The Woman with the Fan
by Robert Hichens · English · Gutenberg #8549 · 507,464 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: The Woman with the Fan
Author: Robert Hichens
Release date: July 1, 2005 [eBook #8549]
Most recently updated: September 24, 2016
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/8549
Credits: Produced by Dagny, and David Widger
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WOMAN WITH THE FAN ***
Produced by Dagny, and David Widger
THE WOMAN WITH THE FAN
By Robert Hichens
CHAPTER I
IN a large and cool drawing-room of London a few people were
scattered about, listening to a soprano voice that was singing to the
accompaniment of a piano. The sound of the voice came from an inner
room, towards which most of these people were looking earnestly. Only
one or two seemed indifferent to the fascination of the singer.
A little woman, with oily black hair and enormous dark eyes, leaned back
on a sofa, playing with a scarlet fan and glancing sideways at a thin,
elderly man, who gazed into the distance from which the voice came. His
mouth worked slightly under his stiff white moustache, and his eyes, in
colour a faded blue, were fixed and stern. Upon his knees his thin and
lemon-coloured hands twitched nervously, as if they longed to grasp
something and hold it fast. The little dark woman glanced down at
these hands, and then sharply up at the elderly man’s face. A faint and
malicious smile curved her full lips, which were artificially reddened,
and she turned her shoulder to him with deliberation and looked about
the room.
On all the faces in it, except one, she perceived intent expressions.
A sleek and plump man, with hanging cheeks, a hooked nose, and hair
slightly tinged with grey and parted in the middle, was the exception.
He sat in a low chair, pouting his lips, playing with his single
eyeglass, and looking as sulky as an ill-conditioned school-boy. Once
or twice he crossed and uncrossed his short legs with a sort of abrupt
violence, laid his fat, white hands on the arms of the chair, lifted
them, glanced at his rosy and shining nails, and frowned. Then he shut
his little eyes so tightly that the skin round them became wrinkled,
and, stretching out his feet, seemed almost angrily endeavouring to fall
asleep.
A tall young man, who was sitting alone not far off, cast a glance of
contempt at him, and then, as if vexed at having bestowed upon him even
this slight attention, leaned forward, listening with eagerness to the
soprano voice. The little dark woman observed him carefully above the
scarlet feathers of her fan, which she now held quite still. His face
was lean and brown. His eyes were long and black, heavy-lidded, and
shaded by big lashes which curled upward. His features were good. The
nose and chin were short and decided, but the mouth was melancholy,
almost weak. On his upper lip grew a short moustache, turned up at the
ends. His body was slim and muscular.
After watching him for a little while the dark woman looked again at the
elderly man beside her, and then quickly back to the young fellow. She
seemed to be comparing the two attentions, of age and of youth. Perhaps
she found something horrible in the process for she suddenly lost her
expression of sparkling and birdlike sarcasm, and bending her arm, as if
overcome with lassitude, she let her fan drop on her knees, and stared
moodily at the carpet.
A very tall woman, with snow-white hair and a face in which nobility and
weariness were mated, let fall two tears, and a huge man, with short,
bronze-coloured hair and a protruding lower jaw, who was sitting
opposite to her, noticed them and suddenly looked proud.
The light soprano voice went on singing an Italian song about a summer
night in Venice, about stars, dark waters and dark palaces, heat, and
the sound of music, and of gondoliers calling over the lagoons to their
comrades. It was an exquisite voice; not large, but flexible and very
warm. The pianoforte accompaniment was rather uneasy and faltering. Now
and then, when it became blurred and wavering, the voice was abruptly
hard and decisive, once even piercing and almost shrewish. Then the
pianist, as if attacked by fear, played louder and hurried the tempo,
the little dark woman smiled mischievously, the white-haired woman put
her handkerchief to her eyes, and the young man looked as if he wished
to commit murder. But the huge man with the bronze hair went on looking
equably proud.
When the voice died away there was distinct, though slight, applause,
which partially drowned the accompanist’s muddled conclusion. Then a
woman walked in from the second drawing-room with an angry expression on
her face.
She was tall and slight. Her hair and eyes were light yellow-brown, and
the former had a natural wave in it. Her shoulders and bust were superb,
and her small head was beautifully set on a lovely, rather long, neck.
She had an oval face, with straight, delicate features, now slightly
distorted by temper. But the most remarkable thing about her was her
complexion. Her skin was exquisite, delicately smooth and white, warmly
white like a white rose. She did nothing to add to its natural beauty,
though nearly every woman in London declared that she had a special
preparation and always slept in a mask coated thickly with it. The Bond
Street oracles never received a visit from her. She had been born
with an enchanting complexion, a marvellous skin. She was young, just
twenty-four. She let herself alone because she knew improvement--in
that direction--was not possible. The mask coated with Juliet paste,
or Aphrodite ivorine, existed only in the radiant imaginations of her
carefully-arranged acquaintances.
In appearance she was a siren. By nature she was a siren too. But she
had a temper and sometimes showed it. She showed it now.
As she walked in slowly all the scattered people leaned forward,
murmuring their thanks, and the men stood up and gathered round her.
“Beautiful! Beautiful!” muttered the thin, elderly man in a hoarse
voice, striking his fingers repeatedly against the palms of his withered
hands.
The young man looked at the singer and said nothing; but the anger in
her face was reflected in his, and mingled with a flaming of sympathy
that made his appearance almost startling. The white-haired woman
clasped the singer’s hands and said, “Thank you, dearest!” in a
thrilling voice, and the little dark woman with the red fan cried out,
“Viola, you simply pack up Venice, carry it over the Continent and set
it down here in London!”
Lady Holme frowned slightly.
“Thank you, thank you, you good-natured dears,” she said with an attempt
at lightness. Then, hearing the thin rustle of a dress, she turned
sharply and cast an unfriendly glance at a mild young woman with a very
pointed nose, on which a pair of eyeglasses sat astride, who came meekly
forward, looking self-conscious, and smiling with one side of her mouth.
The man with the protruding jaw, who was Lord Holme, said to her, in a
loud bass voice:
“Thanks, Miss Filberte, thanks.”
“Oh, not at all, Lord Holme,” replied the accompanist with a sudden
air of rather foolish delight. “I consider it an honour to accompany an
amateur who sings like Lady Holme.”
She laid a slight emphasis on the word “amateur.”
Lady Holme suddenly walked forward to an empty part of the drawing-room.
The elderly man, whose name was Sir Donald Ulford, made a movement as
if to follow her, then cleared his throat and stood still looking
after her. Lord Holme stuck out his under jaw. But Lady Cardington, the
white-haired woman spoke to him softly, and he leaned over to her and
replied. The sleek man, whose name was Mr. Bry, began to talk about
Tschaikowsky to Mrs. Henry Wolfstein, the woman with the red fan. He
uttered his remarks authoritatively in a slow and languid voice, looking
at the pointed toes of his shoes. Conversation became general.
Robin Pierce, the tall young man, stood alone for a few minutes. Two or
three times he glanced towards Lady Holme, who had sat down on a sofa,
and was opening and shutting a small silver box which she had picked up
from a table near her. Then he walked quietly up the room and sat down
beside her.
“Why on earth didn’t you accompany yourself?” he asked in a low voice.
“You knew what a muddler that girl was, I suppose.”
“Yes. She plays like a distracted black beetle--horrid creature!”
“Then--why?”
“I look ridiculous sitting at the piano.”
“Ridiculous--you--”
“Well, I hold them far more when I stand up. They can’t get away from me
then.”
“And you’d rather have your singing ruined than part for a moment with a
scrap of your physical influence, of the influence that comes from your
beauty, not your talent--your face, not your soul. Viola, you’re just
the same.”
“Lady Holme,” she said.
“P’sh! Why?”
“My little husband’s fussy.”
“And much you care if he is.”
“Oh, yes, I do. He sprawls when he fusses and knocks things over, and
then, when I’ve soothed him, he always goes and does Sandow exercises
and gets bigger. And he’s big enough as it is. I must keep him quiet.”
“But you can’t keep the other men quiet. With your face and your
voice--”
“Oh, it isn’t the voice,” she said with contempt.
He looked at her rather sadly.
“Why will you put such an exaggerated value on your appearance? Why will
you never allow that three-quarters at least of your attraction comes
from something else?”
“What?”
“Your personality--your self.”
“My soul!” she said, suddenly putting on a farcically rapt and yearning
expression and speaking in a hollow, hungry voice. “Are we in the
prehistoric Eighties?”
“We are in the unchanging world.”
“Unchanging! My dear boy!”
“Yes, unchanging,” he repeated obstinately.
He pressed his lips together and looked away. Miss Filberte was cackling
and smiling on a settee, with a man whose figure presented a succession
of curves, and who kept on softly patting his hands together and swaying
gently backwards and forwards.
“Well, Mr. Pierce, what’s the matter?”
“Mr. Pierce!” he said, almost savagely.
“Yes, of the English Embassy in Rome, rising young diplomat and full of
early Eighty yearns--”
“How the deuce can you be as you are and yet sing as you do?” he
exclaimed, turning on her. “You say you care for nothing but the outside
of things--the husk, the shell, the surface. You think men care for
nothing else. Yet when you sing you--you--”
“What do I do?”
“It’s as if another woman than you were singing in you--a woman totally
unlike you, a woman who believes in, and loves, the real beauty which
you care nothing about.”
“The real beauty that rules the world is lodged in the epidermis,” she
said, opening her fan and smiling slowly. “If this”--she touched her
face--“were to be changed into--shall we say a Filberte countenance?”
“Oh!” he exclaimed.
“There! You see, directly I put the matter before you, you have to agree
with me!”
“No one could sing like you and have a face like a silly sheep.”
“Poor Miss Filberte! Well, then, suppose me disfigured and singing
better than ever--what man would listen to me?”
“I should.”
“For half a minute. Then you’d say, ‘Poor wretch, she’s lost her voice!’
No, no, it’s my face that sings to the world, my face the world loves to
listen to, my face that makes me friends and--enemies.”
She looked into his eyes with impertinent directness.
“It’s my face that’s made Mr. Robin Pierce deceive himself into the
belief that he only worships women for their souls, their lovely
natures, their--”
“Do you know that in a way you are a singularly modest woman?” he
suddenly interrupted.
“Am I? How?”
“In thinking that you hold people only by your appearance, that your
personality has nothing to say in the matter.”
“I am modest, but not so modest as that.”
“Well, then?”
“Personality is a crutch, a pretty good crutch; but so long as men are
men they will put crutches second and--something else first. Yes, I know
I’m a little bit vulgar, but everybody in London is.”
“I wish you lived in Rome.”
“I’ve seen people being vulgar there too. Besides, there may be reasons
why it would not be good for me to live in Rome.”
She glanced at him again less impertinently, and suddenly her whole body
looked softer and kinder.
“You must put up with my face, Robin,” she added. “It’s no good wishing
me to be ugly. It’s no use. I can’t be.”
She laughed. Her ill-humour had entirely vanished.
“If you were--” he said. “If you were--!”
“What then?”
“Do you think no one would stick to you--stick to you for yourself?”
“Oh, yes.”
“Who, then?”
“Quite several old ladies. It’s very strange, but old ladies of a
certain class--the almost obsolete class that wears caps and connects
piety with black brocade--like me. They think me ‘a bright young thing.’
And so I am.”
“I don’t know what you are. Sometimes I seem to divine what you are, and
then--then your face is like a cloud which obscures you--except when you
are singing.”
She laughed frankly.
“Poor Robin! It was always your great fault--trying to plumb shallows
and to take high dives into water half a foot deep.”
He was silent for a minute. At last he said:
“And your husband?”
“Fritz!”
His forehead contracted.
“Fritz--yes. What does he do? Try to walk in ocean depths?”
“You needn’t sneer at Fritz,” she said sharply.
“I beg your pardon.”
“Fritz doesn’t bother about shallows and depths. He loves me absurdly,
and that’s quite enough for him.”
“And for you.”
She nodded gravely.
“And what would Fritz do if you were to lose your beauty? Would he be
like all the other men? Would he cease to care?”
For the first time Lady Holme looked really thoughtful--almost painfully
thoughtful.
“One’s husband,” she said slowly. “Perhaps he’s different. He--he ought
to be different.”
A faint suggestion of terror came into her large brown eyes.
“There’s a strong tie, you know, whatever people may say, a very strong
tie in marriage,” she murmured, as if she were thinking out something
for herself. “Fritz ought to love me, even if--if--”
She broke off and looked about the room. Robin Pierce glanced round too
over the chattering guests sitting or standing in easy or lazy postures,
smiling vaguely, or looking grave and indifferent. Mrs. Wolfstein was
laughing, and yawned suddenly in the midst of her mirth. Lady Cardington
said something apparently tragic, to Mr. Bry, who was polishing his
eyeglass and pouting out his dewy lips. Sir Donald Ulford, wandering
round the walls, was examining the pictures upon them. Lady Manby, a
woman with a pyramid of brown hair and an aggressively flat back, was
telling a story. Evidently it was a comic history of disaster. Her
gestures were full of deliberate exaggeration, and she appeared to be
impersonating by turns two or three different people, each of whom had
a perfectly ridiculous personality. Lord Holme burst into a roar of
laughter. His big bass voice vibrated through the room. Suddenly Lady
Holme laughed too.
“Why are you laughing?” Robin Pierce asked rather harshly. “You didn’t
hear what Lady Manby said.”
“No, but Fritz is so infectious. I believe there are laughter microbes.
What a noise he makes! It’s really a scandal.”
And she laughed again joyously.
“You don’t know much about women if you think any story of Lady Manby’s
is necessary, to prompt my mirth. Poor dear old Fritz is quite enough.
There he goes again!”
Robin Pierce began to look stiff with constraint, and just then Sir
Donald Ulford, in his progress round the walls, reached the sofa where
they were sitting.
“You are very fortunate to possess this Cuyp, Lady Holme,” he said in a
voice from which all resonance had long ago departed.
“Alas, Sir Donald, cows distress me! They call up sad memories. I was
chased by one in the park at Grantoun when I was a child. A fly had
stung it, so it tried to kill me. This struck me as unreason run riot,
and ever since then I have wished the Spaniards would go a step farther
and make cow-fights the national pastime. I hate cows frankly.”
Sir Donald sat down in an armchair and looked, with his faded blue eyes,
into the eyes of his hostess. His drawn yellow face was melancholy, like
the face of one who had long been an invalid. People who knew him
well, however, said there was nothing the matter with him, and that his
appearance had not altered during the last twenty years.
“You can hate nothing beautiful,” he said with a sort of hollow
assurance.
“I think cows hideous.”
“Cuyp’s?”
“All cows. You’ve never had one running after you.”
She took up her gloves, which she had laid down on the table beside her,
and began to pull them gently through her fingers. Both Sir Donald and
Robin looked at her hands, which were not only beautiful in shape but
extraordinarily intelligent in their movements. Whatever they did they
did well, without hesitation or bungling. Nobody had ever seen them
tremble.
“Do you consider that anything that can be dangerous for a moment must
be hideous for ever?” asked Sir Donald, after a slight pause.
“I’m sure I don’t know. But I truly think cows hideous--I truly do.”
“Don’t put on your gloves,” exclaimed Robin at this moment.
Sir Donald glanced at him and said:
“Thank you.”
“Why not?” said Lady Holme.
It was obvious to both men that there was no need to answer her
question. She laid the gloves in her lap, smoothed them with her small
fingers, and kept silence. Silence was characteristic of her. When she
was in society she sometimes sat quite calmly and composedly without
uttering a word. After watching her for a minute or two, Sir Donald
said:
“You must know Venice very well and understand it completely.”
“Oh, I’ve been there, of course.”
“Recently?”
“Not so very long ago. After my marriage Fritz took me all over Europe.”
“And you loved Venice.”
Sir Donald did not ask a question, he made a statement.
“No. It didn’t agree with me. It depressed me. We were there in the
mosquito season.”
“What has that to do with it?”
“My dear Sir Donald, if you’d ever had a hole in your net you’d know.
I made Fritz take me away after two days, and I’ve never been back. I
don’t want to have my one beauty ruined.”
Sir Donald did not pay the reasonable compliment. He only stretched out
his lean hands over his knees, and said:
“Venice is the only ideal city in Europe.”
“You forget Paris.”
“Paris!” said Sir Donald. “Paris is a suburb of London and New York.
Paris is no longer the city of light, but the city of pornography and
dressmakers.”
“Well, I don’t know exactly what pornography is--unless it’s some new
process for taking snapshots. But I do know what gowns are, and I love
Paris. The Venice shops are failures and the Venice mosquitoes are
successes, and I hate Venice.”
An expression of lemon-coloured amazement appeared upon Sir Donald’s
face, and he glanced at Robin Pierce as if requesting the answer to
a riddle. Robin looked rather as if he were enjoying himself, but the
puzzled melancholy grew deeper on Sir Donald’s face. With the air of a
man determined to reassure his mind upon some matter, however, he spoke
again.
“You visited the European capitals?” he said.
“Yes, all of them.”
“Constantinople?”
“Terrible place! Dogs, dogs, nothing but dogs.”
“Did you like Petersburg?”
“No, I couldn’t bear it. I caught cold there.”
“And that was why you hated it?”
“Yes. I went out one night with Fritz on the Neva to hear a woman in
a boat singing--a peasant girl with high cheek-bones--and I caught a
frightful chill.”
“Ah!” said Sir Donald. “What was the song? I know a good many of the
Northern peasant songs.”
Suddenly Lady Holme got up, letting her gloves fall to the ground.
“I’ll sing it to you,” she said.
Robin Pierce touched her arm.
“For Heaven’s sake not to Miss Filberte’s accompaniment!”
“Very well. But come and sit where you can see me.”
“I won’t,” he said with brusque obstinacy.
“Madman!” she answered. “Anyhow, you come, Sir Donald.”
And she walked lightly away towards the piano, followed by Sir Donald,
who walked lightly too, but uncertainly, on his thin, stick-like legs.
“What are you up to, Vi?” said Lord Holme, as she came near to him.
“I’m going to sing something for Sir Donald.”
“Capital! Where’s Miss Filberte?”
“Here I am!” piped a thin alto voice.
There was a rustle of skirts as the accompanist rose hastily from her
chair.
“Sit down, please, Miss Filberte,” said Lady Holme in a voice of ice.
Miss Filberte sat down like one who has been knocked on the head with a
hammer, and Lady Holme went alone to the piano, turned the button that
raised the music-stool, sat down too, holding herself very upright,
and played some notes. For a moment, while she played, her face was
so determined and pitiless that Mr. Bry, unaware that she was still
thinking about Miss Filberte, murmured to Lady Cardington:
“Evidently we are in for a song about Jael with the butter in the lordly
dish omitted.”
Then an expression of sorrowful youth stole into Lady Holme’s eyes,
changed her mouth to softness and her cheeks to curving innocence.
She leaned a little way from the piano towards her audience and sang,
looking up into vacancy as if her world were hidden there. The song had
the clear melancholy and the passion of a Northern night. It brought
the stars out within that room and set purple distances before the
eyes. Water swayed in it, but languidly, as water sways at night in calm
weather, when the black spars of ships at anchor in sheltered harbours
are motionless as fingers of skeletons pointing towards the moon.
Mysterious lights lay round a silent shore. And in the wide air, on the
wide waters, one woman was singing to herself of a sorrow that was deep
as the grave, and that no one upon the earth knew of save she who sang.
The song was very short. It had only two little verses. When it was
over, Sir Donald, who had been watching the singer, returned to the
sofa, where Robin Pierce was sitting with his eyes shut and, again
striking his fingers against the palms of his hands, said: “I have heard
that song at night on the Neva, and yet I never heard it before.”
People began getting up to go away. It was past eleven o’clock. Sir
Donald and Robin Pierce stood together, saying good-bye to Lady Holme.
As she held out her hand to the former, she said:
“Oh, Sir Donald, you know Russia, don’t you?”
“I do.”
“Then I want you to tell me the name of that stuff they carry down
the Neva in boats--the stuff that has such a horrible smell. That song
always reminds me of it, and Fritz can’t remember the name.”
“Nor can I,” said Sir Donald, rather abruptly. “Good-night, Lady Holme.”
He walked out of the room, followed by Robin.
CHAPTER II
LORD HOLME’S house was in Cadogan Square. When Sir Donald had put on his
coat in the hall he turned to Robin Pierce and said:
“Which way do you go?”
“To Half Moon Street,” said Robin.
“We might walk, if you like. I am going the same way.
“Certainly.”
They set out slowly. It was early in the year. Showers of rain had
fallen during the day. The night was warm, and the damp earth in
the Square garden steamed as if it were oppressed and were breathing
wearily. The sky was dark and cloudy, and the air was impregnated with a
scent to which many things had contributed, each yielding a fragment of
the odour peculiar to it. Rain, smoke, various trees and plants, the wet
paint on a railing, the damp straw laid before the house of an invalid,
the hothouse flowers carried by a woman in a passing carriage--these and
other things were represented in the heavy atmosphere which was full of
the sensation of life. Sir Donald expanded his nostrils.
“London, London!” he said. “I should know it if I were blind.”
“Yes. The London smell is not to be confused with the smell of any other
place. You have been back a good while, I believe?”
“Three years. I am laid on the London shelf now.”
“You have had a long life of work--interesting work.”
“Yes. Diplomacy has interesting moments. I have seen many countries. I
have been transferred from Copenhagen to Teheran, visited the Sultan of
Morocco at Fez, and--” he stopped. After a pause he added: “And now I
sit in London clubs and look out of bay windows.”
They walked on slowly.
“Have you known our hostess of to-night long?” Sir Donald asked
presently.
“A good while--quite a good while. But I’m very much away at Rome now.
Since I have been there she has married.”
“I have only met her to speak to once before to-night, though I have
seen her about very often and heard her sing.”
“Ah!”
“To me she is an enigma,” Sir Donald continued with some hesitation. “I
cannot make her out at all.”
Robin Pierce smiled in the dark and thrust his hands deep down in the
pockets of his overcoat.
“I don’t know,” Sir Donald resumed, after a slight pause, “I don’t know
what is your--whether you care much for beauty in its innumerable forms.
Many young men don’t, I believe.”
“I do,” said Robin. “My mother is an Italian, you know, and not an
Italian Philistine.”
“Then you can help me, perhaps. Does Lady Holme care for beauty? But she
must. It is impossible that she does not.”
“Do you think so? Why?”
“I really cannot reconcile myself to the idea that such performances as
hers are matters of chance.”
“They are not. Lady Holme is not a woman who chances things before the
cruel world in which she, you and I live, Sir Donald.”
“Exactly. I felt sure of that. Then we come to calculation of effects,
to consideration of that very interesting question--self-consciousness
in art.”
“Do you feel that Lady Holme is self-conscious when she is singing?”
“No. And that is just the point. She must, I suppose, have studied
till she has reached that last stage of accomplishment in which the
self-consciousness present is so perfectly concealed that it seems to be
eliminated.”
“Exactly. She has an absolute command over her means.”
“One cannot deny it. No musician could contest it. But the question that
interests me lies behind all this. There is more than accomplishment in
her performance. There is temperament, there is mind, there is emotion
and complete understanding. I am scarcely speaking strongly enough in
saying complete--perhaps infinitely subtle would be nearer the mark.
What do you say?”
“I don’t think if you said that there appears to be an infinitely subtle
understanding at work in Lady Holme’s singing you would be going at all
too far.”
“Appears to be?”
Sir Donald stopped for a moment on the pavement under a gas-lamp. As the
light fell on him he looked like a weary old ghost longing to fade away
into the dark shadows of the London night.
“You say ‘appears to be,’” he repeated.
“Yes.”
“May I ask why?”
“Well, would you undertake to vouch for Lady Holme’s understanding--I
mean for the infinite subtlety of it?”
Sir Donald began to walk on once more.
“I cannot find it in her conversation,” he said.
“Nor can I, nor can anyone.”
“She is full of personal fascination, of course.”
“You mean because of her personal beauty?”
“No, it’s more than that, I think. It’s the woman herself. She is
suggestive somehow. She makes one’s imagination work. Of course she is
beautiful.”
“And she thinks that is everything. She would part with her voice, her
intelligence--she is very intelligent in the quick, frivolous fashion
that is necessary for London--that personal fascination you speak of,
everything rather than her white-rose complexion and the wave in her
hair.”
“Really, really?”
“Yes. She thinks the outside everything. She believes the world is
governed, love is won and held, happiness is gained and kept by the husk
of things. She told me only to-night that it is her face which sings
to us all, not her voice; that were she to sing as well and be an ugly
woman we should not care to listen to her.”
“H’m! H’m!”
“Absurd, isn’t it?”
“What will be the approach of old age to her?”
There was a suspicion of bitterness in his voice.
“The coming of the King of Terrors,” said Pierce. “But she cannot hear
his footsteps yet.”
“They are loud enough in some ears. Ah, we, are at your door already?”
“Will you be good-natured and come in for a little while?”
“I’m afraid--isn’t it rather late?”
“Only half-past eleven.”
“Well, thank you.”
They stepped into the little hall. As they did so a valet appeared at
the head of the stairs leading to the servants’ quarters.
“If you please, sir,” he said to Pierce, “this note has just come. I was
to ask if you would read it directly you returned.”
“Will you excuse me?” said Pierce to Sir Donald, tearing open the
envelope.
He glanced at the note.
“Is it to ask you to go somewhere to-night?” Sir Donald said.
“Yes, but--”
“I will go.”
“Please don’t. It is only from a friend who is just round the corner in
Stratton Street. If you will not mind his joining us here I will send
him a message.”
He said a few words to his man.
“That will be all right. Do come upstairs.”
“You are sure I am not in the way?”
“I hope you will not find my friend in the way; that’s all. He’s an odd
fellow at the best of times, and to-night he’s got an attack of what he
calls the blacks--his form of blues. But he’s very talented. Carey is
his name--Rupert Carey. You don’t happen to know him?”
“No. If I may say so, your room is charming.”
They were on the first floor now, in a chamber rather barely furnished
and hung with blue-grey linen, against which were fastened several old
Italian pictures in black frames. On the floor were some Eastern rugs in
which faded and originally pale colours mingled. A log fire was burning
on an open hearth, at right angles to which stood an immense sofa with a
square back. This sofa was covered with dull blue stuff. Opposite to
it was a large and low armchair, also covered in blue. A Steinway grand
piano stood out in the middle of the room. It was open and there were
no ornaments or photographs upon it. Its shining dark case reflected the
flames which sprang up from the logs. Several dwarf bookcases of black
wood were filled with volumes, some in exquisite bindings, some paper
covered. On the top of the bookcases stood four dragon china vases
filled with carnations of various colours. Electric lights burned just
under the ceiling, but they were hidden from sight. In an angle of the
wall, on a black ebony pedestal, stood an extremely beautiful marble
statuette of a nude girl holding a fan. Under this, on a plaque, was
written, “_Une Danseuse de Tunisie_.”
Sir Donald went up to it, and stood before it for two or three minutes
in silence.
“I see indeed you do care for beauty,” he said at length. “But--forgive
me--that fan makes that statuette wicked.”
“Yes, but a thousand times more charming. Carey said just the same thing
when he saw it. I wonder I wonder what Lady Holme would say.”
They sat down on the sofa by the wood fire.
“Carey could probably tell us!” Pierce added.
“Oh, then your friend knows Lady Holme?”
“He did once. I believe he isn’t allowed to now. Ah, here is Carey!”
A quick step was audible on the stairs, the door was opened, and a
broad, middle-sized young man, with red hair, a huge red moustache
and fierce red-brown eyes, entered swiftly with an air of ruthless
determination.
“I came, but I shall be devilish bad company to-night,” he said at once,
looking at Sir Donald.
“We’ll cheer you up. Let me introduce you to Sir Donald Ulford--Mr.
Rupert Carey.”
Carey shook Sir Donald by the hand.
“Glad to meet you,” he said abruptly. “I’ve carried your Persian
poems round the world with me. They lay in my trunk cheek by jowl with
God-forsaken, glorious old Omar.”
A dusky red flush appeared in Sir Donald’s hollow cheeks.
“Really,” he said, with obvious embarrassment, “I--they were a great
failure. ‘Obviously the poems of a man likely to be successful in
dealing with finance,’ as _The Times_ said in reviewing them.”
“Well, in the course of your career you’ve done some good things for
England financially, haven’t you?--not very publicly, perhaps, but as a
minister abroad.”
“Yes. To come forward as a poet was certainly a mistake.”
“Any fool could see the faults in your book. True Persia all the same
though. I saw all the faults and read ‘em twenty times.”
He flung himself down in the big armchair. Sir Donald could see now that
there was a shining of misery in his big, rather ugly, eyes.
“Where have you two been?” he continued, with a directness that was
almost rude.
“Dining with the Holmes,” answered Pierce.
“That ruffian! Did she sing?”
“Yes, twice.”
“Wish I’d heard her. Here am I playing Saul without a David. Many people
there?”
“Several. Lady Cardington--”
“That white-haired enchantress! There’s a Niobe--weeping not for her
children, she never had any, but for her youth. She is the religion of
half Mayfair, though I don’t know whether she’s got a religion. Men
who wouldn’t look at her when she was sixteen, twenty-six, thirty-six,
worship her now she’s sixty. And she weeps for her youth! Who else?”
“Mrs. Wolfstein.”
“A daughter of Israel; coarse, intelligent, brutal to her reddened
finger-tips. I’d trust her to judge a singer, actor, painter, writer.
But I wouldn’t trust her with my heart or half a crown.”
“Lady Manby.”
“Humour in petticoats. She’s so infernally full of humour that there’s
no room in her for anything else. I doubt if she’s got lungs. I’m sure
she hasn’t got a heart or a brain.”
“But if she is so full of humour,” said Sir Donald mildly, “how does
she--?”
“How does a great writer fail over an addition sum? How does a man who
speaks eight languages talk imbecility in them all? How is it that a
bird isn’t an angel? I wish to Heaven we knew. Well, Robin?”
“Of course, Mr. Bry.”
Carey’s violent face expressed disgust in every line.
“One of the most finished of London types,” he exclaimed. “No other city
supplies quite the same sort of man to take the colour out of things.
He’s enormously clever, enormously abominable, and should have been
strangled at birth merely because of his feet. Why he’s not Chinese
I can’t conceive; why he dines out every night I can. He’s a human
cruet-stand without the oil. He’s so monstrously intelligent that he
knows what a beast he is, and doesn’t mind. Not a bad set of people to
talk with, unless Lady Holme was in a temper and you were next to her,
or you were left stranded with Holme when the women went out of the
dining-room.”
“You think Holme a poor talker?” asked Sir Donald.
“Precious poor. His brain is muscle-bound, I believe. Robin, you know
I’m miserable to-night you offer me nothing to drink.”
“I beg your pardon. Help yourself. And, Sir Donald, what will you--?”
“Nothing, thank you.”
“Try one of those cigars.”
Sir Donald took one and lit it quietly, looking at Carey, who seemed to
interest him a good deal.
“Why are you miserable, Carey?” said Pierce, as the former buried his
moustache in a tall whisky-and-soda.
“Because I’m alive and don’t want to be dead. Reason enough.”
“Because you’re an unmitigated egoist,” rejoined Pierce.
“Yes, I am an egoist. Introduce me to a man who is not, will you?”
“And what about women?”
“Many women are not egoists. But you have been dining with one of the
most finished egoists in London to-night.”
“Lady Holme?” said Sir Donald, shifting into the left-hand corner of the
sofa.
“Yes, Viola Holme, once Lady Viola Grantoun; whom I mustn’t know any
more.”
“I’m not sure that you are right, Carey,” said Pierce, rather coldly.
“What!”
“Can a true and perfect egoist be in love?”
“Certainly. Is not even an egoist an animal?”
Pierce’s lips tightened for a second, and his right hand strained itself
round his knee, on which it was lying.
“And how much can she be in love?”
“Very much.”
“Do you mean with her body?”
“Yes, I do; and with the spirit that lives in it. I don’t believe
there’s any life but this. A church is more fantastic to me than the
room in which Punch belabours Judy. But I say that there is spirit in
lust, in hunger, in everything. When I want a drink my spirit wants it.
Viola Holme’s spirit--a flame that will be blown out at death--takes
part in her love for that great brute Holme. And yet she’s one of the
most pronounced egoists in London.”
“Do you care to tell us any reason you may have for saying so?” said Sir
Donald.
As he spoke, his voice, brought into sharp contrast with the changeful
and animated voice of Carey, sounded almost preposterously thin and worn
out.
“She is always conscious of herself in every situation, in every
relation of life. While she loves even she thinks to herself, ‘How
beautifully I am loving!’ And she never forgets for a single moment
that she is a fascinating woman. If she were being murdered she would be
saying silently, while the knife went in, ‘What an attractive creature,
what an unreplaceable personage they are putting an end to!’”
“Rupert, you are really too absurd!” exclaimed Pierce, laughing
reluctantly.
“I’m not absurd. I see straight. Lady Holme is an egoist--a magnificent,
an adorable egoist, fine enough in her brilliant selfishness to stand
quite alone.”
“And you mean to tell us that any woman can do that?” exclaimed Pierce.
“Who am I that I should pronounce a verdict upon the great mystery? What
do I know of women?”
“Far too much, I’m afraid,” said Pierce.
“Nothing, I have never been married, and only the married man knows
anything of women. The Frenchmen are wrong. It is not the mistress who
informs, it is the loving wife. For me the sex remains mysterious, like
the heroine of my realm of dreams.”
“You are talking great nonsense, Rupert.”
“I always do when I am depressed, and I am very specially depressed
to-night.”
“But why? There must be some very special reason.”
“There is. I, too, dined out and met at dinner a young man whose one
desire in life appears to be to deprive living creatures of life.”
Sir Donald moved slightly.
“You’re not a sportsman, then, Mr. Carey?” he said.
“Indeed, I am. I’ve shot big game, the Lord forgive me, and found big
pleasure in doing it. Yet this young man depressed me. He was so robust,
so perfectly happy, so supremely self-satisfied, and, according to his
own account, so enormously destructive, that he made me feel very sick.
He is married. He married a widow who has an ear-trumpet and a big
shooting in Scotland. If she could be induced to crawl in underwood, or
stand on a cairn against a skyline, I’m sure he’d pot at her for the fun
of the thing.”
“What is his name?” asked Sir Donald.
“I didn’t catch it. My host called him Leo. He has--”
“Ah! He is my only son.”
Pierce looked very uncomfortable, but Carey replied calmly:
“Really. I wonder he hasn’t shot you long ago.”
Sir Donald smiled.
“Doesn’t he depress you?” added Carey.
“He does, I’m sorry to say, but scarcely so much as I depress him.”
“I think Lady Holme would like him.”
For once Sir Donald looked really expressive, of surprise and disgust.
“Oh, I can’t think so!” he said.
“Yes, yes, she would. She doesn’t care honestly for art-loving men. Her
idea of a real man, the sort of man a woman marries, or bolts with, or
goes off her head for, is a huge mass of bones and muscles and thews and
sinews that knows not beauty. And your son would adore her, Sir Donald.
Better not let him, though. Holme’s a jealous devil.”
“Totally without reason,” said Pierce, with a touch of bitterness.
“No doubt. It’s part of his Grand Turk nature. He ought to possess
a Yildiz. He’s out of place in London where marital jealousy is more
unfashionable than pegtop trousers.”
He buried himself in his glass. Sir Donald rose to go.
“I hope I may see you again,” he said rather tentatively at parting. “I
am to be found in the Albany.”
They both said they would call, and he slipped away gently.
“There’s a sensitive man,” said Carey when he had gone. “A sort of male
Lady Cardington. Both of them are morbidly conscious of their age and
carry it about with them as if it were a crime. Yet they’re both worth
knowing. People with that temperament who don’t use hair-dye must have
grit. His son’s awful.”
“And his poems?”
“Very crude, very faulty, very shy, but the real thing. But he’ll never
publish anything again. It must have been torture to him to reveal as
much as he did in that book. He must find others to express him, and
such as him, to the world.”
“Lady Holmes?”
“_Par exemple_. Deuced odd that while the dumb understand the whole
show the person who’s describing it quite accurately to them often knows
nothing about it. Paradox, irony, blasted eternal cussedness of life!
Did you ever know Lady Ulford?”
“No.”
“She was a horse-dealer’s daughter.”
“Rupert!”
“On my honour! One of those women who are all shirt and collar and
nattiness, with a gold fox for a tie-pin and a hunting-crop under the
arm. She was killed schooling a horse in Mexico after making Ulford shy
and uncomfortable for fifteen years. Lady Cardington and a Texas cowboy
would have been as well suited to one another. Ulford’s been like a
wistful ghost, they tell me, ever since her death. I should like to see
him and his son together.”
A hard and almost vicious gleam shone for as instant in his eyes.
“You’re as cruel as a Spaniard at a bull-fight.”
“My boy, I’ve been gored by the bull.”
Pierce was silent for a minute. He thought of Lady Holme’s white-rose
complexion and of the cessation of Carey’s acquaintance with the Holmes.
No one seemed to know exactly why Carey went to the house in Cadogan
Square no more.
“For God’s sake give me another drink, Robin, and make it a stiff one.”
Pierce poured out the whisky and thought:
“Could it have been that?”
Carey emptied the tumbler and heaved a long sigh.
“When d’you go back to Rome?”
“Beginning of July.”
“You’ll be there in the dead season.”
“I like Rome then. The heat doesn’t hurt me and I love the peace.
Antiquity seems to descend upon the city in August, returning to its own
when America is far away.”
Carey stared at him hard.
“A rising diplomatist oughtn’t to live in the past,” he said bluntly.
“I like ruins.”
“Unless they’re women.”
“If I loved a woman I could love her when she became what is called a
ruin.”
“If you were an old man who had crumbled gradually with her.”
“As a young man, too. I was discussing--or rather flitting about,
dinner-party fashion--that very subject to-night.”
“With whom?”
“Viola.”
“The deuce! What line did you take?”
“That one loves--if one loves--the kernel, not the shell.”
“And she?”
“You know her--the opposite.”
“Ah!”
“And you, Carey?”
“I! I think if the shell is a beautiful shell and becomes suddenly
broken it makes a devil of a lot of difference in what most people think
of the kernel.”
“It wouldn’t to me.”
“I think it would.”
“You take Viola’s side then?”
“And when did I ever do anything else? I’m off.”
He got up, nodded good-night, and was gone in a moment. Pierce heard him
singing in a deep voice as he went down the stairs, and smiled with a
faint contempt.
“How odd it is that nobody will believe a man if he’s fool enough to
hint at the truth of his true self,” he thought. “And Carey--who’s so
clever about people!”
CHAPTER III
WHEN the last guest had grimaced at her and left the drawing-room, Lady
Holme stood with her hand on the mantelpiece, facing a tall mirror. She
was alone for the moment. Her husband had accompanied Mrs. Wolfstein
downstairs, and Lady Holme could hear his big, booming voice below,
interrupted now and then by her impudent soprano. She spoke English with
a slight foreign accent which men generally liked and women loathed.
Lady Holme loathed it. But she was not fond of her own sex. She believed
that all women were untrustworthy. She often said that she had never met
a woman who was not a liar, and when she said it she had no doubt
that, for once, a woman was speaking the truth. Now, as she heard Mrs.
Wolfstein’s curiously improper laugh, she frowned. The face in the
mirror changed and looked almost old.
This struck her unpleasantly. She kept the frown in its place and stared
from under it, examining her features closely, fancying herself really
an old woman, her whimsical fascination dead in its decaying home, her
powers faded if not fled for ever. She might do what she liked then.
It would all be of no use. Even the voice would be cracked and thin,
unresponsive, unwieldy. The will would be phlegmatic. If it were not,
the limbs and features would not easily obey its messages. The figure,
now beautiful, would perhaps be marred by the ungracious thickness, the
piteous fleshiness that Time often adds assiduously to ageing bodies, as
if with an ironic pretence of generously giving in one direction
while taking away in another. Decay would be setting in, life becoming
perpetual loss. The precious years would be gone irrevocably.
She let the frown go and looked again on her beauty and smiled. The
momentary bitterness passed. For there were many precious years to come
for her, many years of power. She was young. Her health was superb. Her
looks were of the kind that lasts. She thought of a famous actress whom
she resembled closely. This actress was already forty-three, and was
still a lovely woman, still toured about the world winning the hearts of
men, was still renowned for her personal charm, worshipped not only
for her talent but for her delicious skin, her great romantic eyes, her
thick, waving hair.
Lady Holme laughed. In twenty years what Robin Pierce called her “husk”
would still be an exquisite thing, and she would be going about without
hearing the horrible tap, tap of the crutch in whose sustaining power
she really believed so little. She knew men, and she said to herself, as
she had said to Robin, that for them beauty lies in the epidermis.
“Hullo, Vi, lookin’ in the glass! ‘Pon my soul, your vanity’s
disgustin’. A plain woman like you ought to keep away from such
things--leave ‘em to the Mrs. Wolfsteins--what?”
Lady Holme turned round in time to see her husband’s blunt, brown
features twisted in the grimace which invariably preceded his portentous
laugh.
“I admire Mrs. Wolfstein,” she said.
The laugh burst like a bomb.
“You admire another woman! Why, you’re incapable of it. The Lord defend
me from hypocrisy, and there’s no greater hypocrisy than one woman
takin’ Heaven to witness that she thinks another a stunnin’ beauty.”
“You know nothing about it, Fritz. Mrs. Wolfstein’s eyes would be lovely
if they hadn’t that pawnbroking expression.”
“Good, good! Now we’re goin’ to hear the voice of truth. Think it went
well, eh?”
He threw himself down on a sofa and began to light a cigarette.
“The evening? No, I don’t.”
“Why not?”
He crossed his long legs and leaned back, resting his head on a cushion,
and puffing the smoke towards the ceiling.
“They all seemed cheery--what? Even Lady Cardington only cried when you
were squallin’.”
It was Lord Holme’s habit to speak irreverently of anything he happened
to admire.
“She had reason to cry. Miss Filberte’s accompaniment was a tragedy. She
never comes here again.”
“What’s the row with her? I thought her fingers got about over the piano
awful quick.”
“They did--on the wrong notes.”
She came and sat down beside him.
“You don’t understand music, Fritz, thank goodness.”
“I know I don’t. But why thank what’s-his-name?”
“Because the men that do are usually such anaemic, dolly things, such
shaved poodles with their Sunday bows on.”
“What about that chap Pierce? He’s up to all the scales and thingumies,
isn’t he?”
“Robin--”
“Pierce I said.”
“And I said Robin.”
Lord Holme frowned and stuck out his under jaw. When he was irritated
he always made haste to look like a prize-fighter. His prominent
cheek-bones, and the abnormal development of bone in the lower part
of his face, helped the illusion whose creation was begun by his
expression.
“Look here, Vi,” he said gruffly. “If you get up to any nonsense
there’ll be another Carey business. I give you the tip, and you can just
take it in time. Don’t you make any mistake. I’m not a Brenford, or a
Godley-Halstoun, or a Pennisford, to sit by and--”
“What a pity it is that your body’s so big and your intelligence so
small!” she interrupted gently. “Why aren’t there Sandow exercises for
increasing the brain?”
“I’ve quite enough brain to rub along with very well. If I’d chosen to
take it I could have been undersecretary---”
“You’ve told me that so many times, old darling, and I really can’t
believe it. The Premier’s very silly. Everybody knows that. But he’s
still got just a faint idea of the few things the country won’t stand.
And you are one of them, you truly are. You don’t go down even with
the Primrose League, and they simply worship at the shrine of the great
Ar-rar.”
“Fool or not, I’d kick out Pierce as I kicked out Carey if I thought--”
“And suppose I wouldn’t let you?”
Her voice had suddenly changed. There was in it the sharp sound which
had so overwhelmed Miss Filberte.
Lord Holme sat straight up and looked at his wife.
“Suppose--what?”
“Suppose I declined to let you behave ridiculously a second time.”
“Ridiculously! I like that! Do you stick out that Carey didn’t love
you?”
“Half London loves me. I’m one of the most attractive women in it.
That’s why you married me, blessed boy.”
“Carey’s a violent ass. Red-headed men always are. There’s a chap at
White’s--”
“I know, I know. You told me about him when you forbade poor Mr. Carey
the house. But Robin’s hair is black and he’s the gentlest creature in
diplomacy.”
“I wouldn’t trust him a yard.”
“Believe me, he doesn’t wish you to. He’s far too clever to desire the
impossible.”
“Then he can stop desirin’ you.”
“Don’t be insulting, Fritz. Remember that by birth you are a gentleman.”
Lord Holme bit through his cigarette.
“Sometimes I wish you were an ugly woman,” he muttered.
“And if I were?”
She leaned forward quite eagerly on the sofa and her whimsical,
spoilt-child manner dropped away from her.
“You ain’t.”
“Don’t be silly. I know I’m not, of course. But if I were to become
one?”
“What?”
“Really, Fritz, there’s no sort of continuity in your mental processes.
If I were to become an ugly woman, what would you feel about me then?”
“How the deuce could you become ugly?”
“Oh, in a hundred ways. I might have smallpox and be pitted for life,
or be scalded in the face as poor people’s babies often are, or have
vitriol thrown over me as lots of women do in Paris, or any number of
things.”
“What rot! Who’d throw vitriol over you, I should like to know?”
He lit a fresh cigarette with tender solicitude. Lady Holme began to
look irritated.
“Do use your imagination!” she cried.
“Haven’t got one, thank God!” he returned philosophically.
“I insist upon your imagining me ugly. Do you hear, I insist upon it.”
She laid one soft hand on his knee and squeezed his leg with all her
might.
“Now you’re to imagine me ugly and just the same as I am now.”
“You wouldn’t be the same.”
“Yes, I should. I should be the same woman, with the same heart and
feelings and desires and things as I have now. Only the face would be
altered.”
“Well, go ahead, but don’t pinch so, old girl.”
“I pinch you to make you exert your mind. Now tell me truly--truly;
would you love me as you do now, would you be jealous of me, would
you--”
“I say, wait a bit! Don’t drive on at such a rate. How ugly are you?”
“Very ugly; worse than Miss Filberte.”
“Miss Filberte’s not so bad.”
“Yes, she is, Fritz, you know she is. But I mean ever so much worse;
with a purple complexion, perhaps, like Mrs. Armington, whose husband
insisted on a judicial separation; or a broken nose, or something wrong
with my mouth--”
“What wrong?”
“Oh, dear, anything! What _l’homme qui vir_ had--or a frightful scar
across my cheek. Could you love me as you do now? I should be the same
woman, remember.”
“Then it’d be all the same to me, I s’pose. Let’s turn in.”
He got up, went over to the hearth, on which a small wood fire was
burning, straddled his legs, bent his knees and straightened them
several times, thrusting his hands into the pockets of his trousers,
which were rather tight and horsey and defined his immense limbs. An
expression of profound self-satisfaction illumined his face as he looked
at his wife, giving it a slightly leery expression, as of a shrewd
rustic. His large blunt features seemed to broaden, his big brown eyes
twinkled, and his lips, which were thick and very red and had a cleft
down their middle, parted under his short bronze moustache, exposing two
level rows of square white teeth.
“It’s jolly difficult to imagine you an ugly woman,” he said, with a
deep chuckle.
“I do wish you’d keep your legs still,” said Lady Holme. “What earthly
pleasure can it give you to go on like that? Would you love me as you do
now?”
“You’d be jolly sick if I didn’t, wouldn’t you, Vi, eh?”
“I wonder if it ever occurs to you that you’re hideously conceited,
Fritz?”
She spoke with a touch of real anger, real exasperation.
“No more than any other Englishman that’s worth his salt and ever does
any good in the world. I ain’t a timid molly-coddle, if that’s what you
mean.”
He took one large hand out of his pocket, scratched his cheek
and yawned. As he did so he looked as unconcerned, as free from
self-consciousness, as much a slave to every impulse born of passing
physical sensation as a wild animal in a wood or out on a prairie.
“Otherwise life ain’t worth tuppence,” he added through his yawn.
Lady Holme sat looking at him for a moment in silence. She was really
irritated by his total lack of interest in what she wanted to interest
in him, irritated, too, because her curiosity remained unsatisfied. But
that abrupt look and action of absolutely unconscious animalism, chasing
the leeriness of the contented man’s conceit, turned her to softness
if not to cheerfulness. She adored Fritz like that. His open-mouthed,
gaping yawn moved something in her to tenderness. She would have liked
to kiss him while he was yawning and to pass her hands over his short
hair, which was like a mat and grew as strongly as the hair which he
shaved every morning from his brown cheeks.
“Well, what about bed, old girl?” he said, stretching himself.
Lady Holme did not reply. Some part of him, some joint, creaked as
he forced his clasped hands downward and backward. She was listening
eagerly for a repetition of the little sound.
“What! Is mum the word?” he said, bending forward to stare into her
face.
At this moment the door opened, and a footman came in to extinguish the
lights and close the piano. By mistake he let the lid of the latter
drop with a bang. Lady Holme, who had just got up to go to bed, started
violently. She said nothing but stared at him for an instant with an
expression of cold rebuke on her face. The man reddened. Lord Holme was
already on the stairs. He yawned again noisily, and turned the sound
eventually into a sort of roaring chant up and down the scale as he
mounted towards the next floor. Lady Holme came slowly after him. She
had a very individual walk, moving from the hips and nearly always
taking small, slow steps. Her sapphire-blue gown trailed behind her with
a pretty noise over the carpet.
When her French maid had locked up her jewels and helped her to undress,
she dismissed her, and called out to Lord Holme, who was in the next
room, the door of which was slightly open.
“Fritz!”
“Girlie?”
His mighty form, attired in pale blue pyjamas, stood in the doorway.
In his hand he grasped a toothbrush, and there were dabs of white
tooth-powder on his cheeks and chin.
“Finish your toilet and make haste.”
He disappeared. There was a prolonged noise of brushing and the gurgling
and splashing of water. Lady Holme sat down on the white couch at the
foot of the great bed. She was wrapped in a soft white gown made like a
burnous, a veritable Arab garment, with a white silk hood at the back,
and now she put up her hands and, with great precision, drew the hood up
over her head. The burnous, thus adjusted, made her look very young. She
had thrust her bare feet into white slippers without heels, and now she
drew up her legs lightly and easily and crossed them under her, assuming
an Eastern attitude and the expression of supreme impassivity which
suits it. A long mirror was just opposite to her. She swayed to and fro,
looking into it.
“Allah-Akbar!” she murmured. “Allah-Akbar! I am a fatalist. Everything
is ordained, so why should I bother? I will live for the day. I will
live for the night. Allah-Akbar, Allah-Akbar!”
The sound of water gushing from a reversed tumbler into a full basin was
followed by the reappearance of Lord Holme, looking very clean and very
sleepy.
Lady Holme stopped swaying.
“You look like a kid of twelve years old in that thing, Vi,” he
observed, surveying her with his hands on his hips.
“I am a woman with a philosophy,” she returned with dignity.
“A philosophy! What the deuce is that?”
“You didn’t learn much at Eton and Christchurch.”
“I learnt to use my fists and to make love to the women.”
“You’re a brute!” she exclaimed with most unphilosophic vehemence.
“And that’s why you worship the ground I tread on,” he rejoined equably.
“And that’s why I’ve always had a good time with the women ever since I
stood six foot in my stockin’s when I was sixteen.”
Lady Holme looked really indignant. Her face was contorted by a spasm.
She was one of those unfortunate women who are capable of retrospective
jealousy.
“I won’t--how dare you speak to me of those women?” she said bitterly.
“You insult me.”
“Hang it, there’s no one since you, Vi. You know that. And what would
you have thought of a great, hulkin’ chap like me who’d never--well, all
right. I’ll dry up. But you know well enough you wouldn’t have looked at
me.”
“I wonder why I ever did.”
“No, you don’t. I’m just the chap to suit you. You’re full of whimsies
and need a sledge-hammer fellow to keep you quiet. It you’d married that
ass, Carey, or that--”
“Fritz, once for all, I won’t have my friends abused. I allowed you to
have your own way about Rupert Carey, but I will not have Robin Pierce
or anyone else insulted. Please understand that. I married to be more
free, not more--”
“You married because you’d fallen jolly well in love with me, that’s why
you married, and that’s why you’re a damned lucky woman. Come to bed.
You won’t, eh?”
He made a stride, snatched Lady Holme up as if she were a bundle, and
carried her off to bed.
She was on the point of bursting into angry tears, but when she found
herself snatched up, her slippers tumbling off, the hood of the burnous
falling over her eyes, her face crushed anyhow against her husband’s
sinewy chest, she suddenly felt oddly contented, disinclined to protest
or to struggle.
Lord Holme did not trouble himself to ask what she was feeling or why
she was feeling it.
He thought of himself--the surest way to fasten upon a man the thoughts
of others.
CHAPTER IV
ROBIN PIERCE and Carey were old acquaintances, if not exactly old
friends. They had been for a time at Harrow together. Pierce had six
thousand a year and worked hard for a few hundreds. Carey had a thousand
and did nothing. He had never done anything definite, anything to earn a
living. Yet his talents were notorious. He played the piano well for
an amateur, was an extraordinarily clever mimic, acted better than most
people who were not on the stage, and could write very entertaining
verse with a pungent, sub-acid flavour. But he had no creative power and
no perseverance. As a critic of the performances of others he was cruel
but discerning, giving no quarter, but giving credit where it was due.
He loathed a bad workman more than a criminal, and would rather have
crushed an incompetent human being than a worm. Secretly he despised
himself. His own laziness was as disgusting to him as a disease, and
was as incurable as are certain diseases. He was now thirty-four and
realised that he was never going to do anything with his life. Already
he had travelled over the world, seen a hundred, done a hundred things.
He had an enormous acquaintance in Society and among artists; writers,
actors, painters--all the people who did things and did them well. As a
rule they liked him, despite his bizarre bluntness of speech and manner,
and they invariably spoke of him as a man of great talent; he said
because he was so seldom fool enough to do anything that could reveal
incompetence. His mother, who was a widow, lived in the north, in an
old family mansion, half house, half castle, near the sea coast of
Cumberland. He had one sister, who was married to an American.
Carey always declared that he was that _rara avis_ an atheist, and that
he had been born an atheist. He affirmed that even when a child he had
never, for a moment, felt that there could be any other life than
this earth-life. Few people believed him. There are few people who can
believe in a child atheist.
Pierce had a totally different character. He seemed to be more dreamy
and was more energetic, talked much less and accomplished much more. It
had always been his ambition to be a successful diplomat, and in many
respects he was well fitted for a diplomatic career. He had a talent for
languages, great ease of manner, self-possession, patience and cunning.
