"
Mildred ostentatiously controlled a yawn as the Doctor continued:
"As to a provision for Patrine on her marriage, you know that I shall
gladly give it. Of course, upon condition——"
"Yes, yes, I know what your condition would be!" Mildred's finger-
tips, adorned with nails elaborately veneered and dyed, drummed a
maddening little tattoo on the table-ledge. "That she marries the 'right kind
of man, with wholesome tastes,' and all the rest of it. The question is—
would Patrine be able to endure him? She is—let us say—more than a little
difficult to get on with—and essentially an independent, up-to-date girl."
"If Patrine would have subdued her ideas about independence and
given up this idea of taking a place as salaried companion, I would have
welcomed her, and so would my wife!"
"Patrine is—as you are very well aware—something very different to a
mere companion. She is reader and secretary to Lady Beauvayse. Her Club
subscription is paid, she moves there amongst gentlewomen, and is treated
at Berkeley Square exactly like a favoured guest. You should see the
presents Lady Beauvayse absolutely showers upon her—and she gets all her
expenses and a hundred a year."
Saxham was silent. Patrine might have had all this and much more, if
she would have accepted the home he offered. Not only because she was his
niece, but the girl was dear to him. His wife loved her, and in her strange,
wild way Patrine returned some measure of Lynette's tenderness.

"She is worth loving," Lynette had told her husband. "She has a
generous, brave, independent nature and a deep heart. She is not easily won
because she is so well worth winning. Ah! if the Mother were only with us,
how well she would understand and help Patrine!"
But Mildred had risen to depart. Saxham rose too, not without alacrity,
and taking her offered hand, pressed it and let it fall to her side.
"Well, good-bye. My kind regards to Captain Dyneham." He referred
to the second legal possessor of Mildred's once coveted charms. "When can
I dine with you at Kensington, do you ask? I fear I have very few
opportunities for sociality. Some day! ... Tell Patrine to come and see me.
Half-past one o'clock to-morrow. Lunch after my scolding—and a chat with
Lynette."
"You are extremely kind to Patrine." Mildred's tone was sweetly
venomous. "But I fear just at present she has little time to spare. Men in
love are so exacting. Dear me, what a feather-brained creature I am! ...
Haven't I told you about Count von Herrnung?"
"You have told me nothing," said Saxham, "and you know it. Who and
what is the man?"
Mildred said with a great air of dignity:
"He is a distinguished officer of the Prussian Flying Service, the son
and heir of a high official in the German Foreign Office. He holds the rank
of Count by courtesy. I assure you I never met a more agreeable young
man."
"Even were he all that you say, and more, and even while I regard the
German Army as a marvel of organisation and efficiency—I should not,
knowing the type of man that is the product of their military system, desire
my niece to marry a German officer."
Mildred mocked:

"'Marry'—who said anything about marriage? ... When they have not
known each other for a month. Not"—her tone became sentimental—"that I
am a disbeliever in love at first sight. No one could doubt that Patrine is
attracted, and he—the Count"—she dropped her eyelids—"is simply too
fearfully gone for words. Absolutely dead-nuts!"
"'Gone.' ... 'Dead-nuts.' ..."
"I give you my word. Entangled hopelessly. 'What a captive to lead in
chains,' I said to Patrine—he is quite six feet in height or over, and has the
most perfect features; simply magnificent eyes, the most fascinating
manner, and the build of a Greek athlete. He is staying at the 'Tarlton,' and I
must say Lady Beauvayse is extremely sympathetic. For since they came
back from Paris together the Count has been taking Patrine about
everywhere. She can hardly have had a glimpse of my gay girl.... Dinners,
theatres, the opera, and heaven knows what else, they have crowded into the
week!" The smiling speaker shrugged her ample shoulders. "To say nothing
of cabaret suppers and dances. He even promises to take her to the famous
'Upas Club.' Wonderful, by all accounts. They say the French Regency
came nowhere near it. Dancing in the Hall of the Hundred Pillars, a simply
wonderful three A.M. supper, and champagne of the most expensive brands,
served up in gold-mounted crystal jugs."
"Can it be possible? ..." broke from Saxham. "Are you mad, that you
countenance this German in taking Patrine to such an infamous place?"
"'Infamous!' Really, Owen, your notions are too old-fashioned for
anything." Her laughter broke out, and her chains and bangles jingled an
accompaniment. "Do," she urged, "come out of your shell. Dine with us on
Thursday. We have a box for the 'Ministers' Theatre. We'll go on, you and I,
George and Irma, from there to the cabaret supper at the 'Rocroy.' We can't
afford the 'Upas,' the subscription is too fearfully prohibitive. But the

entertainment at the 'Rocroy' is really chic—the dancing is as good—
everyone says—as they have it at Maxim's. Do come! Of course, you can
trust us not to blab to your wife! Mercy! how severe you look!" Her tone
changed, became wheedling, her made-up eyes languished tenderly. "Odd!
how we poor, silly women prefer the men who bully us. Come! One chance
more. Dine Thursday and see 'Squiffed' at the 'Ministers'—try a whiff of
Paris at the 'Rocroy' after midnight, 'twill buck you up like nothing else—
take my word! Won't you?"
"I will not!"
"Why not?"
"I have told you why not. Because these places are centres of
corruption, schools for the inculcation and practice of vice in every form.
Men and women, young or old, those who take part in or witness one of
these loathsome dances, hot and reeking from the brothels and voodoo-
houses of Cuba and the Argentine are equally degraded. I had rather see my
niece Patrine dead and in her coffin than know her capable of appreciating
such abominable exhibitions, pernicious in their effects, as I, and others of
my profession have grave reason to know!—ruinous in their results to body,
mind, and soul!"
"Intolerable!"
Her plump, middle-aged face was leaden grey beneath her violet veil
as she screamed at him:
"You have insulted me! Horribly—abominably! ... How dare you tell
me that I frequent infamous places, and encourage my daughter to visit
schools of vice! And it is not for Irma you are so rottenly scrupulous, but
for Patrine, your wife's favourite! Who will do as she pleases, and marry
whom she prefers without 'by your leave' or with mine! She is a mule for
self-will and obstinacy—another point of resemblance to yourself! ..."

He had recovered his stern self-possession. His face was granite as he
said:
"I have not insulted you, but if you will set no example to your
daughters in avoiding these evils, it is my duty to expostulate."
She reared like an angry cobra, then spat her jet of scalding venom.
"I take leave to think my present example quite harmless to Irma and
Patrine. Now yours—of a few years ago—was certainly calculated to
damage the bodily and worldly prospects of your son." She added, as
Saxham silently put out his hand to touch the bell: "No! please don't ring. I
know my way out. Good-morning.... Pray remember me to Bawne and your
wife!"

CHAPTER XVIII
SAXHAM PAYS

Thus, having shot her bolt, Mildred departed. The Dop Doctor standing in
the open doorway, watched the gaily-accoutred, middle-aged figure in the
peg-top skirt and bouffante tunic of green taffeta patterned with a violet
grape-vine, moving down the white-panelled corridor.
Saxham watched her out of sight before he shut the door and went
back to his chair. There he sat thinking.... No one would disturb the Doctor
until he touched his electric bell.
Ah! if the truth were told, not all of us find solace in the thought that in
the niches of Heaven are safely stored our ancient idols. To Owen Saxham
it was gall and verjuice to remember that for love of this woman, weak,

vain, silly, spiteful, he, the man of intellect and knowledge, had gone down,
quick, to the very verge of Hell.
Mildred was just eighteen when he had wooed and won her. She had
been slight and willowy and pale, with round, surprised brown eyes, an
indeterminate nose, and a little mouth of the rosebud kind. Her neck had
been long and swanlike, her waist long and slim, her hands and feet long
and narrow. He had desired her with all the indiscriminating passion of
early manhood. He had planned to pass his life by her side. He had hoped
that she might bear him children—he had wrought in a frenzy of intellectual
and physical endeavour to take rank in his chosen profession, that Success
might make life sweeter for Mildred—his wife.
She had seemed to love him, and he had been happy in that seeming.
Then the shadow of a tragic error had fallen blackly across his path. From
the omission to copy in his memorandum-book a prescription made up by
himself in a sudden emergency had sprung the branding suspicion that
culminated in the Old Bailey Criminal Case of the Crown v. Saxham. His
acquittal restored to him freedom of movement. He left the Court without a
stain on his professional reputation, but socially and financially a ruined
man.
Friends and patients fell away from Saxham—acquaintances dropped
him. Mildred—his Mildred—was one of the rats that scurried from the
sinking ship. She had thrown him over and married David, his brother. Her
betrayal had been the wreath of nightshade crowning Saxham's cup of woe.
Those vertical lines graven on his broad white forehead, those others that
descended from the outer angles of the deep-cut nostrils to the corners of
that stern mouth of his, and yet those others at the angles of the lower jaw,
were chiefly Mildred's handiwork. They told of past excess, a desperate

effort to drown Memory and hasten longed-for death on the part of a man
who had quarrelled with his God.
The demons of pride and self-will, defiance and scorn had been cast
out. An ordeal such as few men are called upon to endure had purified,
cleansed, and regenerated the drunkard. Friendship had taken the desperate
man by the hand, plucked his feet from the morass, led him into the light
and set his feet once more on firm ground. His profession was his again to
follow. Love, real love, had come to him and folded her rose-white wings
beside his hearth.
Years of pure domestic happiness, of successful work, had passed, and
now—the July sunshine had no warmth in it, though it streamed in through
the open window over the tops of the pot-roses. The Dop Doctor's head was
bowed upon his hands, his great shoulders shook as though he strove with a
mortal rigour, the wood of the table where his elbows leaned, the boards
beneath the thick carpet on which his feet rested, creaked as the long
shudders convulsed him at intervals.
It had seemed to Saxham—in whom the seed of Faith had germinated
and put forth leaves in one great night of storm following upon years of arid
dryness—that Almighty God must have forgiven those five worse than
wasted years.
Fool! he now cried in his heart. The Divine Mercy is boundless as the
ocean of air in which our planet swims, and for the cleansing of our spotted
souls the Blood of the Redeemer flowed on Calvary. But He who said in
His wrath that the sins of the fathers should be visited on the children, does
not break, even for those repentant prodigals whom He has taken to His
Heart again—the immutable laws of Nature. Nature, of all forces most
conservative, wastes nothing, loses nothing, pardons nothing, avenges
everything.

The shouted curse, like the whispered blessing, is carried on the
invisible wings of Air forever. Thus, the deformed limb, the devouring
cancer, the loathsome ulcer, and the degrading vice, are perpetuated and
reproduced as diligently and faithfully as the beautiful feature, the noble
quality, the wit that charms, the genius that dominates. Nay, since Nature
turns out some millions of fools to one Dante or Shakespeare or Molière or
Cervantes, it would appear that she prefers the fools.
So it is. Divine Grace has reached and saved the sinner. The ugly vice,
the base appetite, have been eradicated by prayer and mortification, by
years of self-control and watchfulness. Free will, moral and physical force,
self-command and self-respect are yours again. And with sobs of gratitude
the erstwhile slave of Hell gives thanks to Heaven.
Saved. Cured. Great words and true in Saxham's case as in many
others. But though they are saved and cured they cannot ever forget. Their
eyes have a characteristic look of alert, suspicious watchfulness. For
wheresoever they move about the world, in the drawing-rooms of what is
called Society, in the business circles of the City, in the barracks or the
mining-camp, on the ship's heaving deck or the floor of the Pullman
carriage; amidst the sands of the Desert or the golden-rod of the prairie, or
the red sand and dry karroo scrub of the lone veld, they will hear, when they
least expect it, the thin, shrill hiss of the Asp that once bit them to the bone.
Or supposing that they have forgotten in reality—so cleverly has the world
pretended to!—with what a pang of mortal anguish Memory awakens.
When you recognise the devil that once entered and possessed you, looking
out of the eyes of your child.

When Saxham lifted up his ashen face and looked at the portrait in the third
leaf of the triptych frame and met the clear, candid gaze of his son's blue

eyes, you know what he was seeking, and praying not to find.
To have given Lynette a drunkard for her son would be the most
terrible penalty that could be exacted by merciless Nature for those five
sodden, wasted years.
Ah! to have had a clean, unspotted life to share with Bawne's fair
mother. That his priceless pearl of womanhood should gleam upon a
drunkard's hand—his spotless Convent lily have opened to fullest bloom in
a drunkard's holding, had been from the outset of their married life, verjuice
in Saxham's cup by day, and a thorn in his pillow by night.
But never before had it occurred to the man of science, the great
surgeon, the learned biologist, that relentless Nature might be saving up for
him, Saxham, a special rod in saltest brine.
Bawne.... He sat in silence with set teeth, asking himself the bitter
question:
"How could I have forgotten—Bawne?"

CHAPTER XIX
BAWNE

As so often happens, the thought of the beloved heralded his well-known
thump upon the door-panel. When had the Dop Doctor ever cried, "Come
in!" with such a leaden sinking of the heart?
The boy who came in was alert, upright, slim, and strong for his
twelve years. You saw him attired in the dress with which we are all
familiar—the loose shirt of khaki-brown, with its knotted silk neckerchief
of dark blue, the lanyards ending in clasp-knife and whistle, the roomy

shorts upheld by a brown leather pouch-belt supporting a serviceable axe,
the dark blue stockings turned over at the knee, fitting close to the slim
muscular legs, the light strong shoes, the brown smasher hat with the chin-
strap, completed the picture of a Scout of whom no patrol need be ashamed.
He carried his light staff at the trail, and entering, brought it to an upright
position, and saluted smartly. The salute formally acknowledged, he came
straight to the table and stood at his father's elbow, waiting, as Saxham
feigned to blot a written line. Outwardly composed, the drumming of the
man's heart deafened him, and a mist before his eyes blurred the page they
were bent upon. Fatherhood gripped him by the throat as in the first
moment of his son's separate existence. A thing we prize is never so
poignantly precious as when we contemplate the possibility of its ruin or
loss.
"Father, you aren't generally pleased when I come bothering you in
consulting hours, but this time it is really serious business, no kid, and
Honour bright!"
Saxham answered with equal gravity:
"If you have a reasonable excuse for coming, I have said that you may
come."
The boy was like him. You saw it as he stood waiting. The vivid
gentian-blue eyes were Saxham's, as were the thick throat and prominent
under-jaw and the square facial outline. But the plume of hair that swept
over the broad forehead was red-brown like Lynette's. The delicate,
irregular profile and a sensitive sweetness about the lips were gifts from his
mother. The directness of his look, and the tinge of brusqueness in his
speech were unconsciously modelled on the father's, as he said, sacrificing
sufficient of manly independence to come within the curve of the Doctor's
strong arm:

"First, I wanted to show you my new badge."
Saxham's left hand squeezed the arm most distant from him, where a
familiar device was displayed upon the sleeve, midway, between the
shoulder and elbow, below the six-inch length of colours distinctive of this
Scout's Patrol.
"Turn round and show it, then!"
"Father, you're larking. That's my General Scout Badge. I've had it
ever since I passed my Second Class tests. Before then, you know, when I
was a Tenderfoot, I'd only the top-part—the fleur-de-lis without the motto,
and you wear that in your left pocket button-hole. But this is something
special, don't you see?"
Saxham eyed the row of little enamelled circles on the sleeve next him
with respectful gravity. The boy went on, trying to control the gleeful
tremor in his voice:
"I've got the Ambulance Badge!—look at the Geneva Cross!—and the
Signaller's Badge—this is it—with the crossed flags—and the Interpreter's
Badge—the one with the two hands holding. But this is the very latest. Our
Scoutmaster gave it to me after parade to-day. It's the Airman's Badge—"
He caught his breath, the secret was coming in a moment.... He went on:
"To get it you must have made a model aëroplane. Not a flying-stick, any
kid of nine can make one—but a model that will really fly. That's my
special reason for coming. Mother was out—and—and next to her I wanted
to tell you!"
"And next after me?"
The boy considered a moment before he looked up to answer:
"Cousin Pat, because she can keep a secret so tightly."
Saxham patted the sturdy square shoulders.
"You are fond of Cousin Patrine, aren't you?"

"Rather!"
"Just tell me why?"
"Because"—the young brows were puckered—"because she's so big
and so—beautiful. And she'd just die for you and Mother.... She comes in
my prayers next after you two."
"And—the Chief Scout?"
"Father, wouldn't it be—a bit cheeky to go and pray for a man like
that?"
A spark of laughter wakened in Saxham's sombre eyes.
"Not quite respectful, you think? Is that it? Why so, when you're taught
to pray for the Holy Father, Mother Church, and the King and Queen?"
The boy's puckered brows smoothed. The question was settled.
"Of course. I forgot. Then the Chief Scout must come in after Cousin
Patrine. Because a gentleman must always give place to a lady. That's what
Mother says."
"Suppose Cousin Patrine never came to see you any more, what would
you do then?"
Bawne straightened the sturdy body and proclaimed:
"I would go and find her and bring her back!"
"Suppose she did not want to come?"
Bawne said instantly:
"I would tell her Mother was wanting her. For Mother would be, you
know. And Cousin Pat wouldn't keep her waiting. Not much, sir, she
wouldn't!"
"She cares so?"
"Doesn't she! Why, have you forgotten when I was a little shaver and
Mother was so ill?"

Saxham, with a certain tightening of the muscles of the throat, recalled
the wan, red-eyed spectre that had haunted the landing outside the guarded
bedroom where Lynette lay, white and strengthless, while her husband
fought for her with Death.
"Well, well. Go on loving Patrine and praying for her! Now tell me of
your model."
The boy said, controlling his exultation:
"It has to be left at our District Headquarters until to-morrow. You see
—it's rather a special affair. It's not a flying stick, like the things I used to
make when I was a shaver, nor a glider—you see men in spectacles flying
those every day to please the kids on Hampstead Heath and in Kensington
Gardens, but a model of a Bristol monoplane with a span of thirty inches,
and a main-plane-area of a hundred and fifty"—he caught his breath and
with difficulty kept his eager words from tumbling over one another as he
reached the thrilling climax—"and I built up her fuselage with cardboard
and sticking-plaster out of the First Aid case you gave me to carry in my
belt-pouch, and cut the propeller out of a tin toy engine I've had ever since I
was a kid—and made the planes of big sheets of stiff foolscap strengthened
with thin strips of glued wood, and her spars, sir!—the upright ones are
quills, and her stays and struts I made of copper wire and she's weighted
with lead ribbon like what you wrap about the gut when you're bottom-
fishing for tench or barbel—and her motor-power is eighteen inches of
square elastic twisted—and father"—he broke into a war-dance of ecstasy
unrestrained—"when Roddy Wrynche and me went on a secret expedition
to Primrose Hill to test her—she flew, sir! First go-off—by George!"
"Really flew? ... You are certain?"
"Upon my life, sir, and that's my Honour. Scout's Honour and life are
the same thing. That's what the Oath rubs into us." He squared his shoulders

and lowered his voice as a boy speaking of high matters that must be dealt
with reverently. "I think it's—ripping. I can say it. Would you like me to?"
Saxham nodded without speaking, because of that choking something
sticking in his throat. That something Lear called "the mother." And,
dammed away behind his eyes, were scalding tears that only men may shed.
As the young voice said:
"On my Honour I promise that I will do my best to be loyal to God and
the King.
"On my Honour I promise that I will do my best to Help other people
at all times.
"On my Honour I promise that I will do my best to obey the Scout
Law.... You see"—the boyish arm was on Saxham's shoulder now, the
ruddy-fair cheek pressed against the pale, close-shaven face—"you see,
Father, when a Scout says 'On my Honour' it's just as if he swore on the
Crucifix!"
Saxham said, crushing down the fierce emotion that had almost
mastered him:
"It is—just the same! For the man who breaks a promise will never
keep an oath.... I have a friend of whom I have told you.... I think he would
like to hear about your model aëroplane.... May I tell him, or would you
prefer to tell him yourself?"
Bawne's fair face glowed. He gasped in ecstasy:
"Father.... You mean Mr. Sherbrand—your Flying Man who's in the
Hospital?"
"My Flying Man—but he is well again and back at work at Hendon.
There was not much the matter with him; a slight obstruction in one of the
nasal passages that prevented him from breathing with his mouth shut as he

should. Now he has asked me—this afternoon if I am at leisure—to bring
my little son to the aërodrome and see him make a flight."
"And go up in his aëroplane with him? Father, say Yes! Do, please
do!"
As the little figure bobbed up and down beside him in joyous
excitement, Saxham answered, not without an inward tug:
"If your mother says 'Yes' I shall not say No! Now off with you, my
son!"
The boy saluted and went. Even his bright obedience wrung his
father's heart. The man looked haggard and old. He hid his careworn face in
his hands for a minute. His lips were still moving when he looked up and
made the Sign so well known to many of us upon his forehead and breast.
Prayer, that most powerful of all therapeutic agents, so often prescribed by
Saxham for his patients, was his own tonic and sedative in moments of
bodily exhaustion and mental overstrain.
He had prayed, he, the sceptic, on that unforgettable night at
Gueldersdorp, when he wrestled with his possessing fiend.... Lynette had
taught him the habit of prayer. And even as she, a friendless, neglected waif,
had learned to look up and see the shining Faces of our Divine Redeemer
and His Virgin Mother through the features of a pure and tender woman; so
her husband, looking in the eyes of Lynette, had found the gift of Faith lost
years before.
"Oh! ... Prayer!" you say—"Faith!" ... and I see you shrug and sneer a
little, you who are intellectual and highly educated, and have ceased to
believe in what you term the Hebraic myth or the Christian legend—since
you learned to point out the weak places in the First Book of Genesis, and
sneer at the discrepancies between the statements of the Gospel narrators—

though you will hear such testimonies sworn to in good faith, wherever
witnesses are examined in a Court of Law.
But no! you tell me, you are not an Agnostic. You credit the existence
of Almighty God, but prayer is the parson's affair. Well, because a man
wears a straight black coat, will you abandon to him so inestimable a
privilege? Is it not a marvellous thing that you or I should lift up our earth-
made, earth-begrimed hands, and that He who set this tiny planet to spin out
its æons of cycles amidst the innumerable millions of systems wheeling
through His Universe should stoop to hear the words we utter? Feeble cries,
drowned by the orchestras of the winds, and the chorus of the Spheres
revolving in their orbits, or silent utterances imperceptible to any Ear save
His alone.

CHAPTER XX
THE MODERN HIPPOCRATES

Patients rapidly succeeded one another in the chair that faced the window.
There were confirmed invalids who were really healthy men and women,
and certain others who came in smilingly to talk about the weather and the
newest Russian Opera, who bore upon their faces the unmistakable stamp
of mortal disease. The wife or the husband, the father or the mother had
worried for nothing.... Would the Doctor prescribe a little tonic to buck
them, or the surgeon alleviate a little trouble of the local kind? Really
nothing—but—Death's knock at the door. And there were cases—open or
unacknowledged—of the liquor-habit and the drug-mania. To these, instead
of dropping out bromide of potassium and throwing in the chloral hydrates
with strychnine and the chloride of the metal that is crushed and assayed out
of the quartz reef near Johannesburg, or pick-axed out of the frozen ground
of the Klondyke, Saxham dealt out that savage tonic Truth, in ladlesful.
The secret dipsomaniac or druggard could not deceive this man's keen
scrutiny, or escape his unerring diagnosis. When, beaten, they admitted the
fact, Saxham said to them as to the others:
"You say you cannot conquer the craving. I myself once thought so.
Your moral power can be restored, even as was mine. In your case the habit
is barely as ingrained as in the case I quote to you. I drank alcohol to excess
for a period of five years."
Some of the sufferers—elderly women and mild-mannered old
gentlemen—were horrified. Others thought such candour brutal—but

attractively so. Yet others responded to the sympathy masked by the stern,
impassive face, and the blunt, brusque manner.
"At any rate the man's no humbug!" such and such an one would
stutter. "And seems to have any amount of Will. Think I shall put myself in
his hands for a bit." Adding with a rueful twinkle: "He knows how the dog
bites, if anyone does!"
He did, and those hands of his were strong, prompt and unfaltering.
Since the grip of human sympathy had fastened on the Dop Doctor of
Gueldersdorp, and drawn him up out of the depths into sunlight and free air,
and set his feet once more on the firm ground, how many of his fellow-
sufferers had Saxham not hauled reeking and squelching out of the abysmal
sludge, whose secrets shall only be revealed upon the Last Day.
Yet Saxham realised that the grand majority of these twentieth-century
men and women really wanted little more of the physician and surgeon than
the thirteenth-century patient desired of the apothecary or the leech. A
patient hearing given to their category of evils—a little hocus-pocus, and a
nostrum or so.
We scoff, thought Saxham, at the ignorance of those men of the Dark
Ages, yet in this enlightened era the eye of newt and toe of frog, the salted
earthworms, and the Pulvis Bezoardicus Magistralis or Pulvis Sanctus,
dissolved in the liquor of herbs gathered under a propitious conjunction of
their ruling planets with the Moon—have but given place to extract of the
dried thyroid gland of the sheep, the ovaries of the guinea-pig, the spinal
cord and brain of rabbits and mice and other small mammalia, with—
instead of broth of vipers, liquor distilled from the parotid secretion of the
tropical toad; identical with the reptile administered in boluses to Pagan
patients by the Greek Hippocrates. With other remedies hideously akin to
the hell-brews that whipped the sated desires of Tiberius and Nero.... Such

as the pastelloids frequently prescribed by bland-mannered, frock-coated,
twentieth-century physicians—professing Christians who pay West-End
pew-rents, and deplore the abnormal drop in the birth-rate—for the spurring
of the sense of debilitated Hedonists.
Thus, summed Saxham, we have rediscovered Organotherapy. We
have harnessed the bacillus to Hygeia's silver chariot. In Surgery the Short
Circuit is the latest word. It is wonderful to know how well one can get on,
at a pinch, without organs hitherto deemed indispensable to existence.
Radiology reveals to us the inner mysteries of the human machine, alive
and palpitating. The splintered bone, the bullet or the shell-splinter
embedded in the muscle or the osseous structure, can be detected and
photographed by the teleradiographic apparatus. The electro-magnet
automatically carried out the removal of such fragments, provided only that
they are of steel. Ah yes! We are very clever in this twentieth century,
reflected the Dop Doctor. Modern Science has even weighed the Soul.
Could Dee and Lilly have bettered that? Debate—consider.... This
quenchless spark of Being, kindled in Saxham's breast and in yours and
mine by the Supreme Will of the Divine Creator—this Ego for whose
eternal salvation Christ died upon the bitter Cross, dips the scale at
precisely one-sixteenth of an ounce avoirdupois. The expiring man,
weighed a moment previously to dissolution, and again immediately
afterwards, was found to have lost so much and no more.
The dying world is in the scales to-day, thought Saxham, bitterly and
sorrowfully. Religious Faith being the soul of the world, one wonders, when
the last thin hymn shall have died upon the fierce irrespirable air; when the
last human sigh shall have exhaled from Earth, how much in ponderability
shall be lacking to the acorn-shaped lump of whirling matter. Will the result
proportionate with the moribund's sixteenth of an ounce?

It seemed to Saxham, that without a moral and social upheaval upon a
vaster scale than historian ever recorded or visionary ever dreamed; a
cataclysmic cleansing, a purging as by fire; the regeneration of the human
race, the reconstitution of the human mind, the renaissance of the Divine
Ideal, could never be brought about. Unconsciously he sought for the
decadent world some such ordeal as he himself had passed through. You
looked at him and saw the scars of suffering. The soil of his nature had been
rent by volcanic convulsions and seared by the upburst of fierce abysmal
fires, before the green herb clothed the sides of the frowning steeps, the
jagged peaks were wreathed with gentle clouds; the pure springs gathered
and ran; the valleys became fruitful and the plains carpeted themselves with
flowers.
A miracle had been wrought for Saxham the Man, and he saw the need
of one for the World, and said in his heart that, though holy men might pray,
it would not, could not, ever be vouchsafed. And all the while the miracle
was ripening, the Day was coming, the Great Awakening was at hand.

CHAPTER XXI
MARGOT LOOKS IN

It drew on to the luncheon hour. The last patient a very young, very little,
very pretty married woman, was summoned by the neat maid from the
waiting-room, in a remote corner of which a husband of military type and
ordinarily cheerful countenance, remained, maintaining with obvious effort
a fictitious interest in the pages of a remote issue of Punch.

