Britons laugh at brag and bluffing, and the gassy patriotism shown by
some foreigners we're apt to call bad form. We abuse our Institutions
and rag our Governments--we've done that since the year One--far as I
can make out. And when other people do it we generally sit tight and
smile. We've no use for heroics. But when the pinch comes--it ain't so
much that we're loyal. We're Loyalty. We're IT!"
With all his boggling he was so much in earnest, and with all his
earnestness so absurdly, quaintly slangy, that the listeners, men and
women of British race, whose blood warmed to something in his face and
utterance, were forced to struggle to restrain their mirth. Some
inkling of this increased the speaker's confusion. He cast a drowning
glance at his bulwark Courtley, and Courtley's eye signalled back to
his, "Good egg! ... Drive on, old son!"
"You're a foreigner here, of course ..." Franky pursued before the
German could interrupt him. He appeared oblivious to his own analogous
case. Perhaps for the moment the Hotel Spitz in the Place Vendome,
Paris, and its gorgeous namesake in the London West End, were confused
in his not too intellectual mind. He went on: "We're ready to make
allowances--too rottenly ready sometimes.... But I read off the
iddy-umpties to Full Stop, a minute back.... Count von Herrnung, when
you ask English ladies and Englishmen--two of 'em in the Service--to
drink that toast with you--you must know you're putting your foot in
your hat!"
"Especially," said Courtley, as Franky collapsed, dewy all over and
wondering where his breath had gone to--"especially as--a friend of mine
happens to have heard that toast proposed rather recently during a Staff
banquet at a military headquarters in Germany. And the words,
are--not--quite exactly flavoured to suit the British taste."
"'_To the Day of Supremacy. On the Land and on the Sea, under the Sea
and in the Air, Germany Victorious for ever and ever!_'" said von
Herrnung, who had got upon his legs, and loomed gigantic over the
lace-covered, flower-decked table, now in the after-dinner stage of
untidiness, with its silver-gilt and crystal dishes of choice fruit and
glittering bonbons disarranged and ravaged, its plates littered, its
half-emptied wine-goblets pushed aside to make room for fragrant,
steaming coffee-cups in filigree holders, and tiny jewel-hued glasses of
Maraschino Cusenier, and Pere Kermann. There was a rustle, and a
general scraping-back of chairs. Courtley had also risen, and Lord
Norwater. A susurration of excitement had passed through the long,
lofty, brilliant dining-room. People were getting up from the
tables--the pink-and-yellow sheets of _Paris Soir_, the late edition of
the _Daily Mail_, and another of the _Liberte_, were fluttering from
hand to hand.... And the shrill voice of Lady Wathe was heard.
*CHAPTER XII*
*THE GATHERING OF THE STORM*
"Sit down, Tido!" said Lady Wathe. "What is the matter with everybody?
What are they talking about? Tell a waiter to get us a paper! What do
you say, Sir Thomas? Of course! Stupid of me to forget. To-day was to
be the official summing-up of the evidence in the Perdroux Murder Case.
A French Jury won't guillotine a woman--you said they wouldn't, Sir
Thomas, from the beginning. But of course the verdict's 'Guilty' for
Madame! ..."
Brayham, with a King's Bench cough, admitted that he had few misgivings
as to the ultimate upshot. Upon the waiter's return without a
newspaper, affirming a copy not to be procurable, judicial inquiries
elicited from the man that the general _furore_ for news was less due to
popular interest in the famous _cause celebre_ than to popular thirst
for details with reference to the Assassinations at Serajevo. Which
brought from Lady Wathe the shrill query:
"Sarajevo--where's Sarajevo? Ask him about the Verdict--I simply must
know!"
The Verdict had been "Not Guilty," according to the waiter.... The
Goblin screamed:
"But she is!--she is! Good heavens, my dear Sir Thomas! Isn't it murder
to riddle an editor to death in his own office, before his subordinates,
with bullets from a revolver you've hidden in your muff?"
Brayham summoned up his best King's Bench manner to answer:
"If he dies--and a jury don't happen to decide that you're innocent--the
evidence is against you, my dear ma'am!"
Lady Wathe's vivacious gestures provoked astounding coruscations from
her panoply of jewels. She had been certain from the first that there
would be no capital sentence. But "Not Guilty." ... Surely it should
have been Mazas for life. Or New Caledonia--didn't they send
murderesses to New Caledonia?
