"They go about together a good deal, and he does stare at her in rather a possessive style. She's so awfully good to look at, isn't she?"
"She is; but she isn't quite so good for you to know!"
"Why?"
"Could we drop the subject? I'll say why later. Let's scoot now! With luck, we could nip in for the end of the second act of 'The Filberts' at Ryley's Theatre, and see Jimmy Griggson do 'The Dance of the Varalette.'"
And they rose and sauntered away in search of entertainment, leaving Cynthia Charterhouse drawing out von Herrnung, who seemed in a particularly arrogant mood. Did he like England and London especially? Did he find English women as nice, generally, as the friends he had left at home?
ue
"Nice.... One is charmed with English ladies!" declared von Herrnung. "So tall, willowy, and elegant, so independent of manner, and so amiably ready to make a stranger feel at home! True, they have not the plumpness and repose of our German ladies ... at the theatres especially they are rather thin than otherwise.... But they have _gehen_ and _chic_"--he showed his white teeth--"and change is a delightful thing!"
Patrine, silent in her settee-corner, wondered whether Trixie Wastwood and Cynthia Charterhouse knew that he was insulting them?
"Change from a fat woman to a thin one, is that what you mean?" asked Mrs. Charterhouse. She added: "I'm so glad we strike you as having lots of go. Perhaps it's a result of our being given to exercise, that general effect of slimness you mention. But if German women don't walk, or ride, or skate, or fence, or swim, they do dance a great deal."
"They dance a great deal, yes!" agreed von Herrnung. "One might say they are passionately devoted to it. Dancing is also one of the chief joys of a German officer's life--when he has handsome partners to choose amongst!" He added: "When one is young, and the blood runs hot in the veins, what more glowing pleasures can Life offer, than to ride a noble horse, to drink glorious wine, or to dance all night with a beautiful woman, to the sound of music voluptuous and exquisite!"
Patrine, behind the shelter of a copy of the _Pall Mall Gazette_, was shuddering uncontrollably. Her life seemed driven back from the extremities to centre about her heart. In that and in her brain were glowing cores of fire. All else was ice, rigid and heavy and cold.
"Dear me!" came plaintively from Mrs. Charterhouse. She signalled with her eyebrows to Lady Wastwood and continued, as the diaphanous Trixie came drifting to her assistance: "Really, I shall have to seek a delightful change by going to Germany. I'd quite forgotten how different you are! The way you talk about your blood, and all that. It's simply too awfully interesting! Trixie, you've got to listen to this!"
"I need no telling, I assure you. I have been drinking in Count von Herrnung's eloquence at every pore," affirmed Trixie. She added: "Like you I have been deeply intrigued by his descriptions of his countrymen. So, _so_ different from our poor creatures, who don't drink glorious wine because they funk gouty complications, and leave their noble horses eating their heads off in loose-boxes while they're scorching about the country in racing-cars. And as for dancing all night--" She shrugged her frail shoulders, and elevated her Pierrot eyebrows beneath the veil that tightly swathed her white triangular face.
"Doesn't it fire you to go to Germany?" gushed Mrs. Charterhouse. "Why"--she demanded, raising her fine eyes to the genuine Adam ceiling--"why can't my husband get a post in the Berlin Diplomatic, instead of stupid old Petersburg? One never _dreamed_ Germans could be so interesting before!"
"We are interesting, yes!" blandly agreed von Herrnung. He lighted a fresh cigarette, balanced his magnificent person upon an inlaid Oriental chess-stool, folded his huge arms upon his broad breast, and turned upon Trixie and the impressionable Cynthia the batteries of his superb blue eyes. "_Es mag wohl sein_--it may possibly be because the Englishman is a human machine--a cold and formal, if intelligent being; while the German is a child of Nature, whatever his calling may be. His bounding pulses throb under the official or military uniform as though it were a fawn-skin worn by a young satyr. He can sing. He can revel. He can enjoy. He can love----"
"He can love! Now you're getting really quite too interesting!" Mrs. Charterhouse exclaimed in seeming ecstasy: "Do go on, Count. Pray, pray tell us how German officers love!"
