excellent a _bon-mot_. As for Mademoiselle Nou-Nou, I do not myself
admire her, but my brother Ludwig, when he was alive, paid intermittent
tribute to her charms." He added: "He was killed in the charge by a
fall with his horse in the Autumn Manoeuvres of last year, while the
Emperor was being entertained by command at a shooting-party upon a
forest property of my father's that is about fifty kilometres from
Berlin."
*CHAPTER X*
*A SUPERMAN*
"Do tell what the Kaiser said when he heard of the accident!" came in
the voice of Lady Beauvayse, pitched now in a high, nasal tone that was
a danger-signal to those who knew her, like the mischievous twinkle in
her beautiful eyes. "I guess he must have been real upset!"
"_Ja, ja, gewiss_," returned von Herrnung, slightly shrugging his broad,
square shoulders. "Of course the Emperor was greatly grieved for my
father's loss. But naturally the programme had to be carried out.
There is another day's Imperial shooting; the business is
concluded--very satisfactorily--and _Seine Majestaet_ takes leave.....
But of course he sent to my mother a sympathetic message, which greatly
consoled her. And his Chief Equerry, Baron von Wildenberg, represented
him at my brother's funeral. And shortly afterwards he graciously
conferred upon my father the Second Class of the Order _Pour le
Merite_."
"How nice! But what for?" demanded the downright American, with
astonishment so genuine that Brayham strangled with suppressed chuckles,
and the bearded mouth of Commander Courtley assumed the curve of a sly
smile.
"What for?" exclaimed von Herrnung. He stiffened his big body
arrogantly, reddening with evident annoyance, and thickly through his
carefully-accentuated English the Teutonic consonants and gutturals
began to crop. "_Gnaedige Graefin_, because that so coveted decoration
is the reward of special service rendered to the Emperor. And my father
in his-personal-sorrow-conquering that it upon the amusements of
Imperial Majesty-might-not-intrude--had the noblest devotion and courage
exhibited--in the opinion of the All-Highest."
"My land!" exclaimed Lady Beauvayse, stimulated by the undisguised
enjoyment of Brayham, Courtley, and Franky, "if that don't take the team
and waggon, with the yella dog underneath it, an' the hoss-fly sittin'
on the near-wheel mule's left ear!" She added: "No wonder your Kaiser
thinks himself the hub of this little old universe--being nourished from
infancy on flapdoodle of that kind." She added, dropping the saw-edged
artificial accent, and reverting to the agreeable, drawling tones
familiar to her friends: "But, last fall, when King George and Queen
Mary were allowing to spend the day with us at Foltlebarre Abbey, and
see the Gobelins tapestries after Teniers that were restored by our
great American dye-specialist, Charlotte B. Pendrill of New York--and I
had a dud head with neuralgitis, and couldn't have bobbed a curtsey
without screaming like peacocks before a wet spell--Lord Beauvayse just
sent a respectful note of excuse over by fast car to the place in our
county where their Majesties were spending a week-end, and got a kind,
cosy little line by return, making an appointment for a more convenient
day."
"_Es mag wohl sein_," said von Herrnung stiffly, repeating an apparently
favourite phrase. "It may be so--in Great Britain. But in Germany the
trivial happenings of ordinary existence are not permitted to interfere
with the Imperial plans."
"Mustn't spoil Great Caesar's shoot by letting a natural sorrow dim your
eye, in case you're unexpectedly informed of a family bereavement," said
Brayham to Lady Beauvayse. "So now you know what to expect in case the
Kaiser should take it into his head to pop in on you at Foltlebarre
somewhere about July."
"I surmise I'd expect a visitor of mine, whether he's the Kaiser, the
King, or the President," retorted Lady Beauvayse, "to be a gentleman!"