Brayham, with a tone and manner even more deeply tinged with the King's
Bench, begged leave to correct--arah!--his very dear friend's impression
that the blameless and much-tried lady, now
probably--aha--arah!--supping in the company of her husband and her
advocate in her own luxurious dining-room, might, without libel, be
called a murderess. Like--aha!--many other highly-strung women, Madame
Perdroux had had recourse to the revolver as the _ultima ratio_. But
the Verdict pronounced by the President of the Paris Court of Assize
that afternoon had--arah!--purged----
"Bother the Verdict!" snapped the Goblin.
Brayham, incensed at this irreverence, replied with acrimony. The pair
wrangled as Paris had wrangled since March 16th, while the great,
crowded restaurant buzzed with the name of an obscure town in Eastern
Europe--"_Sarajevo, Sarajevo_"--tossed and bandied from mouth to mouth.
We have learned to our bitter cost the appalling significance of this
crime of Sarajevo, which had dwarfed in the estimation of the
keen-witted Parisians the most sensational _cause celebre_ ever tried
before a French Criminal Court.
The Perdroux trial and its probable result had split Paris into hostile
factions. The Press had attacked or defended, lauded or vilified the
chief personages of the drama with tireless energy for weeks. The
Verdict of "Not Guilty" would have caused fierce rioting upon the
boulevards this sultry night of July. Blood would have been spilt
between the partisans of Madame Perdroux and her opponents, but for this
unexpected bolt from the blue.
Berlin had had the story of the assassinations with its breakfast-rolls
and hot creamed coffee. Now, in the blue-white glare of the great
electric arc-lamps of the Paris boulevards, men and women leaned over
one another's shoulders to get a whiff of the big black letters on the
displayed contents-bills; at every kiosk and bookstall the
newspaper-vendors were sold out; much-thumbed copies of the papers were
bought by knowing speculators, to be sold and bought and sold again.
The Kaiser at Kiel was racing his own clipper when the operator of the
Imperial private wireless read a story from the notes of the singing
spark that smote him pale and sick. When his anointed master heard the
gory news, his chief regret seems to have concerned the untimely decease
of the partner of his "life-work." "It will have," he said with
bitterness, "to be begun all over again!"
One wonders, in the blood-red light of four years of dreadful carnage,
seeing Hell and its dark Powers still unchained, and raging on this
War-torn earth of ours--what would have been the nature of the edifice
reared by these two Imperial craftsmen, had the younger not been removed
by a violent and sudden death?
Did the prospect of unlocking--with one touch on an electric button and
the scrawl of a wet pen--the brazen gates of Death and Terror ever
strike cold to the heart of the rufous Hapsburg Archduke? Madness, we
know, is in the blood of his evil-fated House. But, when the shots from
a Bosnian High School student's revolver pierced Franz Ferdinand's brain
and body, was he sane enough to realise that the crime of the Anarchist
had saved his own name from foul, indelible, and hideous infamy? We
shall know when the trumpet of the Archangel sounds the Last Reveille,
and the grave gives up its dead, and the Sea spews forth its victims,
and the secrets of that deeper abyss, the human heart, are revealed in
the sheer, awful Light that streams from the Throne of God.
*CHAPTER XIII*
*THE SUPERMAN*
People had for some time been rising, passing out through the oxidised
silver-framed glass doors of Spitz's big brilliant dining-room; beyond
these the vestibule was now full to the walls, so that its palms and
tree-ferns rocked amidst the billows of a heaving human sea. Many
guests lingered in conversation, standing in groups near the vacated
tables. The glitter and blaze of jewels, adorning bizarre coiffures,
bare and powdered throats, bosoms, arms, and backs,--the dazzling
display of brilliantly-hued toilettes, made an _ensemble_ marvellously
gay. And now, returning as they had arrived, but unattended by M.
Spitz, came the party of notables from the German Embassy, talking
together in loud, harsh, Teutonic accents. Von Herrnung, erect,
stiffening to the salute as previously, remained in the rigid attitude
until the Ambassador had passed. But this time the official finger
beckoned. He turned, pushed back his chair, and in a stride, joined the
squat, elderly figure. The yellow-white, heavily-featured face with its
stiff brush of white hair above the square brain-box turned to him, the
deeply-pouched, shrewd grey eyes looked past _him_ to the table he had
left. The coarse mouth under the white moustache with the brushed-up
points, uttered a few emphatic words. Then, with a slight nod, the
representative of the All Highest at Berlin passed on. The swing-doors
opened and shut behind him and his following. And von Herrnung rejoined
his party, saying with a queer, excited breathlessness:
"The ladies will pardon.... His Excellency had something to say!"
The ladies were rising, looking for their theatre-wraps. He deftly
lifted the barbaric garment of green velvet and sable-edged ermines from
the back of Miss Saxham's chair, and, opening it, held it to receive her
tall, luxuriant person, mentally commenting:
"With such hips, such a bosom, and such shoulders, the jade must be
twenty-eight or nine." And remembering how boldly she had said to him
that she liked red men, he thought: "Amusement here.... Nothing needed
but time and opportunity--which this Bosnian affair reduces to a
minimum." "_Gnaediges Fraulein_ will you not put on your _mantel_?"
She told him that she was too hot. He insisted, with all the Teuton's
dread of chill:
"But it will be cooler in the vestibule, and cooler still when we are
driving. Do we not go on to a theatre? I think Lady Wathe has told me
so?"
She shrugged her splendid shoulders.
"Nothing so proper. The _Jardin des Milles Plaisirs_, on the Champs
Elysees. We're all dead nuts on seeing the new dance from Sao Paulo.
The thing that has exploded Tango and Maxixe, you know. Look!--the
others are moving. Don't let's lose them! No! I won't take your arm.
Please carry my wrap with your coat."
"I will put my coat on. Then I shall better carry your _mantel_."
An attendant deftly hung von Herrnung's thin black, sleeveless garment
over his broad shoulders, and gave him his white silk wrap and soft
crush felt. He slipped a coin into the man's palm, its small value
being instantly reflected in the features of the receiver, and moved
towards the swing-doors with Patrine. She said, as a slight block
momentarily arrested their progress:
"What are they all jabbering about? Who has been assassinated? What
has happened at this place with the crack jaw name? ..."
"Sarajevo..." came in von Herrnung's guttural accent.
"Sarajevo.... Not that I know where it is," said the deep warm voice,
that was more like a young man's baritone than a young woman's
contralto. And von Herrnung answered, with a renewal of that tingling
thrill:
"Sarajevo is the capital of Bosnia in Eastern Europe. When Austria
annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1909, she made her seat of Government
at Sarajevo. The Slavs grumbled. They wished for union with
Servia--that little nation of pig-breeders! ... They themselves--the
Bosnians--are stupid peasants, _duemmer Teufels!--Schafskopfs_! They
cultivate their land with the wooden ploughs that were used at the date
of the Trojan War.... But this does not interest you at all, I think?"
"How do you know it doesn't interest me?"
"Because dress and jewellery and amusement are the chief things in your
life, _gnaediges Fraeulein_. You are not even interested in _der
Politik_, or in the higher _Kultur_. The social progress of your own
country is nothing to you. You are too----"
"Too frightfully stupid.... Thanks!"
"I did not say too stupid," von Herrnung contradicted. "But if you were
stupid, you are too hellishly handsome for that to matter in the least."
To be called hellishly handsome pleased her. Her eyes gave him a
flashing side-glance. As a surge in the crowd pressed her curving hip
against his tall, muscular body, she took his offered arm with a rough,
brusque grace. They were near the swing-doors when she spoke:
"Tell me about the Sarajevo business.... Who is the official swell the
Trojan ploughmen have hoisted--as Lady Beau would say?"
"I will tell you. It has happened only this morning----"
She felt the man's powerful muscles thrill and become rigid with
suppressed excitement under the hand that rested on his arm.
"Two personages of the highest rank have been horribly assassinated.
The Archduke Franz Ferdinand, _Kronprinz_ of the Imperial House of
Austria, and his wife; you have heard of the _Graefin_ Sophie Chotek,
created Duchess of Hohenberg? Virtually she was
_Erzherzogin_--Archduchess--but the wife of the Archduke by a _mariage
de la main gauche_. A morganatic marriage--such unions have been heard
of in your virtuous England."
They had passed the swing-doors now, and mingled, with the crush in the
vestibule. Patrine said, signalling with a pair of long black suede
gloves and a vanity-bag of gilded metal chain-mail:
"There's Lady Beau. Behind the second column right of the entrance.
And here's Captain Courtley coming to hurry us up!"
Courtley, smiling and unruffled as ever, dodged under the huge roseate
elbow of an immense lady in Oriental kincob tissues. He gave his
message, turned and dived back again. The rich, womanly baritone of Miss
Saxham said, addressing von Herrnung:
"Lady Wathe and Sir Thomas Brayham have gone on in Lady Wathe's
auto-brougham. Lord Norwater has done a bunk. Pretended he had an
appointment; he's been frightfully fed up with all of us this evening.
