landing my _Albatros_ once only during two days' flight. The weather
was magnificent. My engine gave no trouble. That is why I call the
ring my mascot, you understand. Now that it has been worn by you, it is
more precious than when I first received it. Whenever I look at it, it
will speak to me of you."
"Don't let it!"
"Why should it not speak of you? Isis! My heart's Queen!"
"I have told you--don't revolt me with--piffle of that kind. And don't
touch me, unless you want me to jump out of the car!"
A voice that he barely knew had issued from the face she turned on
him--a face all violet shadows and haggard drawn lines, under the
burning splendour of the dead beech-leaf hair. She vibrated like an
electrified wire, and round her pale pinched mouth and about her
blue-veined temples were little points of moisture, fine and glittering
as diamond-dust.
"Am I to understand that my touch is unpleasant to you? That you are
angry with me? That you do not love me any more?"
"Love...."
She laughed out harshly, hugely disconcerting him.
"Lady Wathe said at that Grand Prix night dinner in Paris that you were
without a sense of humour. But you must have a grain or so--to talk of
love to me!"
She turned her face away, and the exquisite beauty of her small white
ear appealed to him provokingly. He ground his teeth. He could have
thrown his arm about her, and crushed the tall, full, womanly figure
against him. How superb she was in her mood of hate. The strapped-up
wound in his left hand was throbbing and smarting, just as when she had
writhed her head free from his furious kisses and bitten him to the
bone.
He had made her pay richly for her bite. He hugged himself as he
remembered.... Now the sting of desire was renewed in him and he eyed
her with greediness. Presently he stooped and said in her ear,
coaxingly:
"Let us be friends! Dine with me at the Rocroy to-night. We will have
a box at the Alhambra, and sup again at the Upas. Say you will come,
loved one! Will you not, Patrine?"
"No!"
"No? But I think you mean Yes! Do you not?"
"I have said No! Is that not enough?"
"You are mad!" he blustered at her--"mad as a March hare!"
She answered him:
"I have been mad, but I am sane now and I stay so."
He said scoffingly:
"You may not always remain as you are now!"
If he launched a poisoned dart, its meaning glanced aside from her.
"Shall you not write to me when I am back in Germany? Not one line? Not
one single word? Yet I have a few little notes from you that I
particularly value...."
"Make the most of them. I shall write no more." And suddenly her hate
and loathing of him reached boiling point and ran over. "My God! Can't
you understand that I ask nothing better than never to see nor hear of
you again!"
"_Grossartig_! You are hellishly conciliatory." His voice was thick
and shook with anger. His smile mocked and the look in his eyes was
hateful as he pursued in a tone that was now quite gentle and purring:
"Just think a bit, my dear! Because--to burn one's boats behind
one--that is not prudent at all!"
She did not answer, and he drove on to Hendon, planning fresh assaults
upon this unconquerable woman's pride.
*CHAPTER XXV*
*THREE MEN IN A CAR*
When the yellow Darracq car turned in under the archway that advertised
Fanshaw's Flying School in three-foot capitals, the name revived no
associations in the mind of Patrine. She had never visited the
aerodrome upon an afternoon in the mid-week, when as in the present
instance practice and instruction were being carried on. The cafes, no
longer crowded by smart people, were thinly patronised by bronzed young
men in overalls, not innocent of lubricating medium, thirstily drinking
ginger swizzle or sucking iced-lemon squashes through yellow straws.
Business-looking middle-aged men discussed the market-prices of steels
and timbers, dope and fabrics, over bitter beer and ham-sandwiches,
while experimenting amateurs, male and female, discussed in loud,
relieved voices the experiences of the premier flight. These, having
been previously warned not to experiment upon a crowded system, were now
ravenously putting in the solid, three-course lunches they had foregone.
It was a perfect July day, hot and blue and green and golden. To the
nor'-west, you glimpsed the elms and oaks and beeches of Boreham Wood,
westward the chestnuts of Bushey and Stanmore in fullest summer foliage.
The hawthorns of New Barnet were already browning in the sun. Hill and
common were plumy with the brake-fern. Heather and ling were purpling
into bloom.
Still looking westwards, you snatched a glimpse of Windsor. Eastwards, a
diamond set in emeralds, was the Crystal Palace at Sydenham. Across the
whitish-grey scarp of Highgate and the verdant shoulder of heathy
Hampstead you saw the dun-coloured haze that is the breath of London,
the huge, black, formidable and formless monster, as, sprawling on her
ancient River, she keeps her envied place in the Sun.