The dainty little lady bore a name well known to Saxham. The fact that
a title was attached to it did not interest him, nor had it shortened her term
of waiting by a second of the clock. But her youth smote him with a sense
of pity as she took the chair upon his left hand facing the window, and
without overmuch embarrassment made clear her case.
She was going to have a baby. Franky, her husband, earnestly desired
the kiddie for family reasons, yet its advent was unwelcome to him, in that
it must inevitably involve physical pain and mental anxiety for the little
lady, Franky's wife.
The little lady had been frightfully downed by the prospect. She rather
cottoned to kiddies, she explained, than otherwise. It was the bother of
having them that didn't appeal. It put everything in the cart as regarded the
Autumn Season. Besides—there were family reasons on her side, why the
prospect should not be too rosy. She stated the reasons, and Saxham's
listening face grew grave. He realised the danger of a Preconceived Idea.
He said nothing. Margot went on talking. Her beautiful deer-eyes were
alternately wistful and coaxing. They entreated sympathy. They begged for
gentleness. They grew brilliant with enthusiasm as she explained that after a
lot of chinning, she and Franky had hit upon a perfectly ripping plan.
A friend, recently encountered in Paris, had thrown a ray of hope upon
the doubtful prospect. No doubt Dr. Saxham was in sympathy with the
pioneers of the New Crusade against Unnecessary Pain.... Of course, Dr.
Saxham knew all about the wonderful experiments of German
gynæwhatdoyoucall'ems. The right term was frightfully crack-jaw. Perhaps
Dr. Saxham knew what was meant?
Saxham reassured the little lady.
"You refer of course to the experiments of Professors von
Wolfenbuchel of Vienna, and Krauss of the Berlin Fraüenklinik, resulting in

the method of treatment now known throughout the Continent as 'Purple
Dreams.' Wolfenbuchel and Krauss have published a pamphlet on the
subject. Perhaps you have read the pamphlet?"
"Yes—I've read it. A wonderful book that has been translated into
every language. A German officer, friend of a friend I met in Paris, told her
about it. His sister had tried the treatment, and found it A1. So I bought a
French translation of the book in Paris, and an English one at a shop in the
Haymarket. It's bound in rose-coloured vellum stamped with a rising sun in
gold. 'Weep No More, Mothers!' it's called. Isn't that a charming title? And
the subject is: 'Pangless Childbirth, Produced through Purple Dreams.'"
In a sweet, coaxing voice that trembled a little, she began to tell the
Doctor about the wonderful results obtained by hypodermics of Krauss and
Wolfenbüchel's marvellous combination of drugs. And Saxham hearkened
with stern patience, while the table-clock ticked and the luncheon hour
drew near, and Franky chewed the cud of suspense in the Doctor's waiting-
room.
Thousands of peasant women, and others of the lower middle-class in
Germany had become mothers under the Purple Dreams treatment.
Maternity Hospitals in Paris, Brussels, and New York had adopted the
method after controversy and hesitation. It had triumphed over every doubt.
An American woman whose brother's wife had had a "Purple Dreams" baby
at the Berlin Institute had told the little narrator only yesterday how quite
too wonderful was the discovery of the enlightened Krauss and the gifted
Wolfenbuchel. Everything was made easy. When your ordeal drew near you
simply went to the place, and signed your name in a book, and put yourself
in the hands of skilled persons. You felt no pain—not a twinge. Only the
prick and throb of the hypodermic needle-syringe, and most people were
used to the pique nowadays—administering the first subcutaneous

injections of the wonderful new drug.... Under its mild sedative influence
you dozed off to sleep presently. And when you woke up—there was the
baby—beautifully dressed, and lying on a lace pillow in the arms of a
smartly dressed, fresh-cheeked nurse.
This had been the experience of the sister of the German officer, as of
the wife of the brother of the American lady. The same thing happening to
thousands everywhere. The philanthropic Wolfenbuchel and the benevolent
Krauss had made of the stony Via Dolorosa by which Womanhood attains
maternity—a path of soft green turf bordered with fragrant lilies and
bestrewn with the perfumed petals of the rose.
She ended. Saxham had kept his keen blue eyes steadily upon her
during the eloquent recital. Not a hair of his black brows had twitched, not a
muscle of his pale face had moved—betraying his urgent inclination to
smile. His fine hand, lying upon the blotter near the small black case-book,
might have been carved out of ancient Spanish ivory, or yellow-white lava.
Now he said:
"There is nothing new nor marvellous about the 'Dreams' method. It is
—persistent narcosis obtained from the subcutaneous injections of
morphine with the hydrobromide of hyoscine, another alkaloid obtained
from henbane. I have visited not only the Institute at Berlin, but the
Rottburg Fraüenklinik—and an establishment of the same type in Paris, and
another in Brussels. It is a fact that when a patient awakens from the
anæsthesia there is no recollection of anything that has taken place
subsequently to the injection of the drug."
"There has been no pain. Absolutely—none whatever!" She spoke with
a little, joyful catch in her breath.
"Pardon me," said Saxham. "You labour under a delusion which the
rose-coloured pamphlet was not written to dispel. There must have been

pain—if there has been childbirth. Perhaps there has been overwhelming
pain. Pain manifested by outcries and convulsions—violent struggles—
subdued by the attendants and nurses—for the friends and relatives of the
patient are rigidly excluded—the patient enters and leaves the Home alone.
Two or three days may have vanished in that vacuum which has been
created in her memory. Days in which she has been lying—it may be—
strapped to the bed in the private ward of the nursing home—her purple,
congested face and staring eyes concealed by a mask of wetted linen—her
agonies only witnessed by paid attendants whose interests are best served
by denial or concealment—supposing anything to have gone wrong?"
The relentless surgeon's hand had torn away the painted curtain.
Margot contemplated the grim truth in silence for a moment. Then she
found words:
"But nothing ever does go wrong. The pink pamphlet says so. My
American friend's sister-in-law says so.... Thousands of women have had
children under scopolo—what's its name? And none of them felt pain—not
the slightest. And in every case—in every case—there was the baby when
they woke up!"
The sweet bird-voice quivered. She had entered the room so full of
hope and enthusiasm, and this man with the piercing eyes and the brusque,
direct manner was putting things before her in a way that dashed and
damped. Hear him now:
"Yes, there is generally a baby—when it is necessary there should be
one. Though the patients who are treated in the free wards of German and
Austrian Kliniks may not always be scrupulous upon this point. Still, if the
treatment can be carried out without undue peril for the mother—and I do
not allow this for a single moment—have you not considered the risk for
the child?"

Margot had pulled off one long glove. Now she murmured, setting the
tip of a little bare, jewelled finger near the corner of a distracting little
mouth:
"You consider that it's handicapping the start for—the kiddie?"
The avalanche fell; shocking and freezing and stunning her.
"Ask yourself, Lady Norwater, and do not forget to ask your husband:
Will a healthy or a degenerate type of man or woman be eventually reared
from an infant in whom the springs of Life have been deliberately poisoned
with henbane and morphia—before its entrance into the world?"
She gasped:
"Then it's all U.P.?" She was slangy even in her tragic misery. She
sought in her gold vanity-bag and produced the envelope that held the
cheque, but Saxham waved it away.
"Pray put that back.... Neither from rich nor poor do I accept unearned
money. You have not really consulted me. You have asked my opinion upon
a course of treatment. And I have given it, for what it is worth. You will go
home, and tell your husband that I have talked tosh, and consult another
physician."
"No, I won't!" She said it bravely. "I want you to prescribe!"
"If I prescribe," Saxham told her, "you shall certainly fee me. But you
do not need treatment." His eyes smiled though his mouth did not relax its
grimness, as he added: "You strike me as being in excellent health."
She owned to feeling "top-hole," first-class, and simply awfully beany!
Though, and her dimple faded as she owned it, the thought of what must
happen in November took "the gilt off the gingerbread."
"Do not think of what is going to happen in November," Saxham
advised her. "Or teach yourself to think of it in the right way." The sense of
her childishness and inexperience went home to the sensitive quick beneath

the man's hard exterior, as she said to him with an unconsciously appealing
accent:
"But how am I to find out what is the right way?"
He had gained upon her confidence. The admission proved it. With
infinite tact he began to win yet another woman to drain out her chalice of
Motherhood, untinctured with the druggist's nepenthe,—to gain for the race
yet another babe unmarred before its birth. For this end no labour was too
great for Saxham. A crank you may call him, but that cranks of this type are
the leaven of the world, you know.
It is typical of the human butterfly Saxham dealt with, that his clothes
pleased Margot. She liked their characteristic mingling of elegance with
simplicity. Some fashionable doctors got themselves up like elderly bloods,
others affected garments dating from the year One. There was neither
perfume upon Saxham's handkerchief nor flue upon his coat-sleeve. His
shirt of soft white cashmere, his slightly starched linen cuffs and narrow
double collar were fastened with plain buttons of mother o' pearl, the black
silk necktie was blameless of pin or ring. The handsome gold chronometer
he carried because it had been presented to him by the Staff and patients of
St. Teresa and St. Stanislaus. The chain attached to it—rather worn and
shabby now—was of woven red-brown hair.
The hair of his wife. A creamy-pale Niphetos rose stood where her
hands had placed it near his writing-pad, in a tall, slender beaker of green-
and-gold Venetian glass. His eyes drank at the beauty of the lovely scarce-
unfolded blossom. Perhaps the resemblance of the fair flower to the beloved
giver softened the lines of the stern square face into the smile that Margot
liked, as he found her eyes again, saying:
"Perhaps I could better answer your question by telling you how
another patient bore herself in—circumstances akin to yours. Will it tire

you? I promise not to be unduly prolix. And to listen commits you to no
course of action. Now, shall I go on?"
"I'd love you to go on!"
Always in extremes, the little wayward creature. She flushed and
sparkled at the Doctor as he took from its place on his writing-table a
triptych photograph-frame in gold-mounted mother-o'-pearl, folded the
leaves so as to reveal but one of the portraits, and held under Margot's eyes
the delicately-tinted photograph of a girl of twenty. The portrait had been
taken the year following Saxham's return from South Africa with his young
wife.
"How beautiful!" Margot exclaimed.
"Beautiful, as you say, but does she look happy?"
Margot wrinkled her dainty eyebrows, puzzling out the question. Did
she look happy, the girl of the portrait, whose face and figure might have
served one of the old Greek masters as model for an Artemis to be carved
upon a gem? Well, perhaps not quite happy, now one came to look again.
The black-lashed eyes of golden hazel were full of wistful sadness,
there was a faintly indicated fold between the fine arched eyebrows, much
darker than the rippling red-brown hair, whose luxuriance seemed to weigh
down the little Greek head. The closely-folded, deeply-cut lips spoke
dumbly of sorrow, the nymph-like bosom seemed rising on a breath of
weariness. Something was lacking to complete her beauty. So much was
plain even to Margot. But not until the Doctor showed by the side of the
first, the second portrait, did she realise what that Something was.
In the first portrait both face and figure were shown in profile. In the
second, bearing a date of two years later, the beautiful, sensitive face of the
young woman was turned towards you. Still rather grave than smiling, she
held in her arms a sturdy baby boy of some twelve months, upon whose

downy head her chin lightly rested. The clasp of her slender arms about her
child, the poise of her still nymph-like figure, expressed fulness of life,
buoyant energy, and happiness in fullest measure. What was previously
lacking was now made clear.
"Lovely, quite lovely!" trilled the sweet little voice. "And what an
exquie kiddy!"
"Then you do not dislike children?" Saxham asked, as his visitor's
husband had done not long ago.
"On the contrary," the little lady assured him, "I rather cotton to them.
But"—she shrugged her little shoulders prettily and quoted boldly from
another woman—"but the fag of having them doesn't—appeal!"
The Doctor replaced the threefold frame and turned his regard back
upon his visitor.
"These photographs speak for themselves ..." he said quietly. "She—
the mother of the boy you see, was, when she first knew that she was to be a
mother, fragile and delicate in body, and in mind highly-strung and
sensitive. As a child she had known neglect and unkind usage. Twice she
had sustained an overwhelming shock, physical and mental; she had rallied,
passed through a crisis and regained lost ground. But the possibility of a
relapse was not to be blinked at. It was a lion in the path!"
The slight form of the listener was convulsed by a shudder. The pretty
face lost its wild-rose tint. The lion in the path ... Margot saw him
crouching, his tawny eyes aflame, his great jaws slavering, his tail lashing
the dust, his great muscles tightening for the fearful spring. And Saxham
went on:
"She maintained from the first a sweet, sane mental standpoint. She
tamed her lion by sheer force of will. Her courage was her own: she did not
owe it to the physician and surgeon. But he advised as he knew best, and

she followed his advice implicitly, as to wholesome diet and regular
exercise, thus keeping her body in health. She surrounded herself with
objects that were beautiful in form and colour. She made a point of hearing
great music and of re-reading the works of great poets, essayists, and
novelists. She wished her child to owe much to pre-natal influences. For
that these——"
The speaker faltered for a moment, before he resumed the thread of his
discourse.
"—That these form character for good or evil no physiologist can
deny. Therefore while she did not flee from, she avoided the sight of
deformity or ugliness, as she shunned active infection, or tainted air. It was
desirable that her child should be healthy, strong, and beautiful. But the love
of loveliness, though one of the dominants of her character, scales lowest of
the triad. Human love, the love of mother, husband, and friend rank above
it, and first of all stands the love of God."
"How awfully good she must be!"
"She took the child, first and last, as a gift from God to her. If she lived
or died, and she longed inexpressibly to live—Death, like Life, would be
the fulfilment of the Divine Will. Fortified by the Sacraments of her Church
she lay down upon her bed of pain as though it were an altar. She suffered
intensely——"
His voice broke.
"She suffered inexpressibly. Not until the actual crisis did I have
recourse to chloroform. When I was about to use it she said to me: 'Not yet!
... I will wear it a little longer... this mother's crown of thorns.' To-day the
crown is one of roses. Does not this appeal to you?"
The Doctor's supple hand displayed the third portrait in the triptych,
and Margot saw the same assured joy, rounded with a richer and more deep

content. The exquisite face was fuller, the outlines of the form displayed the
ripeness of early maturity, the slender palm was now a stately tree. The girl
of twenty was merged in the woman of thirty, rich in all feminine graces,
beautiful exceedingly, with the beauty that is not only of line and
proportion, form and colour, but shines from within, irradiating the
perishable living clay with the immortal radiance of the soul. Her boy stood
at her side, a manly square-headed young British twelve-year-old, wearing a
simple, distinctive dress; familiar to us all.
"Y-yes. But I'm afraid you have forgotten: I told you at the beginning,
or I meant to.... My—my own mother died when I was born!"
"And that sad fact increases your natural fear and repugnance.
Naturally. It will strike you as a curious point of resemblance between your
case and that of the—patient whose portrait I have shown you, when I tell
you that her mother did not survive the birth of a later child. May I tell you
further that the possibility of some inherited weakness does not render you
more promising—regarded as a subject for the treatment of Wolfenbuchel
and Krauss."
Margot was beginning to hate this stern-faced man who set forth things
so clearly. He had bored her almost to weeping. Why on earth had she
come? The fact that Franky's sister Trix's boy Ronald had been helped into
the world by Saxham thirteen years ago and recently operated on for the
removal of the appendix, was no reason that Franky's wife should regard
him as infallible. She glanced at her tiny jewelled wrist-watch. Ten whole
minutes had gone. She rose.
"You have been so kind, and I have been so much interested. But I
must go now!" she said, like a weary child pleading to be let out of school.
"Franky—my husband—will be waiting. I have promised to lunch with him
at the Club."

"If he is here, perhaps Lord Norwater would like to speak to me,"
Saxham suggested.
Margot lied badly. She reddened as she answered:
"Oh, what a pity that he did not come!"

CHAPTER XXII
MARGOT IS SQUARE

She was in what she would have termed "a blue funk" for fear that Saxham
would accompany her to the threshold. But he merely bowed her out of the
consulting-room and smartly shut his door. Then she tripped to the waiting-
room and beckoned forth Franky with an air of buoyant, fictitious
cheerfulness. Her eyes were radiant, her little face was dressed in artful
smiles....
"Did I seem long? Were you getting the hump?" she asked of Franky,
who rose and hurried to meet her, dropping Punches all over the place. His
smooth hair was almost rumpled and his brown eyes begged like a
retriever's. He asked in the kind of whisper that travels miles:
"Yes—no! Did you pull off the interview? What does the Doctor——"
"S-sh!" She glanced anxiously towards the one remaining patient. "Tell
you when we get out. Impossible here!"
He urged: "But is it all right?"
"As right as rain!"
"Good egg!" She had got him out of the room and as far as the hall
door. "Stop! ... Wait! Oughtn't I to go and thank——"

"No—no!" The door was open, the neat little landau-limousine that
had brought them was waiting by the kerb-stone. Before Franky knew it,
Margot had plucked him down the steps, pulled him into the car, and given
the chauffeur the signal. They were in Hanover Square before he recovered
his breath.
"Oh come, I say, Kittums! That sort of Sandow business can't be good
for you. Why you're in such a thundering hurry to get me away, I'd rather
like to know?"
Her heart shook her, but she lied again bravely.
"Didn't you want to hear what the Doctor told me about the 'Purple
Dreams' treatment?"
"More than anything in the world. That drug with the freak name! ...
Can it do any harm—to you and——"
"Not a scrap!"
She planted a flying kiss between his ear and his collar. He greatly
appreciated the attention, though it tickled him horribly.
"Dr. Saxham said it was a frightfully clever, practicable method.
Absolutely harmless, and the patient doesn't suffer—not that much!" She
measured off an infinitesimal bit of finger-nail and showed him, and went
on as he caught the little hand and gratefully mumbled it: "You don't know
a thing that happens. You simply go to bye-bye. And—there's always the
baby when you wake up!"
"A first-class baby?" His harping maddened her. "A healthy little
buffer to send to Eton and represent us in the Regiment, and inherit the title
presently when his poor old Pater pops? Just look me in the face like the
little sport you are, Margot, and tell me that you're playing square with me.
For this—for this is the game of Life!"

He had both her hands. He made her look at him. She met his eager
stare with limpid eyes. And all the while that sentence of Saxham's about
the pre-natal poisoning of the springs of existence, drummed, drummed at
the back of her brain. "What a little beast I am!" she mentally commented,
hearing her own voice answering:
"I've told you No, and that I am playing square with you!" She grasped
the fact that Franky had suffered, by the grunt of relief with which he
loosed her hands. "And so it's settled I go to Berlin about the middle of—
September, say?"
"Wow-wow! It's us for the gay life! Just when the beastly hole's as
dusty as the Sahara and as hot as hell!"
"You won't be in the beastly hole, and perhaps I needn't go before the
beginning of October. You can go down to Brakehills and slay away at the
pheasants, and run over when I cable, to bring me back——"
"With my boy! Our boy, Kittums!"
His simple, kind face was quivering. He put out a strong brown hand
and laid it on hers, and she gave the hand a little affectionate nip:
"Hullo!" Perhaps he talked on to cover up the momentary lapse into
sentiment. "Pipe old St. George's, where we did the deed! Hardly seems
close on six months since we got spliced, does it? And there's the Bijou
Cottage...." Franky thus irreverently designated the large, drab, stucco-
faced, eminently respectable if mousey mansion on the Square's east side,
where Margot's bachelor Uncle Derek lived with his collection of moths
and beetles. "Shall we stop and give the old gentleman a cheero? Is he at all
likely to be in?"
His hand was on the silk-netted rubber bulb of the chauffeur's whistle,
when Margot caught it back.

"No, don't stop! Of course he's in. He never goes out, unless it is to a
meeting of the Entomological Society, or the Museum of Natural History, or
some other place equally stuffy and scientific. Besides, Uncle Derek is a
vegetarian—and there wouldn't be anything but tomato soup, and pea-flour
cutlets, and Lepidoptera for lunch!"
"Poor little woman, was she peckish, then? All lity, we'll chuff along
and fill up tanks at the Club. Bally odd bill of fare, pea-flour cutlets and
Lepidop—what's-their-names? But we'll get things nearly as rummy served
up to us in Berlin. Pork chops with sweet gooseberry sauce, and pink
sausages with lilac cabbage and dumplings. Why do you look so scared?"
She forced a laugh.
"Not scared, but you said 'we' ..."
"You don't suppose I could go shooting when you were—facing what
you've got to face?" he asked her, and added, in a tone and with a look that
she had once before encountered from him: "When you go to Berlin in
October, Kittums, I go with you; take that as straight from Headquarters,
old child! Unless—something happens to prevent our going there at all!"
He added, answering the mute question in her eyes:
"Something that's been on the cards since the Anglo-French Agreement
of 1904. It cropped up again in 1905, when the German Kaiser's feelings
were so upset by John Bull's carryings-on with the pretty lady in the
tricolour petticoat and Cap of Liberty, that he called on the Sultan of
Morocco at Tangier to ask his Sublimity to interfere. And again in 1908 we
were up against it ... when Austria annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina, and
Russia took the needle, and William ordered out his best suit of shining
armour in readiness for a scrap.... If there's anything in the Triple Entente,
the fat was nearly in the fire then.... And again in 1911, over the French
occupation of Morocco, when the German gunboat Panther and the German

cruiser Berlin were sent to the closed Fort of Agadir near the mouth of the
smelly River Sus. That piffed out after a good deal of what they call 'acute
tension between the Powers.' To the Services acute tension means the
stoppin' of leave. And I'd fixed things up for spendin' the July fortnight
before Henley with some jolly people at Baden-Baden, and if the trip had
come off, the chances are I'd have come back engaged to another girl!"
"Are you sorry?"
"Do I look sorry?" was the quick riposte. He went on: "France and
Germany went in for 'precautionary measures' that time. Precautionary
measures mean concentration of troops on both frontiers, and General
Manoeuvres on the biggest scale. Dress-rehearsal for a general
mobilisation, you tumble? While our Home Fleet quietly concentrated on
our north-east coast. And just when the lid seemed on the point of being
taken off, Billiam the Bumptious climbed down, and withdrew from Agadir.
The squabble was patched up. France got a free hand in Morocco in return
for the open door and 100,000 square miles of the Congo Basin. French and
German troops left off mugging at one another across the frontiers.
Whitehall Wireless, Nordeich Station, and the Eiffel Tower emitted radios
reversin' the weather-signals from 10 to 0, which means a dead calm. And
the British Fleet gave up all hope and went home to bed.
"But—and don't you swipe in, Kittums, for I'm gettin' to the thrillin'
part—the bigwigs who manage Foreign Affairs weren't taken in so easily.
They knew the bad blood had got to break out somewhere, and it did. Italy
and Turkey went to war in November, 1911, and the Balkan Rumpus broke
out ten months later. Turkey didn't win, though her Army has had German
instructors ever since von Moltke licked it into shape in 1835, and
Germany'd naturally expected her to finish as top-dog. So the concessions
Germany wanted from Turkey were lost. I rather think the Prussian Eagle

had its eye on Adrianople on the Black Sea coast, and the Gallipoli
Peninsula, for the furtherin' of her views on the Near East—and Austria had
a fancy for the Sanjak of Novibazar—and wanted Salonika as a base for
operations on the Mediterranean. Anyhow, both of 'em were wiped on the
jaw. And William the All Too Knowing, as Courtley calls him—Courtley's
going in strong for Nietzsche just now—says his works are a slogging
attack on Teutonism!—William has got to the end of his patience. The
shining armour's been hanging up all these years, getting too tight for an
Emperor inclined to run to tummy. The shining sword was getting rusty in
its regulation sheath. And then in the nick of time—happens the Affair of
Sarajevo. The news came through that Sunday in Paris. I remember how
Spitz's Restaurant boiled over, and the people were shouting 'Sarajevo' on
the boulevards. By George! I forgot you were in bed and asleep while we
were dining."
Margot, between waking and sleeping, had got some inkling of the
tragedy of that night. She asked, as Franky took off his hat and proceeded to
mop his non-intellectual forehead:
"And is Sarajevo likely to stop me from going to Berlin?"
Franky left off mopping and said, looking at her squarely:
"If Austria's Note to Serbia is—what the Kaiser would like it to be—
you may take it we're on the giddy verge of a General All-Round Scrap."
"You mean—a war?"
"I mean the War that'll dwarf all others by comparison. The War of
Nations, that the prophet wrote of in Revelations. Armageddon.... The Last
Battle. The Big Bust Up that comes before the end."
"Darling old boy, what rot!"
"Rot if you like. You wait and see what happens. D'you pipe me
tipping you the gag Asquithian?" He grinned at the idea.

"Franky, you've set me asking myself something."
"Why you've married an idiot? ... Is that it?" He turned upon her a
rueful face from which the grin had been wiped away.
Margot said, as the car turned smoothly into Short Street and stopped
before the Club portico:
"No, but—How is it you know—all the things you know, when I've
always known you knew nothing about anything?"
He shook his head.
"Give it up! ... No, I don't! The answer is—I'm one of those fellows—
and the Services are simply stiff with 'em, who are absolute asses till it's
necessary for 'em to be something else."

CHAPTER XXIII
A MODERN CLUB

Perhaps in those prehistoric days before the War, you knew the big, cool,
ground-floor dining-room of the "Ladies' Social" Club. They lunched
excellently at Margot's pet table in the corner near the conservatory,
between whose rows of well-tended pot-plants you pass to the smoke-room,
celebrated for its Persian divan, and green-and-rose-coloured glass dome.
Soon the Club would be abandoned to sweeps, painters, charwomen,
and window-cleaners. Just now everything was in full swing. As the little
tables became vacant, the drawing-rooms and lounges filled up. The smoke-
room was a crush of well got-up men and extravagantly-caparisoned
women, chattering nineteen to the dozen under a thick blue canopy of
Turkish, Egyptian, and Virginian. The tang of Kümmel and Benedictine and

Crème de Menthe came to you with the fragrance of the Club's especial
coffee and the reek of innumerable illusion perfumes.
People were having a cigarette and a gossip before going on to Lord's
to see the tennis-singles between Oxford and Cambridge; or the Inter-
Regimental Polo Finals at Hurlingham. Others had just motored back from
witnessing the rowing-matches at Henley, between Eton and Darley, and the
Eton second Eight and Montbeau College, and were recuperating before
dropping in for a whiff of the new comedy at the Ambassador's, or the latest
revue at the Fleur de Lis. To be followed by Tango Tea at the Rocroy, or
Unlimited Bridge at the house of an accommodating friend.
Perhaps you can recall them—those men and women of the best and
bluest blood in Britain, strenuously spending their days in doing nothing as
expensively as ever it could be done. Light, frivolous, shallow, dry-hearted;
restlessly seeking new things on which to waste their barren energies, they
seemed, and bore out their seeming in all thoroughness; the degenerate sons
and daughters of a once great and splendid race.
Save Vanity and the Pride of Life there seemed but little in Eve or
Adam. Not overmuch grey brain-matter appeared to be contained within
their small neat skulls. Though in comparison with the modern Eve, slangy,
loud, extravagantly attired in every tint of the Teutonic dye-chemist's
chromatic register, topped with feathers that missed the ceiling by a bare
half-foot, Adam in his neutral greys, and buffs and browns, and umbers,
struck you as a being of mild demeanour and uncostly apparel, until looking
closer, you found him out.
His nice hair was gummed about his head as sleekly as a golliwog's.
He sported stays, for the preservation of his silhouette. His gossamer
cambric exhaled perfumes like a Georgian dandy's. Fashionable
complexion-creams lent his tanned and well-shaved cheek a tempting

peachiness. His socks were all too lovely for description by this feeble pen
of mine. The uppers of his boots were of every imaginable material and
substance, ranging from silk brocade, green lizard, and ivory-white shark
skin, to sandy-pink armadillo-belly, or the tender grey of the African
gazelle.
The results of the Olympic Games of 1912 must have made dour
reading for the fathers of these youthful Britons, remembering their own
triumphs in the early eighties. A bitter pill for those stark old men, their
grandfathers, makers of 'Varsity records in '61 and '67, whose faith in the
superiority of British lungs and muscles had been bequeathed them by their
own sires. Yet their juniors took it calmly. They carried the stigma of
inferiority with cheerful indifference. Even while holding it the thing best
worth living for—they placidly submitted to be outclassed in sport.
And both the man and the woman of this era were possessed by
strange crazes and pleased with vivid contrasts. The musical jig-saw
puzzles of Lertes, Hein, and de Blonc vied in their favour with the weird
Oriental Operas of the Russian Rimsky-Korsakov and the delicate
rhapsodies of Delius, and the sylvan nymphs and fauns of Russian Ballet
shared their plaudits with Señora Panchita and Herr Maxi Zuchs, the
celebrated exponents of the Tango.
Ah, yes, it was an extraordinary era. Slips from that old, old Tree that
bore the Forbidden Fruit had been successfully grafted upon so many old-
world stocks in British orchards, that you caught a tang of its exotic flavour
in almost everything. Play ran high. Luxury ran riot. Period Balls and Upas
Club Cabaret Suppers were IT—absolutely IT. Morality was at lowest ebb
—Religion a forgotten formulary. And as the Christian virtues cheapened,
so the prices of dress, jewellery, motor-cars, and other indispensables of
modern existence climbed to still more amazing altitudes. The marvel was,

because nobody seemed to have any money—where the money came from
to pay for these things? What we are yet to pay for the wholesale levelling
of moral barriers, and the abolition of old-world modesty and good taste,
that distinguished the years of ill-fame 1913 and 1914, only Heaven knows.
Even more comprehensively pervasive than the illusion perfumes
extracted from coal-tar by German chemists, and supplied us by German
manufacturers; even more striking than the dazzling, vivid aniline dyes,
procured from the same source, even more potent than the vast array of by-
product drugs which represent as it were the scum of the insulated vats
wherein the Teuton chemist macerates and mingles his high explosives—
was the strange, mysteriously pervasive flavour, the seductively-suggestive
tang of evil in the social atmosphere. You caught the look of secret,
intimate, half-cynical knowledge in the faces not only of the merest youths,
but of the youngest, freshest, prettiest girls. Subjects held unmentionable a
few years ago were openly discussed in English drawing-rooms. Curious
lore in strange things old and new was much sought after at this period,
when Cubism and Futurism governed design, not only in dress and stage
scenery, but in Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture; and dances known in
the voodoo-houses of East Africa and the West Indies, and the hells of
Central America and the Argentine were seen in the ball-rooms as in the
brothels, of Paris and London, Petrograd and Brussels, Vienna, New York,
and Berlin.
Novelty was so much the rage, that if the Arch-Enemy of Mankind had
appeared among the exclusive patrons of a fashionable night-club in any
one of these cities, a hearty welcome would have been extended to him, and
his ripe experience would have been laid under contribution with a view to
imparting to the latest Cabaret entertainment some exotic novelty from
Hell.

Franky with obtrusive care selected a comfortable corner of the Persian
divan for Margot, and while she signed for coffee and Kümmel, established
himself at her side.
They were isolated, it seemed to Kittums. Friends nodded and smiled
cordially, but did not attempt to join them. Was it because Franky's too-
possessive manner had told secrets? ... She shivered and glanced at her lord.
He said, as the light-footed button-boys scoured about with coffee and
liqueur-trays, while the electric fans purred, the blue smoke-canopy
thickened under the green and rose glass dome, and the clamour of many
feminine voices, in combination with the gaudy feathers of the clamourers,
suggested the South American macaw-house at the Zoo:
"My eye! you're pretty thick in here. Might be a fog in mid-Channel."
He mounted a square monocle recently purchased in Paris and the pride of
his bosom, threw back his head and stared up into the famous green and
rose dome. "Swagger affair. How much did it tot up to?"
"Seventeen hundred, clear, with the carpet and the divan."
"Pretty stiff!" His doleful whistle set Margot's teeth on edge. She
added:
"And rattling cheap at the price! And—if it wasn't, I was spending my
own money.... There was nobody—then—to interfere!"
He conceded:
"Of course I don't suggest that you were done in the eye. Probably you
got the value of your dibs. But you'll have something better to spend cash
on presently. Me, too! We must both draw in our horns now, Kittums. For
the sake of—you know who! ... Hullo! Is anything wrong?"
She had winced, but she gritted her little teeth, and fought back the
rising hysteria. She could have shrieked, or thrown the little coffee-pot at
his head. He went on, recognising friends through the smoke-haze:

"There's Lady Beau with that German aviator-chap we met in Paris.
Big red-headed brute. You remember him? And—who's the girl? But for her
hair, I'd say it was Miss Saxham. By the Great Brass Hat, it is! With a wig,
or dyed...."
"Dyed. It was done in Paris—done most beautifully." Margot's eyes
had lighted up with interest. "I must have forgotten to tell you. I've known it
three or four days. Don't you like it?"
"Like it?" Franky had reached for his little glass and gulped the
contents hurriedly. "My stars, I never saw such a transformation. Order
another Kümmel, please, to give me a buck-up."
"Take mine. I simply loathe the sticky stuff." She added, as Franky
obliged: "I think that Pat looks ripping."
"All too ripping. That's where the trouble comes in." He went on:
"When her hair was black, you knew where it was you'd seen her. Makin'
one in an endless procession of women—all with long eyes and big busts
and curving hips, walkin'—like pussy-cats along a roof-ridge, on the walls
of those old Egyptian temples we did together—that November when I got
such spoons on you—going up with the Gillinghams from Cairo to Philae—
a flat-bottomed Nile tug towin' the whole crowd in a string of dahabeahs.
You remember those ochre-coloured Nile sunrises? When a dust-storm had
been blowin' over the Desert, and the River was all wrinkly white, like
curdled milk."
"How killingly poetic!"
"Am I poetic? Good egg! Never thought I'd live to be called that."
"Live and learn!" Margot's laugh was a hard little silvery tinkle. She
too was remembering the sunrises and sunsets of Egypt, and the long days
under the green canvas awnings. How beautiful she had thought the brown
eyes that seemed only vacuous now. She, Margot, would be ugly very soon

now, she told herself. Already her small face showed lines and hollows.
Soon beauty-loving men and women would turn their eyes away.... Her
cheval-glass would tell her why, and shop-windows when she passed them
would reveal her shapelessness. She would only possess interest for three
people. For the doctor, as a patient. For the certificated nurse, as a Case. For
her husband, as the potential mother of the boy he longed for. And—what
price Margot?
"Should you like me to take you to see some polo, or wouldn't a chuff-
chuff in the country be best?" Franky's eyes were full of hungry solicitude
as they rested on the small, pinched features. "You look a bit fagged, it
strikes me!"
She nipped her little lower lip, stung by the tone of sympathetic
proprietorship. "Oh! very well. A drive!" she told him, and they passed
together from the smoking-room. The sheath-skirt revealed, as she moved,
what she would have hidden. Von Herrnung smiled, following the little
figure with bold, curious glances. Other men stared, if more discreetly.
Towering feathers nodded to each other as their feminine wearers
commented:
"Poor little Margot, how quite too rough on her!"
Said Lady Beauvayse, assuming the rip-saw Yankee accent in which it
pleased her to deliver her witticisms:
"Say now! if we women could pick babies right away off the
strawberry-vines, it would save a deal of trouble, and a considerable pile of
self-respect."
Everybody laughed. A slender white and golden woman with a string
of sapphires very much the colour of her own eyes, picked up a toy
Pekingese that squatted near her, and said, cuddling the goggling morsel
under her chin:

"I agree. When I look at my two precious duckies I say to myself: 'You
little dears, for each of your sweet sakes I became a plain woman with a
shapeless silhouette and saucer-eyes. Now that I've done my duty to your
pappy and Posterity, this is the only kind of baby I'll indulge in." She kissed
the Pekingese on the end of its black snub-nose. "And when I want a new
one—I'll buy it at the shop!"
"Noch besser. Why not hire one? ..." suggested von Herrnung.
Mrs. Charterhouse laughed and gave him the Pekingese to hold. But it
snapped at him furiously and she took the little beast back again.
"Dogs do not like me," said the big German. "You will read perhaps in
novels that that is a bad sign, yes?"
"I never read novels," returned Mrs. Charterhouse, with her famous
manner, "nor any books, only bits of the papers for the Sporting and Society
news. And Reports of Divorce Proceedings, and the Notices in Bankruptcy.
One likes to know what one's friends are doing, and where they are to be
found. Don't you, Count? Not that there is any great difficulty in
ascertaining your whereabouts, just now, I fancy.... Why, what has become
of Patrine?"
"Miss Saxham went in there just now to write a letter," said the smiling
von Herrnung, pointing to the leather-covered swing-doors communicating
with the writing-room. "She comes now, I think! Yes, it is she!" He rose
with his air of exaggerated courtesy as the tall figure of Patrine Saxham
returned through the swing-doors and re-crossed the room. She carried her
head high, and had a letter in her hand. The alteration in the colour of her
hair made her whiteness almost startling. There were bluish shadows about
her long eyes, and her rounded cheeks had lost a little of their fulness, but
her beauty had never been more apparent than now.

"She has dyed, therefore she is dead to me!" groaned Courtley, who
was, as usual, in attendance on Lady Beauvayse. He added, plaintively: "It's
like—white-washing the Sphinx, or enamelling a first-class battle-cruiser in
some fashionable colour. Why did you let her do it, my lady fair?"
Lady Beauvayse retorted:
"Am I Miss Saxham's mother that I should meddle in her love-affairs?"
"If I was acquainted with her mother," said Courtley, below his breath,
"and thought the good lady would take my tip seriously, I'd step in and nip
this affair in the bud. It's no go, even if Miss Saxham thinks it is. It's a dud.
That German flying-chap is booked to marry a cousin; a Baroness
Something von Wolfensbragen-Hirschenbuttel. I've seen it in the Berlin
Lokal Anzeiger, and that's inspired, a sort of Imperial Court Almanac. And
even if it wasn't true, there are reasons—" His kind grey eyes were worried,
he tugged at his pointed black beard in a vexed way. "Take me seriously,
Miladi, tell her what I've told you, before it's too late!"
"And bring on myself the fate of the interferer.... Couldn't you—since
you're so anxious?" Lady Beauvayse began.
"Not possible," said Courtley. "Too crushed with responsibilities. Got
to brush up my seamanship, while my junior executive swots away in
Docks at Chatham, fillin' in the watch-bill and making out commissioning-
cards."
"You've got a ship, do you mean?"
Courtley nodded.
"They call her one at the Admiralty just by way of being funny. When
they've scraped off the dirt enough to get at her, she may turn out to be a
first-class protected cruiser. Twenty months out of commission—and
mobilised for the Spithead Naval Review."

"Ought one to be glad? ... Does it mean that we're to congratulate you
on promotion?" asked puzzled Lady Beauvayse.
"Well," Courtley admitted cautiously, "when I've got my full-dress
frock-coat and sword out of pawn, and hoisted my pennant and called on
the post Commander-in-Chief—I shall be something between a Rear-
Admiral and a Post Captain—or they'll have told me wrong."
"And the Review—what do you call it?" persisted Lady Beauvayse.
"Can one go and see it—whenever it comes off?"
"It'll be big enough to see—with a stiffish pair of binkies," admitted
Courtley in his gentlest manner; "and the newspapers seem to have
arranged it for somewhere in the middle of the month. As to what you're to
call it—if you called it an Object Lesson on the biggest scale for the use of
German Kultur Classes, perhaps you wouldn't be very wide of the bull."
He got up before Lady Beauvayse could rejoin, and had met Patrine,
and engineered her into his vacated seat next her friend upon the divan
almost before she knew. She lowered her tall person upon the cushions,
studiously avoiding von Herrnung's glances. She wore a white embroidered
gown of cobwebby material and extreme scantiness, a stole of black cock's
feathers was looped about her shoulders, and on her dead beech-leaf-
coloured hair sat a curious little hat of glittering silver spangles, from which
sprang a single black cock's plume.
"What have you all been talking about?" she asked, looking about her.
Lady Wastwood, who sat near, answered, balancing her long, slim,
fragile personality on the fender-stool before the hearth that was filled with
tall ferns and flowering plants in pots:
"We were saying—what a wretched pity the process of racial
reproduction is so abominably unbecoming. It really points to a loose style

of reasoning on the part of Nature—or whoever it is who arranges these
things!"
Who does not know Lady Wastwood. She affected, at this period, a
skull-cap of gold-green hair and a triangular chalk-white face, with a V-
shaped mouth, painted scarlet as a Pierrot's. Her eyebrows were black and
resembled musical slurs. Through her few diaphanous garments you could
have counted every bone of her frail person, so light that it was a favourite
vacation joke with her eldest boy—who was now at Sandhurst qualifying
for a Cavalry Commission—to sprint with his widowed mother on his
shoulder up and down corridors and stairs.
Listen to Trixie:
"I suppose—Nature. She's so unreasonable—that must be why she's a
she, in literature. She implanted in us poor women the raging desire to be
pretty under all imaginable circumstances.... At the same time she says to
us: 'You're immoral, unnatural, and selfish, if you don't replenish the Race.
Go and do it!' Consequently, when one is ordered in that bullying way to
choose between immorality and ugliness, one calls out: 'Oh! do let me be
pretty, please!'"
A soldierly, good-looking man, sitting with a charming girl in a
particularly smoky corner, lazily propounded:
"Why do women covet prettiness beyond everything?"
"To please men, I rather surmise," said Lady Beauvayse, turning her
Romney head in the direction of the speaker, who queried:
"Ah! but why do women want to please men?"
"I can answer that," interrupted Mrs. Charterhouse. "Because she who
pleases is perfectly sure of having a gorgeous time."
"It has been said by some inspired idiot," lisped Lady Wastwood "that
women make themselves beautiful for the sake of their own sex. Give us

your opinion on this question, Count von Herrnung. Did I put on this
perfectly devey frock for Miss Saxham, or for you?"
"Gnädige Gräfin, for neither myself nor Miss Saxham. For your own
pleasure," said von Herrnung, "have you joy in making yourself beautiful."
"You feel like that when your tailor has done you particularly well?"
asked Lady Wastwood, wickedly, looking down her long, thin nose to hide
the sparks of humour in her eyes. Half a dozen pairs of ears were cocked to
catch the answer, in which von Herrnung's characteristic lack of humour
showed.
"Gracious Countess, certainly. It is prachtvoll for a cultured man to
study and develop his physical advantages. To please women," he made his
little insolent bow, "who adore Beauty, and for the sake of ingratiating
oneself with men. But above all for one's own sake. For ugliness is
despicable," said von Herrnung. His florid face paled, his hard blue eyes
dilated, he shivered as he spoke with uncontrollable disgust. "It is—niedrig!
There is no other word! No longer to be beautiful and strong—that would
be horrible! There are many ugly accidents in our German Flying Service.
Thus far I have escaped disfigurement. But when my time comes I shall
take care to be killed outright. Better to die than to be made hideous!"
"Did you hear?" said the man in the distant corner to the charming girl
who shared it with him. "The fellow's dead in earnest. And he is
uncommonly good-looking, though I don't care about the German Service
type of man myself. Don't like their clothes, don't like their jewellery, don't
like their tone when they're talking to women, and simply loathe it when
they're talking to me!"
"It's a case of Doctor Fell," said his pretty friend. "Now I should
admire him—if he admired himself a little less, and his valet or somebody
with influence over him could persuade him to cut that awful thumb-nail.

No, you can't see it now. He's wearing a glove on his left hand. But it can't
be under two inches long."
"Queer kind of freak for a Twentieth Centurion," said the man
contemptuously. "All very well for the Imperial Court of China, or a Stone
Age make-up for a Covent Garden Fancy Ball. But for a London drawin'-
room in the year 1914 it is a little off the bull. We must approach Miss
Saxham in the matter of cutting it. She appears to be the Ruling Star."
His friend glanced across at the big knot of people gathered near the
ferny fireplace.
"They go about together a good deal, and he does stare at her in rather
a possessive style. She's so awfully good to look at, isn't she?"
"She is; but she isn't quite so good for you to know!"
"Why?"
"Could we drop the subject? I'll say why later. Let's scoot now! With
luck, we could nip in for the end of the second act of 'The Filberts' at
Ryley's Theatre, and see Jimmy Griggson do 'The Dance of the Varalette.'"
And they rose and sauntered away in search of entertainment, leaving
Cynthia Charterhouse drawing out von Herrnung, who seemed in a
particularly arrogant mood. Did he like England and London especially?
Did he find English women as nice, generally, as the friends he had left at
home?
ü
"Nice.... One is charmed with English ladies!" declared von Herrnung.
"So tall, willowy, and elegant, so independent of manner, and so amiably
ready to make a stranger feel at home! True, they have not the plumpness
and repose of our German ladies ... at the theatres especially they are rather
thin than otherwise.... But they have gehen and chic"—he showed his white
teeth—"and change is a delightful thing!"

Patrine, silent in her settee-corner, wondered whether Trixie Wastwood
and Cynthia Charterhouse knew that he was insulting them?
"Change from a fat woman to a thin one, is that what you mean?"
asked Mrs. Charterhouse. She added: "I'm so glad we strike you as having
lots of go. Perhaps it's a result of our being given to exercise, that general
effect of slimness you mention. But if German women don't walk, or ride,
or skate, or fence, or swim, they do dance a great deal."
"They dance a great deal, yes!" agreed von Herrnung. "One might say
they are passionately devoted to it. Dancing is also one of the chief joys of a
German officer's life—when he has handsome partners to choose amongst!"
He added: "When one is young, and the blood runs hot in the veins, what
more glowing pleasures can Life offer, than to ride a noble horse, to drink
glorious wine, or to dance all night with a beautiful woman, to the sound of
music voluptuous and exquisite!"
Patrine, behind the shelter of a copy of the Pall Mall Gazette, was
shuddering uncontrollably. Her life seemed driven back from the
extremities to centre about her heart. In that and in her brain were glowing
cores of fire. All else was ice, rigid and heavy and cold.
"Dear me!" came plaintively from Mrs. Charterhouse. She signalled
with her eyebrows to Lady Wastwood and continued, as the diaphanous
Trixie came drifting to her assistance: "Really, I shall have to seek a
delightful change by going to Germany. I'd quite forgotten how different
you are! The way you talk about your blood, and all that. It's simply too
awfully interesting! Trixie, you've got to listen to this!"
"I need no telling, I assure you. I have been drinking in Count von
Herrnung's eloquence at every pore," affirmed Trixie. She added: "Like you
I have been deeply intrigued by his descriptions of his countrymen. So, so
different from our poor creatures, who don't drink glorious wine because

they funk gouty complications, and leave their noble horses eating their
heads off in loose-boxes while they're scorching about the country in
racing-cars. And as for dancing all night—" She shrugged her frail
shoulders, and elevated her Pierrot eyebrows beneath the veil that tightly
swathed her white triangular face.
"Doesn't it fire you to go to Germany?" gushed Mrs. Charterhouse.
"Why"—she demanded, raising her fine eyes to the genuine Adam ceiling
—"why can't my husband get a post in the Berlin Diplomatic, instead of
stupid old Petersburg? One never dreamed Germans could be so interesting
before!"
"We are interesting, yes!" blandly agreed von Herrnung. He lighted a
fresh cigarette, balanced his magnificent person upon an inlaid Oriental
chess-stool, folded his huge arms upon his broad breast, and turned upon
Trixie and the impressionable Cynthia the batteries of his superb blue eyes.
"Es mag wohl sein—it may possibly be because the Englishman is a human
machine—a cold and formal, if intelligent being; while the German is a
child of Nature, whatever his calling may be. His bounding pulses throb
under the official or military uniform as though it were a fawn-skin worn by
a young satyr. He can sing. He can revel. He can enjoy. He can love——"
"He can love! Now you're getting really quite too interesting!" Mrs.
Charterhouse exclaimed in seeming ecstasy: "Do go on, Count. Pray, pray
tell us how German officers love!"
"Yet this exuberance, and seeming-careless child-likeness," pursued
von Herrnung, "co-exists in the representative male of our glorious German
nation with an energy which is pitilessly indomitable, and a hardness like
that of diamond, or of the metal of the Hammer of Thor. Scratch the child,
joyous and voluptuous"—the ladies nodded to each other delightedly at this
second reference to voluptuousness—"you will find beneath its rosy skin

the German Superman. Gnädige Gräfin, may I give you a cigarette?" He
pulled out a massive silver-gilt case, and offered it to Lady Wastwood, who
had thrown away the end of a tiny Péra.
"Thanks," said the lady, "but it might turn out a super-cigarette and
disagree with me. How astonishingly well-informed you Germans are upon
the subject of yourselves! I've met heaps of your countrymen whom the
subject seemed perfectly to obsess. I suppose they begin to teach you at a
very early age, don't they? Don't you suppose they would, Cynthia dear?"
Mrs. Charterhouse agreed.
"Of course. But I wonder if that sort of—might one call it—intensive
culture?—can be good for you?" With her charming head on one side she
regarded von Herrnung pensively. "Don't you sometimes get fed up with
yourselves? One would somehow suppose you would! Like the East End
Board School children whose mother had to write to the Fifth Standard
teacher to ask her not to tell Hemma and 'Arriet any more nasty things
about their insides."
Courtley and Lady Beauvayse, who under cover of a separate
conversation had been listening, were seized with simultaneous attacks of
coughing, rose and escaped from the smoking-room. Patrine Saxham
remained, seeming to study the newspaper she had picked up. But only a
confused jumble of letters, big and little, danced up and down the columns
she held before her eyes.
And yet there were lines scattered here and there throughout the
newspapers, that boded ill for the peace of the world. How little we
dreamed of what was coming while crowded London audiences applauded
Jimmy Greggson in the "Dance of the Varalette." The River was ablaze with
multi-coloured sweaters, vast crowds planked their gate-money to witness

cricket-matches, lawn-tennis and polo-matches, Flying contests, and bouts
between International champions at the ancient game of fisticuffs.
Even while the handsome young French heavy-weight Carpentier was
whacking the Yankee Smith at Olympia, white-faced, weary-eyed men of
great affairs were spending the hot hours of the July days and nights—
minus a stray half-hour for a meal and a snatched eyeful of sleep now and
then—in reading reports in cipher sent by lesser men, agents of the Secret
Intelligence Department—who were registered as numbers and owned no
names.
These told of vast preparations long complete, and terrible designs
perfect and perfecting. Poison-fruit, grown and matured in shade, now
bursting-ripe and ready to kill. The aërials thrilled, the long waves travelled
through invisible ether, carrying the despatches for the weary-eyed men.
The despatches were not all in cipher. Thus little polyglot employés,
youthful radiotelegraphic operators in charge of ship-stations in Territorial
or foreign waters, or Wireless posts quite recently established on foreign
frontiers, found themselves sharers in the secret councils of Ambassadors,
Emperors, Kings, and Presidents.
In their ear-pieces such words as "situation," "utmost gravity," "friction
avoided," "Triple Alliance," and "Triple Entente," were repeated over and
over. To them the tuned spark sang what the Tsar was saying to his Cousin
of Great Britain and the Dominions overseas. They heard the British
Foreign Secretary talking from Downing Street to the British Ambassador
at Berlin, and the British Ambassador at Paris, and the French President, on
a visit to Tsarskoe Selo, replying to communiqués from the Quai d'Orsay.
Also de Munsen from the Embassy at Vienna, confirming Whitehall views
as to the extreme gravity of the Austro-Servian situation.

Last, but not least, the voice from a certain guarded sanctum in the
Kaiserlicher Palais on the Schloss Platz, Berlin, saying in a cipher of
grouped numbers, the secret language of Hohenzollern intrigue not
understood of little operators—things that bleached the face of the listener
in London to the yellow of old cheese.
"As Vicegerent of the World, charged by Almighty God with the
supreme duty of maintaining peace among nations ... warn these silly devils
of the danger in which they stand! Just for the word 'neutrality'—a word in
War-time often disregarded—they risk annihilation of a dynasty by my
conquering sword, and the inevitable blotting-out of the British race.
Invasion Belgium indispensable.... Must strike the blow before Russia could
get to the frontier. Life and death as regards the Success of my Plan. Delay
by diplomacy. Promise anything for neutrality. Obtain an understanding of
non-intervention. Bluff for all you are worth!"
Again in yet more groups of numbers, the vocal spark sang on and on:
"Attention. If the Secret Service agent who has managed to get into
Lord Clanronald's service as under-librarian at Gwyll Castle can secure
complete copies—or better still, the originals—of the old Lord's plans for
construction of the secret War-machine that hypocritical England has kept
up her sleeve out of so-called humanity since the days of the British
Regency—strike a deal with him at once. To the ménu that will presently be
served to our enemies—beginning with Super-Explosive—explosive
bullets, incendiary shells, lachrymatory shells serving as entrées—the
bombardment of Dover from Calais—the destruction of London and the
chief Naval Ports of Great Britain by our Zeppelin Fleet being the pièce de
résistance of the banquet—the Clanronald Death-engine will be added as
fifth course! Thou wilt pay the rogue who has dared to stickle for higher
terms ten thousand pounds in English banknotes on account of the sum of

twelve million marks he presumptuously demands of us. The balance will
be paid him on personal application at the Wilhelmstrasse—you
understand! Warn Prince Henry and von Moltke not to risk bringing the
Secret Plans personally. Should the loss of the documents be discovered,
suspicion would instantly attach to one of these two. Trust not the thief; he
may be tempted to betray us. Send the plans by Undersea Boat 18 now on
coast-observation duty in Area 88—fathoms 50—44, east of Spurn Head.
Annulled. Forward by air. Squadron-Captain-Pilot von Herrnung of my
10th Field Flight will be detailed for this duty, being now in London
investigating the value of a new stabiliser—rejected by the English War
Office—which the French Chiefs of the Service Aë are anxious to secure.
Tell him to obtain a personal flying-test from the inventor. I say no further!
As the Hohenzollern were noble robber-knights, so also were von
Herrnung's ancestors. Let the eagle fly home to his Imperial master with
booty from across the sea. England may suppose him drowned. France
also.... We shall know better.... A hearty welcome awaits the proud bird-
knight alighting on our German soil."

CHAPTER XXIV
DISILLUSION

Rhona Helvellyn came stalking in, looked round, recognised Patrine, came
over and dropped down beside her on the divan, full to the brim of the
invariable subject, and suffering to talk.
Through the good offices of a legal pal she had got in to hear the
Suffragette Trial at the Old Bailey that day. Fan Braid and Kitty Neek had

been frightfully plucky. Full of grit and vim, in spite of the six weeks'
hunger-strike. Began shrieking like Jimmy O! the moment they were
brought into the dock by the warders and wardresses. On being rebuked by
the Judge, Fan had bunked a bundle of pamphlets at the head of his
lordship, catching the Clerk of the Court, who was seated immediately
underneath the Bench, no end of a biff in the eye.
"And then?"
Patrine heard a strange voice from her own stiff lips asking the
question.
"Then both of 'em were removed from the Dock. It was done—in
time!" Rhona's light eyes danced with enjoyment. "Such a scrimmage! Such
a rumpus! Took three men and a woman to tackle each of 'em. We could
hear 'em giving tongue all the way down to the cells. Then they had to go
on with the Trial without 'em." She chuckled. "You may guess there were a
lot of us at the back of the Court waiting—just for that! Perfect wadge all
together. Hell and trimmings when we started. They had to eject us before
they could jog on with their gay old summing-up!"
"But in the end they got through?" The weary voice was so unlike
Patrine's that she wondered why Rhona did not jump and stare at her. But
Rhona was mounted on her hobby-horse, and unobservant of other things.
"Through right enough! And Fan and Kitty—" Rhona screwed up her
lips into the shape of a whistle, and winked away a tear that hung on one of
her fair eyelashes; "It's too brutal! Three months each, and poor little Kitty
dying of lung-trouble. They only brought her back from Davos in May. That
riles me!" She clenched her hands fiercely and went on, cautiously lowering
her tone: "So far I've taken no active share in any Militant Demonstration.
Partly because I'd be wiped off the Club books if I got spouting in public, or
was mixed up in any police-court business, partly because I'm funky—

there's the word! But at last I'm wound up! It was Kitty's little peaky-white
face did it! ... She—she broke a blood-vessel as the warders were carrying
her down to the cells."
A sob choked Rhona's voice, and a spasm of misery wrenched her. She
controlled herself. She was deadly in earnest—wound up to go, as she had
said. She went on, talking rapidly, in a tone that only reached the ear it had
been meant for. How many such secret disclosures the Club divan had
known.
"I've thought.... A regular swarm of Distinguished French and Belgian
Big Pots and Little Pots—Mayors—Prefects and Deputies, Judges, Press
Representatives and Inspectors-General—are engaged in Discovering
England this week as ever is. It's an echo of the Entente Cordiale. Behind
the badge of the International Advancement Association—I've got one!—I
might drop in at one of their farewell speechifications, I believe the next's
on Friday at Leamington—and heckle 'em like one o'clock! Ask 'em why
women don't have the Vote in France and Belgium——"
"Don't they?"
"Nix a bit! Not for all the fuss they make about the sex. Or—to fix the
scene of my maiden effort nearer home—there's a Banquet of Archbishops,
Bishops and their wives at the Mansion House to-morrow night. Music just
after the flesh-pots and before the speeches or after—a select company of
Concert Artistes, the gemmen in boiled shirts and the usual
accompaniments; the ladies in white with black sashes and black gloves.
And that's where I shall come in—in white with black trimmings. Land of
Hope and Glory!—when I get up and ask the Archbishop of Canterbury to
plump for Female Suffrage!—or shall it be the Lord Mayor? ... Won't my
Uncle Gustavus burst the buttons off his episcopal waistcoat. You've seen
him. He's Bishop of Dorminster—and they fasten 'em at the back."

"Let the Bishop keep his buttons on!" said Patrine, suddenly and
savagely. "What the—devil does it matter whether women get the Vote?
Would we keep it if we got it, or throw it away—oh! idiots—idiots!—to
gratify some vulgar vanity, or some beastly sensual whim?"
"Gee-whillikins!" Rhona whistled shrilly in astonishment. "Why, I
thought you were one of Us. Not actively militant, but a sympathiser, no
end. Didn't you get our Committee in touch with Mrs. Saxham, when we'd
set our hearts on having her speak at the Monster Meeting of Women we're
going to have in October at the Grand Imperial Hall? She's promised to
address us on Suffrage and we're all over ourselves to hear her. That last
article of hers in The National Quarterly—'The Burden of Tyre,' has
collared the literary cake. People tell me who've read it that she doesn't care
a hang about the Vote for Women in any other sense than that it'd open a
gateway to legislation on the Sex Question of a much more drastic kind.
She'd bring in a Bill to have moral offences against children dealt with by a
Jury of Mothers—a lot they'd leave of the offender once they'd their claws
on him!—and make it a Life Sentence every time, for the fellow who
seduces a girl."
Patrine listened in stony silence. Rhona chattered on. "Of course the
work she does amongst those unlucky wretches—young girls and women
who've come to grief—is topping. But why waste herself rescuing
prostitutes and street-walkers? Aren't any of us good enough—or bad
enough to interest her? I'm going to ask her that when you introduce me—
remember you've promised to!"
Patrine said in a voice jarred and harsh with anger:
"Since your declared intention is to be offensive to Mrs. Saxham,
whose shoes neither you nor myself, nor any woman of our set is worthy to
unlace, I take back the promise, if it was ever given!"

