the barrier, climbed a flight of shallow gilt marble stairs carpeted
with pink plush and decorated with roses and tree-ferns and reached the
elevated promenade. Set within the circumference of the outer one, it
commanded a complete view of the circular ball-room, to whose level
descended from it at intervals yet other flights of broad gilt stairs,
similarly carpeted and flower-decked for the convenience of those who
wished to join the dancers, or return from the ball-room to the level of
the promenade.
The revels were in full swing. Standing upon the brink, looking down as
into a cockpit, you saw Patrine, superb in her false diadem and mock
ermines, leaning her bare white hand upon a velvet-covered rail. At
first she could only make out a giddying whirl of arms and heads and
shoulders. Presently, the picture began to clear.
To the wail, clang and clash of strange, discordant, exotic music,
rendered by an orchestra of coloured performers, two wide circles of
dancers rhythmically spun. The floors they danced on were set at
different levels, and rotated automatically,--each floor revolving in a
different direction. Coloured lights, flung at intervals from reflectors
in the ceiling, conveyed to Patrine the impression of staring down upon
the whirling planes of a huge gyroscopic top.
Only the central space of shining parquet was void within the double
circle of gyrating dancers. A crash from the orchestra and three
couples, oddly costumed, leaped suddenly out upon the floor. Patrine
could not make out where they had come from. They appeared, and there
was a slight commotion. A hedge of applauding spectators, four or five
deep, formed about the central, stationary patch of parquet. The music
changed, the six Brazilians began the famous dance.
They were not beautiful to look at it seemed to Patrine, the men,
familiarly styled by voices in the crowd as Lauro, Pedro, and Herculano,
being undersized, sleek-headed, lithe and sallow, attired in faultlessly
fitting evening dress-coats, white vests, black satin knee-breeches,
black silks, and buckled pumps. They wore shallow collars of curious
cut, lawn-frilled shirts and wide black neckties. Their female
companions were swarthy as Indians, even through their paint, and plain
of feature. But their superb hair and eyes, the rounded grace of hip
and waist and limb, the slenderness of throat and wrist and ankle,
testified, like their tiny feet and high-arched insteps, to a strain of
Spanish blood.
"La Rivadavia, Alexandrina, and Silvana," the eager spectators named
them. They wore transparent sheaths, and brief, oddly _bouffante_
overskirts, like flounced muslin lamp-shades with a boldly suggestive
forward tilt. They began the dance with some familiar Tango figures.
The poses, the approaches, the hesitations, were well known to Patrine.
"Nothing very new.... But--the music made by those buck niggers!
'_Bizzarramente_' isn't the word for it. One expects to see gombos
covered with serpent-skin, trumpets of elephant-tusk, skull-rattles, and
all the paraphernalia of Obeah in the orchestra, instead of those huge,
superb brass wind-instruments, cymbals as big as table-tops and ten-foot
silver trumpets, like poor de Souza's.... Raised in the States, but
wasn't he a Brazilian by birth?" It was the voice of Lady Beauvayse,
and von Herrnung's answered from behind Patrine:
"It may be so. But the _Blechinstrumente_ and the
_Blasinstrumente_--for the biggest of those they have to go to Germany.
Nowhere else can they be made as there.... Bravo! ... _Bis--bis!_"
He applauded.... Everybody was applauding. The gyroscopic whirl of
dancers had become stationary. All now were eager spectators. And the
three couples from Sao Paulo had reached the culminating point of a
uniquely curious and exotic figure. Savage and violent, sinuous and
creeping; suggestive of the nocturnal gambols of enamoured jaguars, in
the deep primeval forests of Brazil.
"Horrid! One expects them to lash tails and roar.... I've got what Mrs.
Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch called 'cold clams walking up my backbone.'"
Lady Beauvayse shuddered and made a pretty grimace. "All the same I
think I'll go down and look at them a little closer. Ah-h! ... Good
grapes! Why, he simply picked her up by the scruff of the neck with his
teeth and shook her.... I've just _got_ to see that done over again!"
She was gone, with a whisk of the emerald bird of paradise and a waft of
_parfum tres persistant_. Captain Courtley vanished in her wake.
Patrine made no motion to follow them.
The tense excitement, the pungent exhalations rising from the crowded
ball-room were affecting her brain. She felt giddy, and the steady
pressure of the crowd behind her was thrusting her to the very verge of
the promenade. She yielded automatically, unconscious of danger near.
You are to see her there, poised on the verge of the rose-carpeted
precipice, her hand gripping the velvet-covered railing, her wide
nostrils distended, her broad bosom heaving as she inhaled the sultry,
vitiated atmosphere, heavy with a myriad perfumes, tainted by a thousand
breaths. Her stare, lifeless as the enamelled, glittering regard of
some Princess-mummy of Old Egypt, was fixed upon the artists, of whom
two couples had retired, as though in despair of competition with the
chief favourites, leaving La Rivadavia and her comrade Herculano in
possession of the floor.
And the passions expressed by the rhythmical, sinuous movements of these
dancers grew moment by moment less human, and more bestial. Art of the
most consummate was displayed and degraded. Beauty and Truth shone
pre-eminent in the hideous display. Now the woman sank towards the
ground, with supple limbs outstretched and her wild head thrown back in
fierce surrender. Her white fangs gleamed, her dumb mouth seemed to
roar. And as her conqueror crept stealthily towards her, the play of
his great muscles could be seen beneath his civilised attire, as though
his supple body had been clothed with the tawny-golden, black-dappled
hide of the Brazilian jaguar.
As Herculano crouched and sprang, La Rivadavia's muscles visibly
tightened. She bounded high, turned in the act.... Their gleaming
fangs clashed in mid-air. And from the massed spectators came a hiss of
excitement, "_Th-h-h!_ ..." like the hissing of a thousand snakes.
"Great Scott!" Patrine heard herself saying. "_Great--Scott!_"
She no longer heard von Herrnung harshly breathing behind her.... He
had moved to the leftward. His tall, broad-shouldered figure now stood
against the railing some dozen feet away. His well-cut face, seen in
profile, was purplish-red to the crisp, scarlet waves topping his high
square forehead. The big white hands that held the glasses glued to his
eyes, jerked, and as he pressed against the railing Patrine knew that he
was shuddering. Now he looked at her, and his ravaged face was
terrifying to the girl.
"Will you not..." he began, thickly.
She quivered, cast a look about; saw the ugly emotion under which he
laboured reflected in every face within her range of vision, as round
after round of plaudits rose to the roof of the pavilion, escaping
through the wide-open spaces between its gilded, rose-twined pillars
into the night. The rafters vibrated with demands for a repetition of
the popular sensation. The dancers accepted the encore.
If von Herrnung beckoned now, asking Patrine to go down with him amongst
the acrid exhalations of that cockpit of variegated lights, thronged
with excited men and strangely-bedizened women, rent by devastating
emotions, drunk with strange excitements, would Patrine say Yes or No?
...
_Ouf!_ but it was hot. How thick the air was with those illusion
perfumes. And from whence was that cool breeze blowing that suddenly
freshened the heavy air? ...
*CHAPTER XVI*
*THE WIND OF JOY*
Patrine drew back from the edge of the promenade. A stout, swarthy
Frenchman, a Southerner evidently, whose full brown face streamed with
little rills of perspiration, stepped nimbly into her vacated place.
His female companion instantly took his. The same movement was
repeated--the packed bodies seemed to melt before her. In a few more
steps she had merged from the crowd, upon the outer edge of the elevated
promenade.
There was another velvet railing there, and steps leading down to the
promenade upon the ground-level. Against the background of starlit sky
and illuminated gardens stood the tall figure of a man. He was
broad-shouldered and lightly built, the poise and balance of his figure
admirable. But for the gleam of his living eyes in his tanned face, and
the movements of his head as he turned it from side to side, evidently
seeking somebody, he might have been a statue of Mercury cast in
light-hued bronze.
For he wore loose, waist-high leggings strapped at the ankles, and a
belted gabardine of thin light brown material, while a cap with an
upturned brim and ear-flaps dangled from his sunburnt hand. And a
uniformed official, all lacquered moustaches and gold-laced blue cloth,
stood gesticulating a few paces from him, keen on defending from so
unceremonious an intruder the integrity of the Upper Promenade.
"Monsieur cannot possibly descend into the ball-room ... the costume of
Monsieur is not appropriate. It offends against good taste. It
outrages the proprieties.... It is _peu convenable_ even that Monsieur
should be here."
Patrine heard the protest, saw it driven home by swift expressive Gallic
gestures, caught a gleam of mirth in the eyes of the oddly-garbed
intruder, and the quirk of a smile at the corners of his mouth. No
doubt the suggestion of the proprieties in connection with the
traditions of Mabille had evoked it. She liked his face; it was lean
and hard and rather hatchety, with a brave outlook of clear light eyes
under the marked eyebrows, thick and straight and silvery-fair against
his sunburnt skin. To her woman's eyes, Fatigue was stamped upon it and
anxiety, and a kind of rueful impatience, as he apologised for the
necessity of the intrusion in fragmentary but excellently accentuated
French. He came in search of a friend, who was here and must be found;
it was imperative...
"There is to-morrow!--there is always to-morrow!" the official stated
with a wave.
"That's just the point.... To-morrow! ..." The stranger's forehead was
ploughed with lines of anxiety. He spoke in English now--the well-bred,
modern, clipped English of the public school and the University. "No!
you don't understand"--for the official had vigorously disclaimed all
knowledge of the strange, barbarous tongue in which the other addressed
him. "And I don't believe I'd ever make you. If I could only hammer
into you what sort of a hat I'm in!"
He knitted his brows; pulled himself together for a crowning effort.
Patrine spoke, not as a stranger yielding to a sudden, helpful impulse,
but quite simply, with a little, joyful catching of her breath:
"Could I explain for you, do you suppose?"
"A--thanks! You're awfully good!"
He turned to her eagerly, if with a certain embarrassment.
"If you would.... There is a man here I have to get word to. And--what
French I have is simply technical.... You hardly find it in modern
dictionaries--the argot of the engine-shop and the Flying School."
"Now I understand...." She smiled in his perplexed face, drinking in
deep breaths of the fresh fragrant air that blew about them as they
stood together behind the thick wall of bodies that hid the cockpit from
their view. A deep dimple von Herrnung had never seen showed low down
in one of her pale cheeks. Their whiteness was slightly tinged with
delicate pale rose. And her eyes had lost their brilliant enamelled
hardness. They shone like dusky stars as she went on: "Now I know why I
thought of wide green spaces and a breeze blowing to me over gorse and
heather as I looked at you. Sub-conscious memories of Hendon and
Brooklands and Upavon. For you're a Flying Man!"
"Just that!" His ruefulness was banished. "And now you know how I come
to be in Paris with the clothes I stand up in and not another rag....
Two of us flew the Channel yesterday morning.... If the weather holds
decent, we should be on the wing again by four A.M. And my mechanic's
given me the slip. To say he's taken French leave would be appropriate
under the circumstances. Left a line--the cool--beggar!--to say I'd
find him here."
"Too bad!" she said, as fresh furrows dug themselves into the tanned
forehead. "Not fair to leave you in the cart like that. No wonder you
followed--hot upon his track."
"Combed the whole place--everywhere they'll let me in. But my aviator's
kit's against me. I've seen some rummy get-ups. But they draw the line
at Carberry's overalls."
One hand rested easily on his hip, in the other hand he swung the eared
cap with goggles. A pedestal in the moonlight would have suited him.
It occurred to her to ask:
"What was he like--your runaway mechanic?"
"I hardly ... Oh! ... Little black-avised Welshman--barely tips the
scale at eight stone. Has to be a light-weight, because I weigh all of
eleven. And with the hovering-gear--but that can't interest you."
"Indeed it does. What of the hovering-gear?"
His face darkened and hardened. He said:
"It's an invention of mine. And after no end trying--our own people at
Whitehall simply wouldn't have anything to do with me--the chiefs of the
French Service Aeronautique consented to give it a test."
"Sporting of them, wasn't it?"
He agreed:
"No end sporting. So I bucked the tiger over the Channel with Davis--to
find that an officer and mechanic of the S. A. were told off to try the
hoverer over the selected area. For us to engineer the thing ourselves
wasn't '_l'etiquette militaire_.' That's the French for Government
red-tape."
"Bother etiquette! I'm beginning to sympathise with Davis!"
His vexation broke up in laughter.
"That's what _she_ did. She sympathised with Davis and carried him off
here."
Patrine said, a light breaking in on her:
"Why, of course, there would be a girl.... He'd hardly come to a place
like this alone, would he?"
Some query in his look made her add hastily:
"What was she like?"
"Like.... The girl who's carried off Davis? ..." He reflected a
moment. "Pretty and plump and fluffy, with a pair of goo-goo eyes!
She's daughter or niece or something"--he boggled the explanation
rather--"to the German chap who hired us the hangar at Drancy--if you
can give that name to a ramshackle shed in a waste building-lot! And
Davis--thundering good man, but once on a spree..." He whistled
dismally. "If I could only get my claws on him! ..."
Here the uniformed official returned to the charge:
"Monsieur has found his friend--Monsieur has explained the situation.
