Part 7

"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.

"Do not look at her too hard, or she may send round and invite you to supper," warned the laughing voice of von Herrnung speaking close to her ear. "She has all the vices--the good Nou-Nou!"

"Including the vice of indiscriminate hospitality," Patrine laughed; but a little uncontrollable shudder rippled over her as she withdrew her eyes from the painted, crumpled visage, leering with half-extinguished eyes from under the canary-coloured wig.

"That is so. Tell me--you and Lady Beauvayse seem great friends--quite inseparable...." He leaned nearer, his bold eyes closely scrutinising her face. "How comes it that she leaves you alone in a Paris dance-garden: with me, whom you have met to-night--for the first time?"

"She knows I can take jolly good care of myself, wherever and with whomsoever I may happen to be!" Her black brows frowned; it was evident she resented his criticism. "And--what are you getting at? What's the matter with poor old Paris? You know--perhaps it sounds odd!--but I've never been in Paris before.... And I love it! Down to the ground--it suits me! It's so gay and brightly-coloured and pagan. The public buildings and parks are dreams; the shops--too entrancing for anything! And this place, with its jabber and music and stagy illuminations, trellises where real roses mix up with artificial ones--ornamental beds of geraniums and calceolarias and thingumbobs bordered with smelly little oil lamps, gilt band-stands, concerts, and lovely trees in blossom.... Is it so luridly awful? To me, it's rather sweet! Of course the dancing--everybody knows the dancing is pretty well the limit. But one has seen such a lot of Tango in London--the bloom will be pretty well rubbed off!"

"Yet some lingers. You have still something to learn from Herculano and La Rivadavia! ..."

"Do I strike you as such a perfect daisy of inexperience?" Something in his tone stung, for the full white cheeks coloured faintly. "You didn't talk to me at dinner as though I were one!"

"How could I help that?" he asked, with the roughness that had previously intrigued her. "Am I to blame that you look like Phryne or Aspasia when you are only Mademoiselle de Maupin--before she set out upon her travels? For you have only got as far as Paris with your friend Lady Beauvayse. Why does she bring you? I am curious to know."

"Because I am her paid secretary and amanuensis." Patrine brought the words out with a rush; it was clear that she thought the candour a necessity, but hated it. "She can't get on without one, and her husband, Lord Beauvayse--awful little bounder!--won't stand her having a man. Don't great ladies have secretaries in Germany? Can't you see me doing Lady Beau's correspondence in my fearful fist--enclosing cheques to people who solicit donations for charities with a committee and Hon. Treasurer--tearing up the begging letters full of howlers in the spelling-line--smelling of bad tobacco and beer or gin? Then I have to keep her posted in her engagements, go to shows, and functions, and kettledrums with her when she hasn't a pal handy--that's where my share of the fun comes in. Just as I'm visiting Paris, as I dare say I shall visit other centres of lively iniquity--in the character of the sheep-dog that doesn't bow-wow at the wrong man!"

"You should bow-wow at me." His teeth were hidden, but his eyes were crinkled up with soundless laughter. "For I am a very wrong--a very wicked man!"

"How sad!" Her brows were still frowning, but her wide red mouth was beginning to curl up at the corners. "Couldn't you reform? Is it too late?"

"I hope so!" he answered her. "For if I were good I should possess no attraction for a woman of your type. And to charm you I would give my soul--if I had a soul!"

"Great Scott! You're candid.... Modest too.... And complimentary!"

"I am candid, because I cannot help myself."

Three comedians had come upon the stage. She told him not to talk to her. She wanted to see the turn; she liked music-hall stuff. He obeyed, mentally congratulating himself on having ascertained her social status, something better than a typist, hardly on the same level with his sister Gusta's _dame de compagnie_.

While his bold eyes read the book of her provoking beauty, the performance on the stage, backed by the deep green palmate foliage and white or ruddy candelabra-like blossom-sprays of the chestnuts, framed by a broad band of electric lamp-flowers, was culminating to its final gag. A preposterously fat man attired in the historic low-crowned hat, Union Jack waistcoat, brass-buttoned blue tail-coat, leathers and hunting-tops of the traditional John Bull, another comedian in the legendary costume of M. Jacques Prud'homme, and a truculent-looking personage whose Teutonic French accent, spiked silver helmet with the Prussian eagle, First Imperial Guards cuirass and tunic, breeches and spurred jack-boots, in combination with a well-known moustache with upright ends, a huge Iron Cross, and a great many other property decorations, left no doubt as to the political bent of the scrap of pantomime.

It was an ordinary bit of comic knockabout, to which the tragic circumstances of the day lent a peculiar tang. One has seen it before, played by the three comedians, in the green-baize aprons, brown duffel knee-breeches, and shirt-sleeves sported by the waiters of low-class Paris or Munich brasseries.