"What's up?" Rhona turned and stared. "I say!—but you look fearfully
seedy! Worried about Margot, is that it?" She was off on another tack,
carried by the light shifting breeze of her imagination. "Poor little Margot!
—in spite of good advice and top-hole mascots—booked for the Nursery
Handicap—and out of the running for a year!"
"Who told you—that?—about Margot?"
"Melts—the head housemaid here—had it from Kittum's maid Pauline,
who dropped in to fetch away some stored luggage of her ladyship's....
They've furnished a house at Cadogan Place—Margot and her Franky-
wanky. West End enough, and quite exquie inside, but not as convee as the
dear old Club. But—I believe I'm boring you." Her nimble glance left
Patrine's face, and darted in the direction of von Herrnung. "Who's the big,
good-looking, carroty man, gobbling you up with his eyes while he's talking
piffle to Cynthia and Trix? Now I remember—I have heard some hints of
your going over to the Common Enemy." Rhona's sharp light eyes sparkled
like polished gold-stones. "Is that the reason why you've bleached your
hair? What a putrid shame of you! And the Enemy's a foreigner—a
German! Did he give you that gorgeous ring?"
Upon the third finger of Patrine's left hand was the magpie pearl set in
platinum, gleaming to its wearer's fevered fancy, like some malignant
demon's eye. Rhona caught the hand, and uttered a little squeak as Patrine
wrenched it away. She—Patrine—was driven beyond endurance: her self-
command was breaking. Her hair seemed to creep upon her tingling scalp.
Down her spine and along the muscles of her thighs passed slow recurrent
waves of physical anguish. She could have screamed aloud, torn her
garments, set her teeth in her own flesh. But she mastered herself
sufficiently to say:

"I won the ring over a bet in Paris. You can see for yourself I don't
wear it on the engagement left. Do not despair of me. At this moment I do
not particularly esteem women. But on the other hand, I absolutely
abominate men!"
"Hope for you then, politically speaking," said the misanthropic
Rhona. "What, are you going?"
Patrine had thrown aside her paper and risen, towering over her. She
nodded without speaking, and went out of the smoking-room, crumpling the
letter she had written in her strong white hand. She would not post it, she
told herself as she passed through the outer lounge. She would go and look
up Uncle Owen at Harley Street. She spoke a word to an agile hall-boy in
the vestibule and he skipped out, and signalled a taxi-cab.
A handsome Darracq four-seater, enamelled bright yellow and fitted in
ebonized steel, was waiting by the kerbstone. As the taxi manoeuvred to get
round it, von Herrnung's voice said, speaking behind Patrine:
"Stop the boy, that machine will not be wanted.... I have here a car that
is lent me by a friend."
She turned and saw him, standing hat in hand. His tone was pleasant,
and he was smiling. He went on:
"He—my friend—is a Secretary of our German Embassy. He has three
automobiles—why should he not lend me one?" He replaced his hat and
pulled a curved gold cigar-case out of the breast-pocket of his waistcoat
asking: "I may light a zigarre after these stupid cigarettes I have been
smoking? It will not be unpleasant to gnädiges Fräulein?"
His courtesy insulted. His smile was an outrage. She controlled the
trembling of her lips with difficulty. Whether he observed or not was
uncertain, he seemed to busy himself solely with the selection and kindling
of his cigar.

"Pardon that I get in first, as I shall be driving!" he said, and threw
away the smoking vesta, pushed back the hall-boy who was wrestling with
the door-handle, got in and took his place at the steering-wheel, beckoning
to Patrine.
"Thanks, but I cannot.... I am going to Berkeley Square."
"I will drop you at Berkeley Square." He met her eyes hardily. "You
will not refuse me this pleasure, when I have not seen you since—" The
slight significant pause stabbed as it had been meant to. He saw her wince,
and finished: "Since two days. Will you not get in?"
She took the seat beside him. He stretched his arm across her knees
and shut the door neatly. She leaned back to avoid his touch, and he smiled,
feeling her shudder. Her eyes were on his gloved left hand as he drew it
back.
He manipulated the electrical starter and the yellow Darracq moved up
and out of Short Street. Patrine stared before her, sitting rigid in her place.
Not once did her glance visit him. But every skilful movement of his hands
upon the steering-wheel, every creak of the springy leather cushion under
his great body, every tightening of his mouth or twitch of his thick red
eyebrows, were photographed upon her brain.
He was irreproachably got up in thin, loose grey tweed morning
clothes, cut by a West End tailor, and his feather-weight grey felt hat
testified to the make of Scott. His knitted silk tie, a combination of electric
blue and vivid yellow, was a discordant note. Patrine was certain it must
have been the work of some other woman in Berlin. The heavy flat gold
ring through which the ends were drawn was set with a ruby and two
diamonds, another false note that jarred her painfully. But he was looking
strong and well and in admirable condition. His blue eyes were bright, his

red hair and his tightly-rolled moustache glittered in the sunshine, there was
a bloom of perfect health upon his florid skin.
If Patrine did not look at von Herrnung, his eyes were less abstemious
with regard to her. Under cover of their short red eyelashes, they scrutinised
her from time to time. There was unbridled curiosity in their regard, and
also a retrospective vanity, admiration, and resentment as well. She rode the
high horse. She was hellishly sure of herself. Sure of von Herrnung, it
might be. This passed in his mind as he said to her:
"Do you know that this car has had the honour to carry the Emperor of
Germany? When Seine Majestät paid a visit to England in the year 1907, he
used it every day."
Patrine returned indifferently:
"It seems to go smoothly."
Von Herrnung said, as the car obeyed every motion of his practised
hands upon the steering-wheel:
"It is a wonderful traveller. It has been fitted with a Heinz motor, three
times more powerful to its weight than any other known petrol-engine.
Some journeys, I can tell you, it has had with the All Highest. Travelling
incognito, driven always by a—certain young Prussian officer; then of
Engineers—attached to the Personal Staff specially for this work."
"I daresay you mean yourself?"
"That is a clever piece of guessing; I congratulate you, gnädiges
Fräulein. Well, it is now no secret. I do not object to admit having been the
young Leutnant in the case. So now you know how I gained my flair for
English scenery and my violent penchant for English beauty. A weakness of
which I am rather proud, since it is one the Emperor shares."
The final sentence might have conveyed a jeer. But Patrine was not
listening. She called to her companion: "You are driving in the wrong

direction for Berkeley Square, but it does not matter. Please put me down
just here at the corner of Harley Street. I can leave this letter at a house
there instead of putting it in the pillar-post."
"You are not getting out, gnädiges Fräulein. You are coming with me
to Hendon. I have there a little business which will occupy an hour." He
added with a familiarity that stung, looking at the tense white profile and
the black brows knitted in anger: "You are yourself to blame that I cannot
part with you. You are really as magnificent by day as by evening—with
your so-gloriously-coloured hair. May I also congratulate you on the
effective costume? Black and white are our Prussian colours. I take that as a
personal compliment."
"Take it as you like, it will not make it one."
"Sehr gutig. I do not need telling. When I want things I take them. It is
a habit of mine."
He spoke sheer, brutal truth. Oh God! what of Patrine's had he not
coveted and taken, only two horrible days ago. "So," he went on, "you will
have to post your letter. I will stop at a Postammt and drop it in for you. You
see, I am greedy of your society. At any moment I may be recalled to
Germany. One must catch the Bird of Happiness and hold it while one can.
Now tell me, is not that a pretty speech?"
"Extremely, but it does not alter the situation. I have a particular
appointment. I cannot go to Hendon with you."
"I have already told you that we are going there. Grosse Gott!" His
tone was savage. "How is it that you are so confoundedly stubborn? Do you
think such behaviour sensible—or wise?"
"I am certainly wiser than I was two days ago."
He slewed his head round to look at her with a greedy curiosity. He
saw the lines of face and figure grow rigid, and her bare hands clench

themselves together in her lap.
He glanced at her ringed hand, then transferred his regard to his own
left hand, the glove upon which he had retained at the Club. The soft
dressed suéde bulged as though a bandage were concealed underneath. She
averted her eyes hastily as though she shunned some ugly, sickening,
spectacle. He said:
"I see that you honour me by wearing my mascot. The magpie pearl
most excellently becomes your beautiful hand, my dear!"
They had reached Regents Park Square and were turning into the
Broad Walk. She plucked the ring from her bare finger, and held it out to
him, saying in a low tone:
"Please take it back!"
"I am to take it back? ... You are in earnest?"
She repeated her words, holding out the bauble. He released his gloved
left hand from the steering-wheel to take it. His eyes were on the road ahead
and his face was hard as pink stone. But she heard him give a little sigh of
relief as he slipped the ring into an inside coat-pocket. He said, as though to
excuse the sigh:
"It was given me in April, when I made my raid on Paris from
Hanover, landing my Albatros once only during two days' flight. The
weather was magnificent. My engine gave no trouble. That is why I call the
ring my mascot, you understand. Now that it has been worn by you, it is
more precious than when I first received it. Whenever I look at it, it will
speak to me of you."
"Don't let it!"
"Why should it not speak of you? Isis! My heart's Queen!"
"I have told you—don't revolt me with—piffle of that kind. And don't
touch me, unless you want me to jump out of the car!"

A voice that he barely knew had issued from the face she turned on
him—a face all violet shadows and haggard drawn lines, under the burning
splendour of the dead beech-leaf hair. She vibrated like an electrified wire,
and round her pale pinched mouth and about her blue-veined temples were
little points of moisture, fine and glittering as diamond-dust.
"Am I to understand that my touch is unpleasant to you? That you are
angry with me? That you do not love me any more?"
"Love...."
She laughed out harshly, hugely disconcerting him.
"Lady Wathe said at that Grand Prix night dinner in Paris that you
were without a sense of humour. But you must have a grain or so—to talk
of love to me!"
She turned her face away, and the exquisite beauty of her small white
ear appealed to him provokingly. He ground his teeth. He could have
thrown his arm about her, and crushed the tall, full, womanly figure against
him. How superb she was in her mood of hate. The strapped-up wound in
his left hand was throbbing and smarting, just as when she had writhed her
head free from his furious kisses and bitten him to the bone.
He had made her pay richly for her bite. He hugged himself as he
remembered.... Now the sting of desire was renewed in him and he eyed her
with greediness. Presently he stooped and said in her ear, coaxingly:
"Let us be friends! Dine with me at the Rocroy to-night. We will have
a box at the Alhambra, and sup again at the Upas. Say you will come, loved
one! Will you not, Patrine?"
"No!"
"No? But I think you mean Yes! Do you not?"
"I have said No! Is that not enough?"
"You are mad!" he blustered at her—"mad as a March hare!"

She answered him:
"I have been mad, but I am sane now and I stay so."
He said scoffingly:
"You may not always remain as you are now!"
If he launched a poisoned dart, its meaning glanced aside from her.
"Shall you not write to me when I am back in Germany? Not one line?
Not one single word? Yet I have a few little notes from you that I
particularly value...."
"Make the most of them. I shall write no more." And suddenly her hate
and loathing of him reached boiling point and ran over. "My God! Can't you
understand that I ask nothing better than never to see nor hear of you
again!"
"Grossartig! You are hellishly conciliatory." His voice was thick and
shook with anger. His smile mocked and the look in his eyes was hateful as
he pursued in a tone that was now quite gentle and purring: "Just think a bit,
my dear! Because—to burn one's boats behind one—that is not prudent at
all!"
She did not answer, and he drove on to Hendon, planning fresh
assaults upon this unconquerable woman's pride.

CHAPTER XXV
THREE MEN IN A CAR

When the yellow Darracq car turned in under the archway that advertised
Fanshaw's Flying School in three-foot capitals, the name revived no
associations in the mind of Patrine. She had never visited the aërodrome

upon an afternoon in the mid-week, when as in the present instance practice
and instruction were being carried on. The cafés, no longer crowded by
smart people, were thinly patronised by bronzed young men in overalls, not
innocent of lubricating medium, thirstily drinking ginger swizzle or sucking
iced-lemon squashes through yellow straws. Business-looking middle-aged
men discussed the market-prices of steels and timbers, dope and fabrics,
over bitter beer and ham-sandwiches, while experimenting amateurs, male
and female, discussed in loud, relieved voices the experiences of the
premier flight. These, having been previously warned not to experiment
upon a crowded system, were now ravenously putting in the solid, three-
course lunches they had foregone.
It was a perfect July day, hot and blue and green and golden. To the
nor'-west, you glimpsed the elms and oaks and beeches of Boreham Wood,
westward the chestnuts of Bushey and Stanmore in fullest summer foliage.
The hawthorns of New Barnet were already browning in the sun. Hill and
common were plumy with the brake-fern. Heather and ling were purpling
into bloom.
Still looking westwards, you snatched a glimpse of Windsor.
Eastwards, a diamond set in emeralds, was the Crystal Palace at Sydenham.
Across the whitish-grey scarp of Highgate and the verdant shoulder of
heathy Hampstead you saw the dun-coloured haze that is the breath of
London, the huge, black, formidable and formless monster, as, sprawling on
her ancient River, she keeps her envied place in the Sun.
At the café end of Fanshaw's enclosure the Frogged Roumanian String
Orchestra were playing the "Dance Rhapsody" of Delius. From a rival
establishment came the brazen strains of a German band in a death-wrestle
with ragtime. Behind a straggling crowd of visitors, where the cars that had
brought them were parked in a double row, von Herrnung stopped the

yellow Darracq, leaned across Patrine's unwilling knees and opened the car-
door.
As Patrine was getting out, a large hand in a white leather glove was
thrust forwards for her assistance. The owner of the hand was a square-
faced, fair-haired, soldierly-looking servant of the somewhat hybrid type
that has replaced the carriage-groom. He wore a dark blue livery overcoat
with silver braid upon collar, belt, and shoulder-straps, black knee-boots,
and a white topped cap with silver braid, a shiny black peak and an enamel
front badge in black, white, and red. Looking past Patrine, he saluted in
military fashion and spoke to von Herrnung in German, of which language
Patrine possessed a smattering:
"Will the Herr Hauptmann speak to the Herrschaft? Upon business. Er
ist sehr wichtig."
Von Herrnung, at the first sound of the messenger's voice, had
stiffened to rigidity. He glanced over his shoulder in the direction pointed
out by the big hand in the white glove, and answered:
"Say to the Herrschaft that I come!"
The groom vanished. Von Herrnung jumped out of the yellow Darracq
and went quickly over to the machine that had been indicated, a large,
superbly-finished F.I.A.T. touring-car of the landau-limousine type,
enamelled dark blue with a narrow silver line of finish. The top was open. A
white-capped chauffeur in dark blue and silver livery sat immovable at the
steering-wheel, and three men, only one of whom was plainly visible to
Patrine, occupied the roomy body of the car.
The visible man, sitting in the forward seat with his back to the motor,
his baldness topped, in deference to the weather, with a white felt
Newmarket, was a long-bodied, broad-shouldered personage, certainly over
seventy; clean-shaven, with staring eyes of light grey tinged with bilious

yellow, and skin of a prevailing yellow-grey doughiness, with a huge wart
in the middle of the cheekbone on the side next to Patrine. His clothes were
of yellowish-grey like his eyes and skin, his linen had a yellow line in it and
a huge, crumpled vest of buff nankeen threw into relief a flaming crimson
satin necktie confined within bounds by a flat jewelled ring. He had the air
of an old actor of character parts, or of a libertine monk who has foregone
the cord and cowled habit. Of the two men sitting facing him little could be
seen beyond the peak of a gold-banded white yachting-cap pulled rather
low over a bronzed and rather aquiline profile with an upward-turned
moustache and slightly-grizzled beard of reddish-brown, and a Homburg
straw with a broad black ribbon and a slouched brim, overshadowing the
face of the man who sat on White Cap's left hand. An astute and cunning
face, his; long and sallow, with narrow, blinking eyes, a drooping nose, and
a drooping black moustache. With this its owner played constantly, twisting
and pulling it with a delicate white hand that wore a diamond solitaire. He
never looked up, when addressed by either of his companions, but raised his
eyes to the speaker, and pivoted, without lifting his head.
Von Herrnung's friends were nothing to Patrine, and von Herrnung's
person was by now intolerable, yet her eyes unwillingly followed the tall,
soldierly figure as he drew himself up, clicked his heels and uncovered. A
brown hand went up to the peak of the white yachting-cap, the wearers of
the straw Homburg and the felt Newmarket slightly raised their hats. Von
Herrnung did not speak first, he waited bareheaded to be spoken to. When
the door of the big blue car was opened by the servant at an imperious
signal from the sallow man, von Herrnung got inside, and sat down beside
the personage with the wart on his cheek,—leaning forwards deferentially
to be addressed by the bearded wearer of the white yachting-cap, who made
great play with a brown right hand that sported a heavy gold curb-chain

watch-bracelet. Once the hand clenched and shook in vivacious threat or
warning, very close to von Herrnung's handsome nose. That made Patrine
laugh, and instantly she was angry with herself for laughing. She put up her
long-sticked sunshade, turned her back upon the blue F.I.A.T. car and
moved away towards the part of the enclosure where the visitors sat or
promenaded, drawing eyes as she went with her spangled silver headgear
twinkling in the sunshine, and its black cock's plume waving over her
strangely coloured hair.
So changed, so changed. She was sensible of an alteration even in her
gait and gestures. A sickness of the soul weighed on her body as though she
walked in invisible fetters of lead. The free space, the fresh air, seemed to
yield no physical stimulus. She had bitten deep into the apple of
Knowledge, and found bitterness and ashes at the core.

CHAPTER XXVI
A PAIR OF PALS

Among a dozen pairs of masculine eyes that followed the gallant womanly
figure, crowned by the plumed hat of silver spangles and displayed in the
frank unreticence of fashion by the semi-transparent sheath of glistening
white, a pair very blue, very shiningly alert and interested, drew nearer until
the elongated shadow of a small boy in Scout's uniform mingled upon the
sunlit turf with the longer shadow of Patrine.
His thumping heart had said to him: "You know her!" It was Pat and
yet not Pat. Her tall, rounded figure. Her walk. The same face—and another
woman's hair. The white gown and the long stole of black cock's feathers he

had seen before, and the hat had previously fascinated him. He had asked
Pat if it were not made of the twinkly stuff with which they covered the
Bobby-dazzlers on Christmas trees? She had cried "Yes!" and assured him
that she would always hereafter call it her "Bobby-dazzler chapper." ... And
his Cousin Irma, whom Bawne secretly abominated, had said it was too bad
to talk costermonger slang to the child. "The child." ... A man must be ready
to pardon an insult from the unpunchable female. But Bawne found himself
wishing that Cousin Irma had been a boy.
He loved Pat. You had to love a person who could keep secrets as
faithfully as Dad or Mother, and play tennis and hockey better than a great
many grown-up fellows. Bowl you out at cricket, too, middle bail, before
you could wink. She could cycle all day without getting knocked up, and
swim a mile, easily. For these reasons Bawne knew he loved her. But he
loved her most for the reasons that he did not understand.
"Pat!"
He had screwed up his courage to touch his crusher felt and speak the
name, but the tall lady with the electrifying hair did not seem to hear. Her
long eyes looked at him in a blind way without seeing him. He had never
kissed this frozen, stranger's face.
"I thought you knew me! I most awfully beg your pardon!" he
stammered, in scarlet anguish, and the dull eyes suddenly came to life, and
the stiff lips smiled:
"It's Bawne. My sweet, I'm glad! How did you come here?"
"Dad brought me because he'd promised," the boy said joyously as
they shook hands.
"Where is Uncle Owen?"
"Over there." Bawne pointed to two men talking apart beyond the
straggling line of spectators, and Patrine recognised the great frame and

scholarly stoop of the Doctor, standing with his side-face towards her, a
half-consumed cigar in the corner of his mouth, and his stick, a weighty
ivory-topped Malacca, loosely gripped in both hands behind his back.
"And the man he is talking to? Why—of course! It's Sir Roland—how
is it I didn't recognise him?"
"The Chief Scout!" Bawne's tone was one of incredulous wonder. "But
you couldn't have forgotten him! It—isn't possible!"
Nor even to a stranger did he appear a personality to be easily
forgotten, the bright-eyed, falcon-beaked, middle-aged man, whose feather-
weight crusher felt was worn at an inimitable angle, and whose slight,
active figure set off his well-cut morning suit of thin blue serge in a way to
arouse envy in a military dandy of twenty-five.
"You see," Bawne explained, "he was talking business with Father, so I
just took myself out of the way." He added: "They hadn't told me to, but
they might have forgotten. And so"—the big word came out of the childish
mouth quaintly—"I acted on my initiative—you understand?"
"I understand." The formal handshake once over, their fingers had not
separated. She held in her large, strong, womanly palm the hand that was
little, and hard, and boyish. It squeezed her fingers, and the squeeze was an
apology. It said:
"I'd like you to have kissed me if there hadn't been lots of people
looking. For, of course, you know I love you, Pat!"
"And I love you, Bawne. We'll always love each other, whatever
happens," said the answering pressure. Her spoken utterance was:
"So these are your holidays! ... How did you leave them all at
Charterhouse? And—are you still tremendous pals with young Roddy
Wrynche?"
He said, with a naive, adorable gravity:

"Boys don't squabble like girls—and Wrynche is a frightfully decent
fellow. We passed together from Shell into Under Fourth, and we've
promised always to stand by each other!"
"Good egg! And now, how is it you're here? Has Uncle Owen given in
at last about the flying?"
"Really and truly! Man alive!"—Bawne's characteristic expletive
—"I've been up to-day in the air-'bus and—wasn't it first-class!"
"Honour?"
"Honour! Twice round the aërodrome with the Instructor—and
presently I'm to have a longer flight with Mr. Sherbrand in his monoplane."
"'Mr. Sherbrand' ..." Patrine repeated rather vaguely. "Sherbrand" had
somehow a ring that was familiar. Bawne explained:
"He's a great friend of Father's. He's splendid. A regularly topping
chap!"
"And you've actually flown?"
"I've flewed—and I mean to go on with it." He repeated the assurance
more sedately: "It's the profession I have chosen. They say you've got to
begin young. And my legs wobbled and the ground rocked a bit when I got
down on it. But I wasn't air-sick at all."
"Air-sick.... Are people...?"
Bawne said from the pedestal of superior knowledge:
"Oh, aren't they just, like anything! The Calais-Dover steamer-
crossing's nothing to it sometimes—the Instructor told me."
Patrine laughed. The latest circulating-library novel, Love in the
Clouds, had omitted to mention this fact. The heroine had donned an
aviator's cap and pneumatic jacket, and "leapt nimbly on board" the
aëroplane in half a gale of wind. As the machine dipped and rose gracefully
upon the heaving element that cradled it, Enid had experienced merely a

delicious exhilaration. Then a crisp moustache had brushed her rosy ear.
The voice of Hubert, attuned to deepest melody of passion, had murmured
in the shell-like organ of hearing: "Little girl. At last I have you! ... Mine,
mine, my bride of the swan-path!—mine for ever and aye!"
Bawne continued, innocently discounting further statements on the
part of the author of Love in the Clouds:
"He told me before we went up, you know. Of course, when you're
flying you can't hear anything but the racket of the propeller. It goes roaring
through you till your bones buzz, and the very ends of your teeth hum. So
the other man has to yell at you through a trumpet, or write to you on bits of
paper, unless he's switched off the engine for diving, and then you don't feel
like talking—that's if you're a beginner, you know.... But man alive! it's
splendid. You must try it, Pat!"
She declared, laughingly:
"While a single flight costs a brace of my hard-earned guineas, the
sport is not for me! Why haven't I got a pal like your wonderful Mr.
Sherbrand? I'm getting envious—you lucky infant, you!"
It didn't hurt to be called an infant by Pat, because she never would
have done it in a stranger's hearing. And it was ripping to have her here,
sharing his hour of joy.
He told her: "Father brought me here as a reward for making a model
aëroplane. Reminds me!—I've got to tell you all about that. But it's only a
toy and this is the Real Thing. There's nothing worth having in the whole
world," added the unconscious philosopher "unless it's real and true!"
"Am I not real?" Patrine asked, squeezing his shoulder.
"Now you are!" He said it with an effort of candour. "But when I saw
you a minute ago, I wasn't—quite sure." He glanced up at her and asked
shyly: "Why are you different since you have been away in Paris?"

"Different, how different?" She whipped her hand from his shoulder.
Her black eyebrows knitted, and her face stiffened into the strange mask
that had puzzled him, under the scrutiny of his clear blue eyes. "Do I seem
changed?" she queried. And Bawne answered:
"A little. I was afraid at first you were somebody else, because of"—he
said it shyly—"because of your hair."
"My hair?" she repeated blankly, and then said awkwardly: "The air of
Paris did that, darling, but it will soon be its old colour again!"
"Will it ever be just like it was before?" asked Bawne, looking
innocently up at her, and something broke in Patrine's heart just then. She
gave a sudden gasping sigh, and a sudden spate of tears rolled over her
thick underlids, streamed down her pale cheeks, and fell upon her broad
bosom, heaving under its thin covering of filmy white voile.
"Pat! You're—crying!" Bawne had never yet seen his friend weep, and
he was wrung between pity and bewilderment. "Who has vexed you? Who
has been hurting you?" he begged, and she answered brokenly:
"No one! ... Someone.... It doesn't matter!" adding: "Would you punch
him, if anyone had—done as you say?"
"Wouldn't I?"
"My sweet!" Her arm went round his slight, square shoulders. She
doted on the little amber freckles on his pure, healthy skin, the little drake's
tail of silky red-brown hair at the nape of his brown neck, the half-shy, half-
bold curve of his mouth as he smiled, the blue sparkle of his eye glancing
sidewise up at her. She found in the pure warmth and sweetness of the slight
young body leaning against her, a healing, comforting balm.
"Why aren't you my little brother, Bawne?" she said, hugging him
closer. He answered after an instant's thought:

"If my mother could be your mother too, it would be jolly! Not unless!
..."
He was not going to take on Mildred for anybody. Patrine sighed
pensively.
"That's what I used to cry for when I was a little pig-tailed girl, my
sonny. More than anything I wanted to belong to Aunt Lynette. But she's so
young—only thirty-three. She couldn't be my mother."
"No." His eyes considered her face gravely. "Of course not. You're far
too old. How old are you, Cousin Pat?"
"How old am I?" A shudder went through her. "Nineteen in August.
And I feel about a hundred and one."
"That's 'cos you're not well!" His eyes were anxious and a little pucker
showed between his reddish eyebrows. "You're not going to be ill—are
you?" he asked in alarm.
"Not I!" She murmured it caressingly in her deep, soft voice. "My pet,
don't worry. Everything's all right with me!—perfectly all right and O.K.!
Only talk to me. Don't let me keep on thinking. Things are never so—bally
rotten if you can stop brooding over them."
Why did she look like that? What had somebody done to hurt her? His
boyish hand clenched, the thumb well turned in over the knuckles.
Instinctively Bawne knew that the Enemy, who had stamped that dreadful
look of frozen misery on the face of his beloved, white as ivory or old snow
in its strange setting of flaming tresses—was of his own sex.

All the while, ever since Patrine had entered the gates of Panshaw's, the
song of the air-screw had not been absent from her ears. The tractor of the
practice-engine roared fitfully, like a tiger being prodded in its den by a
spiteful keeper's meat-fork. The propellers of the double-engined passenger-

buses kept up a steady droning as Fanshaw's pilots followed the pointing
arms of the red, white, and blue pylons marking the limits of the air-circuit,
or were silent as the machines dropped to earth within the huge white
circles where a giant T indicated "Land."
This was not a show day when visitors' half-crowns rattled unceasingly
into the boxes at the turnstile. The rows of green-painted chairs behind the
whitewashed iron railings of the spectators' enclosure were but thinly
patronised by friends of people taking passenger-flights. No man with a
megaphone announced events forthcoming or imminent. No white flag fell
for the start, no pistol cracked signifying the conclusion of a race.
Three men occupied the Judge's stand behind the Committee
enclosure. One, small and dapper, in a frock-coat and topper, kept his eye
on what was probably a stop-watch. Another, stout, bearded, and straw-
hatted, was absorbedly gazing at the sky through a big pair of Zeiss
binoculars. The third, in the uniform of a commissionaire, was an employé
of the School. No one manifested any particular interest in them or their
occupation. The sparse general public were not enlightened as to the reason
of their presence on the Judge's stand.
"Talk," Patrine said, clinging to Bawne, her slender plank in moral
shipwreck. "Tell me what Sir Roland and the Doctor are waiting to see.
What is that thin man doing with the stop-watch and the note-book? And
the fat gentleman beside him, who never leaves off staring at the sky
through those big field-glasses. Nothing is billed to happen—there are no
numbers up on the pylons—yet something seems to be going on!"
"Rather!"
The boy broke into a little gurgle of excited laughter, and began to
dance up and down under the arm that rested on his neck.

