*chapter Xiii*
*THE SUPERMAN*
People had for some time been rising, passing out through the oxidised silver-framed glass doors of Spitz’s big brilliant dining-room; beyond these the vestibule was now full to the walls, so that its palms and tree-ferns rocked amidst the billows of a heaving human sea. Many guests lingered in conversation, standing in groups near the vacated tables. The glitter and blaze of jewels, adorning bizarre coiffures, bare and powdered throats, bosoms, arms, and backs,—the dazzling display of brilliantly-hued toilettes, made an ensemble marvellously gay. And now, returning as they had arrived, but unattended by M. Spitz, came the party of notables from the German Embassy, talking together in loud, harsh, Teutonic accents. Von Herrnung, erect, stiffening to the salute as previously, remained in the rigid attitude until the Ambassador had passed. But this time the official finger beckoned. He turned, pushed back his chair, and in a stride, joined the squat, elderly figure. The yellow-white, heavily-featured face with its stiff brush of white hair above the square brain-box turned to him, the deeply-pouched, shrewd grey eyes looked past him to the table he had left. The coarse mouth under the white moustache with the brushed-up points, uttered a few emphatic words. Then, with a slight nod, the representative of the All Highest at Berlin passed on. The swing-doors opened and shut behind him and his following. And von Herrnung rejoined his party, saying with a queer, excited breathlessness:
“The ladies will pardon… His Excellency had something to say!”
The ladies were rising, looking for their theatre-wraps. He deftly lifted the barbaric garment of green velvet and sable-edged ermines from the back of Miss Saxham’s chair, and, opening it, held it to receive her tall, luxuriant person, mentally commenting:
“With such hips, such a bosom, and such shoulders, the jade must be twenty-eight or nine.” And remembering how boldly she had said to him that she liked red men, he thought: “Amusement here… Nothing needed but time and opportunity—which this Bosnian affair reduces to a minimum.” “Gnaediges Fraulein will you not put on your mantel?”
She told him that she was too hot. He insisted, with all the Teuton’s dread of chill:
“But it will be cooler in the vestibule, and cooler still when we are driving. Do we not go on to a theatre? I think Lady Wathe has told me so?”
She shrugged her splendid shoulders.
“Nothing so proper. The Jardin des Milles Plaisirs, on the Champs Elysees. We’re all dead nuts on seeing the new dance from Sao Paulo. The thing that has exploded Tango and Maxixe, you know. Look!—the others are moving. Don’t let’s lose them! No! I won’t take your arm. Please carry my wrap with your coat.”
“I will put my coat on. Then I shall better carry your mantel.”
An attendant deftly hung von Herrnung’s thin black, sleeveless garment over his broad shoulders, and gave him his white silk wrap and soft crush felt. He slipped a coin into the man’s palm, its small value being instantly reflected in the features of the receiver, and moved towards the swing-doors with Patrine. She said, as a slight block momentarily arrested their progress:
“What are they all jabbering about? Who has been assassinated? What has happened at this place with the crack jaw name? …”
“Sarajevo…” came in von Herrnung’s guttural accent.
“Sarajevo… Not that I know where it is,” said the deep warm voice, that was more like a young man’s baritone than a young woman’s contralto. And von Herrnung answered, with a renewal of that tingling thrill:
“Sarajevo is the capital of Bosnia in Eastern Europe. When Austria annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1909, she made her seat of Government at Sarajevo. The Slavs grumbled. They wished for union with Servia—that little nation of pig-breeders! … They themselves—the Bosnians—are stupid peasants, duemmer Teufels!—Schafskopfs! They cultivate their land with the wooden ploughs that were used at the date of the Trojan War… But this does not interest you at all, I think?”
“How do you know it doesn’t interest me?”
“Because dress and jewellery and amusement are the chief things in your life, gnaediges Fraeulein. You are not even interested in der Politik, or in the higher Kultur. The social progress of your own country is nothing to you. You are too—“
“Too frightfully stupid… Thanks!”
“I did not say too stupid,” von Herrnung contradicted. “But if you were stupid, you are too hellishly handsome for that to matter in the least.”
To be called hellishly handsome pleased her. Her eyes gave him a flashing side-glance. As a surge in the crowd pressed her curving hip against his tall, muscular body, she took his offered arm with a rough, brusque grace. They were near the swing-doors when she spoke:
“Tell me about the Sarajevo business… Who is the official swell the Trojan ploughmen have hoisted—as Lady Beau would say?”
“I will tell you. It has happened only this morning—“
She felt the man’s powerful muscles thrill and become rigid with suppressed excitement under the hand that rested on his arm.
“Two personages of the highest rank have been horribly assassinated. The Archduke Franz Ferdinand, Kronprinz of the Imperial House of Austria, and his wife; you have heard of the Graefin Sophie Chotek, created Duchess of Hohenberg? Virtually she was Erzherzogin—Archduchess—but the wife of the Archduke by a mariage de la main gauche. A morganatic marriage—such unions have been heard of in your virtuous England.”
They had passed the swing-doors now, and mingled, with the crush in the vestibule. Patrine said, signalling with a pair of long black suede gloves and a vanity-bag of gilded metal chain-mail:
“There’s Lady Beau. Behind the second column right of the entrance. And here’s Captain Courtley coming to hurry us up!”
Courtley, smiling and unruffled as ever, dodged under the huge roseate elbow of an immense lady in Oriental kincob tissues. He gave his message, turned and dived back again. The rich, womanly baritone of Miss Saxham said, addressing von Herrnung:
“Lady Wathe and Sir Thomas Brayham have gone on in Lady Wathe’s auto-brougham. Lord Norwater has done a bunk. Pretended he had an appointment; he’s been frightfully fed up with all of us this evening. Lady Beauvayse says her chauffeur is on the string all right, but about a million cars are ahead of him. Why did your Austrian Archduke and his wife go to that place in Bosnia if it wasn’t healthy for Royalties? Fancy!—they went to their deaths this Sunday morning! Why does one always forget it’s Sunday in Paris?”
“That English Sunday of yours,” exclaimed von Herrnung, “is very good to forget, I think!”
She gave her deep, soft laugh. He went on rapidly:
“Of the Archduke and the Duchess I tell you, since you have asked me… They inspected the troops—regiments of the Austrian garrison. Then they drove in their automobile along the Appel Quay, towards the Sarajevo Town Hall. They are passing beneath the shade of an avenue of tamarind and oak trees when a bomb is thrown at them by a man hidden among the branches… The Archduke is very prompt—he wards off the bomb with his arm. He is not then hurt, nor is the Duchess. But his Adjutant—in the car behind them—is wounded in the neck. When they arrive at the Town Hall the Mayor commences the address of welcome. To him Franz Ferdinand says angrily: ‘Halt den Mund! … Shut up, you silly fellow! What the big devil is the use of your speeches? I came to Sarajevo on a visit, and I get bombs thrown at me… It is too damned rotten for anything! …”
“Yes, yes! … Go on!” She bit her lips, fighting a nervous impulse to laugh.
“So the Imperial cortege drove away, and a student threw at the Archduke another bomb. It did not explode, so he shot him with an automatic revolver, an American Browning. The Duchess tried to cover him with her body, and the assassin shot her also. The Archduke begged her to live for their children, but both victims died as they were being taken to the Governor’s house… They have arrested the assassins, he who tried to kill, and the fellow who succeeded… They are both young, and men of Serb race. They are rebels all—they hate their Austrian rulers. Sarajevo is swarming with fellows of the same breed…”
“What will the Austrian Government do to them, now they’ve caught them?”
“To the regicides,” von Herrnung returned harshly, “Austria will do—nothing that very much matters. It is not an important thing to destroy two trapped rats. But I think there will be an ultimatum from Vienna to the Servian Government; and if the terms of that are not complied with, then the Emperor of Austria may give the signal for his monitors upon the Donau to open fire upon the capital of Belgrade.”
Patrine asked negligently, as a new surge of the crowd thrust her tall, lithe figure away from her companion’s, forcing her to tighten her hold upon his arm:
“‘Monitors?’ … I used to think monitors were big schoolboys and schoolgirls. Senior pupils told off to keep order. I was one myself once… Chosen because I was bigger, and noisier, and naughtier than any other girl in my class…”
“Ha, ha, ha! … Praechtig! … That is capital!” She could feel the laughter shaking his big ribs. “That is just what they are—those monitors of the Donau. Each is a big girl who keeps order von anderen Sorte. But they have turned-up noses, not Egyptian and beautiful like yours!”
He added, with the calculated roughness that had previously pleased her:
“You shall now put on your mantel. For the car, I see, is open.” He shrugged his broad square shoulders closer into his overcoat and pulled up the collar about his throat, saying ill-temperedly: “Always does one find it with the English. It is laecherlich—that passion for the air.”
“Lovely, did you say? …”
Ignorant or careless that he had said “ridiculous,” Patrine suffered him to wrap her mock ermines about her, seeing above the frieze of waiting figures that filled in the lower part of the picture framed by the portico, the emerald-green bird-of-Paradise plume of Lady Beauvayse whisk into the big white Rolls-Royce, past the neat black-haired head of Courtley, and the peaked cap and pale Cockney profile of Morris, the chauffeur. She threw back a jest as she passed out:
“I’m glad you think it lovely. It’s one of the nicest things about us—that we’re keen on soap and water and can’t do without lots of fresh air.”
She was in the car before his outstretched hand could touch her. He followed, letting Courtley precede him because he wished to sit opposite, and the great Rolls-Royce purred out of the jam beneath the illuminated glass archway, and in a moment was out of the Place Vendome and moving with the stream of vehicles down the Avenue of the Champs Elysees. In the mingling of moonlight and electric light the tawdry paste jewels of Patrine’s preposterous diadem rivalled the costly splendours of the jewelled fillets adorning Lady Beauvayse’s coiffure, her panache of white osprey flared above her broad, dark brows as insolently as though they crowned a Nitocris or a Cleopatra. But—and here was a titillating discovery—the strange face with its broad brows, wide, generously-curving cheeks, and little rounded chin, did not belong to a woman of thirty, or even twenty-five. She was much younger than the German, who plumed himself upon his flair for the accurate dating of women, had at first credited. It would be amusing—he told himself again—hellishly amusing, to cultivate this curious hybrid, half hoyden, half femme-du-monde.
Sarajevo—still Sarajevo. You caught echoes of the crime of that morning in the tongues of twenty nationalities upon the Paris boulevards that night. People in automobiles and open carriages, people in the little red and blue flagged taxis, people crowding the auto-buses and Cook’s big open brakes, the army of people on foot, endlessly streaming east and west along the great splendid thoroughfares, tossed the name of the Bosnian capital backwards and forwards, as though it had been a blood-stained ball.
A gay masculine voice called from a knot of chatterers standing near the wide illuminated archway of electric stars and crowns and flowers under which streamed a variegated crowd of pleasure-seekers as the big Rolls-Royce deposited its load:
“Nom d’un chien! What a pack of assassins these Serbians! … And yet—what if the whole show were got up by Rataplan at Berlin? … His bosom friend, you say—the big Franz Ferdinand? Zut! what of that? … Sometimes one finds inconvenient the continued existence of even a bosom friend.”