Chapter VI: Part 6

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 Kuemmel, 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 Kuemmel, 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?"

"_Gnaedige Graefin_, 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?

ue

"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. _Gnaedige Graefin_, 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 Pera.

"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 aerials 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 employes, 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 _communiques_ 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 _menu_ that will presently be served to our enemies--beginning with Super-Explosive--explosive bullets, incendiary shells, lachrymatory shells serving as _entrees_--the bombardment of Dover from Calais--the destruction of London and the chief Naval Ports of Great Britain by our Zeppelin Fleet being the _piece de resistance_ 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 Ae 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 _gnaediges Fraeulein_?"

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 Majestaet_ 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, _gnaediges Fraeulein_. 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, _gnaediges Fraeulein_. 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 _suede_ 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 aerodrome upon an afternoon in the mid-week, when as in the present instance practice and instruction were being carried on. The cafes, 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 cafe 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.