"Rather! Didn't you know? How funny! Why, man alive, we're waiting
for him!"
"For him?"
"For Mr. Sherbrand. Father's friend. The Flying Man I've told you
about."
"Mr.—— Where is he?" Patrine asked vaguely, looking all about her.
In the tumult of her thoughts the name that had been upon a crumpled card
suggested no association with that so rapturously uttered by the boy.
"There!" Bawne pointed upwards with another of the excited laughs.
"Carrying out a hovering-test. The man with the stop-watch is timing him,
and the other with the binnocs is observing him. He's French—no end of an
official swell! The French Government sent him," went on the boy, with
infinite relish, "to see Mr. Sherbrand test his invention. He thought they
didn't catch on, but the hoverer has fetched them. If he hovers for twenty
minutes, ten thousand feet up, his fortune's made!—I heard a fellow say so
to the Instructor. Man alive! isn't it topping that you and I should be here to-
day!"

CHAPTER XXVII
SIR ROLAND TELLS A STORY

While yet the Bird of War hovered invisible at ten thousand feet of altitude,
and the lungs of the men aboard her toiled and laboured, and foam gathered
about their nostrils and lips, Saxham stood talking with the man who in his
eyes ranked above all others, the tried and trusty friend of fourteen years.

In those unforgettable months of the Siege of Gueldersdorp you might
have noticed a crow's foot or so at the corner of the Chief's keen falcon-
eyes. To-day, their hazel brightness undiminished, they looked at Life from
a network of fine criss-crossed lines. But Time, the spider, had spun no web
in the fine alert brain, and the man's heart was free from crow's feet or
wrinkles. Fresh and evergreen, it was as it would always be, an oasis of
kindness for the downhearted or weary, watered by the twin wells of
sympathy and enthusiasm. He said, speaking to Saxham of the invisible
Sherbrand:
"I wish we had a million like him!"
Saxham answered:
"I wish we had several millions. He is a fine, energetic type. A bit of a
hero-worshipper—a bit of a philosopher, a bit of a stoic: 'He hath seen men
rise to authority without envy, and schooled himself to endure adversity,
that he might bear himself the better when his time should come to rule.'"
"His time is coming, or I am no judge of capability. And you quoted
from the Encheiridion of Epictetus, I think? I've always found good
reading-meat in that and the Discourses. Used to carry a little sixpenny
copy about in my pocket, until I wore it to rags."
"I have often seen and noted its raggedness, and its uncompromising
Isabella-hue!"
"It was negroid in complexion before the Relief of Gueldersdorp.
Perhaps you won't be astonished when I tell you I have got it now." The
Chief's smiling eyes narrowed in laughter. "My wife has bound it
gorgeously, and with other volumes of my Siege library, it occupies a
special and most sacred shelf near my writing-desk at home."
He went on:

"This fine fellow Sherbrand is an old correspondent of mine. He would
say I might tell you the story, and I think it's worth hearing, in a way. It
must be eight years ago, when he would be about seventeen, that he wrote
to me from an engineering college at Newcastle, to say he had read some
papers of mine on the subject of scouting, and proposed—if I thought it
would not be presumption on his part—save the mark!—to enrol and
organise a troop on the lines laid down. He wanted a definite code of Scout
law to work on, and Rules and so forth, all of which I supplied him, you
may be sure. Busy as I was drilling and cub-licking the North British
Territorials, I couldn't find time to spare to run up and see the boy. So he
commandeered a holiday and motor-cycled to Headquarters. Rode all
through one night in pelters of rain, and caught me in my 5 A.M. tub."
"He meant business."
"Business—and it was up to me to encourage such grittiness and
enthusiasm. So I ordered coffee for two, and bacon and eggs for half a
dozen, and when I had fed him I talked. My book wasn't published, but I
lent him some proof-sheets. He thanked me, but before he took them he had
to disburden his mind."
The fine sunburnt hand went thoughtfully to the grizzled moustache,
worn rather longer than of old.
"He had got something on his mind. He had been reading that old
bogey-book, Hales on Mental Heredity, and the theory of the transmission
of base or criminal tendencies from the parents to the children, had haunted
him night and day. He said to me, standing up before me, looking about as
long and thin as a fathom of pump-water: 'My father was dismissed from
the Army in War-time, for not backing up his C.O. Is there a kink in my
brain or a bacillus lying waiting in my body that will one day make a
slacker of me?"

Saxham's square face was ashen, but the Chief's eyes were elsewhere.
"And you told him——?"
"I told him, that whilst physical disease and deformity are
transmissible from the unhealthy parents to their unlucky offspring, no
sensible Christian regarded the theory of inherited vice or crime, as
anything but the most pernicious lie that the devil ever invented to spread as
a net for the catching of bodies and souls. That seemed to buck him up!"
"I do not doubt it!" said Saxham. He breathed more freely, and his face
had regained its natural hue.
"I reminded him," went on the Chief, "that our Army and our Fleet are
indebted for thousands of the finest men, morally and physically speaking,
to Reformatories and Industrial Schools and Homes. 'Think of the character
borne by Barnardo's boys,' I told him, 'and grind the scorpion lie to pulp
under your boot-heel, whenever and wherever you find it cocking up its
damnable tail!'"
"So he went back," said Saxham, "cheered and strengthened by your
sympathy, as—other men have been before now!"
"So he went back to the College, fortified by my bit of nervous
English, and worked at his troop for all he was worth. Raked in seventy in
the first month, and kept on raking. He is dandy at drill and organisation, is
Sherbrand. When he left the College they mustered three hundred strong."
The speaker struck his stick upon the turf and said emphatically: "How it
grows!—how the Movement spreads and gathers and ramifies! Do you
know Saxham, that there are moments in my life when I am tempted to be
proud. When rank upon rank of young, fresh, fearless faces with bright eyes
are turned to me. When thousands of active, lithe, healthy young bodies run
out into the open and rally about the Chief Scout."

There was a mist in the bright eyes that his manliness was not ashamed
of.
"Years ago, when the officer in command of a certain beleaguered
garrison was doing his best to defend it, a great Fear came upon him in the
watches of a particularly anxious night. Perhaps you will guess what I
mean, Saxham? The man had not slept for more weeks than I like to
remember, and the hours of rest in the day-time were hot-eyed staring
horrors of insomnia. He was—up against it! The shrunken lids would not
shut down over his bursting eyeballs, and his jaws were clamped so that he
could not yawn. Then, on this night, his Fear rose up and mopped and
mowed at him, and it had the kind of face that madhouse doctors and
keepers know. He wasn't ordinarily a 'fearful man,' like Kipling's immortal
Bengali, but now he was horribly, sickeningly afraid!"
"I guessed it," said Saxham. "I realised what you were suffering, but I
did not dare to hint my knowledge to you. There was no danger of madness.
But you were certainly on the verge of mental and physical breakdown."
"And being in such desperate case," said the other, "I prayed to God in
my extremity. I promised Him if He would help me to carry out my duty to
Him, as to my earthly superiors, and those men and women and children
who looked to me as their protector and guide, that I would one day, if He
spared me, build Him a big Temple, made of the little temples that are the
work of His Hands."
"And to-day the Temple is a reality!"
"A grand reality. East, West, North, and South, it spreads and widens
and towers. It is built of boys. Clean-limbed, clean-minded, self-respecting
fellows, scorning vices, eager for service, sensitive in Honour, chivalrous,
patriotic, keen for Truth and Right. It frightens me, Saxham, when I think
what a leaven is working through these boys of mine, potential fathers of

sons in the ripeness of Time, for the ultimate regeneration of this vicious,
degenerate world. It makes me understand how near old Coleridge got to
the live heart of things when he wrote the Ancient Mariner. The service of
Almighty God is the love of your fellow-man. But why to me, and not to
another worthier, should God have given this wonderful, glorious thing to
bring about? ..."
"Because you are worthy of doing His work for Him. Has He not used
you as His instrument in my own case? Should I not own to this, I who owe
everything to you?"
The other laid a hand on the great shoulder of the Dop Doctor.
"If ever you owed me anything, Saxham, you paid me long ago!"
He was silent a moment and said in a lighter tone: "I am not quite clear
yet as to how you met my whilom Scoutmaster."
"Our acquaintance dates from a cross-Channel flight he made in the
end of June."
"I know." The Chief prodded the turf with his walking-stick. "A French
pilot-officer of their Service Aëronautique, a certain Commandant
Raymond, who flew here in the contest for the Ivor International Cup in
May, had heard of Sherbrand and his inventions from Lamond of the
Central Flying School. He took a shine to the aërial stabiliser and got his
Chiefs to give it a trial. That came off on the Grand Prix Sunday, when Paris
went wild over the Sarajevo affair."
"And scenting War in the air," said Saxham, "Sherbrand promptly took
wing for England without waiting for the decision of the judges who were
present at the test."
"Did he? He has keen scent."
"Better now," said Saxham laughing, "than when he came to me—on
the recommendation of an old patient—suffering from an aggravated form

of nasal catarrh. He had had it at intervals for years, and suspected it to be
owing to what he described, in the language of the engineering-shop, as "a
defect in the air-intake." He proved to be right—and I sent him into the
Hospital, where Berry Boyle performed a slight minor operation which
removed the trouble, and left him capitally fit. Then, when he came out of
the Hospital, he found a letter from the French Consul waiting at his office
——"
The Chief interpolated:
"Ah yes. The aërial stabiliser had gained the suffrages of Messieurs the
Chiefs of the Aëronautique Française. I hope M. Jourdain's report to his
Government will induce them to buy the patent. For, judging by the interest
that the representatives of another Power seem to take in——"
The Chief broke off. The smiling lines about his eyes and mouth had
vanished as he queried: "Who is the lady my Scout over there is squiring? A
superbly-shaped young woman, with hair of the fashionable terra-cotta
shade. But for the hair, I should have said it was your niece, Patrine."
Saxham's eyes followed the direction of the Chief's glance. He said,
and his face looked hard as a mask of stone:
"Your memory for faces is correct as usual. The lady with the terra-
cotta hair is my late brother's daughter, Patrine."
The Chief's familiar whistle filled in a space of silence, with a pensive
little fragment of Delius' Spring Song, while Saxham's frown grew deeper
and his jaw thrust out more angrily. Then the well-known voice said:
"I am sorry that Miss Patrine has been tempted to follow the fashion.
But I regret still more her choice of friends! I refer to the German officer in
whose company your niece arrived here, in a yellow Darracq car, about
half-an-hour ago." The speaker made sure, with a rapid glance to right and
left, that no listener was standing near them, and added: "I know that I may

trust you as myself in any private or official matter. Between ourselves
frankly, I am here to-day for the purpose of—keeping an eye on this
particular man!"
The Doctor's vivid blue eyes darted rapier-points at the other, from
caves that had suddenly been dug about them. The General went on:
"The man himself is no common spy, though he may on occasion act
as an agent or post-box for Secret Intelligence communications. He is an
extraordinarily able young officer, a squadron captain in their Field Flying
Service, with some astonishing records to his credit, though he was an
Engineer Lieutenant in 1907 when he came to England as chauffeur-officer
attached to the Kaiser's Personal Staff. For a comprehensible reason his
superiors desired him to improve his knowledge of the topography of the
British Isles. He certainly did so, but"—the keen eyes twinkled—"the
record runs accomplished by von Herrnung with the All Highest as
passenger, were not unattended, or unobserved by us. That he is well-born
and well-looking is undeniable, and these advantages, with other social
gifts, may easily attract your niece, like any other of Eve's daughters. But to
say the least it is inadvisable that she should encourage the advances of this
man, or of any other German officer,—when the next forty-eight hours may
see Britain and Germany at grips in War."
"That is your opinion?"
"It is my plain, unvarnished opinion, speaking as one of those who are
admitted behind the scenes. Not that I am infallible, but the Signs and the
Tokens all lead one way." He lifted his lean brown hand and pointed
eastwards. "For years they have been making ready, but now—what a
frenzy of ordered preparation. What secret councils, what reiteration of
orders, what accumulations of stores, what roaring of electric furnaces—I'd
give my little finger to know what chemical they're making in huge bulk at

the Badische Anilin-und-Soda Fabrik, and hundreds of other dye and
bleaching-powder works in Germany and Austria!—every one backed up
by the German Imperial State or the Dual Monarchy on the understanding
that at the signal, they are to turn to and turn out—what? Benzine for
phenol, phenol for picric, and toluene for Super-Explosive, that's
understood. But this stuff puzzles me. Do you see the Senile Arc in my eyes
yet, Saxham? It must be that I'm getting old!"
He smiled his whimsical smile and went on:
"A day or two after the burial of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his
morganatic partner, murdered by some fanatics among the Greater Serbs, a
huge majority among the German military and naval officers doing duty in
their Colonies, or on political service in Africa, were recalled by Wireless.
Leave has been stopped. Rolling-stock in inconceivable masses is being
concentrated on the greater strategic railways, while the official and semi-
official Press prates and gabbles of peace and neighbourly goodwill!" He
shrugged. "Things were safer when they yelled and foamed in convulsions
of Anglophobia. Then one doubted.... Now one is sure! ... Ah, I thought I
wasn't mistaken. Here's Sherbrand coming down!"

CHAPTER XXVIII
THE GOD FROM THE MACHINE

The dazzling turquoise of the sky was now streaked with milky bands of
haziness. Dappled golden-white cloudlets at the zenith made what is known
as mackerel sky. Trails of rounded stratus floated low in the east and south-
east. Long shadows of hangars, pylons, semaphore and electric searchlight-
stations, stretched over the turf from westwards, crossed by perambulatory
shadows of people moving about. These became stationary, betokening that
popular interest was newly awakened. Umbrellas and sticks flourished
towards the sky. Bawne gave a little crow of delight as the whitish-brown,
shining shape of the monoplane dived down out of the empyrean, travelling
with a bold, beautiful swooping glide that took away the gazer's breath.
"Look, oh look!" Bawne gasped, leaning against Patrine. Now her
tardy interest was genuinely awakened. Reaching the end of its glide, the
monoplane had regained the horizontal position. As she flattened out and
hung well-nigh motionless in mid-air with the sunlight beating on and
drenching her fragile, lacy structure, she was a thing of beauty and of
wonder. The humming of her tractor came to you mingled with the buzzing
of her gyroscopic hoverer, like the incessant vibration of living, sentient
wings.
She seemed to tire of hanging between earth and heaven, ceased
buzzing, tilted a wing sharply and began to frolic after it as a kitten runs
after its tail on a hearthrug, or as a swallow gambols on a chase after gnats,
always turning towards the West, whilst her greyish shadow danced and

skipped upon the gold-white cloud-surfaces to eastwards a long way below
her, like the ghost of an aëroplane. All the time she was gobbling up
distance, steadily descending. She presently reversed her sun-worshipping
tactics, dived, and spiralled, banking, from west to east. You saw plainly the
helmeted heads and slightly hunched shoulders of the pilot at the controls
and the mechanic strapped in the forward cockpit.
Soon she hovered again and swooped, so suddenly that Patrine nipped
Bawne's shoulder, saying "Great Scott!" under her breath. Another long
sweeping glide brought her close to the green turf of the aërodrome. Then,
with an adroit flexing of the wing-tips, she balanced, flattened, and landed
lightly within the huge white circle, rocking a little on her tyred wheels.
The man with the stop-watch checked the mechanism, the bearded
man with the big binoculars lowered and closed them, scribbled in a
memorandum-book and came down the judge's stand. The Bird of War's
mechanic stayed in his place, the pilot unhitched his body-strap, pushed up
his goggled visor, threw a long leg over the fuselage and jumped lightly to
the ground. He staggered as he reached it, recovered himself and stood
breathing quickly, as a man overcoming giddiness, or other physical
sensation of distress.
Tall, young, and lightly built, with long active limbs and a physique
suggestive of youth and courage and enterprise, as he stood motionless, his
eared and goggled cap now in hand, the play of sunlight upon his thin
brown waterproof gabardine and overalls made him look like a statue of
Mercury wrought in pale new bronze. And with a lifting of her sick heart as
though it had suddenly spread wings, and soared into a region of unlimited
space and glorious freedom, Patrine recognised her Flying Man of the
Jardin des Milles Plaisirs.

From what airt, of what world unknown, did it blow, that cool, fragrant
wind that then and always heralded for Patrine his coming? It took her by
surprise; lapped her delicately about; enveloped her from head to foot in its
pure invisible waves. The hot, sore places in her heart were bathed and
healed, the deep caverns filled, the little thirsty rock-pools set awash and
brimming. When the sough of it was no longer in her ears or the tug and
flutter of it among the folds of her garments; when she ceased to be
conscious of the cool resilient pressure upon cheek and neck and forehead
—her brief sweet hour of joy was over. Sherbrand had gone away again.

"Cela ira-t-il, monsieur? Je suis prêt à faire une nouvelle demonstration si
vous n'êtes pas satisfait."
His clear, strong voice speaking in laborious public school French
gave her a delicious shock of pleasure. He was addressing the stout,
bearded Frenchman who, accompanied by the thinner man who had timed
Sherbrand by the stop-watch, now walked across the turf to shake the
aviator's hand. As Sherbrand spoke, he drew a white handkerchief from the
sleeve of his gabardine and wiped from the corners of his mouth some little
blobs of foam, slightly bloodstained. The stout, friendly Frenchman glanced
at him, and uttered an exclamation. Sherbrand shook his head in vigorous
protest and laughed, repeating his offer to demonstrate again. Upon which
the bearded man, who had also a moustache with thick, stiff waxed ends,
and wore a large checked-pattern summer suit with a white drill waistcoat, a
low collar and a necktie with flowing ends, and was topped with a high-
crowned straw hat that suggested Trouville in mid-season, negatived the
proposal with a vivacious gesture, pouring forth a stream of words:
"Au contraire, Monsieur, je suis convainçu que vous avez une idée
superbe. Nous vous avons observé avec la lunette Zeiss, pendant votre vol,

et nous avons constaté le temps très soigneusement: vous avez maintenu le
bruit et la stabilité pendant cinq minutes de plus que les vingt-cinq minutes
stipulées. Permettez moi comme une simple formalité de voir votre
altimètre?"
"By all means!" Sherbrand returned.
They went back to the aëroplane together, and Sherbrand reached over
and unhooked the altimeter from a board in the pilot's cockpit, and the
bearded man examined it, and then cordially shook hands.
"Within two days, at latest. Possibly sooner!" Patrine heard the straw-
hatted, bearded gentleman say in English, pronounced with a strong French
accent. "Believe me," he added, "I shall represent most strongly the
usefulness of your invention to the Chief of the État de l'Aviation. Au revoir,
Monsieur, et encore mes félicitations!"
Then he went away with the small dark man who had used the stop-
watch, and who carried the Zeiss binoculars slung in their case.
During this business interview Patrine had felt Bawne panting and
wriggling close beside her, like an excited, but well-mannered fox-terrier
waiting to be whistled for. But Sherbrand, though he glanced at the boy
smilingly, had turned aside to engage in conversation with Saxham, and the
Chief Scout, whom Sherbrand saluted in orthodox Scout fashion, flushing
red under the clear sunburn that darkened his fair skin.
"He's one of Us!" Bawne whispered to Patrine, his own young face
alight with pleasure. "He was Scoutmaster of a troop in the North, he told
me, and I know he must have been a splendid one. He's the kind of chap
who'd be prepared for anything. Don't you think he looks like that?"
Patrine did not answer. She was feeling "cheap," as Lady Beauvayse
would have expressed it. She had put the man out of her thoughts because
she had taken it for granted that Fanshaw's instructor could not be a

gentleman. Now, as she watched Sherbrand in conversation with the elder
man, his manner of quiet, well-bred deference, mingled with a pleasant
courtesy, showed her beyond all doubt that his place was above the salt.
He had looked towards her, when he had smiled at Bawne, and his
glance had swept over her without recognition. She would have known him
anywhere, while he——! She had forgotten her preposterously-coloured
hair.
How sweet the breeze was, bringing from the west the smell of
strawberry-fields and red and white clover. Yet she had not noticed it until
now. Her mood had changed. She had put away the thing she most hated to
remember. She felt almost like the Patrine of two days ago.
"Miss Saxham!"
It was von Herrnung's voice speaking behind her, and with a shock of
loathing horror she remembered all. She turned to see his tall figure
approaching. The first impression was that he was ill; the next, that he was
furiously angry. His florid complexion had bleached to an ugly, greenish
pallor, even the blue of his eyes had faded to a curious lilac hue. He carried
in his gloved left hand, and with evident care, a flat strapped wallet of
brown leather, fastened with two Bramah locks and a lock-strap. He said to
Patrine in a jarring voice of resentment and impatience:
"I have been looking for you. Could one not leave you for a minute but
you must go off by yourself? Sapperlot! Whom has one here? Where did
you pick up the boy?"
Her heart swelled as Bawne looked up at her in astonishment, then
transferred his stare to von Herrnung, puckering his brows in disapproval of
the rude, strange man. She answered as calmly as was possible:
"This is my cousin, Bawne Saxham, Count von Herrnung."

"Why did you leave me?" von Herrnung grumbled as Bawne stiffly
saluted, and she told him:
"Because I saw you occupied in conversation with your German
friends."
"Women are incomprehensible creatures! ... How do you know that
they were German? At any rate, whether they were or not, they have gone
away now! You find me annoyed. It is because they are—what shall I call
it?—perhaps a little exigent. Now I will have a smoke. I suppose you do not
mind?"
He had not freed his hand from the brown leather satchel to remove his
hat when he had mopped his perspiring forehead, with a big cambric
handkerchief scented with the très persistent perfume that always clung
about his clothes. Nor did he relinquish it to help himself to a cigar, but
opened the gold case containing the weeds with the hand that drew it from
his pocket, extracted a cigar with his teeth, and returned the case to his
pocket; then produced a matchbox, opened it in the same way, picked out a
match, shut the box, and struck the match upon it, saying to Bawne, as he
blew out the first mouthful of smoke: "What do you think of that, my fine
fellow? Should I not make a famous one-handed man?" But Bawne's
suffrages remained unwon, although the dexterity of the thing had secretly
pleased him. He remained doggedly silent, scowling with his reddish-fair
brows, thrusting out his chin.
"Should I not? Tell me!" von Herrnung persisted. "Or is it that British
boys are cowards and afraid to answer when they are spoken to?"
"I am not afraid—of anything or anybody!"
Bawne reddened and looked the taunting big man between the eyes,
squarely. The look added—And least of all of anybody like you! He went
on:

"But I think it takes more than—that kind of being clever—to make a
famous man."
"Nicht so schlimm!" Von Herrnung nodded. "But all the same these
little tricks are worth knowing. You might be bound with ropes to a post, or
tree, or waggon by the enemy, and if he happened to have left your matches
on you—and you could get one hand free—there is no knot man could tie
that I could not wriggle myself out of!—you might burn the rope and get
away! I did that once when I was a gunner-boy of seventeen in South Africa
——"
Von Herrnung stopped short. Bawne asked simply, and with the same
straight look between the eyes:
"Did you fight with the Boers against us in the War?"
Von Herrnung did not seem to have heard. He had caught the drift of a
sentence spoken by Sherbrand, who was answering to a question of the
Chief Scout.
"Oh yes! I live here—have quarters over Mrs. Dunlett's restaurant—
you could communicate with me practically at any time. We've the 'phone
and a private telegraph-office, and the wireless—under the usual licence
from the Postmaster-General."
He pointed towards the well-known tall posts with the short cross-
pieces, china insulators and lines of thick wire, standing beside the
telegraph-cabin, over the roof of which straddled the wireless installation's
tall, latticed steel mast.
"We find it useful for business as well as instructional purposes," he
went on. "Macrombie—the man in charge—is a one-time Royal Navy Petty
Officer Telegraphist and a first-class operator." Sherbrand's mouth twisted a
little at the corners as he added: "About twenty-four days out of thirty, let us
say!"

The quick rejoinder came:
"Then he's D.O.D. two working days in the month, not counting
Sundays. I've met plenty of Macrombies in my time. This doesn't happen to
be the monthly pay-day, by any chance, or one of the other close days in its
neighbourhood?"
"No, no! He's as right as rain and as sober as a seal," said Sherbrand.
"And—this tall fellow with red hair must be the man who has written to me
upon business. I shall have to go to him."
They exchanged a left-handed grip, mutually smiling.
"Good old habits stick," said the Chief, and Sherbrand answered:
"Fortunately, they do. Let me say again how much and how gratefully
I have to thank you for the teaching that has helped me to find myself!" His
clear light glance reverted to Saxham. "The Doctor too, for giving me this
chance of meeting you. Please tell him the story if you think it would
interest him. I hope with all my heart, sir, that you will soon come here
again!"
"I had already taken the permission for granted," the Chief said, as
Sherbrand saluted and went forward to meet "the fellow with red hair."
"There is big business in that gyroscopic stabiliser of his," he added to
Saxham, "and our friends at the French War Ministry have tumbled to it as
one might naturally expect. So much the worse for our bungling bigwigs at
Whitehall, who've let a good thing slip, for the millionth time, out of their
claws. But taking for granted the value of the patent, and recognising the
likelihood of the French bid stimulating Teutonic competition——"
The gentle, modulated voice broke off. Von Herrnung had stepped out
upon the green and was striding towards the lightly-moving, less stiffly-
carried figure of Sherbrand, the approximation of the two somehow
suggesting a salute of gladiators previous to the fight. Now the big, grey-

clad German was arrested in the middle of his stride by the sudden kling-a-
ling of a motor-gong, a sharp crystal vibration that stiffened him to
attention, and pricked his ears for a repetition of the sound.
It did not immediately come. He raised the left hand that held the
leather satchel, and swung it from front to rear, so that it was for a moment
clear of the outline of his body, as who should signal: "I have it safe!"
Quick, watchful eyes noted this. Took in also the ornate bulk of the dark
blue F.I.A.T. touring-car, as with the characteristic, noiseless smoothness of
its make, it glided between the ranks of parked and waiting automobiles,
and stopped in the open, perhaps some forty yards away.
A fat yellow hand, with a twinkling solitaire upon it, waved. A brown
hand, with a massive gold curb-chain watch-bracelet on the wrist of it,
beckoned imperiously. Something had been forgotten, something was still
to say. Von Herrnung wheeled, and went back in his traces as obediently as
the pointer that has been called to heel. He did not uncover, perhaps he had
been told not to. He saluted, and stood stiffly, listening to a harsh German
voice that yapped at him. All his arrogance and swagger seemed to have
been juggled out of him by the gestures of the brown hand with the flashing
wrist-bracelet, emerging from the white cuff with jewelled sleeve-links and
the snowy sleeve with its broad bands of glittering golden braid.
"S'th!"
The slight sound pulled Saxham's head round. He had not been looking
at the occupants of the blue F.I.A.T. His eyes were intent on the tall white
figure of the woman standing beside his boy. Her black lace sunshade was
closed. She held the tall-sticked thing at arm's-length, leaning upon it, and
the westering light smote a myriad of multi-coloured sparkles out of the
tinsel spangles of the hat with the single black cock's plume. The queer
headgear crowning her barbaric hair, and her full white oval face with its

wide, low, arched black brows and long eyes, made her seem strange,
alluring, as some tall-stemmed, exotic flower, sprung at the incantation of
an Oriental conjuror, from a green stretch of English turf.
In the same instant von Herrnung touched his hat, stepped back from
the blue car, wheeled and walked away toward the waiting figure of
Sherbrand, the sallow man in the Homburg hat gave an order, the chauffeur
touched the electric starter, and the F.I.A.T. turned and smoothly bowled
away. But in the instant of its turning, the bearded man in the white naval
uniform rose in his place, and obtruding half his short, bulky body across
the lean person of his sallow neighbour, scrutinised the face and figure of
Patrine Saxham with a cool, appraising deliberateness that tortured the
wincing flesh it enveloped like the cut of a carriage-whip.
They were full, bright, and rather handsome grey-blue eyes shadowed
by the white cap-peak, and they had the indefinable expression of authority
and power. Their glance said—and the face with the perfectly-trimmed
beard and the upturned moustache wore a curious smile that bore out the
glance's meaning:
"So! That's the woman!" And a surge of scalding shame and bitter
resentment rose in the heart of Patrine Saxham and filled it to the brim.
She could not have explained why she felt certain that her shameful
secret was known to the man with the powerful eyes, the cast of whose face
with its pointed beard faintly reminded one of the King and the Tsar.
Patrine had always abominated cheap sentiment. She had once laughed
until she cried at a revival of an old four-decker drama, whose hero, waking
to the knowledge of a committed, irrevocable deed cried in throaty, stagy
tones of anguish upon God to put back the dreadful clock of Time and give
him yesterday.

Now she perceived the deep, vital interest of the common-place human
story. If asking Him on whom that other sinner cried would wipe from
Time's register a span of hours between twelve P.M. and three o'clock in the
morning—blot one deed from the Roll of things that done, are beyond
Humanity's undoing—Patrine told herself that it would be worth while to
wear sackcloth, live on boiled field-peas, drink brook-water, and pray—
until her knees were worn to the bone.
She caught Saxham's piercing glance across the intervening strip of
greensward. He turned away his eyes, and a shudder went through her
frame. Had he suspected—could anyone have found out and told him? The
Doctor's head was bent now as the General talked to him. It seemed to her
that a muscle in his lean cheek twitched, a characteristic sign with him of
excitement, or emotion. She wondered what the General had said to Uncle
Owen to make him look like that.
As a fact, the quiet voice was saying in Saxham's ear: "And prepare
against a surprise, Doctor—for though your nerves are tough as aluminium
bronze, a few million gallons of water have rolled under the Thames
bridges since you and I held Council of War.... As I mentioned before, the
interest taken by the French Government in Sherbrand's gyroscopic hoverer
may well have stimulated the interest of our Teuton neighbours. But it
doesn't explain the presence on Fanshaw's Flying Ground of Lieutenant-
General Count Helmuth von Moltke, Chief of the German Great General
Staff, and—Grand Admiral Prince Henry of Prussia, brother of the Kaiser—
in a F.I.A.T. touring-car!"

CHAPTER XXIX
A SECRET MISSION

"Can it be possible——" Saxham checked himself. "You see how rusty I am
getting, General. You refer to that machine that turned out from where cars
are parked just now. The German fellow went up to it.... It had a groom
beside the chauffeur and three other men inside it.... While I was looking—
elsewhere—it must have moved away!"
"It has only turned the corner of the café-restaurant," the Chief said in
his quiet tones. He glanced in the direction of the squat block of gaily
painted wooden buildings devoted to the inner needs of Fanshaw's clients.
"The awning hides it, but I can see a bit of it still. Until it moves, I can go
on talking. Frankly, I am in the position of the High Church curate who
went out wild-pig shooting in the territories of the Limpopo with a single-
bore hammer-gun of grandpapa's pattern—and got his choice of pot-shots
between a lion and a rhino. Prinz Heinrich is my royal lion and von
Herrnung,—who counted for little more than a bush-pig—has suddenly
swelled into a rhinoceros."
He pulled the grizzled moustache thoughtfully, keeping his eyes glued
on the back of the big blue car.
"If I could get hold of Sherbrand!—but the chance is dead for the rhino
and lion winding me. Old von Moltke with the big wart on his ginger-
coloured face, and the charming manner that makes you forget that you
don't like him!—would certainly recognise me—and the nautical
Hohenzollern and I have met once or twice before. I must lay low like Brer
Rabbit, and take a single-handed chance. No, no, Doctor, you have your
patients to look after! I am not going to drag you into this. But if I'd got a
couple of my Boy Scouts handy——" He broke off, encountering Bawne's
bright eyes. "By George, Doctor! I'm going to chance it! I'm going to give
your youngster an opportunity to prove his Saxham blood!"

The Master-hand gave the Scout's Sign, and Bawne shot across like a
brownish streak of swiftness. He drew himself up, gave the Full Salute, and
stood waiting, his rigid attitude in sharp contrast with his dancing, expectant
eyes. The Doctor looked at his watch and moved away silently. The Chief
said in a clear undertone:
"You see that tall, red-haired man in grey clothes over there with Mr.
Sherbrand? Don't look at him openly, or he will know we are talking about
him, but take a sidelong gliff, and say."
"I see him, sir."
"Do you know anything of him? Stand easy and answer carefully."
The hand came down from the hat-brim. The boy said:
"I've heard him talk, sir, and I think he is German. I'm learning that and
French at Charterhouse."
"He is a German. Do you speak enough of the language to understand
him, suppose he were talking to one of his countrymen?"
"Ich—kann—lesen, aber Ich kann es—nicht sprechen." The answer
came slowly. "And if they weren't using crack-jaw words, sir, or talking
very quick, I might manage—I could make out a lot of what they said."
"Very well, keep your man under close observation and—you see that
brown satchel he has in his hand?"
"I've seen it close, sir. A flat brown leather despatch case thing—with a
criss-cross pattern on the leather, and two locks, and another lock on the
strap that goes round. He hadn't it with him when first I saw him talking to
—a lady. Then a man—a servant—came and called him away to speak to
some gentlemen in a big blue motor-car. One of them—fat and old and bald
—with a wart on his cheek, who wore a white topper, and yellowy clothes,
and a red necktie, and looked rather like a—like an Inspector of Sunday
Schools in shooting-clothes—passed him the leather case. That's how I

know he didn't bring it, sir. Oh! and the yellow car he drives isn't British.
She's got an oval International plate with the German 'D' in black on a white
ground."
"I am glad my Scout knows how to use his eyes!"
The Chief's own eyes were crinkled with merriment. That Moltke, the
Chief of the German Great General staff, bosom friend of the All Highest,
should resemble a stout Inspector of Sunday Schools in the estimation of a
small British boy, was lovely in the extreme.
"Well, I want to know what the big German officer—he is an officer!
—does with that leather satchel he's carrying so carefully. Where he goes
with it, whom he talks to, and what he says to them. Find out whether it is
light or heavy, if it is what I believe it to be, you might be rendering good
service to your country in destroying it. But you'll be doing all I want or
expect, if you stick to the man who carries it!"
"I'll do that, sir, on my Honour!"
"Good! Make your little German serve you. I may have to leave here
upon this business, but I'll be back within, at least—half an hour. If he goes
before I get back, find out where he is going. If you can't find out, follow
him. On foot if he walks, in a taxi if he doesn't. Here are six separate
shillings—in that case you'll want money for fares. Remember, if things
take a puzzling turn and you find yourself in a tight place, whisper a quiet
word to Sherbrand, though I'd prefer you to carry through on your own!
Report to me, in case he goes before I get back here—at Headquarters,
Victoria Street. Have you got all this tucked away safe in your head?"
"Yes, sir."
"Then quit yourself like a man. My signal to you that I have left will
be a dog's yelping. Ah!" The keen bright eyes, glued on the distant back of

the blue car, had seen the rear wheels moving. Before the F.I.A.T. glided
smoothly out of eyeshot the Chief had hurried away.
In the opposite direction to the archway of exit, the slight, active figure
in the perfectly-cut blue serge morning clothes and pot hat of Bond Street
block, was rapidly walking. Bawne doubted his eyes for a moment before
he remembered that the Collingwood Avenue ran along that side of the
Flying Ground fence. There was a smaller gate in charge of a
commissionaire, in the fence, about a hundred yards along it. Taxi-cabs
were standing outside the gate. Any person on foot or awheel, leaving the
Flying Ground, must pass the gate and the taxi-stand. You could see through
the chinks in the fence when they passed, nip out when they were well by,
and follow in a green-flagged chuffer. Bawne had settled this to his
satisfaction before a wrench at the rein of duty pulled his head round to the
business on hand.
"I'm not spying on Mr. Sherbrand," the boy told himself, gritting his
small square teeth doggedly. "I've got to listen, so as to understand the
German's game. And I'm going to. This is how I'm going to!"
He began to turn hand-springs after the fashion of the London street
Arab, thus lessening the distance between himself and the talking men.
They glanced at him, and Sherbrand grinned, but they looked back again
directly at each other. Then Bawne threw himself down and panted, rolled
over and lay, still panting. Now he was near enough to hear what passed
between the two.
Sherbrand said:
"No, I was not particularly solid in my conviction that the aërial
stabiliser would take the fancy of the Chiefs of the Service Aëronautique.
An accident prevented me from witnessing the final test, and I got what the
Americans call cold feet and judged it no use staying in France longer. So I

flew back here, starting early by daylight the next morning, with Davis, my
mechanic, and found a cable waiting at my office to say the working of the
invention had been observed with interest by the Chiefs of the S. Aë. F., and
that if I could carry out a satisfactory time-trial at my headquarters in the
presence of the French Consul, the authorities at the Ministry of War would
be willing to buy my patents for France. As it happened, I was suffering
from a slight obstruction in the nasal passages, that spoiled my climbing. It
was absolutely necessary to go into Hospital. That is why I could not give
M. Jourdain an earlier date for the hovering-test you have just seen carried
out."
Von Herrnung demanded:
"But did you not receive a letter containing a business proposal? A
communication from Rathenau, Wolff and Brothers, Aëromotor Engineers
of Paris, 200, Rue Gagnette? I happen to know that it was posted, and the
date being that of the Paris trial, Herren Rathenau and Wolff certainly
possess the prior claim!"
"Their communication reached me in Hospital, three days later than
the French War Office cable," Sherbrand answered. "It had been forwarded
from the makeshift hangar I rented at Drancy—a mistake in the address
being the reason of the delay!"
"That fellow Lindemann is a Dummer Teufel," said von Herrnung,
shrugging.
"My German landlord.... Why—do you know him?" asked Sherbrand
with a look of surprise.
"No, certainly. But you—you said the fellow's name was Lindemann.
Not so? No?—then I am mistaken," said von Herrnung with another shrug.
He hurried on as though to cover a mistake with a spate of sentences:

"Of course, with Rathenau and Wolff I have nothing to do. Save as an
old customer, of whom they have asked a favour—you understand? Indeed
I—you will pardon me!—do not your hoverer regard as an original
invention. In 1912 our German Ministry of Marine completed a gun-boat
fitted with a gyroscopic stabiliser to prevent rolling—you understand—in
stormy weather. The device was hellishly effective."
"So effective," rejoined Sherbrand, without the quiver of a facial
muscle, though there was laughter in his eyes, "that it broke up the ship."
"Es mag wohl sein!" returned von Herrnung, covering discomfiture, if
he felt it, with his imperturbable shrug and hard blue stare.
Sherbrand went on, straightening his wide shoulders and clasping his
hands loosely at his back as he talked:
"I don't claim that my patent is an absolutely new invention. Far from
it. But it is a new arrangement of some old ideas, and limited though its use
may be—it works. You have seen it working. You agree that it justifies its
name?" He waited for the assent, and went on: "Possibly if I had described
it as an aërial drag-anchor, I should have explained its uses more clearly. It
is no good at all when your machine isn't flying level—of course you
understand that? If you were ass enough to try to dive without cutting out
the power that drives the horizontal screws you would drop to the ground
like a plummet and break into a million of little bits—or dig a hole in the
earth big enough for a Tube Station. But—keeping an even line of flight—
when you switch it on it pulls against the tractor just sufficiently to give you
—not immovability—but poise. Sufficient to take a photograph or drop an
explosive with a good deal of accuracy."
The small boy lying outstretched on the warm turf near them, thought
dolefully:

"Dummer Teufel meant 'stupid devil' in German. But this talk is
dreadfully business, I can't stow away much. Man alive! I wish Roddy
Wrynche or some other fellow with a top-hole memory had got this job to
tackle. And yet the Chief trusted it to me!"
All this, while Sherbrand was explaining.
"M. Jourdain declared himself completely satisfied. His observer said
that I maintained poise and stability for five minutes longer than the
stipulated twenty-five. He looked at the altimeter and said I should receive a
definite answer within a couple of days.... Unlucky brute! Someone must
have run over him!"
The shrill yelp of a hurt dog had evoked Sherbrand's exclamation. The
sufferer's plaint came from the Collingwood Avenue, on the other side of
the fence. Thrice the excruciating sound ripped the ears, then died out in a
sobbing whimper.... That was for me! Bawne told himself, as von Herrnung
went on:
"Still, you are not pledged. There is no definite understanding. In the
interests of the wealthy firm I am asked to represent—solely as a matter of
courtesy, because they have been immensely civil to me in business,—you
would not refuse me a test?"
Sherbrand said, drawing off his left glove and showing blood oozing
from under bluish-looking finger-nails:
"I found it uncommonly parky to-day at 10,000 feet. There was a nor'-
east breeze, a regular piercer. Found myself spitting blood rather badly, and
to be candid, I was uncommonly grateful that the French Consul declined
my offer, in case he was not satisfied, to do the thing again. The fact is, the
operation, slight as it was, has weakened me a little. I wouldn't care to
repeat the performance without a good night's rest to buck me up."
Von Herrnung shrugged and agreed:

"That it is cold at 10,000 I can credit easily. I have had the oil in my
own gauges frozen at 7,000 in midsummer. Da ist nicht zit strassen.
Hæmorrhage and dizziness are the chief enemies of the aviator. One's
stomach betrays one also, the cursed beast!—after a good hearty meal!"
"I don't give mine the chance!" Sherbrand returned, "but stave off the
pangs of appetite with milk-tablets and meat-lozenges. Do all my flying on
these and chocolate. Keep a little store of the things and a Thermos of hot
coffee, in a cache I've made for them, under the map-desk on the left of the
instrument-frame, facing the pilot's seat. If you will come over to the Bird
I'll show you, and explain the working of the gyroscopic hoverer." He
added, looking squarely at von Herrnung: "Of course the cutting of the
double screw is the chief thing about the invention. I've registered every
way I know and got a trade-mark. They tell me at the Patent Office that my
international rights are secure!"
"They should be, if you have those precautions taken. It does not do to
trust," said von Herrnung, "too much! The monkey proverb is law for most
men." He shrugged. "It comes, by the way, from Namaland in German
South-West Africa. 'Nuts in your pouch are nuts in mine!'"
The freemasonry of their calling had established a degree of
friendliness between them. They were laughing over the monkey's
philosophy as they went over together to the Bird. The small boy who had
been idly sprawling on the hot turf near them, with his tilted hat shielding
his face from the westering sun-rays, got up and trotted after them like a
collie pup.
"Coming too, young man?" Sherbrand said, glancing back and smiling.
The boy nodded in answer, and thence-forward kept close at the heels of the
men, his ears industriously drinking in their conversation, while his eyes
were glued on the brown leather satchel depending from the German's

gloved left hand. Both men, now leaning over the side of the pilot's cockpit,
examined the gearing of the hoverer, protected by a transparent casing set in
the tough ash, copper-riveted planking of the fuselage. Then with the aid of
sulky Davis they tilted the Bird, and inspected the pair of thin circular
plates of toughened steel with flanged edges that, revolving at high velocity
in different. directions, constituted the horizontal screw.
"Driven from the engine, as you see, by an endless chain-drive
arrangement. By manipulation of levers, you can throw the tractor out of
gear, and hover, under favourable circumstances and in still weather, by
means of the horizontal screw alone. But as a rule you keep the tractor
working, and the screw acts in one as a lifter and floating-anchor. That's
about all it amounts to!—I've said I don't pretend to hang immovable in the
air like the albatross and the condor, not to mention the gull and sparrow-
hawk and dragon-fly! While I hover I am making way—but way to an
inappreciable amount. One of these days we shall find out the big Secret of
Stability. Until then we must rub along as best we can!"
Von Herrnung returned:
"I am hellishly interested in your invention. It now occurs to me that as
you happen to know my flying record"—he shrugged his great shoulders
and smoothed his tight red roll of moustache with a well-manicured finger-
tip—"that it is possible you would have sufficient confidence to allow me to
test your gyroscopic hoverer myself?" He laughed again pleasantly as he
finished: "Whatever else I may do, I give you my word of honour I shall not
pile up your machine. Will you consent? It may lead—supposing you do not
close with the French offer—to big business—done with my friends!"
Sherbrand had looked doubtful, only for an instant. Before the twelve-
year-old eavesdropper had recovered from the shock that had set his brain
spinning and his heart thumping, the situation had been accepted by the

owner of the Bird of War. He held out his left hand, and von Herrnung
gripped and wrenched it, noting with inward amusement that his grip had
brought fresh lines of blood creeping about the edges of Sherbrand's finger-
nails.
"You shake hands with the left," he commented, smiling. "Not for the
first time have I noticed the peculiarity in Englishmen of the younger
breed."
"It is a custom," Sherbrand answered, "with—members of an
organisation to which I had, and still have, the honour to belong."
His eyes, in speaking, went to the bright-haired boy in Scout's uniform
standing near them, but von Herrnung's glance had not followed his. The
boy was staring wistfully at the round-faced clock on the front gable of the
café restaurant—ten minutes to the half-hour and no sign of the Chief's
returning. Bawne's courage began to ooze away at the ends of his fingers
and toes.
"Then," von Herrnung was beginning impatiently, when a sallow,
undersized young man, whose hollow chest and inky paper cuffs advertised
his clerical employment, came up, touched a pen sticking out from behind
his ear, and said as Sherbrand turned to him:
"Beg pardon, sir, but the telegraph-cabin is locked up proper, and Mr.
Macrombie 'as carried orf the key."
"Out of sorts to-day, is he?" Sherbrand asked meaningly, and the
telegraph-clerk answered:
"I've never seen 'im so bad before—in the middle of the month!"
As Fate would have it, Macrombie, ex-Petty Officer Telegraphist of
the R.N.—from whose sleeve the golden Crown and thunderbolt had been
reft by reason of his anti-teetotal habits, had received a visit that morning
from a friend who had repaid a debt. Hence the licensed operator of

Fanshaw's experimental and educational Wireless-station had succumbed to
an attack of his intermittent complaint.

Hear Macrombie's assistant continuing the recital:
"He's left the aërial connected to the transmitter and gone out for
lemon-squashes four times since one o'clock grub. 'That's the drink for men
who have souls to save, ye little fag-eater!' he says to me; 'Salvation for
soul and body, sucked through a straw! If thae deboshed and hopeless
drunkards at the Admiralty could be induced to swear off their cursed
alcohol and take to it, I wad no longer be deaved to the point of steeping my
tongue in profanity, by the kind o' eediots' gibberish that is yammering at
my lugs!'"
"He'd been raking a lot of Admiralty strays in?" Sherbrand queried.
Von Herrnung, who had been grinding his heel into the turf and gnawing his
lip with ill-concealed impatience, turned his head sharply, and listened to
the colloquy with all his ears.
"Not so much X's as definites, sir," responded Macrombie's assistant.
"He was upset about ten minutes before he broke out by getting an 'Urgent'
without a Preparative Call. Then comes 'Important' in International Code,
and 'Administration' and 'Emergency.' Then 'War Office,' and 'Documents,'
and 'Enforcement of the Law.' By that time 'e was purple in the face and 'arf
crazy. 'If I had my way wi' you, ye bung-nosed intemperates,' he says,
groaning-like—'I wad keep ye on grits an' caller watter for a fortnicht! Oh,
that men, as auld Hosea says in the inspired Screeptures'—an' I 'appen to
know myself it was Shakespeare—'should pit an enemy intil their mooths to
steal awa' their brains!' An' 'e snatches off the telephone 'ead-band and
chucks it into the corner, and just as my own instrument starts to tick out a
call, he ketches me by the neck as if I'd bin a tame rabbit, an' slings me out

o' the office an' locks the door. 'Out o' this!' 'e says, puttin' the cabin key in
'is pocket. 'I will no' have your lugs, dirr-ty as they are, polluted by the
unclean counsels o' the wicked. I'm awa' to cool the wrath o' the righteous
wi' anither lemon squash!' An' the winder is blocked by the Morse key
instrument, an' even if it wasn't, it's too small for me to get in through!"
Macrombie's victim ended, with an injured sniff.
"Well, well! Better hang about the cabin a bit and possess your soul in
patience. If any pupils drop along, tell them they'll have to wait! Perhaps
Macrombie'll turn up sober enough to take them on by-and-by. As for the
message in transmission, I daresay it will keep. Mr. Fanshaw's not
expecting any particularly important communication that I know of. Oh,
hang it!" Sherbrand whistled dismally. "I'd forgotten. That's just what I am!"
"Shall I go and see if I can find Rumball?" suggested Macrombie's
assistant helpfully. "He's at the engine-sheds. He's been a locksmith.
'Twouldn't take him more than a sec. to open the office door!"
"Cut then!" acceded Sherbrand, and the telegraph-clerk touched his
pen—discovering by a jab of the inky nib that he was wearing it—and set
off at a trot in the direction of the engine-sheds.
You are to suppose that von Herrnung's sharp ears had gathered the
pith of the communication. Some meaning in the isolated words the clerk
had repeated had had a palpable effect upon his nerves. His face looked
bluish-grey and streaky, as he said to Sherbrand, stammering in his
eagerness:
"So then, it is agreed about my flying your machine?"
"I see no objection."
"Gut!" Von Herrnung went on, concealing a huge joy under a careless
camaraderie: "Can you lend me a cap and coat and a pair of Schulzbrille?
Goggles you call them, yes! The coat should better to be a large one"—he

stumbled in his English now through sheer excitement—"I am so much a
bigger man than you!"
"Certainly. We keep Flying rigs in all manner of sizes. It's in the way
of business," Sherbrand said. Then his glance fell upon Davis, whose little
black-avised countenance wore an expression of sulky resentment, and he
uttered a slight exclamation. "I forgot, Davis! I really am very sorry!" He
turned to von Herrnung and explained in a tone of finality that enraged the
hearer: "This is Davis's afternoon off. I cannot ask him to repeat the climb."
"It is hellishly annoying! But see! Listen, my fellow!" He addressed
himself to little grimy Davis, unhelmeted and unbuttoned, leaning against
the Bird's flank with his hands in the pockets of his oily overalls, chewing a
blade of grass; "You will go up with me if I tip you? A sovereign! Come
then! The gold does it! You will go up with me, will you not, yes?"
Davis spat out grass and delivered himself:
"Not even for my young guv'nor—and a Bank of England finnup, do I
do the soaring heagle hact again this blooming Wednesday."
Welsh Davis had come to London from a mountain farm in Merioneth,
speaking nothing but his native Cymric, and had culled his Sassenach from
Cockney lips. Von Herrnung bid another sovereign, and then two more,
ineffectually.
"Naow!" Davis was rock. "I've done my day's stunt an' I'm nuffy. D'yer
tumble? Nuffy! Yer knaows wot that means—if you're a Flying Bloke!"
"Damn you, I will gif you ten pounds!" Von Herrnung's face was
wrung and streaked with passion. He breathed hard, and the brown leather
satchel jumped and wobbled in his shaking hand.
"It isn't any use," said Sherbrand, "really! Money doesn't count with
Davis where his off-time's concerned. Davis doesn't want to go up again,

and I've not another man of his weight available. What do you turn the scale
at? I should guess 16 stone or thereabouts?"
"I weigh 16 st. 8 lbs. in my ordinary clothes."
"Well, I tot 11 st. 6 lbs. in the fullest of flying-rig, and Davis only 8 st.
5 lbs. And the Bird is built to carry in addition to her engine—what with the
instruments, so forth, and man-freight, a cargo of something like 22 stone.
You see, even with Davis, you'd load the machine a good bit over her"—he
smiled at the conceit—"her Plimsoll mark. Again, I'm sorry. It's your luck!
No flying for you to-day!"
"It is damnably annoying! But"—von Herrnung's red-lashed blue eyes
were busily scanning Bawne's face and figure—"but suppose I could get a
boy of 6 stone to go up with me? Merely as ballast, for I do not require an
assistant—the difficulty might be got over in this way? What you say, my
little English fellow?" He turned on the boy with a great air of jovial
patronage. "Are you plucky enough? Shall we go for a voyage together in
the sky?"
"Yes—please!"
The dark blue eyes met the hard light ones bravely, though every
vestige of colour had sunk out of the young face. Then back to lips and
cheeks the banished colour came racing. Bawne flushed crimson, as von
Herrnung held up a bright bit of gold, and sharply shook his head.
"Was? Will you not take the sovereign?" von Herrnung demanded.
"Are you a faint-heart after all?"
The boy bit his lip and said, clenching his small fists desperately:
"It's against the rule for Scouts to take tips. So I don't want the money.
But I'm ready to come with you!"
"Look here, old fellow!" Sherbrand was beginning anxiously. The boy
stopped him with:

"Really and truly I'm not funky—and you said I was to have another
flight."
"So I did, and so you shall," agreed Sherbrand. "But this won't be just
a 'bus trip around the aërodrome. It will be climbing and spiralling and
hovering, and all the rest!"
Bawne persisted:
"You could strap me in. And I'm not afraid—really!"
"And," von Herrnung interposed, "I shall not ascend higher than three
thousand. Probably less will do for my purpose. The boy will be quite safe.
Surely you are able to trust him with me?"
Sherbrand hesitated, then said to Bawne in a relieved tone: "Well,
there's the Doctor talking to a tall lady in white with a hat that glitters. Run
across to your father and ask him whether you may go?"
"I'd rather you asked him—if you must—and let me stop here!"
"Gut! Sehr gut!" Von Herrnung's tautened nerves would have been
relieved by some hard Prussian swearing. He jangled out a laugh instead.
He caught hold of the boy under the armpits and lifted him high above his
head. "What is your weight? Six stone? Come now, have I not guessed
nearly!" He had not relinquished his grip on the leather satchel, and as it
banged against his ribs, Bawne realised that it was quite light.
"Papers inside!" he said to himself. Something quite hard was under
the leather at the corners, perhaps the thinnest of metal plates. Its contact
with the boy's body seemed to sober von Herrnung's exultation. He dropped
Bawne unceremoniously, and straightened himself again.
"How much petrol has been used?" he asked hastily of Davis, going
over to the Bird and mounting on the landing-carriage to look at the gauges.
"Because when I fly I never take risks. You will have to fill up the tank
again. Do you hear, my fellow?"

"If Mr. Sherbrand orders me," Davis spat out another piece of grass,
"dessay I shall do it!" He eyed von Herrnung with surly disapproval as he
craned over the Bird's fuselage, while audibly commenting to an
acquaintance who had strolled up:
"Sheer blinders, I call 'em, these ere Fritzies! Walk into Buckingham
Pallis next minute and ask to look into the Privy Puss. 'Ope the Governor
comes back before 'e gits Nosey Parkerin' into the 'orizontal 'overing gear!
Perish me if I ever met a bloke with such a nerve! Watto, old sonny?" He
addressed himself to the boy. "Ain't you feelin' up to the posh?"
"I am quite all right, thank you!" Bawne responded, while his heart
bumped against his ribs. In his brain words and sentences kept forming:
"I'm only a little chap. And this is—a Big thing! Bigger than the Chief
expected, perhaps! And he said he'd be back in half an hour." Half an hour
meant thirty minutes. He glanced at the big round white-faced clock above
the entrance of the café restaurant. More than fifteen minutes of the half-
hour had gone.
To stick to the big, brutal German was his—Bawne's—Secret Mission.
And the inspiring, uplifting voice that thousands of boy-hearts thrill to all
the big world over had said to him:
"Quit yourself like a man!"

CHAPTER XXX
THE REAPING

To Patrine, when the shadow of the familiar figure of the Doctor mingled
with hers upon the dry green grass, and Saxham's voice called her by her

name, it was as though his presence had a weight that physically oppressed
her, and his scrutiny seared her flesh like the approach of white-hot iron.
Through her mind passed swift sentences: "Yet another of us has
disgraced him! My father and mother are not the only traitors of our
name!" In the rawness of her mental anguish every sense was unnaturally
exaggerated. The ticking of Saxham's watch, that the furious beating of her
heart could not drown, tormented by its iteration. And worst of all, was the
consciousness of defilement in the physical sense.

"Did not your mother give you my message?"
Always pale, her pallor did not demand particular attention, save that
under their ruddy salve the edges of her lips showed white. She answered,
forcing the lips to smile, compelling her eyes to meet Saxham's.
"About coming to see you?" She remembered and drew from her gilt-
chain vanity bag the letter she had not posted: "This was written to you to-
day. Then I thought I would have been able to look in at Harley Street, and
in the end——"
"In the end you neither paid the visit nor posted the excuse. Well, be
more considerate in future to those who love you. Sincere, clean love does
not grow on every gooseberry bush, my dear!"
The curt speech, made in the Doctor's brusquest tone, conveyed to
Patrine an impression of exquisite kindness. So many boons, so many
benefits had been conferred in that grim, curt way. She had wept and would
not weep again, but her hard bright eyes grew misty as she thanked him,
and asked after Lynette, with a touch of wistfulness that recalled to the
Doctor that unforgettable time when greedy Death had threatened to rob
him of his joy. He answered her cheerfully, and they found themselves
chatting of familiar, everyday matters across the gulf that yawned between.

And then, warned by some swift change of expression in her face, Saxham
glanced up to see Sherbrand approaching.
"Doctor!" he called. "Sorry to interrupt, but would you listen a
minute?"
The tall, lightly-built, lightly moving figure came swinging towards
them. He still carried the eared cap with the goggled visor, his thick,
silvery-blonde hair was darkened at the temples with the dampness
generated under the close covering of waterproof. His light grey-blue eyes
were smiling, yet there was a pucker of anxiety between his eyebrows, as he
put von Herrnung's case.
"So," he ended, "instead of taking a second flight in the Bird with me
as we arranged, would you trust your boy to this foreign crack who's in a
hole for a passenger? He is Captain von Herrnung of the German Flying
Service—winner of the two-days' flight from Hanover to Paris in April—a
famous run!" He added, "I need hardly say that with such a record as von
Herrnung holds you cannot be apprehensive of any rashness or neglect on
his part. But I'll own I would rather take Bawne up another day myself.
Still, von Herrnung——"
"I am aware of the reputation held by the person you mention. I am
going now to speak to him."
The Doctor's face was devoid of all expression. But he battled, as he
spoke, with a masterful desire to forbid Bawne the expedition. To assert
parental authority on this point would have been the mode of dealing
approved by one of the two men who dwelt within the Dop Doctor. The
other Saxham said "Hold!"
Dare you place your paternal love, that other Saxham asked—between
your son and his duty? Because it would be so easy to do it, is the reason
why you should refrain! The Doctor had walked a few paces towards the

object of his troubled reflections. He wheeled abruptly, returned, and
presented Sherbrand to his niece.

