"Of course I was regretting my brother, yes!" said von Herrnung. "But I do not pretend that his death did not improve what you English would call my worldly prospects. That is the cant of Christianity--particularly the sentimental Christianity of England. One world is not enough for your greed of possession. You must eat your cake here and hereafter. But for the robust super-humanity of Germany, this world is both Hell and Heaven. It is Hell for the man who is stupid, weakly, poor, and conscience-ridden. It is Heaven for the man who has knowledge, power, health, wealth, the craft to keep his riches, and the capacity to enjoy to the fullest the pleasures they can procure him, with the courage to free himself from the bonds of what Christians and Agnostics term Morality, and live precisely as Nature prompts. So when my brother fell in the charge," continued von Herrnung, with perfect seriousness, "he opened for me the gates of Heaven. Since then I am a god!"
"A mortal god," called out the chuckling Brayham; "for you've got to die, you know, when your number's up."
"When the time comes, of course I shall die," acquiesced von Herrnung, "in the vulgar sense of the word. But not so those who come after. Our bacteriologists will have discovered the microbe of old age and its antitoxin, and then we shall die no more."
"Dashed if I know the difference between the vulgar way of dying and the other style!" Brayham snorted apoplectically, feeling in his waistcoat-pocket for the box of digestive tabloids that showed in a bulge. "Dashed unpleasant certainty--however you look at it! And a man who weighs eighteen stone at fifty has _got_ to look at it, every time his tailor lets out his waistcoats, and his valet asks him to order more collars because the last lot have shrunk in the wash."
"Ah, yes, to die is a hellish bore!" agreed von Herrnung, contemplating his obese and purple host with a cruel smile. "But I and my friends have no Hell, and we have done away with the myth of Heaven. To dissolve and be reabsorbed into the elements--that is the only after-life that is possible for a Superman."
"You'd hardly call it Life, would you?" came unwillingly from Franky. For von Herrnung's eyes seemed to challenge his own.
"'_Imperial Caesar, dead and turned to clay_,' what?" quoted Courtley, to whom von Herrnung transferred his smiling regard.
"I venture to hope that my clay may serve a more patriotic purpose than stopping a draught-hole," said the German, carefully fingering the tight roll of glittering red hair upon his upper-lip. "It may be baked into a sparking-plug for the aero-motor of one of our Zeppelin dirigibles--the mysterious Z. X., for instance, in whose trial trip from Stettin across the Baltic to Upsala in Sweden you were so keenly interested some months ago. Or some of my body's chemical constituents may pass into the young tree beneath which my ashes will be deposited. If beech or spruce, then I may furnish ribs or struts for an Aviatik or a Taube. But the best way of continuing to exist after one is dead is to leave plenty of vigorous sons behind one. To perpetuate the race"--he continued speaking to Lord Norwater, who had flushed and moved restlessly--"that is the high and noble obligation Duty imposes upon the German Superman."
"You'll have to hurry up your matrimonial arrangements, Tido," interposed the Goblin, with her cackle, "if your family is to tot up to a respectable number before the year 1916."
"You mean that I may get killed in our great War of Extermination? That is possible," agreed von Herrnung. "Our Flying Service is not a profession conducive to long life. Many of our keenest officers remain unmarried for that reason. The Emperor would prefer each of us to marry, or at least adopt a son. For myself, I would like to steal one of your splendid British boys and rear him up as a true German----"
Something sharp and keen and burning stabbed through Franky's brain to his vitals. It would have been a relief to have insulted von Herrnung. He set his teeth, fighting with the desire, as the guttural voice went on:
"I would teach him to hate you...." The speaker sucked in his breath as though he relished the idea exceedingly. "You cannot think how he would hate you!--my German-British Superman."
"By-the-by, the literary genius of Dreadnought type who invented the Superman," began Courtley, who had been peaceably nibbling salted pistachios, "can't pronounce his name for ginger-nuts, but it sounds something like a sneeze----"
Von Herrnung said stiffly:
"You doubtless speak of our great Nietzsche, whose triumphant thought has crushed all other mental systems."
"Quite so. Must be the chap!" said Courtley. "That is, if he died a lunatic.... But possibly I'm mixing him up with some other philosopher of the crushing kind?"
"No, no. It is true," corroborated von Herrnung. "The brain of Nietzsche gave way under the terrific strain of incessant creation. How should it be otherwise?" He became ponderous, even solemn, when he descanted upon the literary idol of Modern Germany. "How should it indeed be otherwise?" he demanded. "And was it not the fitting crown of such a career--the appropriate end to such a life-work?--to evolve the Superman--and die!"
"Quite so, quite so!" Courtley agreed. He smoothed his well-trimmed beard with his broad hand, and his eyes assumed a meditative expression. "Rather tantalising--always hearing about Germany's Supermen and never seeing any. What sort of chaps are they? I'm really keen to know."
"You have not to go far," returned von Herrnung. His fine florid complexion had suffered a deteriorating change. Savage anger boiled in his blood. He had thrown the iron gauntlet of German military preparedness in the faces of these cool, well-bred, smiling English, and brandished the iron thunderbolt of German intellectual supremacy--and with this result--that they took his deadly earnestness as jest. "_Kreutzdonnerwetter!_ these English officers.... The pig-dogs! the sheep's heads! ..." He swallowed down the abusive epithets he would have liked to pitch at them, and stiffened his huge frame arrogantly as he stared in Courtley's simple face:
"_Aber_--you have not far to go, to visualise the type conceived by Nietzsche. I and my comrades--_we_ are Supermen!"
"Thanks for explaining, frightfully!" said Courtley with artless gratitude, as Brayham purpled apoplectically and even the Goblin tittered behind her fan. "Shall know what to ticket you now, you know. Thanks very much!"
"You have read Nietzsche?" the sailor's victim queried.
Said Courtley, with his best air of frank simplicity:
"His works were recommended to me by my doctor, when I had a bad attack of insomnia, about a year ago. Ordered a volume of 'Thus Spake Zara Somebody.' Half a chapter did the business. No insomnia since then. Sleep like a mite in a Gorgonzola, the instant my head touches the pillow--never read another word. But heaps of friends in the Fleet'll be wanting to borrow the book presently, depend on it. For we'll all be too scared of Germany to sleep--in the year 1916."
Laughter broke forth. Lady Wathe gasped, dabbing her tearful eyes with a lace-bordered handkerchief:
"Oh, Tido! will you dead-in-earnest Germans never learn what pulling a leg means?"
"_Ach ja_! I should have understood!" He had stared, frowned, and reddened savagely. Now, with a palpable effort, his equanimity was regained. He turned with a smiling remark to Patrine Saxham, as Lady Beauvayse breathed in Courtley's ear:
"You perfect pet! How I love you for that!"
"Man simply suffering for a set-down. Good egg, you!" murmured Franky in the other ear of the Commander.
"Felt sorry for him. Had to do something--common humanity!" rejoined Courtley, eating more and more pistachios. "Seems as over-crammed with their _Kultur_ as a pet garden-titmouse with coco-nut. Vain too, but that's the fault of the women. Lord! how they gush at those big, good-looking blighters. See the Saxham!--ready to climb into his waistcoat-pocket and stop there. Would, too, if she wasn't built on Dreadnought lines herself."
She was laughing into von Herrnung's smiling visage as he offered her a light from his cigar. For with the arrival of coffee and liqueurs, the fragrance of choice Havana and Turkish had begun to mingle with the tang of Mocha, the heady bouquet of choice wines, and the odours of fruit and flowers. The screens of frosted glass were rearranged,--the ladies had produced their cigarette-cases,--of gold with the monogram of the Goblin set in diamonds; of platinum adorned with turquoises and pearls wrought into the Beauvayse initial and coronet; and of humbler tortoiseshell, bearing in fanciful golden letters the name "Patrine"----
"Patrine..."
"The Saxham girl" had taken the tortoiseshell cigarette-case from the front of her low-cut, sleeveless bodice. Von Herrnung had leaned towards her, boldly exploring with his eyes the bosom where the trinket had been hiding, and read the golden letters. He smiled as he met her puzzled eyes, saying: