CHAPTER X

*

*A SUPERMAN*

"Do tell what the Kaiser said when he heard of the accident!" came in the voice of Lady Beauvayse, pitched now in a high, nasal tone that was a danger-signal to those who knew her, like the mischievous twinkle in her beautiful eyes. "I guess he must have been real upset!"

"_Ja, ja, gewiss_," returned von Herrnung, slightly shrugging his broad, square shoulders. "Of course the Emperor was greatly grieved for my father's loss. But naturally the programme had to be carried out. There is another day's Imperial shooting; the business is concluded--very satisfactorily--and _Seine Majestaet_ takes leave..... But of course he sent to my mother a sympathetic message, which greatly consoled her. And his Chief Equerry, Baron von Wildenberg, represented him at my brother's funeral. And shortly afterwards he graciously conferred upon my father the Second Class of the Order _Pour le Merite_."

"How nice! But what for?" demanded the downright American, with astonishment so genuine that Brayham strangled with suppressed chuckles, and the bearded mouth of Commander Courtley assumed the curve of a sly smile.

"What for?" exclaimed von Herrnung. He stiffened his big body arrogantly, reddening with evident annoyance, and thickly through his carefully-accentuated English the Teutonic consonants and gutturals began to crop. "_Gnaedige Graefin_, because that so coveted decoration is the reward of special service rendered to the Emperor. And my father in his-personal-sorrow-conquering that it upon the amusements of Imperial Majesty-might-not-intrude--had the noblest devotion and courage exhibited--in the opinion of the All-Highest."

"My land!" exclaimed Lady Beauvayse, stimulated by the undisguised enjoyment of Brayham, Courtley, and Franky, "if that don't take the team and waggon, with the yella dog underneath it, an' the hoss-fly sittin' on the near-wheel mule's left ear!" She added: "No wonder your Kaiser thinks himself the hub of this little old universe--being nourished from infancy on flapdoodle of that kind." She added, dropping the saw-edged artificial accent, and reverting to the agreeable, drawling tones familiar to her friends: "But, last fall, when King George and Queen Mary were allowing to spend the day with us at Foltlebarre Abbey, and see the Gobelins tapestries after Teniers that were restored by our great American dye-specialist, Charlotte B. Pendrill of New York--and I had a dud head with neuralgitis, and couldn't have bobbed a curtsey without screaming like peacocks before a wet spell--Lord Beauvayse just sent a respectful note of excuse over by fast car to the place in our county where their Majesties were spending a week-end, and got a kind, cosy little line by return, making an appointment for a more convenient day."

"_Es mag wohl sein_," said von Herrnung stiffly, repeating an apparently favourite phrase. "It may be so--in Great Britain. But in Germany the trivial happenings of ordinary existence are not permitted to interfere with the Imperial plans."

"Mustn't spoil Great Caesar's shoot by letting a natural sorrow dim your eye, in case you're unexpectedly informed of a family bereavement," said Brayham to Lady Beauvayse. "So now you know what to expect in case the Kaiser should take it into his head to pop in on you at Foltlebarre somewhere about July."

"I surmise I'd expect a visitor of mine, whether he's the Kaiser, the King, or the President," retorted Lady Beauvayse, "to be a gentleman!" Her beautiful eyes blazed with genuine ire as she gave back von Herrnung's dominating stare. She continued, reverting more purposefully than ever to the exaggerated New York accent, mingling cutting Yankee humour with bitter irony in the sentences that twanged, one after another, off her sharp American tongue: "And I guess, Count von Herrnung--though between your father and Amos J. Sculpin of Madison Avenue, New York, and Sculpin Towers, Schenectady, there's considerable of a social gulf--if your Emperor had been a house-guest of my parpa's, and my elder brother"--she lifted an exquisite shoulder significantly ceilingwards--"had happened to get the hoist--parpa'd just have said: 'Your Imperial Majesty, I am unexpectedly one boy short, and far from feeling hunkey. My cars are waiting at my door to convey you right-away to your hotel. Look in on us after the interment, when Mrs. Sculpin has had time to get accustomed to her mourning. And as my _chef_ had orders to serve a special dinner in honour of your Majesty, I shall be gratified by your taking the hull menoo along--outside instead of in!'"

The Goblin cackled. Ecstatic Brayham shrieked:

"Magnificent, by Gad! He ought to know your father!" Franky and Courtley yielded unrestrainedly to mirth, as did the Saxham girl. While her teeth, dazzling as those of a Newfoundland pup, gleamed in her wide red mouth, and her long eyes glittered between their narrowed eyelids, von Herrnung gave her a quick sidelong glance of anger. She caught the look, and suddenly ceased to laugh, as the young Newfoundland might have stopped barking. She said below her breath:

"Vexed? ... Why, you're really! ... And Lady Beau wasn't joking about your brother.... She wouldn't dream of such a thing! .... She's tremendously kind and sympathetic. Was he--your brother--nice? ..."

"Most women thought so."

"Would I have thought so? What was he like?" the girl persisted.

Von Herrnung turned in his chair so as to face her, answering:

"You see him now, with one difference. He was as black as I am red."

The blue eyes of the man and the long agate-coloured eyes of the young woman encountered. She said slowly in her warm, deep voice, less like a feminine contralto than the masculine baritone:

"I like--red men--best!"

"So! Then it was lucky that, instead of me, my brother Ludwig died!" said von Herrnung, so loudly that Lady Wathe's quick ear caught the final words. She shrilled out her laugh:

"But you're a wretch, Tido!" She shrugged her thin vivacious shoulders under their glittering burden. "A heartless wretch!"

"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