A faint blush rose in Patrine's white cheeks as her eyes met those of the tall
young aviator. They looked at her without any sign of recognition, and the
conviction, "He has forgotten!" shot stingingly across her mind. "He did not
think me worth remembering" came next. And then she could have laughed,
recalling that she had dismissed him from her own thoughts on the
discovery of his connection with Fanshaw's. She had made so certain that a
teacher of Flying couldn't be a gentleman.
Now, face to face with him again, in his upright easy bearing, in his
straight and fearless regard, in the pleasant well-bred voice that addressed
her in a brief conventional sentence or so, she read his patent of gentlehood.
From whatever root it sprang, the flower was noble. Her swift eyes
shot a glance at the bigger figure in grey. What a hoggish knight of the
dunghill, what a high-born clown had she not distinguished by her choice
and selection. The smile of scorn that curved her mouth was suddenly
banished by the sudden recollection of Bawne.
"Uncle Owen, you have not yet told Mr. Sherbrand whether Bawne
may go up again or not. I am sure—if you won't think me—if you don't
mind my saying so!—that he has had enough for to-day! I think it would be
better if you would not——"
It was not the deep warm voice of Patrine's characteristic utterance, but
a weaker, thinner voice that hesitated and faltered and trailed away. It
recalled nothing to Sherbrand. He looked at her and transferred his gaze to
Saxham, who asked:
"Does this German officer intend climbing to any high altitude, or
perpetrating anything in the nature of a display?"

Sherbrand explained:
"He does not want to go higher than three thousand. Just to try the
hoverer, regarding which some business friends of his are bitten with
curiosity. My mechanic is not able to go up with him, and he wants a light-
weight passenger. He is over sixteen stone himself, and the Bird has been
built to carry me with Davis. I calculated her wing-area to——"
Sherbrand travelled into the realm of technicalities, using terms that
were Volapuk and Esperanto to Patrine. He had supple, finely-shaped
hands, and used them as he talked with vivid illustrative gestures.
"So," he ended, "as your plucky youngster asked to go, it seemed a
way out of the difficulty, provided you weren't dead against the thing. Of
course we'll swadd the little chap in a sweater or so under the pneumatic
jacket. It'll be a bit parky, even at three thousand, now the sun's beginning
to down."
He added:
"I'll see to the strapping myself. You may rely upon it, Doctor."
Saxham said with a look of kindness at the handsome face with the
clear candid eyes:
"I am sure of that!" He added, mastering that inward impulse: "I shall
not forbid the flight if Bawne is set on it. But first, I must speak to him!"
And the great form with the stern thoughtful face and scholar's stoop
moved across the greensward, followed by the tall young figures of
Sherbrand and Patrine. Of the two, the man was by a bare inch the taller.
This Patrine realised in a swift side-glance. Certain featural characteristics
of him, personal impressions received half-unconsciously, retained their
clear sharpness then and for many days....
The silvery-yellow hair toning into the pale brown skin. The powerful
sweep of the brows over eyes set flush with their large orbits, prominent,

brilliant, mobile as the eyes of a bird of flight. The nose, arched and jutting
like a kite's beak, with large sensitive nostrils, the somewhat sunken cheek
and the sharply-angled jaw, the little ear and the rounded skull superbly set
upon the full muscular neck rising out of the collar of the gabardine, made
up a portrait upon which some happy woman might well dote and dream.
It was five o'clock and the breeze that smelt of heather and clover-hay
and strawberries blew more strongly, straight from under the westering sun.
Patrine drank in deep draughts of the buoyant sweetness. The leaden gyves
had fallen from her limbs, the leaden weight had lifted from her bosom. She
had recovered something of her old, elastic grace of movement, that even
the sheath-skirt could not spoil. Looking at her, Sherbrand said to himself:
"She walks like a Highland hill-woman or a native girl of the
Philippines. And—did Heaven or a Bond Street specialist give her that
extraordinary hair? I rather hate it, and yet I have to go on looking at it.
Does she know? I wonder if she knows?"
She felt his eyes on her. And the buoyant sense of well-being that his
presence brought to her was mingled with an agony of apprehension. Her
heart clamoured, like a brooding thrush attacked by the owl, that Bawne
should not be permitted to risk himself with von Herrnung. "Does any other
living being know him as I know him?" she asked herself. "If by some
misadventure it came to a question of one life or the other, would he scruple
—no! he would not scruple for an instant to sacrifice the child?"
Three words to Uncle Owen—if one only dared to speak them—would
have put the thing out of the question. But at the thought of the dreadful
avowal to which such an utterance might lead, Patrine was stricken dumb.
She could not face the music. This was one little ear of wild oats out of the
full field that waited for her reaping, sown in the hours that lie between the
midnight of pleasure and the dawn of the Day of Remorse.

Perhaps she and Sherbrand had walked more slowly than it had
seemed to her. She saw Saxham and his son meet, heard, indistinctly the
exchange of a few brief sentences, and then the boy, with a jump to hug his
father round the neck, ran to her as she came up.
"Cousin Pat, I'm going to get into my flying-kit in a minute." His heart
was thumping so that it shook him, and the short upper lip with the gold-
brown dust of freckles on it quivered, hard as he tried to keep it stiff: "One
doesn't do it before people generally—but I'd rather like you to kiss me
now!"
"My precious, a dozen times!"
She said it impetuously in the deep womanly baritone that Bawne
loved, and Sherbrand started as he heard it. She dropped her tall-sticked
sunshade, and caught the little boyish figure to her broad womanly bosom,
hugged him until he panted, and kissed his pale cheeks red. You do not need
to be reminded that Patrine was a galumpher. "Don't go! don't go!" she
whispered in her darling's neck. "I hate your going! and I don't believe
Uncle Owen likes it.... Say you've been up once and you're 'nuffy! Pretend
you funk it. Do, for my sake!"
"I—can't. Ouch! You tickle! Please let me go. This is business!" He
squirmed, and she burst out laughing, and released him. The act was a
wrench that tore her bleeding heart anew.
He bounded instantly after Sherbrand, seeing him go forward to join
von Herrnung, who was standing watching Davis fill the Bird's tank with
petrol, and her reservoir with oil.
There was no spurring these lazy devils of English into movement....
The accursed pig-dogs, the stupid sheep's heads! If that fragmentary
Wireless message had really to do with the business, within the next ten
minutes everything might be ruined. One walked perilously, as amongst

pebbles, holding a watch-glass of High Explosive in one's hand. Here came
the man and the boy. He joined them with a noisy burst of forced laughter.
Presently you saw all three moving in the direction of a building where the
"flying-kits of all sorts and shapes and sizes," of which Sherbrand had
boasted, were kept for the use of the patrons of Fanshaw's School. As they
went in, Bawne cast a wistful glance up at the clock on the front gable of
the café restaurant, now supplying afternoon tea served in brown teapots,
and rolls and butter on thick white platters, to a thin sprinkling of
customers.
"Three minutes to the half-hour," said the clock.
Would the Chief come, or must this thing be carried out by a small boy
whose heart lay, a palpable lump of cold lead in the pit of his stomach, and
whose knees were turning to jelly as he went?
If Cousin Pat, when she begged him not to go, had known how badly
he, Bawne, had wanted to hold her round the neck and beg her not to let
him, he would at this moment have been unheroically safe.
She was so big. He had most dreadfully wanted to cling to her and cry
—imagine a fellow of twelve doing anything so kiddish. But he had
swallowed the unmanly tears, and wriggled out of her strong protecting
arms.
He looked back and saw her tall white figure, standing near the
hulking black-clad shape of the Doctor, who had pulled his hat-brim low
down over his eyes, and did not seem to be talking or laughing at all. Davis
was doing something with a spanner to the Bird's under-carriage, and the
long, thin shadow of her in combination with the squat shadow of the little
stooping Welshman, stretched eastwards over the dry green grass.
He heaved a big sigh and followed his man in. Von Herrnung was
already trying on pneumatic coats, swearing in nervous German when they

were not big enough. At last he was caparisoned, in a heavy suit of flannel-
lined Carberrys and a buttonless hooded jacket. He had stripped the burst
glove from his wounded hand, thrown it away, and replaced the magpie
pearl ring upon his little finger. He had put on a woollen helmet and tied
over that a flapped cap with goggles and ear-pieces. While he attended to
his outfit, the leather satchel lay at his feet, or sometimes between them, or
he would keep a boot-toe on a corner of it. And his hard blue eyes were
vigilantly watchful against surprise.
Sherbrand and the dresser—who presided over a long room of shelves
and pegs laden with queer garments, and who looked like a washed
mechanic in spotless blue overalls—put Bawne into a woollen sweater, and
added to the panoply he had worn already that morning, and which
consisted of leggings, slip-strapped to a webbing waistbelt, a pneumatic
jacket, a knitted helmet such as von Herrnung wore, and a pair of goggles.
They looked like the Eskimo hunter and his little boy in the "Book of The
Arctic"—a volume specially beloved of Saxham's small son.
It was five minutes past the half-hour when they emerged from the
dressing-shed. Saxham came to meet them, turned and walked by his son's
side. Davis, whose weakness as regards the sex we know, had pinched from
the visitor's enclosure a green-painted iron chair for Patrine. She half-rose,
stung by an impulse of escape, when she saw von Herrnung approaching,
and then controlled herself and sat down again.
Nothing escaped her long eyes. They saw Sherbrand glance from
Saxham to von Herrnung, and read the intention of an introduction in his
look. He had just begun:
"Doctor, I don't think you have met Captain——" when von Herrnung
lengthened his long stride, outstripped his companions, and went over
swiftly and stood beside Patrine.

CHAPTER XXXI
VON HERRNUNG BAITS THE HOOK

She knew that he had interpreted her movement as an invitation.
He saluted her and said, speaking thickly:
"It is necessary that I have a word with you. Walk with me for one
moment. I shall not keep you more!"
He bulked huge in his rig-out, but looked thoroughly at home, and
deadly workmanlike. He pushed up his goggles as though conscious that
they discounted his personal attractions, and his blue eyes were stony and
glittering, and his full mouth showed pale and hard-set under the scarlet roll
of his moustache.
"I shall not see you again to-day, and I have something important to
tell you." He spoke rapidly and his breathing was harsh and loud. "I have
been recalled by my Chiefs and return to Germany in—another two or three
days. That we do not meet again before I leave is possible, therefore I wish
to give you my address."
She did not look up. A white hand with red hairs growing thick on the
back of it offered her a pencilled card. She made no movement to take it.
He said, thrusting the card underneath her eyes:
"It is printed here in German letters. You read and speak my language
badly, so I will translate for you—'Squadron-Captain-Pilot Count Theodor
von Herrnung, Imperial Field Flying Service, Flight Station XXX.,
Taubefeld, near Diebrich, West Hessen, Germany.' Write your letter to me in
English. The address copy from this. Will you not take the card?"
"There is no need to. I do not mean to write to you!"

"Danke. You are candid," he said, "at least. You give me to understand
that whatever happens—" he repeated the words with a singular inflection
"whatever happens!—you will have no more to do with me?"
"Have I not told you so twice already?"
He gritted his teeth and said, controlling furious anger:
"Erklären Sie! Was giebt es? Why are you so—rottenly furious with
me? You have yourself to thank for—what has happened! You led me on.
You made me crazy about you. And the devil of it is I am so still! The sight
of you maddens me! Listen! Do not be stupid—unkind to yourself and to
me! In three days from now, you will get an envelope at your Club with
plenty of money. Join me at my headquarters at Taubefeld and then—you
will see! We will be happy—you shall have plenty of money to throw about
when we visit Berlin and other big cities, and jewels, dresses, pleasure,
admiration—everything a beautiful woman wants! Grosse Gott! Can I offer
anything more tempting? What are you saying? 'Yes!' or 'No!'"
Her narrowed eyes looked like long black slits in her white face. The
pale lips barely moved to answer:
"Neither! Are you proposing to marry me?"
He laughed woodenly, and repeated:
"Marry you! Ha, ha! What verdammt nonsense are you talking? What
has love to do with getting married? Nothing that I have ever heard! Of
course I shall marry—my family have arranged all that for me. But my
Countess will not interfere with my mistress—that I promise you! Come, be
kind, my beautiful Isis! Whisper now that you agree!"
He bent his head to hear. The whisper came from the pale lips:
"I will see you in Hell first!"
He started, taken aback. Her own utterance had shocked her. "Am I a
street-walker already," she asked herself, "that I begin to curse and swear?"

A whistle trilled. He started and said:
"So then, all is over between us?"
She bent her head assentingly, and her glance fell guiltily on Bawne
who was standing near. Von Herrnung, aware of him at the same instant,
turned on him with a scowl and the harsh demand:
"What is this? Do little English boys pry and listen?"
Bawne returned, looking at the other squarely:
"Beg pardon, but Mr. Sherbrand's calling you. He says it's getting jolly
late."
"So!" Von Herrnung glanced at his wrist-watch, in the act lifting the
brown leather satchel into fullest view. The boy queried with open-eyed
innocent curiosity:
"Shall I carry that? Are you going to take it with you?"
"Es mag wohl sein," von Herrnung answered. Then he clicked his
heels and bowed formally, and kissed Patrine's cold and heavy hand. She
felt his teeth grit as he did it. She knew he was swearing in his way.
"Adieu, then," he said, smiling at her maliciously. "Will you not wish
me Angenehme Reise?"
"Certainly. A pleasant voyage, and a safe landing!" Her eyes fell on
Bawne's little, oddly garbed figure and her woman's heart spoke in spite of
her. "Take care of my dearest!" broke from her, and von Herrnung
answered:
"He is your dearest? Ah yes! I will certainly take very good care of
him!"
He bowed, wheeled about and walked from her with his long strides,
and the boy, with a face all flushed and quivering, suddenly jumped at her
neck and hugged her; bringing with the rough little embrace the queer scent
of water-proofed material and dubbined leather, knocking the silver-

spangled hat awry, loosening divers tortoiseshell hairpins and an amethyst
slide-buckle holding up the heavy tresses of the dead beech-leaf coloured
hair, as he whispered:
"Remember I love you, Pat. Don't mind!"
And she shuddered as he freed her, and ran from her, asking herself:
How much had the child overheard of von Herrnung's proposal? What had
he comprehended of what he had heard?
Next, she was aware of the pleasant voice of Sherbrand calling, and
saw von Herrnung imperiously beckoning. A cold sickness of dread assailed
her, and her knees trembled underneath her weight. A mechanic came
running past, carrying away the chair Davis had brought her. He set it down
at a safe distance from the aëroplane, and she staggered to it, leaning on the
long staff of her sunshade, and sat heavily down, feeling chilly and old....

Saxham had squeezed Bawne's shoulder and kissed him, and then
withdrawn to a distance whence he could see all that took place. He
watched Davis and Sherbrand help the boy into the forward cockpit, and
fasten about him the safety belt attached to the fuselage on either side of the
fixed bamboo seat.

"You are sure you really want to fly again? Mind, I believe you're as safe
with him as houses, but if you don't want to go, say the word, and you
shan't!"
Sherbrand whispered the words as he busied himself with the boy. And
Bawne set his small teeth and squared his sturdy boyish shoulders,
registering an unspoken vow to go in spite of all....
One had been told to drop a word to Sherbrand if one found oneself in
a tight place. But could one ever hold up one's head again before the Patrol,

if one did this? To share one's Mission with another when the Chief had said
"I'd rather you'd carry through on your own" wasn't to be thought of.
Mother—he swallowed hard at the thought of her—would say so too.
It troubled his faithful little soul that he could no longer see von
Herrnung. He heard him talking in his guttural English, to Davis, whom
Bawne could not see either—as he stood near the nose of the machine, in
readiness to start the tractor—any more than the two mechanics who
steadied the Bird, pressing each a toe on the axle of the under-carriage as
they held on to a steel rod that ran along under the rearward edges of her
single plane.
His final directions sharply given, von Herrnung stepped up on the
under-carriage, threw a long leg over the bulwark of the fuselage, and
stepped into the pilot's pit. Bawne screwed his head round and saw, through
and over a low talc wind-shield, the upright torso of the German, big, hard,
and indomitable, the leather satchel still gripped in his strapped-up left
hand.
"Are you going to take that leather case along with you?" Sherbrand's
voice had a note of surprise in it. "You'll find it a handicap, let me say. You
can't sit on it or lean against it, and if you tried to put it under you, you'd
find it dead-certain to foul the controls."
To Sherbrand's voice, von Herrnung's answered harshly and rather
angrily:
"Surely I shall be able to carry this? It is nott-thing but a folding
camera, with a telephoto lens made especially for Survey and
Reconnaissance. There is still a good light. If I fly with the sun behind me, I
shall be able to take quite a panorama of London North-West. It is not
forbidden—no? Your Government would not object?"

"I don't suppose my Government would care a little hang!" Sherbrand's
voice answered. "But—this isn't one of your German Army Albatros's or
Kondors, and I don't see where you're to stow your camera, unless in the
observer's pit. Of course the hovering installation takes up a lot of room,
and I can't possibly risk your hampering the controls."
"Ganz recht! Very good!" came von Herrnung's voice, giving in with
simulated heartiness. In another moment his long legs, followed by his great
body, came scrambling into the forward cockpit, and his hands busied
themselves about the stout belt of pig-leather that secured the boy in the
observer's seat.
"Look here, my fellow! You will take care of this for me? See, I have
passed the belt-strap through the handle. Do not touch it!" The guttural
whisper had menace in it. "I shall be sure to know if you touch it, or try to
unbuckle the strap."
"What's up?" Sherbrand's head and shoulders came thrusting over the
other side of the cockpit. "Why did you unstrap him?" he demanded
brusquely of von Herrnung. "Don't you know that he is my friend's son, and
that it is my business to see to this?" Sherbrand's hand felt over Bawne's
belts and bucklings before his head and shoulders vanished. Then von
Herrnung's big body withdrew itself. His voice, sounding from the pilot's
pit on the other side of the low wind-shield, gave a peremptory order, and
the tractor began slowly to revolve. An instant later, with a blinding flash, it
began to roar and whizz round furiously. The Bird, freed from the hands
that detained her, leaped forwards, hurtling over the smooth turf at the
speed of a racing motor-car. The smooth floor of the cockpit unexpectedly
tilted up, and a rough cold wind buffeted Bawne about the head and
shoulders, sent eddies down about his dangling feet, bellowed in his
covered ears and made him gasp for breath. Then—houses and people,

trees, and hangars fell suddenly away, and he knew that the Bird was
rushing upwards at the bidding of its "Gnome" motor—long superseded
now, but then the latest marvel in aërial engineering—towards the blue sky
with its lines of gilt mackerel clouds. On each side of the roaring, flashing
whirl that meant the tractor, spread North Middlesex, with its fields fast
diminishing to the size of billiard tables. That patch no bigger than a
garden-lawn, with a row of wooden things like dog-kennels and chicken-
coops, must be—Bawne knew that it was—the aërodrome. Deafened by the
noise and a little sick, for the roaring, striving, hurtling Thing in whose
body he sat fastened, stank horribly of castor oil, and seemed to agonise and
call on Bawne to suffer with it—he looked up and took courage from the
warm, blue, beautiful, cheerful sky.
He was quitting himself like a man. Nobody could say otherwise. How
high, how much higher was the Bird going to climb?

CHAPTER XXXII
ADVENTURE IN THE AIR

He looked down, and under his feet, left of the long transparent case that
housed the horizontal hovering gear, was a little steel-framed glass port.
Seen through this, the ground with its trees, fields and houses, hurried along
beneath him as though a comet, travelling in the opposite direction, had
been harnessed to our old earth, and was towing her away.
The floor of the cockpit suddenly altered its angle. It had tilted
upwards. Now it tilted all to one side. Sick and dizzy, but secure, the boy
hung in his straps as she lay over, and saw on his left hand a wing of the

Bird rising and blotting out the heavens, while on his right hand the earth
reared up so horribly that Bawne could only shut his eyes tight and hold on
to the arms-straps of his seat, and gasp out a little prayer. Then the cockpit
floor became more level, and the wind buffeted less. The roar of the tractor
and the twanging drone of the wires made one's bones hum and tingle to the
very ends of one's teeth and finger-tips. But nothing had happened. Perhaps
nothing would!
He drew a great breath of relief, and his heart left off bumping. His
mouth was cold inside and his tongue felt dry and stiff. Only Our Lord and
Our Lady and his guardian Angel had seen him funky, and for this Bawne
was grateful. They understood, and—people—would not.
He guessed it about a quarter to six o'clock. By the genial warmth on
one cheek and shoulder, and the way his shadow stretched over the pale
grained ash-wood that lined the cock-pit, he knew the west must be upon
the left.
He raised himself, craning his neck, and through the low wind screen
behind him, against the background of a sky all flaming and boiling with
molten gold and liquid amber, he saw the wide square shoulders and tall
helmeted head of von Herrnung, the hard eyes staring unflinchingly through
their round glass goggles, the mouth set in a straight inflexible line under
the tight red roll of the moustache.
The red-moustached mouth opened, and von Herrnung shouted
something. Nothing reached the boy but a sort of muffled roar. He shook his
head vigorously, and then—one does not wear the Signaller's Badge for
nothing!—released a stiff little gloved hand from its grip on the arm-rest,
and rapped out with his clenched right fist on the edge of the fuselage:
"I—can't—hear!"

The Code was understood. The helmeted head, some four feet distant,
nodded. One of von Herrnung's gauntleted hands freed itself from the
steering-bar. Its knuckles drubbed out the question:
"Have you the brown satchel?"
Bawne had quite forgotten the brown satchel. He screwed back his
head and looked down and there it was, lying on the numb knees of him,
buckled to him by the tough strap of pigskin that held him in his seat. He
nodded assent, and signalled:
"All right!"
"Good!" von Herrnung signalled back through the hurly-burly of the
Bird's transit. Bawne mustered courage to knock out:
"Where are we? When shall we go down?"
Von Herrnung's right hand lifted itself, and described a sweeping half-
circle. The brusque gesture answered Bawne's first question, bidding him
look and see.
The boy, impeded in his view by reason of his small proportions,
wriggled in his straps so as to get his chin well over the gunwale of the
Bird's fuselage and the buffetting wind that was dug up and spaded over her
bows by the dizzying revolutions of the tractor, got hold of him and
pummelled and buffetted him again. Her course was still north, the sun was
setting in great smoking lakes of gold and sulphur on her left as she flew.
Thick patches of dark green bushes that probably were woods, reddish-
green blotches that might be heathy commons, shiny, square patches that he
guessed at as reservoirs, toybox villages that were thriving suburban
boroughs, specks that were villas, glittering ribbons that suggested canals,
and one broad shiny stripe that was a river with tiny boats upon it, were
swirling from right to left, sweeping along in the opposite direction, under

the rushing body of the winged thing that bore him, ruled by the hand of
von Herrnung upon the steering-wheel.
Behind her a chaotic, formless greyness brooded on the horizon,
innumerable spires rose out of it and a glittering haze hung over all. That
was London, the great grimy Mother of Cities tearing away from her little
son at eighty miles an hour. The shriek of an engine and the rumble of a
train reduced by distance to infinite tenuity pulled the boy's eyes
downwards. A weeny mechanical toy that meant one of the double-humped
colossi of steam traction, dragging a string of match-box goods trucks,
raced another locomotive, towing a crowded passenger-train neck and neck
along the spider-fine perspective of gossamers that meant the Great Eastern
Railway. Now fear was swamped in the sheer joy of the experience. This
thin air that kept you perpetually gulping and swallowing saliva, made you
feel more than ever how good it is to be alive.
Billows and billows of green, interspersed with patches of purple
heather, meant Epping Forest, though he did not know it. A great
aggregation of grey walls and housetops, looking like a section of an old
wasp's nest, stood for Waltham Abbey as the Bird drove on. Quite a tangle
of the shiny grey-blue streaks that were rivers meant Lea and Orwell, Ouse,
and their trouty tributaries. East England rolled away underneath like an
endless carpet woven in irregular patches of many hues. Green and brown,
grey and yellow, and innumerable shades of these, so tempting in their
suggestions of good things to eat that a most unheroic hunger reminded the
schoolboy of tea-time, hours and hours gone by.
He looked round in search of von Herrnung, who maintained
unchanged the same attitude, his shoulders level, his unseen hands steady as
rock upon the wheel of the steering-pillar, his mouth shut tightly, his hard
eyes ranging ahead or lowered, as he conned his course in masterly fashion

by aid of the roller-map, protected by its transparent, rainproof casing, or
the compass, clock, altimeter, and other instruments gimballed in the
wooden frame in front of the pilot's seat.
"How long?" the small fist rapped out. Von Herrnung detached a hand
and signalled in answer:
"One hour!"
"When do we go home?"
"We go home now!" the hand signalled, and the boy settled down in
his seat to wait.

Between hunger and weariness he dozed, and soon slept soundly, his hands
hanging laxly over the leather arm-rests and his head nodding over the
brown satchel lying on his knees. It figured in his dreams as something
huge, oppressive and uncanny, that suddenly took to itself malevolent life,
spread a pair of wide leathery bat-wings, and would have flown away but
that he gripped it fast.
"No, no! You shan't! I promised!" he heard himself crying, and
suddenly the thing collapsed limply in his grasp and became nothing but a
satchel, and he was awake. Awake and very stiff and rather sick and sleepy,
and with the salt smell in his nostrils and the salt taste in his mouth that
meant—that could only mean the Sea.
He looked over the gunwale and cried out in astonishment. For a vast
carpet of rounded woolly-grey-white clouds lay spread beneath. The carpet
beginning to rise and the cockpit floor to incline downwards, a thin clammy
fog suddenly blotted out everything. The Bird had dived through a field of
woolpack mixed with ground-fog. Now flying some hundred feet beneath
it, she regained her level, in the clear light stained by the sunset as water in
which a dash of red wine is mingled, the light that is the aftermath of a

radiant summer's day. And, with the smell of the sea sharper in his nostrils,
the boy became aware of moving, muddy-grey water, with ships and boats
and steamers on it, far down below.
Now the southerly breeze that had steadily tagged on some twenty-
three miles an hour to the Bird's eighty odd, began to veer and come in
strengthening puffs and gusts from the north-west. Swirling eddies of air
came upwards from the water, rocking the machine as a swell takes a boat
at sea, and splashed upon the frail, silk-covered wings of the aëroplane in
deluges of invisible spray.
On the right hand and the left were wide stretches of muddy grey salt
water, banks of sand, and drain-piped foreshore merging in patches of
potato and swede and yellow squares of unripe corn. Clusters of white dots,
where shingle and sea-walls bordered the drab, restless water, were fishing
hamlets, villages and little coal-port towns. Upon the north bank, rapidly
receding in distance, could be dimly sensed, beyond a dense fringe of masts
standing close as pins in rows upon a pincushion, the oblongs and squares
and rectilinears of docks and shipyards, stone quays, and piers and tide-
basins, mixed up with blocks and streets of sheds and warehouses, stations
and goods-yards, and huge, many windowed factories, whose towering
chimneys yet belched forth thick black smoke-gouts, licked by red tongues
of flame. Though even if the Saturday noon steam-siren had not silenced
the throbbing of pneumatic rivetting-hammers and the roaring of steam
coal-shoots, hydraulic grain dischargers and oil-pumps, and all the hellish
hubbub accompanying the huge export and import trade of Yorkshire and
Lancashire with North Europe and the Continent, these sounds would not
have reached the ears of the boy in the aëroplane save as a dull and muffled
murmur, vaguely sensed, through the musical moaning of the stay-wires
and the racket of the tractor-screw.

Now the sunset was behind. The land was rushing back upon the right
and left-hand. The two-mile-wide river was broadening to a great estuary,
vaster than the Thames, between Fort Victoria and Shoeburyness.
Long crawling strings of linked-up barges, sailing vessels of the old
windjammer type and yachts of the latest rig, battered tramp and collier
steamers, high-sided rusty looking oil-tankers, pilot-cutters, coastguard
motor-launches, whole fleets of steam-trawlers, thrashed up and down its
broad south side fairways or cannily negotiated the treacherous channels of
the north bank. Ocean-going giants of the Merchant Service, flaunting the
White Bordered Jack, or the Red Duster, or under Admiralty Warrant,
displaying the Blue Ensign. Behemoths of the North Sea passenger-service
showing the three-striped merchant-flag of Germany—or the tricolour of
the Netherlands, or the Crosses of Norway, Sweden and Denmark—with
more rarely some big grey armoured cruiser upon harbour and Coastal
Defence Service, or a brace of stumpy, square-ended patrol-boats, or a trio
of the stinging black hornets we have learnt to call torpedo-boat destroyers,
ranging in company upon some business of the Powers that order
Britannia's naval affairs.
Fascinating, wonderful to look down upon. Alike, however diverse in
size, shape or uses, in the impression of flat unsubstantiality conveyed to
you—together with the doubt that the emmets crawling upon them could
possibly be life-sized men. A drifting daisy-petal meant a smart private
steam-yacht. You looked down from two thousand feet above, on the open-
lidded snuffboxes that signified the fire-control and signalling-stations of
some Leviathan of the Home Fleet, and a string of black holes jabbed in an
oval of floating white millboard represented her funnels, black discs or
white alternately stood for her ventilators; and her imposing deckworks, her
turrets or barbettes, her gun-houses and casemates, and the terrible monsters

bloodthirstily nosing out of them, were reduced to a more or less
symmetrical arrangement in thick or thin black lines.
The rosy light was greying. The gusts came more fitfully. To the south,
upon the right hand, were stone-built fortifications with black muzzles of
big guns poking from the ramparts, over stretches of salty marsh, drab-
coloured mud-flats, and slimy rocks covered with blackened seaweed,
sticking up from pale silvery sand-shoals, licked by the restless white
tongues of the outgoing tide, and bumped by stranding buoys. Black dots
and grey dots wheeled and scurried and settled. Crows and gulls were
feeding ravenously as the tide drew off the flats and sand-shoals. And by the
queer sensation in his empty stomach, Bawne knew that he too was
ravenous.
From the beaconed north shore of the vast estuary basin, edged now by
low rambling cliffs, and belts of shingle and sand, a long curving headland
with two lighthouses at the crook-end, rushed now towards the Bird at what
seemed the speed of an express train. Bawne winced as the tall granite
towers, topped with helmet-shaped domes of rust-red iron, rose up like twin
giants threatening to destroy. An iron balcony with a flagstaff and signal-
mast ringed the base of each dome-top, a stairway spiralled round each
shaft to a railed stone platform well above high-water mark. And a shrimp-
sized man in a red guernsey waved a speck of blue handkerchief, and
bellowed a disproportionately loud greeting through what was presumably a
megaphone. In reality the lighthouse-keeper was indicating the M. O. cone
storm-signal which hung point downwards from the west end of the yard-
arm, presaging a south-west or north-westerly gale. Whether or no this
warning was lost upon von Herrnung, proof of its value followed. For a
great upleaping billow of brine-tasting wind caught the Bird as she flashed
past the twin lighthouses upon the headland, tossing her upwards like a

withered leaf. And a curved iron shutter in the nearer of the two rust-red
dome-tops rolled down exactly as the nictitating membrane of a bird's eye
does—and with a wink of glass from the prismatic reflector, a broad triple
beam of blinding-white acetylene light leaped north, east and south. In the
same instant upon each side of the flashing tractor, the boy sensed a vast,
shimmering, liquid restlessness. Here was the Sea, the very Sea.

CHAPTER XXXIII
BAWNE LEARNS THE TRUTH

Something in the blood of the child answered to the call of the Ancient
Mother. He cried out, half in terror, half in delight, and the cockpit tilted so
suddenly that he was violently jerked against the seat-back and the canvas
bulkhead behind him. Looking up he saw a large old moon of luminous
yellow, sailing away overhead through a sky all shot with pink and grey as
though hollowed out of a fire-opal. The Bird was rushing through space at
ninety miles an hour, and great lumps of cold salt wind splashed over
Bawne and took his breath away, and his hands were numbed with bitter
cold and his legs were legs of ice.
So brave a spirit dwelt in his little breast, that the sob that heaved it
and the tears that stung his eyelids and dimmed his goggles, were
swallowed and blinked away as soon as shed. The cockpit became level,
and there was an imperious rapping behind him, on the upper canvas deck.
He turned his head and met the hard unflinching stare of von Herrnung,
who held in the hand with which he had rapped a bitten piece of chocolate.
Still munching he signalled:

"Hungry?"
He smiled grimly as the boy nodded in the affirmative, stuffed the bit
of sweetstuff into his mouth, produced from its cache below the level of the
upper deck another square of chocolate, tore off the silver foil with his
teeth, and crunched it greedily.
He smiled, because of a queer tickling pleasure he felt as he did this,
akin to the sensation experienced when his taunts had tortured Patrine.
"Take care of my dearest!" he fancied he could hear her saying.... Not until
she had committed herself to that incautious utterance, had he, von
Herrnung, realised what rich vengeance on the desired, hated woman might
be wreaked by the simple act of carrying off the boy, whom he had regarded
until then as a mere bag of ballast; less useful, but certain to prove less
troublesome, than the Cockney-tongued Welshman, who might or might not
carry a cheap revolver in the hip-picket under his overalls with which to
enforce his protest against being taken away.
Von Herrnung was himself armed with a Browning automatic pistol. A
deadly shot, he would have been capable of dealing with half a dozen
Davises upon the solid ground. But, no lover of avoidable risks, he saw
himself steering with one hand and shooting with the other, while Davis sat
astride the chair in the observer's cockpit, and argued with an eighteen-and-
sixpenny Birmingham four-chamber, loaded with the cheap little cordite
cartridges, whose pea-sized bullet can kill a fine big man.
"What is this? You are sick?"
Even while keeping his ears open and his eyes skinned, as he
negotiated the Bird through a choppy cross-current, conning his course
between the compass and the roller-chart-map, now illuminated by an
electric bulb, his great shoulders shook with merriment as he saw the boy's
head sink helplessly against the side of the fuselage, and his small body

convulsed by throes of the sickness that is indistinguishable from the dismal
malady of the sea. He had shut off the engine to shout to him. And in the
sudden cessation of the tractor's racket, the deep organ note of the waters
rolled in upon the hearing, mingled with the shrill piping of the wires and
the ruffle of the freshening wind. As he switched on power once more, the
broad white ray from the Bull Light leaped forth again and caught them as
it ran eastwards over the tumbling white-crested billows, flinging a huge
shadow of von Herrnung over the canvas-covered space of deck before him
and showing him to the white-faced boy who had twisted round once more
to look at him, as a featureless human torso shaped out of solid ebony with
diamond specks for eyes and gleams of grinning ivory teeth.
"When are we going home? Why are we over the sea now?"
Von Herrnung shut off again for the luxury of hearing and answering:
"I have told you because we are going home. Our home is—Germany.
You will not be an English boy but German, once I have got you there!"
The shrill cry of anger that came from the open mouth of the white
face was lost to him in the necessity of switching on the engine. He nodded
pleasantly to the white face and, in the darkness of his own shadowy visage,
there was the glimmer of a laugh. Then he applied himself to other
business, for the tide would turn in an hour, and then the wind might blow
hellishly from the nor'-west. Flying lower, he knew his course the true one,
for the white headlight and green starboard-lights of a big steamer pricked
twinkling holes in the thick grey dusk to northward on his port beam. He
told himself she was one of the Elbe Company's big bluff-bowed liners
making from Newcastle for Hamburg Docks. The stern-lights of a sister-
ship hailing from Grimsby, by her steerings, were also discernible in the
mirk ahead, while the lights from her tiers of cabins made her look like a
black water-beetle with golden legs, hurriedly scuttling over the sea.

Following the course of the Hamburg-bound liners, even if one failed to
make connection with one's accredited pilot, it would not be long before
one picked up Borkum Riff Lightship and in due course, spiring silver grey
against the pink-and-golden sunrise—the twin towers of Nordeich Wireless
—marking the journey's end.

CHAPTER XXXIV
THE BROWN SATCHEL

The journey's end. A gust, tearing the mist that veiled the livid waters,
showed the shadowy shapes of a procession of battleships, steaming
southwards in single line.
You see the German assailed by the wind, now hard on the aëroplane's
port beam, craning over, counting the speedlights passing diagonally
underneath. Eight steel Leviathans, stabbing bright points of electric light
through fog and funnel-smoke, with an effect of diamonds seen against a
background of dull grey plush.
Eight rushing, neutral-tinted shapes—conveying a formidable
impression of grim power, and force, and ruthlessness. A Squadron of Battle
Cruisers of the British Home Fleet, new from the brine of Lerwick Waters,
or the fierce green surges of Scapa Flow. Bound for Harwich Roads or
Sheerness, or the Solent, to figure in the huge pageant of steel and steam,
electricity, and man-power that would be called the King's Review.
What a chance, supposing Der Tag were come already, for the delivery
of a consignment of bombs! It warmed like a draught of wine, to think of
the devastating effect of a couple of such German love-gifts, exploded in

the bowels of one of those steel monsters, packed with complex machinery,
high explosives, and inflammable oil. True, there might be a reverse to the
medal, damping even to the spirits of a Superman. Wireless signals would
go forth at the order of one amongst a little knot of dark figures on the
forebridge of the Flagship, warning each of those grey monsters of its
danger. Not an armoured cruiser scouting for them on the horizon, not one
of all the torpedo-boat destroyers in their vicinity, not a submarine nosing in
the thick cold darkness below the restless white crests, but would join in the
man-hunt that must ensue.
How the dusk would spring alive with the eyes of foes, and long rays
of searchlight would go probing, and the mobile noses of guns great and
lesser would be thrust from their hoods of proof-armour, sniffing
bloodthirstily for the enemy up in the sky. While from the Flagship's
mothering side, a Navy seaplane, armed with a Vickers' machine-gun, might
swing out and plop upon the water, rise from the white snarl of waves with
a vicious scream of her propeller, and, keen as a gull-hunting sea-hawk,
launch herself in chase.
Pfui! The thought made one sick at the stomach. Cold, isolation, and
darkness tried a man, no matter how courageous. Buffeted by the bitter
wind, aching and stiff with weariness, lonely with the loneliness of some
small bird of the migratory order, outstripped by its companions on the wild
journey over the North Sea, the Kaiser's messenger drew energy and cheer
from the conviction that the dispatches entrusted to him by Imperial favour
were such as would hasten the arrival of The Day.
The Day, to which all good German officers devoted the second toast
on Mess nights. When the Black Eagle would swoop, and the nodding
witch-hag Britannia would awaken from her whisky-dreams of World-

Dominion to find her armour obsolete, her sword rusted in its scabbard, the
trident of Sea Power stolen from her hand.
Hurrah! for The Day when the programme arranged by the All Highest
War Lord and his War Chiefs should be carried out in the complete
overthrow of British Supremacy, the seizure and domination of British
territory, the solution of the Great German Race Problem, in the
transformation of the United Kingdom into a German dependency,—the
annexation of India and the British Colonies—and the forcible
Teutonisation of the hated race.
Aha! Much to be locked in an Imperial messenger's letter-bag, thought
von Herrnung, greedily. What in the way of guerdon might not be lavished
by a gratified All Highest upon the danger-braving and to-duty-fearlessly-
devoted Flying Officer who should accomplish the Secret Mission, and lay
the brown satchel at the Imperial feet.
Probably the Second—tchah!—the First Class of the Iron Cross—with
military promotion, and a handsome sum in hard cash. Laudatory articles in
the State-inspired Press organs and Service Gazettes presently. Meanwhile,
was it fitting that the future of von Herrnung should lie, not upon the knees
of the gods, but on the lap of a little, seasick English boy?
True, the brown satchel was firmly strapped to the boy, now lying in an
attitude of complete exhaustion, with one arm thrown over the gunwale, and
his small round head feebly nodding to and fro. The child knew nothing of
the Imperial dispatches. And yet—one would have been wiser to keep the
bag about one, in spite of the danger of fouling the controls.
It will be gathered that a chilly premonition of imminent disaster
crawled in the veins of the Kaiser's messenger. Hunger and fatigue were
spurring von Herrnung to imaginativeness unworthy of a Superman.

Now he knew his frail winged craft beset by cunning, treacherous
enemies; the invisible air that cradled and supported her, only waiting to
destroy. Other elemental forces, Gale, Lightning, Hail, Waterspout—in
collusion to bring about her swift and speedy ruin. The Sea, no less than
these, was an implacable adversary, reaching up innumerable greedy hands
to drag her down and drown. The hawk-hoverer would have been a help at
this juncture if one had had some previous experience in the use of it. As
things were, it was wiser to leave the Englishman's invention alone. A
labouring beat admonished the man's quick ear of impending engine-
trouble. Ah, if the motor, that was the living heart in the aëroplane, should
break down at this juncture, or the human intelligence perched behind the
roaring tractor falter, the game was up. Kaput for von Herrnung, he very
well knew.
As though the very fear had brought on the catastrophe, the revolutions
dropped. Below 1000, said the indicator's trembling finger, and there was a
miss. The bang!—bang! of a back-fire followed. If one had believed in
God, now, this would have been the time to pray to Him.
But now the aviator's keen eye, peering downwards through
Sherbrand's binoculars, picked up something that had emerged with a
sudden yeasty swirl among the white-crested waves. No handsomer nor
bigger than an under-sized steam-trawler, the casual observer might as such
have accepted her. But a moment more, and fore and aft of the stocky little
pseudo-steamer, stretched the long snaky, whitey-brown hull of a
submarine.
U-18, on observation-service off Spurn Head, or a Britisher? An Evans
signalling-pistol, loaded, and with a supply of spare rockets, was fixed in a
cleat beside the instrument-board, within reach of the pilot's hand. The

altimeter, illuminated by the electric bulb, gave an altitude of six hundred,
as von Herrnung snatched the pistol, and fired, aiming towards the sky.
The shot was followed by a second detonation, and a brilliant crimson
light illuminated the grey welter, throwing up orange balls of fire as it
ascended, to burst in showers of incandescent sparks. Switching off, von
Herrnung strained both ears and eyes for an answer to his signal. With the
cessation of the motor the diapason of the North Sea rolled upwards
through the twilight with a threatening of storm. As the weather-cone had
presaged, a gale was coming. It blew strongly from the north-west. The
engine back-fired again, and von Herrnung swore at it, trying to make out
the nationality of the submarine running on the surface six hundred feet
below. There were half-a-dozen tallish figures on the narrow man-railed
catwalk running along her hull forward, and one upon the screened-in
platform of her humpy conning-tower.
Then the blue-white ray of a searchlight leaped forth illuminating her
bows and forward torpedo-tubes—revealing the long neutral-coloured hull
with the Wireless mast raised for use and soapy seas hissing off the armour-
plate. A backwash of brilliance picked out the black-white-and-red Jack of
Germany, fluttering from a short pole-mast sternwards. Signal-lights of
white and two colours broke out upon another slender mast aft of her
conning-tower, and winked and jabbered. U-18 was in touch with her man.
It was quite time, for the Bird's engine hiccupped more and more
disastrously, and her pilot's frozen hands could only guess the steering-
wheel. He grunted relief. Sapperlot! One's star had not deserted one. Once
more the Prussian Field-Flying Service would, with reason, quote von
Herrnung's hellish good-luck.
Meanwhile the submarine's three lights chattered volubly in German
Navy Code. Do Not Attempt Make Harbour. Heavy Weather Coming.

Original Orders Cancelled. Heave To. Will Stand By To Take You Aboard.
To which von Herrnung, keeping pace with U-18, replied with long and
short flashes of an electric signalling-torch. Understood! What Is the Sea
Like? Keep Off and On. Am Coming Down!
And he came forthwith. The Commander of U-18, standing on the
little platform over which furious seas were slashing, watched him critically
through a pair of Zeiss binoculars. You, too, are asked to see him; pulling
round the Bird's head into the teeth of the nor'wester; shutting off her
hiccupping engine, implacably thrusting her nose seawards, and diving with
a splendid swoop into the widening paths of spirals that ended amidst the
angry surges below.
Hitting the North Sea with so shattering a slap that the Bird's landing-
carriage crumpled and buckled, and the frail spars of her wings crunched
like the bones of a small bird in the jaws of a hungry cat.
A fierce green sea leaped, towered, and broke, dumping a ton of water
on von Herrnung, and knocking the breath out of the man. He tore open the
safety-belt as consciousness left him, and recovered in the warm benzine-
flavoured stuffiness of the officer's cabin aboard the U-18, to the stinging of
schnapps in his mouth and gullet, and the cheer of German words in his ear.
"Hey now, hey now, we are coming about. That is well! Drink another
draught, comrade! You have had a hellishly narrow squeak. Another time,
when flying oversea with dispatches, start early, pick your weather, and ship
a life-belt, if you are wise!"
Thus Lieutenant Commander Luttha of Undersea-boat No. 18. You see
him as a spare, weather-bitten, black-bearded officer in a full panoply of
yellow oilies, and a sou'wester shading little eyes, sharp as lancet-points and
now twinkling with his bit of fun.

But the word "dispatches," coupled with the jest about the life-belt,
volted through von Herrnung like the discharge from an electric battery. He
gulped and choked, collecting enough tinned air to talk with, and at last got
out:
"The boy—the boy, with the satchel! Where is he, in the devil's
name?"
Thus adjured the Commander answered pithily:
"If you mean the half-drowned little English rat Petty Officer Stoll
found washing about in the bows of your aviatik, he's alive. Don't worry
about that!"
Through the churning foam upon his lips, von Herrnung spluttered
furiously:
"Himmelkreüzbombenelement! What is the verdammt boy to me? It is
the satchel that was strapped about the boy's middle I am asking for—the
Emperor's—Herr Gott!—I shall go mad!"
He staggered to his feet, hitting his head a stunning crack against the
low white painted overdeck. The incautious reference to the Emperor
electrified those who heard, squatting on the little folding bunks, or
kneeling on the palpitating deck of the little officer's cabin, into desperate
activity. Von Herrnung found himself boosted up a ladder and through a
manhole, guided along a narrow slippery catwalk, washed by the surges of
the North Sea, to where a collapsible boat was being emptied of a lot of
shipped salt water, and the battered wreck of the Bird of War, lashed to the
U-18's forward man-rail, was waiting the Commander's order to be finally
abandoned to her fate.

CHAPTER XXXV

NUMBER EIGHTEEN

They launched the collapsible, and ransacked every cranny of the Bird's
waterlogged fuselage. Not the ghost of a brown leather satchel rewarded
their feverish search. In the forward cockpit the belt swung loose, the patent
fastening had been opened by pulling the pin out. Clearly the boy had
released himself when the Bird hit the sea.
"Let us go look at this boy!" suggested the Commander, on receiving
the news that the Kind had breathed, and vomited sea-water. Luttha
promptly led the way to the men's cabin, where Petty Officer Stoll and an
earringed first-class seaman were working over a little limp naked body,
outspread on the jiggetting deck-plates, in the raucous glare of the electric
light.
Bawne was questioned, but nothing could be got out of him just then,
except North Sea, so they wrapped him in a blue Navy blanket, and left him
in charge of Petty Officer Stoll.
"This is hellishly unfortunate, you must know, Count," said the
Commander, alone with von Herrnung in the vibrating steel box over the
upper accumulators, called the officers' cabin, and separated from the men's
quarters by a paper-thin sliding bulkhead of painted steel. You are asked to
consider it furnished with seven narrow folding bunks, a trestle-table about
as wide and long as a coffin-lid, some folding chairs, a marvellous array of
charts on spring-rollers, fixed against the steel walls, a row of wooden
lockers, a chronometer and auxiliary gyro-compass, several cylinders of
oxylithe for respiratory emergencies, an electric stove of small size, a log-
book and writing materials, a shelf of German literature, chiefly nautical
reference-books; sets of dominoes, a violin and a cornet, speaking-tubes
and a telephone, a gramophone and a giant cuspidor.

Von Herrnung, having swapped his water-logged flying-kit and soaked
underclothes for dry flannels lent by the Second-in-Command, topped off
with a pair of the Commander's spare trousers, and a guernsey frock
belonging to the biggest man on board. You can see him supplementing the
shortness of the trousers with a pair of long sea-boots: thrusting his huge
arms into the guernsey, beginning already to be superior to his rescuers
upon the strength of his family rank and wealth and his flying-record, his
bulk and handsomeness, and his magpie pearl. He was of the Prussian top-
dog breed and let others know it, even whilst smarting under his loss. That
he felt it was shown by the livid pallor testifying to mental disquiet and
physical exhaustion. But he judged it wisest to bluff, and did.
"The cursed machine would have drowned me if you had not arrived in
the nick of time," he said suggestively, smiling under the red moustache that
hung uncurled over his full sensual lips: "Suppose you say you found me
swimming in the water—the aëroplane having foundered—it is merely
rewording a report!"
"So many thanks!" ... returned the Commander, chewing hard at an
unlighted cigar, sending a jet of saliva into the cuspidor, and smiling in a
wry and dubious fashion. "But when I said things were hellishly
unfortunate, I meant unfortunate for you!"
He moved to the green baize-covered plank that served as a cabin
table, and took from a weighted document-file a pencilled paper-slip.
"As far as they concern you I will read you them as taken down by our
Wireless operator. 'To Undersea-boat No. 18, on observation-duty off Spurn
Head. Stand by to get in touch with, act pilot, and render aid if necessary to
German Imperial Secret Service Messenger, crossing to Nordeich in British
aëroplane.' The message comes from the German Embassy in London and
the sender is Grand Admiral Prinz Heinrich. I have carried out my

instructions to the letter. There is only one man going to be broken over this
affair!"
Von Herrnung knew who the man was. The Commander chewed some
more of his cigar, picked his oozing yellow oilskins off the deck, thrust
himself into them, crowned himself with his sou'wester, and said, taking a
farewell shot at the cuspidor:
"And to brew more thunder-beer for you is not my desire! I am sorry
for you, bei Gott! But to make game of those who command me is not the
purpose for which I am commissioned, Herr Count. Nor have I any
experience in doctoring reports. I rate only as Lieutenant in the Imperial
German Navy—a man born of plain people—without fortune or even von
before my family name!"
Von Herrnung sensed that he had bitterly offended the only human
being who could help him. He apologised subserviently, and catching at the
straw afforded him by the Commander's admission of poverty, offered him
the pickings of the wrecked aëroplane.
"For her instruments and signalling outfit—the seats and vacuum
flasks even—are well worth the having, and her engine and tractor will sell
for——" he named the sum in marks. "There is a patent stabiliser under her
belly that I reserve for Majesty—the French have bought it or think they
have!"
The speaker rubbed his hands. The hoverer might yet prove a sop for
the All Highest. Imperial displeasure thus averted, all would go well. He
added, feeling that he might actually afford the luxury of grumbling:
"As for me, I am what the English call 'fed up' with special missions.
Conceive it. I am at a Hendon Flying School,—chatting with a handsome
Englishwoman who has taken me for her lover—as I am waiting to get an
inkling of the sort of invention the French War Ministry think worth buying

for use in their Service Aëronautique. I am summoned by a groom of our
Embassy to speak to some Excellencies—I follow and find myself clicking
my heels before Prinz Heinrich, von Moltke, and Krupp von Bohlen in an
Embassy auto-car—to be sent off at a moment's notice in a little cranky
devil of an English monoplane—with secret dispatches for the All Highest
—on a journey over the North Sea. With the barometer falling and the hour
past five meridian. That's my luck!" The speaker paused for breath.
Luttha said, pulling his black beard through his fingers with a crisp
sound, a trick of his when in meditation:
"There was no time to lose. And you have a wonderful record for long-
distance flying. And luck it was!—if you had been of my mind. Tell me, did
not they give you plain instructions?"
"Do 'they' ever speak plainly?" von Herrnung scoffed; and Luttha
answered calmly:
"Yes, to an ordinary man, who does not understand obscure language,
they would have said: 'Lieutenant Commander Luttha, here is a brown
leather satchel, with something inside it belonging to the Emperor. You will
convey the satchel to Nordeich and deliver it to His Majesty's hands. And
from the moment I entrust it to yours, it shall be close as your very skin to
you. If you meet Death upon your errand, die with it next your heart!'"
The speaker added with a wounding accent of irony:
"Perhaps that marks the difference between a plebeian and a
nobleman! I would have lashed it to my body, under my clothing. You
strapped it about the boy! By the way, what is the boy?"
"The boy! ... Nothing! ... A piece of ballast, merely!"
Von Herrnung, warmed by dry clothes and exhibitions of schnapps,
was fast recovering his characteristic arrogance. He added, with a shrug and
a wave of the hand:

"As for the lost satchel, it may well be that duplicates of the dispatches
contained in it have been sent to the Emperor by another messenger. That is
the usual method, perhaps you are not aware?"
"Duplicates exist, but in only one place on earth will you find them,
and that place is the London War Office!"
The Commander pitched his cigar-butt into the cuspidor, snapped the
three stud-clips that secured his yellow oilskin storm-coat, and dug his
piercing little eyes into von Herrnung's as he asked:
"Have you never heard of the War-engine of Robert Foulis, the
Scottish sea-captain who first suggested to the British the use of steam as
applied to battle-ships, and invented the screw-propeller and the big devil
knows how many other things besides the mysterious, secret weapon that
Great Britain has kept hidden up her sleeve a hundred and twenty-six years!
It was offered by Foulis, then Earl of Clanronald, in 1812, to the British
Government, and it frightened people like the drunken Regent and the Duke
of York and Lord Mulgrave into refusing it. It was offered again to their
War Office at the time of their Crimean War,—taken into consideration by
the Duke of Newcastle and again ejected,—because—Grosse Gott!—it was
too inhuman! As though a weapon that could end a War in a twinkling by
sheer deadly effectiveness could be anything but a boon to mankind. Pfui!
Such hypocrisy makes me vomit worse than thirty hours of submergence.
Not because of its inhumanity has Britain stored up the old man's war-
engine. Out of diplomacy, to brutalise the great Germanic nation into
subservience under the rod of Fear!"
Luttha and von Herrnung, otherwise antagonistic, were alike in their
rabid hatred of Great Britain. Luttha had talked himself plum-coloured and
hoarse by now, but he went on, pounding the air with a knotty, clenched
fist:

"Thus it was well done on the part of the Kaiser's secret agents to steal
Clanronald's War Plan, on the brink of The Day to which we have drunk so
long! Not the duplicates buried in the Whitehall strong-vaults, see you!—
but the originals from the muniment-room of the Welsh castle, the country-
seat of the present Earl. Less than an hour after you took flight from
Hendon, London was alive and buzzing with the tale! ... How do I know? ...
Does not a man know everything with Wireless? And you, with no inkling
that you carried for Germany—Victory in the World-War that is coming—
you who have lost Clanronald's secret, are a ruined man, bei Gott!"
He added, as von Herrnung broke out cursing and raving:
"As I have said, I pity you!—though you have tried to bribe me!—but
it will not do to talk of suicide, for I shall prevent that! Your cartridges are
wetted—your revolver will not serve you. And you will not get a chance to
drown yourself, for I am going to submerge. My fellows have got the
flying-motor out of the stirrups and stowed it away, with the auto-hoverer
and the other things for the Emperor, whose property they are! Then we run,
only periscopes showing, for the Gat of Norderney. There is a clear-dredged
channel to Nordeich Harbour, navigable in any tide. You have to account
there to the All Highest for the satchel, or I, bei Gott! must account to him
for it and you!"
And Luttha slid back the steel door, passed through the narrow
gangway and shot up the narrow steel ladder to attend to affairs on deck.
Two of his subordinates instantly replaced him. On no account was von
Herrnung, the living proof of the Commander's fidelity to his instructions,
to be left alone, you understand.
One would have said the Superman believed in God, he blasphemed
Him so industriously. When he was quite spent and voiceless, the
lieutenants offered him practical sympathy in the shape of gingerbread and

lager beer. He accepted the beer, and sat on one of the sofas drinking it and
brooding lividly, while Undersea-boat No. 18, with hermetically-sealed
hatches, folded down her signal and Wireless masts, shut off her 2000 h.p.
Diesel oil engines, sucked water into her ballast-tanks, and with only her
periscopes showing above the surface, ran under her electric-motor power
for Norderney Gat and Nordeich quay.
Behind her as she sped, a red stain upon the angry waters gave back
the last rays of stormy sunset, smouldering out behind bars of drift-wrack,
beyond the bleak east-country beaches and the long blue-black, desolate
worlds.
Von Herrnung's private, personal sun was setting somewhat after the
same fashion, amidst sable clouds of Imperial wrath. It was to sink below
the horizon in deepest disfavour, rise again in The Day's gory dawning, and
fall, its evil fires quenched in a drenching rain of blood.

CHAPTER XXXVI
HUE AND CRY

Even as petrol and air mingled in the Bird's cylinders, and Davis rotated the
tractor and nimbly leaped out of the way of sudden death, the buff
broadsheets of the Evening Wire edged the kerbs of Fleet Street and ran up
Kingsway to High Holborn. And from Ludgate Hill to Charing Cross, Pall
Mall, and Piccadilly Circus, the raucous voices of newsboys yelled through
a pelting hail of pence:

AMAZING THEFT OF A FAMILY SECRET.
STOLEN FROM GWYLL CASTLE

THE CLANRONALD WAR-PLAN.
AN ECHO OF CRIMEAN DAYS.
THIEF KNOWN. POLICE SANGUINE.
"COMMON CRACKSMAN'S ENTERPRISE OR DIPLOMATIC
STROKE?"

Strings of news-carts laden with bundles of papers were rattling east, north,
south, and west. Trains were taking in the story by bales of thousands and
disgorging it at every stoppage, as Von Herrnung opened the throttle, and
the Bird raced a hundred yards or so, bumping like a taxi going over a bad
road, then rose into the air, as gracefully as a mallard, and launched upon
the first wide spirals of the aërial ascent.
The small audience interested in the aëroplane, her freight, and her
behaviour, watched her as she dwindled in the sight and died upon the ear.
The spectators in the enclosure had departed in dribbles, the last three-
seater air-bus had rounded the aërodrome, landed and deposited the last
passengers. Two or three over-enthusiastic students lingered, but the rest
had shed their grimy overalls and betaken themselves home.
The mellow light of late afternoon lay sweetly on the wide expanse of
treeless greensward and on the woods that tufted the horizon-line. Rooks
and starlings were wheeling over distant tree-clumps, the bands no longer
brayed or tootled, the mechanics were leaving the sheds and hangars, the
waitresses were hastening to other employments, such as programme-
vending at suburban music-halls and picture-theatres, the selling of stale
boutonnières about the entrances of restaurants, the serving of drinks and
suppers at night-clubs and so on.
On the verge of the white-marked oval from which the Bird had taken
her departure, Saxham was standing with Patrine. Their faces were lifted to