CHAPTER FOUR

Sidney was ensconced in an arm-chair in his sister's pleasant sitting-room. There was not much of him to be seen, save a pair of elegantly trousered legs crossed in mid air. Examining the treasures in a glass cupboard at the other side of the room was Prince Eduard. Both young men were smoking. They did not speak, but seemed to be awaiting some event which might break the distressful tension that resulted from their being alone together. They heard Diana moving about in a neighbouring room. Neither could endure the other, and both were now cudgelling their brains to discover why Diana should have brought them together a second time. A superficial look would imply that they had much in common. One in the early twenties, the other close on thirty, they both sought the same kind of distractions in the same kind of club circles, both were courtly, of an ironical turn of mind, reserved; it might have been expected that even in the course of many years' acquaintanceship no cause of friction should arise between them.

And yet from the first moment when Diana had introduced them to one another, a spontaneous feeling of mistrust had seized them both. Could it have been Sidney's boyish good looks, and the shy hesitancy of his first handshake, that had annoyed the elder man? Or was it the assumed stiffness of Prince Eduard's pose? Eduard sensed a dangerous reticence in the youth; Sidney felt that the prince's silence was due to arrogance; each had mental reserves in respect of the other. Thinking over the matter afterwards, they justified their attitude satisfactorily to themselves: the brother seeing in Eduard a princeling in search of a beautiful mistress; Eduard, a brother who by gambling and underground activities was bringing further discredit on a family which had already suffered in the world's esteem. This evening they had hitherto been content to exchange a chilly and formal greeting.

Although it was Sidney's duty to play the host in his sister's stead until she should appear, it fell to the prince to break the long silence. Pointing to the glass-doored cupboard with the tip of his patent-leather shoe, he said:

"A fine piece. Simplicity is after all the best master. How restful this room is with its couple of easy chairs, its two serviceable tables, its many flowers and few pictures. It speaks eloquently of the occupant!"

"Yes, thank goodness," agreed Sidney, pulling himself up and looking round. "Style consists in bringing suitable things together. I can conceive of nothing more intolerable than to have to live in a 'period' house, so that one has to come in like an old-time marquis, eat in a Raphael setting, listen to music in Napoleonic surroundings, and digest one's meals among the jejune furnishings of the ordinary middle-class household. That's the English fashion...."

"Were you long in England?"

"We were brought up there--at least I was. My father lives in London."

"Fräulein de Wassilko has not spoken of him to me."

"She rarely speaks of him. She is very fond of him."

Prince Eduard became pensive. "That's beautifully put," he thought; and again he was filled with envy of those people who could live their lives out in privacy, who were not for ever forced to be in the public eyes, whose genealogy was obscure.

Sidney was thinking: "That's touched him on the raw. He did not like a reference to the father, since he thinks he'll make light work of the brother to reach his ends!" Then, in spiteful mood, and hoping to get even with this scion of a ruling house from whom he expected nothing but arrogance and treachery, he said:

"Didn't I see you the other day talking with His Highness? He looked to me a good deal older than the pictures of him would have us believe."

"My father is far from well," answered Eduard, much relieved that Diana came in at that moment.

"I'm so sorry. Please forgive me for being late. Well, Sidney, I hope you did the honours in proper style. What's the time?"

Her manner was easy. She wore a loosely falling dress with a chain of amber beads so long that it reached her knees although she had wound it twice round her neck.

"I am glad to find you 'en famille,' for I am an ambassador bringing a petition," said Eduard.

"This sounds very solemn!"

"You are respectfully requested to play the part of a goddess. The divine huntress."

"A southern one?" asked Sidney in unfriendly tones. "We are still in February--a Prussian February!"

"And yet I have just come from a hive of buzzing ladies," retorted the prince, "gathered together with intent to uplift, or ameliorate, or educate, or--well, in a word, I come from a meeting of some women's welfare society or other. The chair was occupied by my worthy chief's wife, Baroness Mühlwerth, who is a wholehearted advocate of human progress, and supports the movement with the full weight of her--of her position. The slogan runs: Down with prejudice! The committee is meeting today to discuss plans for the organization of a great propaganda festival. Admission (which does not include the banquet) gentlemen thirty marks, ladies twenty. I have never been able to fathom why the admission price for women should be less than for men.--Let that pass.--The profits to be devoted to the cause of illegitimate children, so there's to be a ball and tableaux. Subject: A Gallery of Famous Women. Of course they won't be the most important, for those only seek notoriety in memoirs. The women in this gallery are to be persons who have acquired legitimate celebrity, a celebrity built up in the course of centuries, tier upon tier like a wedding cake, from Semiramis down to Sonya Kovaleffska."

"How many tickets do you want me to buy?" asked Diana.

"Oh, but I haven't come here to sell you tickets! You are misunderstanding me. What these worthy ladies have sent me to do is to get your consent to figure in one of the tableaux they have arranged, in No. 4--or 5, I can't remember which. They literally assaulted me with petitions: You know Fräulein de Wassilko! She is so lovely, so beautiful! You must persuade her to do it! She's the only one who can take the part of Atalanta!"

Sidney frowned. His lower lip drooped, as a greyhound's does when it is about to be nasty. He moved away from the other two, murmuring:

"That's queer!"

Diana, who disliked that others should precipitate her decisions, felt mischievously defiant, and inclined to acquiesce in the plan before her better judgment could counsel her to refuse. There was vexation in her face, as she looked at her brother's back.

"Atalanta," she said softly, going towards a little bronze statue on the writing-table. It was a copy of the Diana at the Louvre, short-kirtled for action, her hand holding back by the antlers the very deer she is about to chase. Diana stood gazing down at the statuette, her arms behind her, as if studying the lines of the perfect body of the sculptured goddess. But her cold and searching glance passed beyond the little figure on the table. How long she stood thus before the godlike impersonation of herself, she did not know. Sidney, the inevitable cigarette between his lips, stood by the window, looking askance at his sister from the farther end of the room. Eduard, on the other hand, felt his pulses quicken as he watched the silent colloquy with approval. For the first time he became fully aware of her two-fold nature: the pensive woman and the free woman; the ardent woman and the student. He had always instinctively felt this duality of character, but it was his cultured mind that had brought him to realization. During these last few weeks he had felt bolder, and younger than he had ever hoped he might feel again.

At first he had been unsympathetic towards the charitable scheme. But when the chairwoman had read the name of Atalanta from the list of notable women, his imagination had summoned up Diana's figure in a trice. He was, therefore, hardly surprised when commissioned to seek her out and get her to consent. All the way to her rooms, he had been wondering if she would agree. For three seconds he would see her from afar.... But it would be before a thousand others eyes.... Had not the whole thing already taken place? ... And was it not now a memory and nothing more? ... Or could it be that his heart misgave him? Was it that, from a distant box, protected behind an opera glass, he wanted to assure himself that she was as beautiful as the picture his imagination had conjured up? ... He was inclined to repent of his mission, when, with an abrupt move, as if she had suddenly made up her mind, Diana turned and faced him, supporting herself from behind by her hands on the edge of the table where the goddess presided. Then, with perfect self-possession, she said:

"Agreed!"

Sidney scowled. The prince bowed, and seemed to await an addendum. She came towards him, defiantly, and continued:

"But you can tell your ladies that I refuse to play the part in a perfunctory way. I hate tights, and nobody is to dictate to me the manner and mode of my appearance-- Good evening," she exclaimed as Scherer and Franklin came in.

Franklin had already called upon her, but she had felt a little estranged. He had plied her with questions, and she was not accustomed to giving an account of herself to anyone. She did not feel inclined to permit his bluntness to encroach upon her freedom. During the years since they had parted, Diana had developed into an independent personality. Franklin, although younger than his grey hair would lead one to believe, had become more staid; whereas she, in spite of her rich experience of life, seemed to have grown younger, to be even more full of vitality than before. He was inclined to cherish the illusion that he would be able to take up the threads where he had dropped them, become the teacher again, establish a mastery over one who had long enjoyed the boon of liberty.

Franklin would have liked to unite in himself the qualities of a man of the world and an artist, and he could not help feeling a twinge of affectionate envy for this young woman who, in spite of playing her part in the turmoil of mundane life, succeeded in being the artist as well. In addition, he was curious to know what sort of man this child--it was thus he thought of her--would bless with her favours. There would be no shadow of jealousy in this case; his regard for her was paternal, thanks to his friendship with her father and his relationship to her as a little girl.

Diana read him easily, and determined to fend off his indiscreet questionings in a friendly spirit. But she felt that Sidney would not be a match for him, and would have to be shielded from his intrusiveness. The four guests were obviously embarrassed. Though each had been separately to Diana's rooms before, they had never met here together. There was a feeling of tension in the air, which warned the hostess that she had better lead her guests to the dining-room as soon as possible, when at that very moment Wilhelm arrived breathless on the scene and put them all at their ease.

"So sorry, it really isn't my fault," he gabbled in his usual rambling way, "for what could I do if a dapple-grey horse drawing a carriage, very slowly, passed me by, with a lady inside smiling like the queen of heaven, as they say in the court circulars, only it was true this time, yes, smiling full graciously at me..."

"Oh, Wilhelm, that's so like you," said Diana. "This is Wilhelm," she continued, turning to the company and not mentioning his surname, "and his dapple-greys are quite enough to betray what kind of a man he is without my taking the trouble to introduce him as a poet. Let's go in to dinner."

The ice was broken. None of them wished to shine, but each contributed his quota to a sprightly interchange of rather desultory conversation which ranged from overfeeding on ocean-going steamers to Hungarian national dishes and back again to the sea with its dolphins and its flying fishes. Diana, as hostess, was prone to take a back seat, and so this evening she let her five guests do the talking while she followed the trail of her own thoughts: "They are all artists and men of the world, and yet I should be nonplussed, except of course in Wilhelm's case, to say just exactly what each of them really is, for Scherer is also a philosopher, and I fancy the prince hides the heart of a poet."

"You must decide," she heard Prince Eduard say to Franklin, "for, sandwiched as I am between two poets, I have no choice but to fall back upon the time-honoured method of setting you one against the other! On my right," he phrased his speech rather peculiarly so as to avoid mentioning names, seeing that he knew the young man only as Wilhelm, "we have enthusiastic eulogies of your position as consul. Can you, in spite of having been there in person, swear in cold blood that Zanzibar, an exporting land of third-rate importance, exchanged (thank all the gods there be) against Heligoland, is a genuine island swimming on the bosom of the waters, and is not just a place on a map where the sea is always painted such an obstreperous blue? That forests of palm trees, forests like our Grunewald with its pines, Potsdam in short, stretch away for mile upon mile against the everlastingly cloudless skies? That coco-nuts, as large as a full-sized baby, hang threateningly suspended over the heads of the natives, and when one of the fruits does happen to fall it is the nut and not the head which suffers damage?"

"What is Your Highness doing?" exclaimed Wilhelm. "Would you deprive us even of the scent of clove carnations in that magic isle? It does smell of carnations, doesn't it, Dr. Franklin? Say it does, please! I read all about it in a detailed account, and have no intention of influencing you one way or the other."

"Well," bantered Scherer, "are you going to answer as poet or as man of the world?"

"Both conceptions of the place are correct," began Franklin perfectly seriously. But he could not proceed, for the company burst into merry laughter.

"As diplomatist," exclaimed Diana. "But the day you become Austrian minister for foreign affairs you'll have to write verses again, poems about Zanzibar."

"Maybe--when we have dined," put in Wilhelm, whose author's vanity was a trifle touched. "For the moment, we want an answer to the prince's question."

"You are right, Herr Wilhelm," said Franklin, "Zanzibar is a medley of Indian gems, of silks, wood inlays, daggers; it is a wilderness of phœnix palms; an island in the sea, which catches the rays of sun and moon so that it becomes iridescent as a shell; it is a place wherein the long, lean Arab steals to and fro; where the palaces have roofs opening to the sky, and princely dames sit there of an evening, fanning themselves drowsily in the twilight. No place, be it never so hoary with saga and legend, is more entrancing than this island whose airs are heavy with the scent of carnations. But Zanzibar is likewise a market of third-rate (though I fancy it has risen to second place now!) importance; it has an export harbour with evil-smelling warehouses, yelling niggers, black women at whose pendant breasts squalling children tug. It is a nest of wicked intriguers acting on behalf of the great powers, a land whose soil is being drained of its fertility by the thriftless farming of Arabs, a land overrun by rapacious half-castes and perfidious Hindus--in fact it is a world in miniature, Herr Wilhelm, just like any other State where the chancelleries and business houses smell, like Zanzibar, of the mixed perfumes of carnations and sweat."

"I am all for the carnations," cried Wilhelm resolutely.

"Quite recently," said Scherer, "I heard a speaker who demanded justice for his brethren, and yet he was howled down by the very persons on whose behalf he was speaking, because he advocated methods of achievement that pleased him but which did not please his auditors. What was that man out for, do you fancy? For the carnations? Or for the sweat?"

"For crucifixion," murmured the prince.

"Maybe he was out for power," said Diana pensively, looking at the last speaker. But Eduard did not answer. At such moments her voice was apt to become inaudible to his ears, and he was only aware of the shaft from her falcon eyes.

When, later, they had gone to her sitting-room, the prince said softly to Diana:

"This consul represents the newer forms of public activity. He has, as it were, skipped the disappointments which are almost inevitably the lot of idealists. And yet I cannot rid myself of one final doubt, whether the expenditure of time, energy, and talent is really worth the experience gained, whether there is any balance between the two--as in the case of that marvellous cuckoo clock we had in the nursery at home, which went unfailingly for twenty years and was obviously wound up by the hand of God."

"The present cuckoo," said Sidney sardonically, fixing his eyes on Franklin, "is obviously wound up every morning with the utmost precision."

His sally at the elder man's expense brought balm to his feelings, which had been set on edge by Franklin's paternal attitude. But it laid him open to a possible agreement with the prince's contention, and this he determined to avoid. He found it impossible to escape a feeling of antagonism towards all men who admired his sister, for he was jealous of her without loving her, and hated her friends without harbouring any jealousy towards them.

Scherer, who had been keeping a tight hand on himself all the evening, now said reflectively:

"Herr Franklin is a poet, whatever you may say."

"And precisely for that reason we can allow him his export statistics," exclaimed Diana.

Meanwhile Franklin and Wilhelm were standing in the bow window. The young man seemed to have won the elder man's regard. Candour, and belief in everything that was said, such were two of the characteristics possessed by Wilhelm, and they reminded Franklin of himself as a youth, though, if he remembered rightly, he had been somewhat more ambitious at Wilhelm's age. He was genuinely happy at finding so disingenuous a youngster, one who looked forth with such innocent eyes into a world which Franklin at that age had already resolved to analyse and investigate.

"Would you, too, like to travel?" he asked at length.

"I can't understand you," said Wilhelm irrelevantly. "When I listen to you speaking, you seem to me like one of those knights of old who wore silken shifts under their armour."

"Armour does not form part of my outfit," answered Franklin gaily. "But I always carry an opera glass handy, and alternately look through the wrong end and the right. Thus I get a vision of the world at close quarters or at a distance--a most hygienic exercise for the eyes of one's soul!"

He moved away to join the others, for he wanted to get Scherer to elaborate an idea which had only been broached between them at the Political Club recently: the idea of introducing on the continent the English system of news service, the "tape," whereby items of interest were recorded without comment anywhere you liked.

"I can't see," said Scherer, "why Berlin should not be able to install what every good hotel in London has installed in the lounge. It's merely a matter of organization."

"As to telegraph, I'd have it introduced right into the heart of the jungle," exclaimed Franklin, rhapsodically. "It is the symbol of our epoch. I am fascinated with the notion that when I become a minister of State I shall sit in my little office and my words shall float out over land and sea, and shall be recorded there, crisp and dry, meting out law and order to nigger chieftains!"

"No doubt about the dryness," commented Eduard, "especially when we are dealing with dispatches from the Wilhelm Strasse!"

Wilhelm, who was all ears, could not understand what they were laughing at, and asked them to explain the joke.

"Just imagine for a moment," exclaimed Franklin good-humouredly, while Diana handed round the coffee, "a long strip of paper, endlessly running on a rod under a a little glass plate, and a strange kind of pencil writing on it, ceaselessly writing, day and night, while you stand in front of it...."

"What is it writing? A novel?"

"Something far more precious," said Diana, who was taking an active part in this new undertaking of Scherer's. "It's writing the most exciting things imaginable, for the tape itself has no idea what is going to be inscribed on it from minute to minute."

Wilhelm suspected them all of playing upon his credulity, and asked cautiously:

"Who dictates the stuff?"

"Life, Wilhelm!"

Diana spoke quietly and reverently. Eduard was moved by the words and by the way she had said them. Franklin was struck by the tone of her voice, and vague thoughts drifted through his brain. But Scherer came to the young poet's rescue.

"At a telephone exchange, thousands of messages flow in from every part of the world...."

"Yes, I know that...."

"Well, by means of a ticker," exclaimed Scherer patiently, "news is recorded on a strip of paper, and the message then transmitted through another instrument to hundreds of hotels and clubs and private houses. And these tickers, as the paper moves continually onward, record all the important happenings throughout the world, and news-items are received simultaneously from Peking, Washington, Hamburg, or Zanzibar, always at the same speed, always in the same signs, without interruption, without any arrangement, just haphazard as they take place and as they are sent in."

"Wonderful," said Wilhelm softly. "It's like a piece of finely worked tapestry, a Gobelin."

"A mirror," put in Diana.

"A rhapsody," exclaimed Franklin.

All eyes were turned upon Wilhelm, who stood pensive. During the pause which followed, Prince Eduard joined them, saying:

"To me it sounded more like a fugue."

"It is a fugue," cried Diana and Franklin in one voice. This made them laugh; but the prince felt uneasy. Was she on intimate terms with this grey-haired and yet youthful man? Or had they been on such good terms formerly that now, after many years' separation, without prearrangement, they should have the same thoughts?

At that moment a sound came from the door. They all turned round to see who was there. The handle was pressed down, but no one entered.

"Doreville," cried Diana. The door was pushed open a little way and a light grey muzzle was seen through the opening. Then followed the remainder of a dog, whose length of limb and whose build resembled a greyhound, but whose muscular development and smooth coat made him look more like a Great Dane.

Sidney was transformed. The dog had made straight for him, and was now rubbing its head against the young man's knee. Laughing down at the creature, Sidney fondled it and spoke gently to it, bending over it affectionately. He looked so amazingly beautiful at the moment, that although none of the four other men could bear him, they were constrained to stare in silence at the charming picture.

Then the animal went over to Diana, and she, jumping up to meet it, pulled it towards her. At the same time her eyes caught sight of the statuette on the writing-table, and she scrutinized it as though to test it, to compare it with herself.

"The girl should be riding a horse," thought Franklin, "instead of sitting in an office; or she should be sailing upon the waters of her Macedonian birthplace, instead of being engaged in paddling about on the ponds of such typically urban conversations!"

"Maybe he was out for power," repeated Prince Eduard to himself, for Diana's tone had forced him to apply the words to himself.

Sidney and Wilhelm were looking at each other from either end of the room.

"He is certainly very handsome," thought Wilhelm. "But I wonder if he really can draw?"

"If I only had the naïveté of that boy," thought Sidney, "I'd be a genius."