To enter the _Salon de Danse_ with Madame is not permissible--in the
costume Monsieur displays. No doubt Madame will understand!"
Patrine said, with a slight catch in her breath, as though some drops of
chilly pleasant perfume had been suddenly sprayed on her:
"He supposes ... he thinks ... that I'm ... your friend!"
"I'll explain." He reddened, turning to the official, saying in the
French of the British schoolboy, laborious, devoid of colloquialisms:
"_Monsieur, vous n'avez pas compris. Madame elle--elle n'etes qu'une
etrangere. Pour mon ami, je ne lui vois. Si vous permettre d'entrer,
peut-etre----_"
"_Rototo! Voyez, man blousier, j'connais bien la sorte! Sufficit!
Assez! Ca m' fait suer, comprends?_" The gold-braided arm described a
magnificent sweep, the large white kid-covered hand indicated remote
distance--"_Sortez!_ ..."
The Briton, thus invited to retire, looked at Patrine.
"I can't quite follow, but it's plain he's telling me to hook it. The
rest is--pretty--strong?"
She nodded, biting her lip.
"Frightfully rude. Not that I know much Paris slang. But a friend of
mine--" She broke off to listen, as from under the functionary's waxed
moustache rattled another sentence:
"_A l'instant, ou j'appelle l' sergent d'ville!_"
"He's talking about sending for the police now!" She added hastily:
"Don't let him do that! Offer him a tip!"
The magic word must have been comprehended of the braided functionary.
He ceased to fulminate. He waited, his avid eye upon the pair. The
lean hatchety face of the aviator had flamed at Patrine's suggestion.
He said:
"Don't you think I'd have tipped him in the beginning--if I'd had the
wherewithal? But expenses have been frightful!--the waste lot with the
shed I've stalled the machine in costs as much as a suite of rooms at a
decent middle-class hotel would. Had to fork rent in advance too.
Proprietor's a German as well as a jerry-builder, and when I've paid his
goo-goo girl for our coffee and rolls to-morrow morning"--the speaker
exhibited a disc of shiny metal bearing the classical capped and
oak-wreathed head of the Republic, value exactly
twopence-halfpenny--"I'll have just one of these blessed tin things
left."
"How rotten!" In the gilt metal vanity-bag, Patrine's inseparable
adjunct, lurked, in the company of a mirror, powder-puff, and note-book,
a tiny white silk purse. In the purse nestled two plump British half
sovereigns, the moiety of Patrine's salary for the previous week.
"Would you jump down my throat if I asked you to let me finance you?"
she pleaded, an eager hand in the depths of the receptacle. "Why not?"
"Because I'm a decent man!" If he had been previously crimson he was
now scarlet as a boiled lobster. "Thanks all the same, though! I can't
wait here, even to catch Davis.... I must bike back to Drancy, where
I've left the Bird--the machine--in the German's shed... Not a soul to
keep an eye on her! ... My heart's in my mouth when I think of what
might hap--" He bit off the end of the sentence and went on: "But if
you'd be so awfully kind as to take charge of this, in case you ...
There's a message written on it...." He offered her a soiled, bent
card.
"I understand. If I should chance to come across your Davis.... A
little man ... looking like a Welshman.... But you haven't told me
whether he's dark or fair!"
"Black as a crow," he told her. "Not dressed like me!" His well-cut
mouth began to twist upwards at the corners.
"Quite a swell, in a silk-faced frock-coat, white vest and striped
accompaniments. A silk hat, too, rather curly brimmed, but still, a
topper. I suppose a friend of the lady's rented Davis the kit."
"Of the lady's? ..." She remembered. "Yes, yes! Of course! ... The
German's appendage.... Why! ... Look! ... Those two people who have
just passed the turn-stile at the other end of the Promenade.... If
there's anything in description, here comes Davis with the goo-goo
girl!"
"By--gum! You've nailed me the pair of them." As the aviator's long
strides bore him down in the direction of the little sallow,
black-avised mechanic in the capacious silk-faced frock-coat, and his
high-bosomed, florid, flaxen-haired enchantress, and before the
moustached guardian of the Promenade could renew his indignant protest,
Patrine had dropped the little sovereign-purse in his deep, rapacious
hand. And at that instant the music ended with a crashing succession of
barbaric chords. The Sao Paulo dance was done.
"_Merci millefois, Madame!_ ..."
Patrine turned from the hireling's thanks to see the high head and
powerful square shoulders of von Herrnung forging towards her, towering
above the polyglot, variegated crowd. He hailed her with:
"So you met a friend? Is that why I found myself deserted?"
She answered coldly:
"I did not desert you--and I did not meet a friend."
His face, still suffused with a purplish flush, pouched and baggy about
the eyes, told of the maelstrom of unhealthy excitement the dance of the
jaguars in the jungle had set whirling in his brain. She guessed that
he had taken advantage of their separation to descend into the
ball-room, and that as one of the spectators in the front rank he had
revelled in the final thrill. He persisted:
"_Was_? But what means it? I have lost you.... I think you must have
gone down into the ball-room after your friend.... I follow and you are
not there. I come back to find you.... Who was that dirty bounder I
saw you talking to?"
"He wasn't a dirty bounder!" His rudeness enraged her. "He was a nice,
clean, first-class, top-hole, plucky English boy!"
He sneered:
"'_Boy_' ... Men of forty are boys, in the mouths of you English ladies.
You borrow the term from women of the street-walking class."
"Then I'll call him a man. The best kind of man going! English--from
the top of his nice head to the very tips of his toes."
"How can you tell if he was not a friend of yours? What do you know of
him?" He fixed his eyes compellingly on hers.
She answered:
"Nothing but that he flew the Channel yesterday--with Davis--to test his
invention--and he has got to be on the wing for home at four."
"So! He has told you all this, and you do not know his name, even?
Perhaps it is on that card you hold in your hand?"
She started, and the card fluttered from her twitching fingers to the
carpet.
"Allow me...." Von Herrnung stooped as though to retrieve the bit of
pasteboard. "Curious! It has gone! ... It is not there!" he said.
"I think you have your foot on it." Her eyeballs ached, she felt weary,
and flat, and stale. "Please lift up your foot and let me see if it is
there," she urged, and grown suddenly obtuse, he lifted up the wrong
foot. She was trying to explain that he had done so when they were
rejoined by Courtley and Lady Beauvayse.
"Say, did you see she wore a head-band with a rubber mouth-hold at the
back of her neck? And waist-fixings under her frillies so's Herculano
could swing her around his head. My land! that man has jaw-power to
whip Teddy Roosevelt, and she's got vim enough for a nest of
rattlesnakes.... Used up, Pat? ... If you aren't, you look it!" The
speaker yawned prettily: "I'm about ready to be taken back to by-by,
though it's only two o'clock."
Von Herrnung escorted the wearer of the green bird of paradise as they
went through dark alleys and illuminated avenues back to the archway
with the blazing crowns and stars. Courtley accepted the offer of a
lift back to the hotel. The German declined, saying that he preferred
to walk, as the car was closed.
"Pardon! ..." His voice had arrested Morris on the point of starting
the Rolls-Royce. His handsome face had appeared in the frame of the
car-window. "Excuses! but this belongs to Miss Saxham!" His cuff shone
white in the semi-darkness, the great magpie pearl on his little finger
gleamed maliciously as he dropped the missing card upon Patrine's lap,
and drew back, uncovered and smiling, as the car moved away. Later on,
when she was safe in her room, she looked at the card, and read upon it
in plain black lettering:
+-----------------------------------------------+
| |
| ALAN SHERBRAND, |
| |
| PILOT-INSTRUCTOR AND BUILDER OF AEROPLANES, |
| FANSHAW'S SCHOOL OF FLYING. |
| |
| THE AERODROME, |
| COLLINGWOOD AVENUE, |
| HENDON, N. W. |
| |
+-----------------------------------------------+
Something was scrawled in violet pencil on the upper blank space. Being
a girl with notions about squareness, Patrine would not at first read,
remembering that it was his private message to Davis, whom Chance had
brought within his master's reach. But later still, or earlier, when,
after a brief interval of silence, the traffic of Paris began to roll
over the asphalt, principle yielded to impulse. She switched on the
electric light above her pillow and read:
"_This Sarajevo business spells War. Must get back at once to Hendon.
I trust to your Honour not to fail me. You know what this means to_
"_A. S._"
So the young Mercury in gabardine and overalls was a professional, a
teacher; a pilot who helped men to qualify for the certificate given by
the Royal Aero Club without breaking too many bones. She had seen the
big painted sign in the Collingwood Avenue, Hendon, that advertised
Fanshaw's Flying School.
"_I trust to your Honour_," he had written to his mechanic. The word
would have seemed big, and awful, and imposing, spelt like that, with a
capital "H," if the writer had been a gentleman.