In the centre of the stage, instead of a bright-hooped beer-barrel on a wooden cellar-stand, was a revolving globe representing the World. And each of the three comedians, being armed with a tumbler, a spile-awl, and a spigot-tap, proceeded, with appropriate patter, gesture, and grimaces, to insert his spigot, draw, and drink. John Bull turned the globe to the United Kingdom, and tapped the big black patch in East Middlesex. Creamy-headed London porter filled his glass. He held it up, nodded a "Here's to you!" and toped off. M. Prud'homme punctured France in the rich vine-growing district of Epernay. Champagne crowned the goblet, and he drank in dumb show to Gallia, the land of love, laughter, and wine. It was then the turn of the Teuton. He bored, and Brandenburg yielded a tall bock of foaming blonde lager. He sucked it down with guttural _Achs_ of delight.

But this was not all. John Bull exploited the East Indies. A stream of rubies and emeralds filled his glass. He bored deep in the Union of South Africa--diamonds and gold-dust heaped the vessel. Fired by his success, M. Prud'homme inserted his spigot into wealthy Bordeaux, whipped it out, applied his lips, and drank deep. He corked the oozing spot and tapped Algerian Africa. Coffee rewarded him, fragrant and richly black. He next exploited Pondicherry, Chandernagore on the Hooghly, French Equatorial Africa, and New Caledonia. Nothing came. He tried Cochin China, and drew off a glass of yellow tea at boiling-point. Encouraged to drink the strange beverage by the appreciative pantomime of his British neighbour, he swallowed it, with results of a Rabelaisian nature, at which everybody laughed heartily, including Patrine.

It was now the turn of the Teuton. He drew German beer from Togoland, Cameroon; German South-West and South-East Africa yielded an indifferent brand of the beverage. German New Guinea in the Pacific, the Solomon, Caroline, and other islands, with Asian Kiao-Chao, merely wetted the bottom of the glass with a pale fluid, German beer by courtesy. "_Sapperlot_! _Der Teufel_! _Kreuzdonnerwetter_!" He tasted, spat, stamped, and sputtered forth strange expletives, M. Prud'homme's terror at these unearthly utterances being provocative of more humour of the Rabelaisian kind. Then he decided to try again, excited to envy by the spectacle of the stout Briton drawing gold from Australia, gold from Canada, gold from New Zealand and the West Indies, and gold from Ceylon, gold from the Crown Colonies in China, gold from the Gold Coast, gold from Rhodesia and Nigeria, gold from everywhere; filling the capacious pockets of his blue brass-buttoned coat, of his tight breeches, of his nankeen waistcoat, until he bulked enormously, a Bull of Gargantuan size.

Such wealth roused respect in Prud'homme, who esteems the yellow metal. He embraced the Briton, heartily congratulating him. This roused the Teuton's ire. He seized the spigot and once more plunged it into Germany, Prussia, Bavaria, Saxony--each of the States yielding beer, beer, BEER. He went on, tapping, filling, and guzzling.... Twelve full tumblers and he had begun to swell most horribly. Fifteen--and his rotundity equalled that of John Bull. But one State remained untapped. He swilled down the twenty-fourth bock, drawn out of Lubeck--plunged the spigot into the Reichsland--once Alsace-Lorraine----

And the big glass crimsoned with a sudden spurt of blood.

It was over in an instant, the comedians had skipped nimbly from the scene, the globe had developed a pair of very thin human legs and followed them off at a proscenium-wing, before many of those who had witnessed, clearly understood. Only the men and women of Gallic race among the cosmopolitan, polyglot audience answered with a deep, inward thrill to the ruby gush that told how the blood of France still ran red in the throbbing arteries of the beloved, reft, alienated province, in spite of her forty-five years of separation, in defiance of the loathed laws, customs, language, service, all the gyves rivetted on her by the Teuton, her conqueror. Now round after round of applause signified their comprehension. But the comedians did not answer the call.

Von Herrnung, who had worn the same contemptuous smile for every phase of the clumsy by-play, relaxed his stiff features. A stout tenor from the Opera appeared and sang a Spring song by Tchaikovsky, following it with the exquisite Serenade of Rimsky Korsakov, "Sleep, Sad Friend."

The tenor was recalled. Colette Colin succeeded him. She sang "_Notre Petite Compagnon_" and "_La Buveuse d'Absinthe_" to the accompaniment of a pale, lean, red-nosed man with a profile grotesque as ever adorned a comic poster; who touched the piano-keys as though they were made of butter; and had a way of sucking in his steep upper-lip and cocking his eye at the star as he waited on her famous efforts, that made Patrine shake with suppressed laughter on her green iron chair.

The last ironic line of Rollinat's ballad, marvellously uttered rather than sung, died out upon a stillness. A storm of approval broke. Men and women stood up applauding in their places, and the singer came back, to sigh out the bitter-sweet lyric of Jammes, "_Le Parle de Dieu_." Then, while her name still tossed on the surges of human emotion, backwards and forwards under the electrics, Colette Colin, the pet of Paris, the eclipser of the famous Theresa, was gone. Something of the yearning anguish of Jammes, who sees Religion as a dusty collection of ancient myths and folk-tales; to whom Faith is mere superstition, but who would give his all to be able to pray once more as in childhood, had given the girl lumps in the throat as she listened to Colette Colin. Though, unlike the sad, Agnostic poet, Patrine had no tender, sentimental memories in connection with a mother's knee.

Not from Mildred Saxham had she learned her first childish prayer, but from a procession of nurses; beginning with "Now I Lay Me Down" and "Gentle Jesus," instilled by Hannah, a Church of England woman, continuing with the Lord's Prayer, insisted on by Susan, a Presbyterian; culminating in the "Our Father" "learned the childer" by Norah the Irish Catholic, a petition which--minus the final line--was just the same as the Lord's Prayer. Also the Creed in English, and a surreptitious "Hail Mary" which brought about the sudden exit of Norah from the domestic scene.

For teaching Patrine and Irma about God and Heaven and all that, was sufficiently interfering, said Mrs. Saxham, but when it came to Popery, _rank Popery_, it was time the woman went. So Norah ceased to be, from the point of view of the little Saxhams--and He who had risen above the horizon of childish intelligence, a Being vaguely realised as all-powerful and awful, great and beneficent, stern and tender, sank and vanished at the same time.

But the Idea of Him remained to be merged in the personality of the child Patrine's dada. Dada, so handsome and jolly, and nearly always kind to his rough little romping Pat. The boy, Patrine's senior by sixteen months, had died in infancy. Captain Saxham was always gloomy on the deceased David's birthday. Mildred reserved a nervous headache of the worst for the anniversary, the kind that is accompanied by temper and tears.

She was indifferent to Patrine, who resembled the Saxhams. But she was devoted to Irma, her own image bodily and mentally. Thus nothing interfered with Patrine's adoration of her father. The handsome, genial, ex-officer of cavalry was his daughter's god, until Mildred tore away the veil of Deity, broke the shrine and cast down the idol, one day when Patrine was fourteen years old.

The girl learned that Captain Saxham's noisy fun and alternating fits of rage were due to over-indulgence in brandy-and-soda. That he gambled away Mildred's income over cards and Turf speculations, as he had wasted the sum of money for which his Commission had been sold. That he was "not even faithful"--that he spent week-ends "at hotels with fast women"; that he was not worthy the sacrifice Mildred had made for him.

Had she not for his sake jilted his younger brother, Owen! Even on the verge of their marriage; the presents received; the house taken and furnished; the trousseau ready, everything perfect to the last pin in the wedding veil. Nobody could resist David when he chose to woo, but why, why had Mildred yielded? So fierce a sense of shame awakened in the daughter as she listened, that it seemed to her as though her face and body scorched in the embrace of an actual, material flame.

"How could he? ... How could you? ... Betray Uncle Owen.... One of you was as low-down as the other, to play a beastly, sneaking game like that!"

"You insult your mother and father. Leave the room!" commanded Mildred. And Patrine left it, vigorously slamming the door.

Captain Saxham, who had sold out of the Army when Patrine and Irma were respectively seven and six years old, never knew what he had lost in the esteem of his elder daughter. She loved him still, but he had ceased to be her god. They lived at Croybourn and occupied three sittings at one of its several Anglican Churches. The Vicar, a strenuous man, whipped in Patrine and Irma for Confirmation classes. They studied the Thirty-Nine Articles, the Athanasian Creed, and dipped once more into the Protestant Church Catechism, first instilled at the certified High School for the Daughters of Gentlemen--an establishment they attended as day-pupils, and were to leave, without passing the Oxford Secondary, in the following year when Captain Saxham died.

For David, that cheerful, easy-going Hedonist, dropped off the perch quite suddenly, in the smoking-room of his London Club. In life he had been of the easy-going type of Christian, who avoids open scandal, and hopes to die at peace with the clergyman.

An attack of cerebral effusion had anticipated the clergyman. Mildred and Irma wept bitterly, Patrine sat dry-eyed. Even in the face of the new tombstone at Woking Cemetery, testifying to the many virtues of David, as soldier, husband, and father, her stiff eyelids remained unmoistened by a tear. At the base of the scrolled Cymric Cross ran a text in leaded letters:

BLESSED ARE THE DEAD WHO DIE IN THE LORD.

The undertaker had recommended the text to the widow because it contained the right number of letters required to fit in at the bottom. But did it fit in, Patrine had sometimes wondered, quite so appropriately, at the close of her father's life?

She treasured his portrait, taken at the age of thirty, the tinted presentment of a handsome, stupid young officer, resplendent in the gold and blue and scarlet of a crack Dragoon regiment. It had fallen to her keeping when her mother had re-married. But she cherished no illusions regarding the original. How often, since her own eyes had been opened to the fact of their existence, had she not screened David's vices from strangers' eyes.

She had made him her ideal, and Mildred had revealed him to her as vicious, unprincipled. She could not forgive her mother for telling her those horrors, she, Mildred--seemed to forget whenever she was pleased. But Patrine had never forgotten. She would wake at night even now with the dry sobs shaking her.... To have been able to believe in that dead father as noble, chivalrous, good, would have been so sweet; she had shed big surreptitious tears in sympathy with the anguish of Jammes, who would have so loved to believe in the existence of Almighty God, and the dear little Jesus, the Blessed Virgin, and the holy Angels, because Faith is so restful, _si paisible_....

*CHAPTER XV*

*THE BITE IN THE KISS*

But von Herrnung was saying, as they moved with a straggling procession of similar pleasure-seekers, over smooth sanded pathways between beds of geranium and verbena and lobelia, ivy-leaved geranium and gaily coloured foliage-plants, bordered with little twinkling lamps:

"Shall I tell you what I have just heard as those people passed us? The tall man with the white moustache, and the chic little woman in the Spanish _mantilla_. She told her friend that we make a handsome couple. Perhaps that makes you a little angry? ... Shall I make you still more angry? Well then, listen? ... If we were really a couple you would not have that so-black hair...."

"Why not?" He had roused her curiosity. She put away the little damp, laced handkerchief. "Would your cruel usage of me have turned it white?"

"Not that, but you would have added the one touch that makes perfection. You are too sombre--too much like a night in October with all that cloudy blackness.... You would have bleached and dyed your hair--not yellow, nor yet orange--nor even flame.... The colour of beech-leaves in winter, as one sees them burning against a snow-bank. And--all the women would be crazy with jealousy--and all the men would be dying at your feet! For you would be Isis then--you would be the Sphinx-woman of whom La Forgue wrote and Colette has sung to us. You would be hellishly, divinely beautiful!"

"Hellish again." She gave her low, deep laugh, prolonging it a trifle stagily. "What do you bet me I don't--do what you said?"

"Bleach and dye...?"

"That's it." She nodded. "To the colour of--what was it? 'Beech-leaves in winter.' ..."

"Against a snow-bank." He added: "The snow is your wonderful skin. And I will bet you four hundred and twenty marks--that is twenty pounds English. Is it agreed? ... Do you not say--Done? ..."

"Twenty pounds...." She shrugged her big white shoulders. "My dear man, I haven't got twenty pounds in this blessed old world!"

He hesitated; finally said with reluctance:

"I will lend you twenty pounds--it will cost you twenty pounds to have your hair done here in Paris.... But you will be _sehr schoen_--the money will be well spent. No? ..."--for she had shaken her head, frowning. "It is offered--why will you not accept?"

"Because I won't.... There are some things I draw the line at. Borrowing money's one of them."

"Then I will bet you my magpie pearl--you may have seen it"--he displayed the ornamented little finger--"against that not-very-good diamond you wear on your left hand."

She burst out laughing and repeated through her laughter: "'Not very good.' I call that insulting.... When it cost me fifteen francs in the Palais Royal. Well, done with you!"

"It is done! But you have not done with me." Von Herrnung's tone had a new note of triumph. He urged: "You go back to London--when? ... The day after to-morrow.... _Gut!_ ... I have myself to visit London upon business--I shall see Isis with her beautiful new hair. One thing more. An address where I may call and see it. Be quick! We turn down here! ..."

Patrine protested, peering with narrowed eyes through the dusk-blue twinkling semi-darkness. "But no! ... That big marquee-thing at the end of this avenue--with all the festoons of lights and the ring of promenade about it--surely that's the _Pavilion de la Danse_?"

"_Halt den Mund!_" His hand closed peremptorily on her arm: he hurried her down the trellised vine walk that invited on the left of them, as light measured footsteps padded on the gravel, and a man ran past calling, as it seemed, to somebody ahead:

"Miss Saxham ahoy! ... Lady Beauvayse----"

"He's calling me. It's Captain Courtley...." Patrine persisted.

"Let him call! Are you not with me?" Von Herrnung's tone was masterful. "You shall go to him when you have given me that London address!"

She was amused and yet annoyed by his persistency.

"Oh, all right! 'The Ladies' Social Club, Short Street, Piccadilly, West.' That's where I'm generally to be found when I'm in town."

"_Sehr gut_! Tell me once again, then I shall not forget, no!"

"Write it on your cuff!"