in the judgment of other nations France is a courtesan drunk with
lechery, or at the best _un esprit follet_, she has brought this
judgment upon herself. Flippancy, the desire to _faire de l'esprit_
under any circumstances--the bold and brilliant gaiety that is her
exclusive and most beautiful characteristic--these have caused her to be
misunderstood. But whatever else she be, she is not Pagan nor Agnostic.
To believe that is to wrong her cruelly, Monsieur!"
Franky, by now hopelessly at sea, endured the hailstorm of swift,
vehement sentences with an expression of amiable vacuity, his stiffly
pendent hands plainly yearning for the refuge of his trousers pockets,
his mind rocking on the waves of the stranger's passionate eloquence
like a toy yacht adrift on the bosom of the Atlantic. And the resonant
Gallic voice went on:
*CHAPTER VIII*
*MONSEIGNEUR*
"The masters of France to-day are hostile to Christianity. They are
Freemasons (Freemasonry in England is not Freemasonry as it is
understood here); they are Freethinkers, Socialists, Internationalists,
and Hedonists, the avowed enemies of the Catholic Faith. Hence,
churches, seminaries, and schools have been closed by Government,
communities of religious men and women have been uprooted and exiled.
Priests have been banished, ecclesiastical and private property has been
appropriated and confiscated, churches have been desecrated, the symbols
of Christianity and religion everywhere torn down. In France upon Good
Friday the standard of the Republic waves proudly, while the flag of
every other Christian nation hangs at half-mast high. And yet--the
great mass of the French people are--Catholic and nothing but Catholic!
The light may be hidden, but the fire of devotion still burns in
millions of faithful hearts gathered about the Church's altars, beating
beside the hearths of innumerable homes in France. Blood--torrents of
blood--would not quench that sacred fire. When the Day of Expiation
comes, as it will come, most surely, the Catholicism of France will
prove her salvation yet!"
With the final sentence, the hand that had been lifted in gesture
dropped to the side of the speaker. The flashing glance took in Franky
from the top of his sleek bewildered head to the tips of his beautiful
patent-leathers. He said with a smile of irresistible amusement:
"Monsieur, I fear I have fatigued you. Let me thank you for your
admirable patience. _Au revoir_, or if you prefer it--_Adieu_!"
Another of the quick little bows, and he had covered himself and passed
on rapidly. Franky reflected, staring after the short black figure in
the caped soutane with the worn purple sash and shabby beaver
shovel-hat, as it receded from his view.
"Fruity old wordster, 'pon my natural! Toppin' fine talker! Wonder who
he is? Head of a Public School, swottin' an address for the beginning
of the Midsummer Half term--a Professor of Divinity gettin' up a
lecture--the Archbishop of Paris rehearsin' a sermon. Whichever they
call him, why don't he pitch his language at a man of his own size?"
And he went back to the Spitz through the boulevards that were surging
with the afternoon life of Paris, and heard from Pauline that Miladi had
retired to bed. She had already dispatched a billet of excuses to Sir
Brayham, with whom Miladi and Milord were engaged to dine downstairs
that evening, explaining that a headache prevented her from accompanying
Milord. He--Milord--must be sure to make no noise in changing for
dinner, as Miladi, after a crisis of the nerves of the most alarming,
was now sleeping like an angel, having taken a _potion calmante_ of
orange-flower syrup with water, not the veronal so heartily detested of
Milord....
"Sleepin' like an angel, is she? ... Good egg!--though I thought angels
never went to bed--flew about singing all the giddy time. Righto,
though! I won't disturb her ladyship.... When she wakes, give her my
love...."
And Franky entered his dressing-room on cautious tiptoe, lighted a
cigarette, rang the bell for his valet, and began to reflect.
It was to have been a dinner of eight people--Brayham the host, with
Lady Wathe, skinny little vitriol-tongued woman!--a man unknown who was
to have sat next Margot; Commander Courtley--ripping good fellow old
Courtley! no better sailor walked the quarter-deck of a First-Class
Cruiser--damn shame those Admiralty bigwigs denied such a fellow
post-rank; and Lady Beauvayse, formerly Miss Sadie Sculpin of New
York--pretty American with pots of boodle, married to that ghastly
little bounder who'd stepped into the shoes a better man would be
wearing if his elder brother (handsome fellow who married an actress,
Lessie Lavigne of the Jollity--good old Jollity!) hadn't got pipped in
that scrum with the Boers in 1900-1901.
Lessie, Lady Beauvayse, the widder called herself on the posters and
programmes. Come down to second-rate parts in Music Hall Revue--gettin'
elderly and stout. Must see red when she happened to spy the present
Lord Beauvayse's pretty peeress in the stalls or boxes.... Wonder why
the P.P. made such a pal of Patrine Saxham? Niece of Saxham of Harley
Street--handsome as paint, proud as the devil, and an Advanced
Thinker--according to Margot. Remembering the gift of the jade
tree-frog, Franky involuntarily wrinkled his nose.
With Lady Beau and the Saxham girl, there would be a party of seven,
counting the man unknown.... Might go on afterwards to the Folies
Bergere or the Theatre Marigny--or perhaps the Jardin de Paris. Why
hadn't Jobling answered his master's bell? Why had he deputised a
waiter to enquire whether his lordship wished his valet? Did he think
waiters were paid to do his, Jobling's, work for him? Or did he,
Jobling, suppose he was kept for show?
The strenuous stage-whisper in which Franky addressed the recalcitrant
Jobling penetrated the door-panels of the adjoining bower, as such
whispers usually do. But Margot was really sleeping--the orange-flower
water had had a few drops of chloral mingled with it. Milord had never
prohibited chloral, as Pauline had pointed out. But unsuspicious
Franky, unrigging (as he termed the process), while the tardy Jobling
prepared his master's bath and laid out his master's "glad rags," plumed
himself upon having made a notable advance in the science of
wife-government. Even the blameless potion of orange-flower testified
to his masculine strength of will.
*CHAPTER IX*
*SIR THOMAS ENTERTAINS*
You are invited to follow Franky, and sit with him at his friend Tom
Brayham's circular board, decorated with great silver bowls of
marvellous Rayon d'Or roses, that seemed to exhale the harvested
sunshine of summer from their fiery golden hearts.
You remember the famous dining-room of the big Paris caravanserai, with
its archways supported by slender pillars of creamy pink Carrara marble,
wreathed with inlaid fillets of green malachite and lapis lazuli, and
its electric illuminants concealed behind an oxidised silver frieze.
And possibly you need no introduction to the deity--plain and
middle-aged--in whose honour Brayham--the Hon. Sir Thomas Brayham, an
ex-Justice of the King's Bench Division--in the remote mid-Victorian era
a famous Q.C.--made oblation of luscious meats and special wines. The
clever, sharp-tongued, penniless niece of a famous Minister for Foreign
Affairs, she had made a love-match at twenty with Lord Watho Wathe, a
handsome and equally impecunious subaltern in a famous Highland
regiment, who was killed upon Active Service twenty years later, while
travelling upon a special mission to the Front Headquarters during the
South African War of 1900.
Two years later his widow conferred her hand upon Mr. Reuben Munts, of
Kimberley and South Carfordshire, a diamond-mining magnate who had made
his colossal pile before the War. She had never borne her second
husband's name, and when he died, leaving her sole mistress of his
millions, Lady Wathe resumed her place in Society, thenceforwards to
sparkle as never before.
"The '_Chronique Scandaleuse_' in a diamond setting" some phrase-maker
clever as herself had aptly termed her. Without her riches, stripped of
her wonderful diamonds, Society might have found her to be merely a
little chattering woman, avid of the reputation of a humorist and
_raconteuse_, unflagging in her relish for stories, not seldom of the
broadest, related at her own expense or at the cost of other people, and
over-liberally garnished with nods and becks, darting glances, and
wreathed smiles.
Upon this night of the Grand Prix--won, you will remember, by Baron M.
de Rothschild's "Sardanapole"--the little lady's jests fizzled and
coruscated like Japanese fireworks. Her gibes buzzed and stung like
wasps about a lawn-set tea-table, when new-made jam and fragrant honey
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
_denouement_--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, _nee_ 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 tres
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!"
"_Gnaedige Graefin_," 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
Majestaet_ 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.
"_Gnaedige Fraeulein_," 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 Aeronautique_? Did the
invention they were testing come up to expectations? .... Did the
English aerial stabiliser answer well? ..."
Franky knew, as he encountered the compelling stare of the hard blue
eyes, that he objected to their owner. He returned, in a tone more
huffy and less dignified than he would have liked it to be:
"Can't say.... I was merely walking in the Bois with a lady. Wasn't on
the ground as--an investigator of the professional sort."
"_So!_" Von Herrnung's face was set in a smile of easy amiability. The
shot might have missed the bull for anything that was betrayed there.
"And the name of the inventor? It has escaped my memory. Possibly you
could tell me, eh?"
"Certainly," said Franky, planting one with pleasure. "He happens to be
a cousin of mine. Would you like me to write down his address?"
"_Gewiss_--thanks so very much. But I will not trouble you!"
Nobody had heard the verbal encounter. Lady Wathe was holding the table
with another anecdote punctuated with staccato peals of laughter,
tinkling like the brazen bells of a beaten tambourine. Mademoiselle
Nou-Nou, a Paris celebrity, belonging to the most ancient if not the
most venerable of professions, had promenaded under the chestnuts at
Longchamps that morning, attired, as to the upper portion of her body,
in a sheath of spotted black gauze veiling, unlined--save with her own
charms. And a witty Paris journalist had said that "the costume was
designed to represent Eve, not before nor after, but behind the fall";
and Paillette, who was there, working up her "Modes" letter for _Le
Style_, had answered----
Everybody at table was leaning forward and listening, as the Goblin
quoted the _riposte_ of Paillette.
Von Herrnung, showing his big white teeth in a smile, chose another
nectarine from the piled-up dish before him, seeming to admire the
contrast between his own muscular white fingers and the glowing fruit
they held. But Franky saw that he was angry as he neatly peeled the
fruit, split the odorous yellow flesh, tore the stone out crimson and
dripping like a little human heart, and swallowed both halves of the
fruit in rapid succession, dabbing his mouth with the fine serviette
held up before him in both hands. Then, with an air of arrogant
self-confidence peculiar to him, he said loudly, addressing the whole
company: