"I shouldn't have come to-night," she said, "except that I want to talk to a lot of people about Germany. I want to tell everybody I know how much I loathe 'em all. 'The Hymn of Hate' is a lullaby to what I feel."

Polly was also conducting a glorious war with Lady Clifton-Wyatt. Lady C.-W. had bullied everybody in London so successfully that she went straight up against Polly Widdicombe without a tremor. She got what-for, and everybody was delighted. The two were devoted enemies from then on, and it was beautiful to see them come together.

Lady Clifton-Wyatt followed Polly up the receiving line to-night and invited a duel, but Polly was in no humor for a fight with anybody but Germans. She turned her full-orbed back on Lady C.-W. and, so to speak, gnashed her shoulder-blades at her. Lady C.-W. pa.s.sed by without a word, and Marie Louise was glad to hide behind Polly, for Marie Louise was mortally afraid of Lady C.-W.

She saw the American greet her as if he had met her before. Lady Clifton-Wyatt was positively polite to him. He must be a very great man.

She heard Lady Clifton-Wyatt say something about, "How is the new ship coming on?" and the American said, "She's doing as well as could be expected."

So he was a ship-builder. Marie Louise thought that his must be a heartbreaking business in these days when ships were being slaughtered in such numbers. She asked Polly and her husband if they knew him or his name.

Widdicombe shook his head. Polly laughed at her husband. "How do you know? He might be your own mother, for all you can tell. Put on your distance-gla.s.ses, you poor fish." She turned to Marie Louise. "You know how near-sighted Tom is."

"An excellent fault in a man," said Marie Louise.

"Oh, I don't know," said Polly. "You can't trust even the blind ones.

And you'll notice that when Tom comes to one of these decollete dinners, he wears his reading-gla.s.ses."

All this time Widdicombe was taking out his distance-gla.s.ses, taking off his reading-gla.s.ses and pouching them and putting them away, and putting on his distance-gla.s.ses, and from force of habit putting their pouch away. Then he stared at Davidge, took off his distance-gla.s.ses, found the case with difficulty, put them up, pocketed them, and stood blearing into s.p.a.ce while he searched for his reading-gla.s.ses, found them, put the case back in his pocket and saddled his nose with the lenses.

Polly waited in a mockery of patience and said:

"Well, after all that, what?"

"I don't know him," said Widdicombe.

It was a good deal of an anticlimax to so much work.

Polly said: "That proves nothing. Tom's got a near-memory, too. The man's a pest. If he didn't make so much money, I'd abandon him on a door-step."

That was Polly's form of baby-talk. Everybody knew how she doted on Tom: she called him names as one scolds a pet dog. Widdicombe had the helpless manner of one, and was always at heel with Polly. But he was a t.i.tan financially, and he was signing his name now to munitions-contracts as big as national debts.

Marie Louise was summoned from the presence of the Widdicombes by one of Lady Webling's most mysterious glances, to meet a new-comer whom Lady Webling evidently regarded as a special treasure. Lady Webling was as wide as a screen, and she could always form a sort of alcove in front of her by turning her back on the company. She made such a nook now and, taking Marie Louise's hand in hers, put it in the hand of the tall and staring man whose very look Marie Louise found invasive. His handclasp was somehow like an illicit caress.

How strange it is that with so much modesty going about, people should be allowed to wear their hands naked! The fashion of the last few years compelling the leaving off of gloves was not really very nice.

Marie Louise realized it for the first time. Her fastidious right hand tried to escape from the embrace of the stranger's fingers, but they clung devil-fishily, and Lady Webling's soft cushion palm was there conniving in the abduction. And her voice had a wheedling tone:

"This is my dear Nicky I have spoken of so much--Mr. Easton, you know."

"Oh yes," said Marie Louise.

"Be very nice to him," said Lady Webling. "He is taking you out to dinner."

At that moment the butler appeared, solemn as a long-awaited priest, and there was such a slow crystallization as follows a cry of "Fall in!" to weary soldiers. The guests were soon in double file and on the march to the battlefield with the cooks.

Nicky Easton still had Marie Louise's hand; he had carried it up into the crook of his right arm and kept his left hand over it for guard. A lady can hardly wrench loose from such an attention, but Marie Louise abhorred it.

Nicky treated her as a sort of possession, and she resented his courtesies. He began too soon with compliments. One hates to have even a bunch of violets jabbed into one's nose with the command, "Smell!"

She disliked his accent, too. There was a Germanic something in it as faint as the odor of high game. It was a time when the least hint of Teutonism carried the stench of death to British nostrils.

Lady Webling and Sir Joseph were known to be of German birth, and their phrases carried the tang, but Sir Joseph had become a naturalized citizen ages ago and had won respect and affection a decade back. His lavish use of his money for charities and for great industries had won him his knighthood, and while there was a certain sniff of suspicion in certain fanatic quarters at the mention of his name, those who knew him well had so long ago forgotten his alien birth that they forgave it him now.

As for Marie Louise, she no longer heeded the Prussic acid of his speech. She was as used to it as to his other little mannerisms. She did not think of the old couple as fat and awkward. She did not a.n.a.lyze their attributes or think of their features in detail. She thought of them simply as them. But Easton was new; he brought in a subtle whiff of the hated Germany that had done the _Lusitania_ to death.

The fate of the ship made the dinner resemble a solemn wake. The triumphs of the chef were but funeral baked meats. The feast was brilliant and large and long, and it seemed criminal to see such waste of provender when so much of the world was hungry. The talk was almost all of the _Lusitania_ and the deep d.a.m.nation of her taking off. Many of the guests had crossed the sea in her graceful sh.e.l.l, and they felt a personal loss as well as a bitterness of rage at the worst of the German sea crimes.

Davidge was seated remotely from Marie Louise, far down the flowery lane of the table. She could not see him at all, for the candles and the roses. Just once she heard his voice in a lull. Its tw.a.n.g carried it all the way up the alley:

"A man that would kill a pa.s.senger-ship would shoot a baby in its cradle. When you think how long it takes to build a ship, how much work she represents, how sweet she is when she rides out and all that--by Gosh! there's no word mean enough for the skoundrels. There's nothing they won't do now--absolutely nothing."

She heard no more of him, and she did not see him again that night.

She forgot him utterly. Even the little wince of distress he gave her by his provincialism was forgotten in the anguish her foster-parents caused her.

For Marie Louise had a strange, an odious sensation that Sir Joseph and Lady Webling were not quite sincere in their expressions of horror and grief over the finished epic, the _Lusitania_. It was not for lack of language; they used the strongest words they could find. But there was missing the subtile somewhat of intonation and gesture that actors call sincerity. Marie Louise knew how hard it is even for a great actor to express his simplest thoughts with conviction. No, it was when he expressed them best that he was least convincing, since an emotion that can be adequately presented is not a very big emotion; at least it does not overwhelm the soul. Inadequacy, helplessness, gaucherie, prove that the feelings are bigger than the eloquence. They "get across the footlights" between each player on the human stage and his audience.

Yes, that was it: Sir Joseph and Lady Webling were protesting too well and too much. Marie Louise hated herself for even the disloyalty of such a criticism of them, but she was repelled somehow by such rhetoric, and she liked far better the dour silence of old Mr.

Verrinder. He looked a bishop who had got into a layman's evening dress by mistake. He was something very impressive and influential in the government, n.o.body knew just what.

Marie Louise liked still better than Verrinder's silence the distracted muttering and stammering of a young English aviator, the Marquess of Strathdene, who was recuperating from wounds and was going up in the air rapidly on the Webling champagne. He was maltreating his bread and throwing in champagne with an apparent eagerness for the inevitable result. Before he grew quite too thick to be understood, he groaned to himself, but loudly enough to be heard the whole length and breadth of the table: "I remember readin' about old Greek witch name Circe--changed human beings into shape of swine. I wonder who turned those German swine into the shape of human beings."

Marie Louise noted that Lady Webling was shocked--by the vulgarity, no doubt. "Swine" do not belong in dining-room language--only in the platters or the chairs. Marie Louise caught an angry look also in the eye of Nicholas Easton, though he, too, had been incisive in his comments on the theme of the dinner. His English had been uncannily correct, his phrases formal with the exact.i.tude of a book on syntax or the dialogue of a gentleman in a novel. But he also was drinking too much, and as his lips fuddled he had trouble with a very formal "without which." It resulted first as "veetowit veech," then as "whidthout witch." He made it on the third trial.

Marie Louise, turning her eyes his way in wonder, encountered two other glances moving in the same direction. Lady Webling looked anxious, alarmed. Mr. Verrinder's gaze was merely studious. Marie Louise felt an odd impression that Lady Webling was sending a kind of heliographic warning, while the look of Mr. Verrinder was like a search-light that studies and registers, then moves away.

Marie Louise disliked Easton more and more, but Lady Webling kept recommending him with her solicitous manner toward him. She made several efforts, too, to shift the conversation from the _Lusitania_; but it swung always back. Much bewilderment was expressed because the ship was not protected by a convoy. Many wondered why she was where she was when she was struck, and how she came to take that course at all.

Lady Clifton-Wyatt, who had several friends on board and was uncertain of their fate, was unusually fierce in blaming the government. She always blamed it for everything, when it was Liberal. And now she said:

"It was nothing short of murder to have left the poor ship to steal in by herself without protection. Whatever was the Admiralty thinking of?

If the Cabinet doesn't fall for this, we might as well give up."

The Liberals present acknowledged her notorious prejudices with a sigh of resignation. But the Marquess of Strathdene rolled a foggy eye and a foggy tongue in answer:

"Darlling llady, there must have been war-ships waitin' to convoy the _Lusitania_; but she didn't come to rendezvous because why? Because some filthy Zherman gave her a false wireless and led her into a trap."

This amazing theory with its drunken inspiration of plausibility startled the whole throng. It set eyeb.a.l.l.s rolling in all directions like a break in a game of pool. Everybody stared at Strathdene, then at somebody else. Marie Louise's racing gaze noted that Mr.

Verrinder's eyes went slowly about again, studying everybody except Strathdene.

Lady Clifton-Wyatt's eyes as they ran simply expressed a disgust that she put into words with her usual frankness:

"Don't be more idiotic than necess'ry, my dear boy; there are secret codes, you know."

"S-secret codes I know? Secret codes the Germans know--that's what you mean, sweetheart. I don't know one little secret, but Huns-- Do you know how many thousand Germans there are loose in England--do you?"

Lady Clifton-Wyatt shook her head impatiently. "I haven't the faintest notion. Far more than I wish, I'm sure."

"I hope so, unless you wish fifty thousand. And G.o.d knows how many more. And I'm not alluthing to Germans in disguise, naturalized Germans--quinine pills with a little coating. I'm not referring to you, of course, Sir Joseph. Greates' respect for you. Ever'body has.

You have done all you could to overcome the fatal error of your parents. You're a splen'id gen'l'man. Your 'xception proves rule. Even Germans can't all be perf'ly rotten."