At the cafe end of Fanshaw's enclosure the Frogged Roumanian String
Orchestra were playing the "Dance Rhapsody" of Delius. From a rival
establishment came the brazen strains of a German band in a
death-wrestle with ragtime. Behind a straggling crowd of visitors,
where the cars that had brought them were parked in a double row, von
Herrnung stopped the yellow Darracq, leaned across Patrine's unwilling
knees and opened the car-door.
As Patrine was getting out, a large hand in a white leather glove was
thrust forwards for her assistance. The owner of the hand was a
square-faced, fair-haired, soldierly-looking servant of the somewhat
hybrid type that has replaced the carriage-groom. He wore a dark blue
livery overcoat with silver braid upon collar, belt, and
shoulder-straps, black knee-boots, and a white topped cap with silver
braid, a shiny black peak and an enamel front badge in black, white, and
red. Looking past Patrine, he saluted in military fashion and spoke to
von Herrnung in German, of which language Patrine possessed a
smattering:
"Will the _Herr Hauptmann_ speak to the _Herrschaft_? Upon business.
_Er ist sehr wichtig_."
Von Herrnung, at the first sound of the messenger's voice, had stiffened
to rigidity. He glanced over his shoulder in the direction pointed out
by the big hand in the white glove, and answered:
"Say to the _Herrschaft_ that I come!"
The groom vanished. Von Herrnung jumped out of the yellow Darracq and
went quickly over to the machine that had been indicated, a large,
superbly-finished F.I.A.T. touring-car of the landau-limousine type,
enamelled dark blue with a narrow silver line of finish. The top was
open. A white-capped chauffeur in dark blue and silver livery sat
immovable at the steering-wheel, and three men, only one of whom was
plainly visible to Patrine, occupied the roomy body of the car.
The visible man, sitting in the forward seat with his back to the motor,
his baldness topped, in deference to the weather, with a white felt
Newmarket, was a long-bodied, broad-shouldered personage, certainly over
seventy; clean-shaven, with staring eyes of light grey tinged with
bilious yellow, and skin of a prevailing yellow-grey doughiness, with a
huge wart in the middle of the cheekbone on the side next to Patrine.
His clothes were of yellowish-grey like his eyes and skin, his linen had
a yellow line in it and a huge, crumpled vest of buff nankeen threw into
relief a flaming crimson satin necktie confined within bounds by a flat
jewelled ring. He had the air of an old actor of character parts, or of
a libertine monk who has foregone the cord and cowled habit. Of the two
men sitting facing him little could be seen beyond the peak of a
gold-banded white yachting-cap pulled rather low over a bronzed and
rather aquiline profile with an upward-turned moustache and
slightly-grizzled beard of reddish-brown, and a Homburg straw with a
broad black ribbon and a slouched brim, overshadowing the face of the
man who sat on White Cap's left hand. An astute and cunning face, his;
long and sallow, with narrow, blinking eyes, a drooping nose, and a
drooping black moustache. With this its owner played constantly,
twisting and pulling it with a delicate white hand that wore a diamond
solitaire. He never looked up, when addressed by either of his
companions, but raised his eyes to the speaker, and pivoted, without
lifting his head.
Von Herrnung's friends were nothing to Patrine, and von Herrnung's
person was by now intolerable, yet her eyes unwillingly followed the
tall, soldierly figure as he drew himself up, clicked his heels and
uncovered. A brown hand went up to the peak of the white yachting-cap,
the wearers of the straw Homburg and the felt Newmarket slightly raised
their hats. Von Herrnung did not speak first, he waited bareheaded to
be spoken to. When the door of the big blue car was opened by the
servant at an imperious signal from the sallow man, von Herrnung got
inside, and sat down beside the personage with the wart on his
cheek,--leaning forwards deferentially to be addressed by the bearded
wearer of the white yachting-cap, who made great play with a brown right
hand that sported a heavy gold curb-chain watch-bracelet. Once the hand
clenched and shook in vivacious threat or warning, very close to von
Herrnung's handsome nose. That made Patrine laugh, and instantly she
was angry with herself for laughing. She put up her long-sticked
sunshade, turned her back upon the blue F.I.A.T. car and moved away
towards the part of the enclosure where the visitors sat or promenaded,
drawing eyes as she went with her spangled silver headgear twinkling in
the sunshine, and its black cock's plume waving over her strangely
coloured hair.