Lady Beauvayse says her chauffeur is on the string all right, but about
a million cars are ahead of him. Why did your Austrian Archduke and his
wife go to that place in Bosnia if it wasn't healthy for Royalties?
Fancy!--they went to their deaths this Sunday morning! Why does one
always forget it's Sunday in Paris?"
"That English Sunday of yours," exclaimed von Herrnung, "is very good to
forget, I think!"
She gave her deep, soft laugh. He went on rapidly:
"Of the Archduke and the Duchess I tell you, since you have asked me....
They inspected the troops--regiments of the Austrian garrison. Then
they drove in their automobile along the Appel Quay, towards the
Sarajevo Town Hall. They are passing beneath the shade of an avenue of
tamarind and oak trees when a bomb is thrown at them by a man hidden
among the branches.... The Archduke is very prompt--he wards off the
bomb with his arm. He is not then hurt, nor is the Duchess. But his
_Adjutant_--in the car behind them--is wounded in the neck. When they
arrive at the Town Hall the Mayor commences the address of welcome. To
him Franz Ferdinand says angrily: '_Halt den Mund!_ ... Shut up, you
silly fellow! What the big devil is the use of your speeches? I came to
Sarajevo on a visit, and I get bombs thrown at me.... It is too damned
rotten for anything! ..."
"Yes, yes! ... Go on!" She bit her lips, fighting a nervous impulse to
laugh.
"So the Imperial cortege drove away, and a student threw at the Archduke
another bomb. It did not explode, so he shot him with an automatic
revolver, an American Browning. The Duchess tried to cover him with her
body, and the assassin shot her also. The Archduke begged her to live
for their children, but both victims died as they were being taken to
the Governor's house.... They have arrested the assassins, he who tried
to kill, and the fellow who succeeded.... They are both young, and men
of Serb race. They are rebels all--they hate their Austrian rulers.
Sarajevo is swarming with fellows of the same breed...."
"What will the Austrian Government do to them, now they've caught them?"
"To the regicides," von Herrnung returned harshly, "Austria will
do--nothing that very much matters. It is not an important thing to
destroy two trapped rats. But I think there will be an ultimatum from
Vienna to the Servian Government; and if the terms of that are not
complied with, then the Emperor of Austria may give the signal for his
monitors upon the Donau to open fire upon the capital of Belgrade."
Patrine asked negligently, as a new surge of the crowd thrust her tall,
lithe figure away from her companion's, forcing her to tighten her hold
upon his arm:
"'Monitors?' ... I used to think monitors were big schoolboys and
schoolgirls. Senior pupils told off to keep order. I was one myself
once.... Chosen because I was bigger, and noisier, and naughtier than
any other girl in my class...."
"Ha, ha, ha! ... Praechtig! ... That is capital!" She could feel the
laughter shaking his big ribs. "That is just what they are--those
monitors of the Donau. Each is a big girl who keeps order _von anderen
Sorte_. But they have turned-up noses, not Egyptian and beautiful like
yours!"
He added, with the calculated roughness that had previously pleased her:
"You shall now put on your _mantel_. For the car, I see, is open." He
shrugged his broad square shoulders closer into his overcoat and pulled
up the collar about his throat, saying ill-temperedly: "Always does one
find it with the English. It is _laecherlich_--that passion for the
air."
"Lovely, did you say? ..."
Ignorant or careless that he had said "ridiculous," Patrine suffered him
to wrap her mock ermines about her, seeing above the frieze of waiting
figures that filled in the lower part of the picture framed by the
portico, the emerald-green bird-of-Paradise plume of Lady Beauvayse
whisk into the big white Rolls-Royce, past the neat black-haired head of
Courtley, and the peaked cap and pale Cockney profile of Morris, the
chauffeur. She threw back a jest as she passed out:
"I'm glad you think it lovely. It's one of the nicest things about
us--that we're keen on soap and water and can't do without lots of fresh
air."
She was in the car before his outstretched hand could touch her. He
followed, letting Courtley precede him because he wished to sit
opposite, and the great Rolls-Royce purred out of the jam beneath the
illuminated glass archway, and in a moment was out of the Place Vendome
and moving with the stream of vehicles down the Avenue of the Champs
Elysees. In the mingling of moonlight and electric light the tawdry
paste jewels of Patrine's preposterous diadem rivalled the costly
splendours of the jewelled fillets adorning Lady Beauvayse's coiffure,
her _panache_ of white osprey flared above her broad, dark brows as
insolently as though they crowned a Nitocris or a Cleopatra. But--and
here was a titillating discovery--the strange face with its broad brows,
wide, generously-curving cheeks, and little rounded chin, did not belong
to a woman of thirty, or even twenty-five. She was much younger than
the German, who plumed himself upon his _flair_ for the accurate dating
of women, had at first credited. It would be amusing--he told himself
again--hellishly amusing, to cultivate this curious hybrid, half hoyden,
half _femme-du-monde_.
Sarajevo--still Sarajevo. You caught echoes of the crime of that
morning in the tongues of twenty nationalities upon the Paris boulevards
that night. People in automobiles and open carriages, people in the
little red and blue flagged taxis, people crowding the auto-buses and
Cook's big open brakes, the army of people on foot, endlessly streaming
east and west along the great splendid thoroughfares, tossed the name of
the Bosnian capital backwards and forwards, as though it had been a
blood-stained ball.
A gay masculine voice called from a knot of chatterers standing near the
wide illuminated archway of electric stars and crowns and flowers under
which streamed a variegated crowd of pleasure-seekers as the big
Rolls-Royce deposited its load:
"_Nom d'un chien_! What a pack of assassins these Serbians! ... And
yet--what if the whole show were got up by Rataplan at Berlin? ... His
bosom friend, you say--the big Franz Ferdinand? _Zut!_ what of that?
... Sometimes one finds inconvenient the continued existence of even a
bosom friend."
*CHAPTER XIV*
*A PARIS DANCE-GARDEN*
By "Rataplan" was meant the Kaiser, Patrine comprehended, as her
companion glanced over his shoulder at the candid speaker, muttering
something that sounded like a German oath. But Lady Beauvayse was
twittering through a filmy screen of verd-blue chiffon, now discreetly
enveloping her lovely Romney head:
"We're going to hunt up Lady Wathe and Sir Thomas. Take care of Miss
Saxham, Count von Herrnung, in case we get separated in the crush....
Don't forget our programme, Pat. A whiff of Cafe Concert ... Colette
Colin is billed to sing some of her old songs and the very newest of the
new ones.... Then we're coming to the Pavilion de la Danse to see the
Sao Paulo sensation.... La Rivadavia and Herculano, and all the rest of
the crowd.... Meet you there.... So long! Mind, you're not to get
lost!"
"In London you often hear La Colette," said von Herrnung, as he paid the
lean-jawed functionary in the gold-laced light-blue uniform--the usual
notice of free entry having vanished from the entrance--and passed with
his companion into the gravelled promenade of the open-air concert-hall.
"But to-night you will hear no songs of old France, no Chansons
Pompadour nor Chansons Crinoline. She comes to this place from her own
theatre to oblige an old comrade. There is Nou-Nou in that box with
some smart women and the Turk who wears our Prussian Order of the Red
Eagle with the Star and Crescent of the Medjidie. He is Youssouf Pasha,
the Sultan's Envoy-Extraordinary. Nou-Nou has brought him to hear La
Colette. Shall we not sit here?"
"Who is Nou-Nou?" Patrine asked, as she settled her tall, luxuriant
person on one of the little green-painted iron chairs.
"Who is Nou-Nou?" her companion echoed. "You saw her to-day at
Longchamps in her black confection. Everybody was looking.... She is
wonderfully _chic_--Nou-Nou! May I be permitted to light a _zigarre_?
..."
"Do! ... But--why is she so much the rage? She isn't even pretty, your
Mademoiselle Nou-Nou." Patrine said it with her bright gaze fastened on
the famous Impropriety who had paraded under the chestnuts of Longchamps
in the sheath of black gauze unlined, save with her own notorious
attractions--both irresistible and fatal, judging by their recorded
effects upon excitable Parisian _viveurs_ and _gommeux_. She saw a
triangular and oddly-crumpled face, rouged high upon the cheek-bones in
circular patches, a pair of almost extinguished eyes, indicated by
streaks of blue pencil, and caught a sentence screamed at the stout Turk
in a voice like a hoarse cockatoo's. Boldly erect upon the skull
adorned by a scanty thatch of lemon-yellow balanced a black feather,
long and attenuated as the wearer. Nou-Nou's stick-like, fleshless arms,
the cadaverous and meagre torso unblushingly revealed by the transparent
casing of her upper person, might have enthralled a keen student of
anatomy. But of feminine charms, in the accepted sense of the word, she
possessed not one, it seemed to Patrine.