That Which Hath Wings: A Novel of the Day

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.

"I--don't think so. I'm dead-sure!" said Franky, getting redder. "We 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.