So changed, so changed. She was sensible of an alteration even in her
gait and gestures. A sickness of the soul weighed on her body as though
she walked in invisible fetters of lead. The free space, the fresh air,
seemed to yield no physical stimulus. She had bitten deep into the
apple of Knowledge, and found bitterness and ashes at the core.
*CHAPTER XXVI*
*A PAIR OF PALS*
Among a dozen pairs of masculine eyes that followed the gallant womanly
figure, crowned by the plumed hat of silver spangles and displayed in
the frank unreticence of fashion by the semi-transparent sheath of
glistening white, a pair very blue, very shiningly alert and interested,
drew nearer until the elongated shadow of a small boy in Scout's uniform
mingled upon the sunlit turf with the longer shadow of Patrine.
His thumping heart had said to him: "You know her!" It was Pat and yet
not Pat. Her tall, rounded figure. Her walk. The same face--and
another woman's hair. The white gown and the long stole of black cock's
feathers he had seen before, and the hat had previously fascinated him.
He had asked Pat if it were not made of the twinkly stuff with which
they covered the Bobby-dazzlers on Christmas trees? She had cried
"Yes!" and assured him that she would always hereafter call it her
"Bobby-dazzler chapper." ... And his Cousin Irma, whom Bawne secretly
abominated, had said it was too bad to talk costermonger slang to the
child. "_The child_." ... A man must be ready to pardon an insult from
the unpunchable female. But Bawne found himself wishing that Cousin
Irma had been a boy.
He loved Pat. You had to love a person who could keep secrets as
faithfully as Dad or Mother, and play tennis and hockey better than a
great many grown-up fellows. Bowl you out at cricket, too, middle bail,
before you could wink. She could cycle all day without getting knocked
up, and swim a mile, easily. For these reasons Bawne knew he loved her.
But he loved her most for the reasons that he did not understand.
"Pat!"
He had screwed up his courage to touch his crusher felt and speak the
name, but the tall lady with the electrifying hair did not seem to hear.
Her long eyes looked at him in a blind way without seeing him. He had
never kissed this frozen, stranger's face.
"I thought you knew me! I most awfully beg your pardon!" he stammered,
in scarlet anguish, and the dull eyes suddenly came to life, and the
stiff lips smiled:
"It's Bawne. My sweet, I'm glad! How did you come here?"
"Dad brought me because he'd promised," the boy said joyously as they
shook hands.
"Where is Uncle Owen?"
"Over there." Bawne pointed to two men talking apart beyond the
straggling line of spectators, and Patrine recognised the great frame
and scholarly stoop of the Doctor, standing with his side-face towards
her, a half-consumed cigar in the corner of his mouth, and his stick, a
weighty ivory-topped Malacca, loosely gripped in both hands behind his
back.
"And the man he is talking to? Why--of course! It's Sir Roland--how is
it I didn't recognise him?"
"The Chief Scout!" Bawne's tone was one of incredulous wonder. "But
you couldn't have forgotten _him_! It--isn't possible!"
Nor even to a stranger did he appear a personality to be easily
forgotten, the bright-eyed, falcon-beaked, middle-aged man, whose
feather-weight crusher felt was worn at an inimitable angle, and whose
slight, active figure set off his well-cut morning suit of thin blue
serge in a way to arouse envy in a military dandy of twenty-five.
"You see," Bawne explained, "_he_ was talking business with Father, so I
just took myself out of the way." He added: "They hadn't told me to,
but they might have forgotten. And so"--the big word came out of the
childish mouth quaintly--"I acted on my initiative--you understand?"
"I understand." The formal handshake once over, their fingers had not
separated. She held in her large, strong, womanly palm the hand that
was little, and hard, and boyish. It squeezed her fingers, and the
squeeze was an apology. It said:
"I'd like you to have kissed me if there hadn't been lots of people
looking. For, of course, you know I love you, Pat!"
"And I love you, Bawne. We'll always love each other, whatever
happens," said the answering pressure. Her spoken utterance was:
"So these are your holidays! ... How did you leave them all at
Charterhouse? And--are you still tremendous pals with young Roddy
Wrynche?"
He said, with a naive, adorable gravity:
"Boys don't squabble like girls--and Wrynche is a frightfully decent
fellow. We passed together from Shell into Under Fourth, and we've
promised always to stand by each other!"
"Good egg! And now, how is it you're here? Has Uncle Owen given in at
last about the flying?"
"Really and truly! Man alive!"--Bawne's characteristic expletive--"I've
been up to-day in the air-'bus and--wasn't it first-class!"
"Honour?"
"Honour! Twice round the aerodrome with the Instructor--and presently
I'm to have a longer flight with Mr. Sherbrand in his monoplane."
"'Mr. Sherbrand' ..." Patrine repeated rather vaguely. "Sherbrand" had
somehow a ring that was familiar. Bawne explained:
"He's a great friend of Father's. He's splendid. A regularly topping
chap!"
"And you've actually flown?"
"I've flewed--and I mean to go on with it." He repeated the assurance
more sedately: "It's the profession I have chosen. They say you've got
to begin young. And my legs wobbled and the ground rocked a bit when I
got down on it. But I wasn't air-sick at all."
"_Air-sick_.... Are people...?"
Bawne said from the pedestal of superior knowledge:
"Oh, aren't they just, like anything! The Calais-Dover
steamer-crossing's nothing to it sometimes--the Instructor told me."
Patrine laughed. The latest circulating-library novel, _Love in the
Clouds_, had omitted to mention this fact. The heroine had donned an
aviator's cap and pneumatic jacket, and "leapt nimbly on board" the
aeroplane in half a gale of wind. As the machine dipped and rose
gracefully upon the heaving element that cradled it, Enid had
experienced merely a delicious exhilaration. Then a crisp moustache had
brushed her rosy ear. The voice of Hubert, attuned to deepest melody of
passion, had murmured in the shell-like organ of hearing: "Little girl.
At last I have you! ... Mine, mine, my bride of the swan-path!--mine for
ever and aye!"
Bawne continued, innocently discounting further statements on the part
of the author of _Love in the Clouds_:
"He told me before we went up, you know. Of course, when you're flying
you can't hear anything but the racket of the propeller. It goes
roaring through you till your bones buzz, and the very ends of your
teeth hum. So the other man has to yell at you through a trumpet, or
write to you on bits of paper, unless he's switched off the engine for
diving, and then you don't feel like talking--that's if you're a
beginner, you know.... But man alive! it's splendid. You must try it,
Pat!"
She declared, laughingly:
"While a single flight costs a brace of my hard-earned guineas, the
sport is not for me! Why haven't I got a pal like your wonderful Mr.
Sherbrand? I'm getting envious--you lucky infant, you!"
It didn't hurt to be called an infant by Pat, because she never would
have done it in a stranger's hearing. And it was ripping to have her
here, sharing his hour of joy.
He told her: "Father brought me here as a reward for making a model
aeroplane. Reminds me!--I've got to tell you all about that. But it's
only a toy and this is the Real Thing. There's nothing worth having in
the whole world," added the unconscious philosopher "unless it's real
and true!"
"Am I not real?" Patrine asked, squeezing his shoulder.
"Now you are!" He said it with an effort of candour. "But when I saw
you a minute ago, I wasn't--quite sure." He glanced up at her and asked
shyly: "Why are you different since you have been away in Paris?"
"Different, how different?" She whipped her hand from his shoulder.
Her black eyebrows knitted, and her face stiffened into the strange mask
that had puzzled him, under the scrutiny of his clear blue eyes. "Do I
seem changed?" she queried. And Bawne answered:
"A little. I was afraid at first you were somebody else, because
of"--he said it shyly--"because of your hair."
"My hair?" she repeated blankly, and then said awkwardly: "The air of
Paris did that, darling, but it will soon be its old colour again!"
"Will it ever be just like it was before?" asked Bawne, looking
innocently up at her, and something broke in Patrine's heart just then.
She gave a sudden gasping sigh, and a sudden spate of tears rolled over
her thick underlids, streamed down her pale cheeks, and fell upon her
broad bosom, heaving under its thin covering of filmy white voile.
"Pat! You're--crying!" Bawne had never yet seen his friend weep, and
he was wrung between pity and bewilderment. "Who has vexed you? Who
has been hurting you?" he begged, and she answered brokenly:
"No one! ... Someone.... It doesn't matter!" adding: "Would you punch
him, if anyone had--done as you say?"
"_Wouldn't_ I?"
"My sweet!" Her arm went round his slight, square shoulders. She doted
on the little amber freckles on his pure, healthy skin, the little
drake's tail of silky red-brown hair at the nape of his brown neck, the
half-shy, half-bold curve of his mouth as he smiled, the blue sparkle of
his eye glancing sidewise up at her. She found in the pure warmth and
sweetness of the slight young body leaning against her, a healing,
comforting balm.
"Why aren't you my little brother, Bawne?" she said, hugging him closer.
He answered after an instant's thought:
"If my mother could be your mother too, it would be jolly! Not unless!
..."
He was not going to take on Mildred for anybody. Patrine sighed
pensively.
"That's what I used to cry for when I was a little pig-tailed girl, my
sonny. More than anything I wanted to belong to Aunt Lynette. But
she's so young--only thirty-three. She couldn't be my mother."
"No." His eyes considered her face gravely. "Of course not. You're
far too old. How old are you, Cousin Pat?"
"How old am I?" A shudder went through her. "Nineteen in August. And
I feel about a hundred and one."
"That's 'cos you're not well!" His eyes were anxious and a little
pucker showed between his reddish eyebrows. "You're not going to be
ill--are you?" he asked in alarm.
"Not I!" She murmured it caressingly in her deep, soft voice. "My pet,
don't worry. Everything's all right with me!--perfectly all right and
O.K.! Only talk to me. Don't let me keep on thinking. Things are never
so--bally rotten if you can stop brooding over them."
Why did she look like that? What had somebody done to hurt her? His
boyish hand clenched, the thumb well turned in over the knuckles.
Instinctively Bawne knew that the Enemy, who had stamped that dreadful
look of frozen misery on the face of his beloved, white as ivory or old
snow in its strange setting of flaming tresses--was of his own sex.
All the while, ever since Patrine had entered the gates of Panshaw's,
the song of the air-screw had not been absent from her ears. The
tractor of the practice-engine roared fitfully, like a tiger being
prodded in its den by a spiteful keeper's meat-fork. The propellers of
the double-engined passenger-buses kept up a steady droning as Fanshaw's
pilots followed the pointing arms of the red, white, and blue pylons
marking the limits of the air-circuit, or were silent as the machines
dropped to earth within the huge white circles where a giant T indicated
"Land."
This was not a show day when visitors' half-crowns rattled unceasingly
into the boxes at the turnstile. The rows of green-painted chairs
behind the whitewashed iron railings of the spectators' enclosure were
but thinly patronised by friends of people taking passenger-flights. No
man with a megaphone announced events forthcoming or imminent. No white
flag fell for the start, no pistol cracked signifying the conclusion of
a race.
Three men occupied the Judge's stand behind the Committee enclosure.
One, small and dapper, in a frock-coat and topper, kept his eye on what
was probably a stop-watch. Another, stout, bearded, and straw-hatted,
was absorbedly gazing at the sky through a big pair of Zeiss binoculars.
The third, in the uniform of a commissionaire, was an employe of the
School. No one manifested any particular interest in them or their
occupation. The sparse general public were not enlightened as to the
reason of their presence on the Judge's stand.
"Talk," Patrine said, clinging to Bawne, her slender plank in moral
shipwreck. "Tell me what Sir Roland and the Doctor are waiting to see.
What is that thin man doing with the stop-watch and the note-book? And
the fat gentleman beside him, who never leaves off staring at the sky
through those big field-glasses. Nothing is billed to happen--there are
no numbers up on the pylons--yet something seems to be going on!"
"Rather!"
The boy broke into a little gurgle of excited laughter, and began to
dance up and down under the arm that rested on his neck.
"_Rather_! Didn't you know? How funny! Why, man alive, we're waiting
for _him_!"
"For him?"
"For Mr. Sherbrand. Father's friend. The Flying Man I've told you
about."
"Mr.---- Where is he?" Patrine asked vaguely, looking all about her.
In the tumult of her thoughts the name that had been upon a crumpled
card suggested no association with that so rapturously uttered by the
boy.
"There!" Bawne pointed upwards with another of the excited laughs.
"Carrying out a hovering-test. The man with the stop-watch is timing
him, and the other with the binnocs is observing him. He's French--no
end of an official swell! The French Government sent him," went on the
boy, with infinite relish, "to see Mr. Sherbrand test his invention. He
thought they didn't catch on, but the hoverer has fetched them. If he
hovers for twenty minutes, ten thousand feet up, his fortune's made!--I
heard a fellow say so to the Instructor. Man alive! isn't it topping
that you and I should be here to-day!"
*CHAPTER XXVII*
*SIR ROLAND TELLS A STORY*
While yet the Bird of War hovered invisible at ten thousand feet of
altitude, and the lungs of the men aboard her toiled and laboured, and
foam gathered about their nostrils and lips, Saxham stood talking with
the man who in his eyes ranked above all others, the tried and trusty
friend of fourteen years.