Her beautiful eyes blazed with genuine ire as she gave back von
Herrnung's dominating stare. She continued, reverting more purposefully
than ever to the exaggerated New York accent, mingling cutting Yankee
humour with bitter irony in the sentences that twanged, one after
another, off her sharp American tongue: "And I guess, Count von
Herrnung--though between your father and Amos J. Sculpin of Madison
Avenue, New York, and Sculpin Towers, Schenectady, there's considerable
of a social gulf--if your Emperor had been a house-guest of my parpa's,
and my elder brother"--she lifted an exquisite shoulder significantly
ceilingwards--"had happened to get the hoist--parpa'd just have said:
'Your Imperial Majesty, I am unexpectedly one boy short, and far from
feeling hunkey. My cars are waiting at my door to convey you right-away
to your hotel. Look in on us after the interment, when Mrs. Sculpin has
had time to get accustomed to her mourning. And as my _chef_ had orders
to serve a special dinner in honour of your Majesty, I shall be
gratified by your taking the hull menoo along--outside instead of in!'"
The Goblin cackled. Ecstatic Brayham shrieked:
"Magnificent, by Gad! He ought to know your father!" Franky and
Courtley yielded unrestrainedly to mirth, as did the Saxham girl. While
her teeth, dazzling as those of a Newfoundland pup, gleamed in her wide
red mouth, and her long eyes glittered between their narrowed eyelids,
von Herrnung gave her a quick sidelong glance of anger. She caught the
look, and suddenly ceased to laugh, as the young Newfoundland might have
stopped barking. She said below her breath:
"Vexed? ... Why, you're really! ... And Lady Beau wasn't joking about
your brother.... She wouldn't dream of such a thing! .... She's
tremendously kind and sympathetic. Was he--your brother--nice? ..."
"Most women thought so."
"Would I have thought so? What was he like?" the girl persisted.
Von Herrnung turned in his chair so as to face her, answering:
"You see him now, with one difference. He was as black as I am red."
The blue eyes of the man and the long agate-coloured eyes of the young
woman encountered. She said slowly in her warm, deep voice, less like a
feminine contralto than the masculine baritone:
"I like--red men--best!"
"So! Then it was lucky that, instead of me, my brother Ludwig died!"
said von Herrnung, so loudly that Lady Wathe's quick ear caught the
final words. She shrilled out her laugh:
"But you're a wretch, Tido!" She shrugged her thin vivacious shoulders
under their glittering burden. "A heartless wretch!"
"Of course I was regretting my brother, yes!" said von Herrnung. "But I
do not pretend that his death did not improve what you English would
call my worldly prospects. That is the cant of
Christianity--particularly the sentimental Christianity of England. One
world is not enough for your greed of possession. You must eat your
cake here and hereafter. But for the robust super-humanity of Germany,
this world is both Hell and Heaven. It is Hell for the man who is
stupid, weakly, poor, and conscience-ridden. It is Heaven for the man
who has knowledge, power, health, wealth, the craft to keep his riches,
and the capacity to enjoy to the fullest the pleasures they can procure
him, with the courage to free himself from the bonds of what Christians
and Agnostics term Morality, and live precisely as Nature prompts. So
when my brother fell in the charge," continued von Herrnung, with
perfect seriousness, "he opened for me the gates of Heaven. Since then
I am a god!"
"A mortal god," called out the chuckling Brayham; "for you've got to
die, you know, when your number's up."
"When the time comes, of course I shall die," acquiesced von Herrnung,
"in the vulgar sense of the word. But not so those who come after. Our
bacteriologists will have discovered the microbe of old age and its
antitoxin, and then we shall die no more."
"Dashed if I know the difference between the vulgar way of dying and the
other style!" Brayham snorted apoplectically, feeling in his
waistcoat-pocket for the box of digestive tabloids that showed in a
bulge. "Dashed unpleasant certainty--however you look at it! And a man
who weighs eighteen stone at fifty has _got_ to look at it, every time
his tailor lets out his waistcoats, and his valet asks him to order more
collars because the last lot have shrunk in the wash."
"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 Caesar, 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 aero-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 _ragout_, 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.