"Yet this exuberance, and seeming-careless child-likeness," pursued von Herrnung, "co-exists in the representative male of our glorious German nation with an energy which is pitilessly indomitable, and a hardness like that of diamond, or of the metal of the Hammer of Thor. Scratch the child, joyous and voluptuous"--the ladies nodded to each other delightedly at this second reference to voluptuousness--"you will find beneath its rosy skin the German Superman. _Gnaedige Graefin_, may I give you a cigarette?" He pulled out a massive silver-gilt case, and offered it to Lady Wastwood, who had thrown away the end of a tiny Pera.
"Thanks," said the lady, "but it might turn out a super-cigarette and disagree with me. How astonishingly well-informed you Germans are upon the subject of yourselves! I've met heaps of your countrymen whom the subject seemed perfectly to obsess. I suppose they begin to teach you at a very early age, don't they? Don't you suppose they would, Cynthia dear?"
Mrs. Charterhouse agreed.
"Of course. But I wonder if that sort of--might one call it--intensive culture?--can be good for you?" With her charming head on one side she regarded von Herrnung pensively. "Don't you _sometimes_ get fed up with yourselves? One would somehow suppose you would! Like the East End Board School children whose mother had to write to the Fifth Standard teacher to ask her not to tell Hemma and 'Arriet any more nasty things about their insides."
Courtley and Lady Beauvayse, who under cover of a separate conversation had been listening, were seized with simultaneous attacks of coughing, rose and escaped from the smoking-room. Patrine Saxham remained, seeming to study the newspaper she had picked up. But only a confused jumble of letters, big and little, danced up and down the columns she held before her eyes.
And yet there were lines scattered here and there throughout the newspapers, that boded ill for the peace of the world. How little we dreamed of what was coming while crowded London audiences applauded Jimmy Greggson in the "Dance of the Varalette." The River was ablaze with multi-coloured sweaters, vast crowds planked their gate-money to witness cricket-matches, lawn-tennis and polo-matches, Flying contests, and bouts between International champions at the ancient game of fisticuffs.
Even while the handsome young French heavy-weight Carpentier was whacking the Yankee Smith at Olympia, white-faced, weary-eyed men of great affairs were spending the hot hours of the July days and nights--_minus_ a stray half-hour for a meal and a snatched eyeful of sleep now and then--in reading reports in cipher sent by lesser men, agents of the Secret Intelligence Department--who were registered as numbers and owned no names.
These told of vast preparations long complete, and terrible designs perfect and perfecting. Poison-fruit, grown and matured in shade, now bursting-ripe and ready to kill. The aerials thrilled, the long waves travelled through invisible ether, carrying the despatches for the weary-eyed men.
The despatches were not all in cipher. Thus little polyglot employes, youthful radiotelegraphic operators in charge of ship-stations in Territorial or foreign waters, or Wireless posts quite recently established on foreign frontiers, found themselves sharers in the secret councils of Ambassadors, Emperors, Kings, and Presidents.
In their ear-pieces such words as "situation," "utmost gravity," "friction avoided," "Triple Alliance," and "Triple Entente," were repeated over and over. To them the tuned spark sang what the Tsar was saying to his Cousin of Great Britain and the Dominions overseas. They heard the British Foreign Secretary talking from Downing Street to the British Ambassador at Berlin, and the British Ambassador at Paris, and the French President, on a visit to Tsarskoe Selo, replying to _communiques_ from the Quai d'Orsay. Also de Munsen from the Embassy at Vienna, confirming Whitehall views as to the extreme gravity of the Austro-Servian situation.
Last, but not least, the voice from a certain guarded sanctum in the Kaiserlicher Palais on the Schloss Platz, Berlin, saying in a cipher of grouped numbers, the secret language of Hohenzollern intrigue not understood of little operators--things that bleached the face of the listener in London to the yellow of old cheese.
"As Vicegerent of the World, charged by Almighty God with the supreme duty of maintaining peace among nations ... warn these silly devils of the danger in which they stand! Just for the word 'neutrality'--a word in War-time often disregarded--they risk annihilation of a dynasty by my conquering sword, and the inevitable blotting-out of the British race. Invasion Belgium indispensable.... Must strike the blow before Russia could get to the frontier. Life and death as regards the Success of my Plan. Delay by diplomacy. Promise anything for neutrality. Obtain an understanding of non-intervention. Bluff for all you are worth!"