He loved foreign life. Directly he set foot in a country which was
not his own he felt stimulated. He felt that he woke up, that his mind
became more alert, his imagination more lively. He delighted in change,
in being brought into contact with a society which required study to be
understood. His present fate contented him well enough. He liked Rome
and was liked there. As his mother was a Roman he had many Italian
connections, and he was far more at ease with Romans than with the
average London man. His father and mother lived almost perpetually
in large hotels. The former, who was enormously rich, was a _malade
imaginaire_. He invariably spoke of his quite normal health as if it
were some deadly disease, and always treated himself, and insisted on
being treated, as if he were an exceptionally distinguished invalid.
In the course of years his friends had learned to take his view of the
matter, and he was at this time almost universally spoken of as “that
poor Sir Henry Pierce whose life has been one long martyrdom.” Poor
Sir Henry was fortunate in the possession of a wife who really was a
martyr--to him. Nobody had ever discovered whether Lady Pierce knew, or
did not know, that her husband was quite as well as most people. There
are many women with such secrets. Robin’s parents were at present taking
baths and drinking waters in Germany. They were later going for an
“after cure” to Switzerland, and then to Italy to “keep warm” during the
autumn. As they never lived in London, Robin had no home there except
his little house in Half Moon Street. He had one brother, renowned as
a polo player, and one sister, who was married to a rising politician,
Lord Evelyn Clowes, a young man with a voluble talent, a peculiar power
of irritating Chancellors of the Exchequer, and hair so thick that he
was adored by the caricaturists.
Robin Pierce and Carey saw little of each other now, being generally
separated by a good many leagues of land and sea, but when they met they
were still fairly intimate. They had some real regard for each
other. Carey felt at ease in giving his violence to the quiet and
self-possessed young secretary, who was three years his junior, but who
sometimes seemed to him the elder of the two, perhaps because calm is
essentially the senior of storm. He had even allowed Robin to guess
at the truth of his feeling for Lady Holme, though he had never been
explicit, on the subject to him or to anyone. There were moments
when Robin wished he had not been permitted to guess, for Lady Holme
attracted him far more than any other woman he had seen, and he had
proposed to her before she had been carried off by her husband. He
admired her beauty, but he did not believe that it was her beauty which
had led him into love. He was sure that he loved the woman in her,
the hidden woman whom Lord Holme and the world at large--including
Carey--knew nothing about. He thought that Lady Holme herself did not
understand this hidden woman, did not realise, as he did, that she
existed. She spoke to him sometimes in Lady Holme’s singing, sometimes
in an expression in her eyes when she was serious, sometimes even in
a bodily attitude. For Robin, half fantastically, put faith in the
eloquence of line as a revealer of character, of soul. But she did not
speak to him in Lady Holme’s conversation. He really thought this hidden
woman was obscured by the lovely window--he conceived it as a window of
exquisite stained glass, jewelled but concealing--through which she was
condemned to look for ever, through which, too, all men must look at
her. He really wished sometimes, as he had said, that Lady Holme were
ugly, for he had a fancy that perhaps then, and only then, would
the hidden woman arise and be seen as a person may be seen through
unstained, clear glass. He really felt that what he loved would be there
to love if the face that ruled was ruined; would not only still be
there to love, but would become more powerful, more true to itself, more
understanding of itself, more reliant, purer, braver. And he had learnt
to cherish this fancy till it had become a little monomania. Robin
thought that the world misunderstood him, but he knew the world too well
to say so. He never risked being laughed at. He felt sure that he
was passionate, that he was capable of romantic deeds, of Quixotic
self-sacrifice, of a devotion that might well be sung by poets, and that
would certainly be worshipped by ardent women. And he said to himself
that Lady Holme was the one woman who could set free, if the occasion
came, this passionate, unusual and surely admirable captive at present
chained within him, doomed to inactivity and the creeping weakness that
comes from enforced repose.
Carey’s passion for Lady Holme had come into being shortly before
her marriage. No one knew much about it, or about the rupture of all
relations between him and the Holmes which had eventually taken place.
But the fact that Carey had lost his head about Lady Holme was known
to half London. For Carey, when carried away, was singularly reckless;
singularly careless of consequences and of what people thought. It was
difficult to influence him, but when influenced he was almost painfully
open in his acknowledgment of the power that had reached him. As a rule,
however, despite his apparent definiteness, his decisive violence, there
seemed to be something fluid in his character, something that divided
and flowed away from anything which sought to grasp and hold it. He
had impetus but not balance; swiftness, but a swiftness that was
uncontrolled. He resembled a machine without a brake.
It was soon after his rupture with the Holmes that his intimates began
to notice that he was becoming inclined to drink too much. When Pierce
returned to London from Rome he was immediately conscious of the slight
alteration in his friend. Once he remonstrated with Carey about it.
Carey was silent for a moment. Then he said abruptly:
“My heart wants to be drowned.”
Lord Holme hated Carey. Yet Lady Holme had not loved him; though she had
not objected to him more than to other men because he loved her. She had
been brought up in a society which is singularly free from prejudices,
which has no time to study carefully questions of so-called honour,
which has little real religious feeling, and a desire for gaiety which
perhaps takes the place of a desire for morals. Intrigues are one of the
chief amusements of this society, which oscillates from London to Paris
as the pendulum of a clock oscillates from right to left. Lady Holme,
however, happened to be protected doubly against the dangers--or joys
by the way--to which so many of her companions fell cheerful, and even
chattering, victims. She had a husband who though extremely stupid was
extremely masterful, and, for the time at any rate, she sincerely loved
him. She was a faithful wife and had no desire to be anything else,
though she liked to be, and usually was, in the fashion. But though
faithful to Lord Holme she had, as has been said, both the appearance
and the temperament of a siren. She enjoyed governing men, and those who
were governed by her, who submitted obviously to the power of her beauty
and the charm of manner that seemed to emanate from it, and to be one
with it, were more attractive to her than those who were not. She
was inclined to admire a man for loving her, as a serious and
solemn-thinking woman, with bandeaux and convictions, admires a
clergyman for doing his duty. Carey had done his duty with such fiery
ardour that, though she did not prevent her husband from kicking him out
of the house, she could not refrain from thinking well of him.
Her thoughts of Robin Pierce were perhaps a little more confused.
She had not accepted him. Carey would have said that he was not “her
type.” Although strong and active he was not the huge mass of bones and
muscles and thews and sinews, ignorant of beauty and devoid of the love
of art, which Carey had described as her ideal. There was melancholy and
there was subtlety in him. When Lady Holme was a girl this melancholy
and subtlety had not appealed to her sufficiently to induce her to
become Lady Viola Pierce. Nevertheless, Robin’s affection for her, and
the peculiar form it took--of idealising her secret nature and wishing
her obvious beauty away--had won upon the egoism of her. Although she
laughed at his absurdity, as she called it, and honestly held to her
Pagan belief that physical beauty was all in all to the world she wished
to influence, it pleased her sometimes to fancy that perhaps he was
right, that perhaps her greatest loveliness was hidden and dwelt apart.
The thought was flattering, and though her knowledge of men rejected the
idea that such a loveliness alone could ever command an empire worth the
ruling, she could have no real objection to being credited with a double
share of charm--the charm of face and manner which everyone, including
herself, was aware that she possessed, and that other stranger, more dim
and mysterious charm at whose altar Robin burnt an agreeably perfumed
incense.
She had a peculiar power of awakening in others that which she usually
seemed not to possess herself--imagination, passion, not only physical
but ethereal and of the mind; a tenderness for old sorrows, desire for
distant, fleeting, misty glories not surely of this earth. She was
a brilliant suggestionist, but not in conversation. Her face and her
voice, when she sang, were luring to the lovers of beauty. When she sang
she often expressed for them the under-thoughts and under-feelings of
secretly romantic, secretly wistful men and women, and drew them to her
as if by a spell. But her talk and manner in conversation were so unlike
her singing, so little accorded with the look that often came into her
eyes while she sang, that she was a perpetual puzzle to such elderly
men as Sir Donald Ulford, to such young men as Robin Pierce, and even to
some women. They came about her like beggars who have heard a chink of
gold, and she showed them a purse that seemed to be empty.
Was it the _milieu_ in which she lived, the influence of a vulgar and
greedy age, which prevented her from showing her true self except in
her art? Or was she that stupefying enigma sometimes met with, an
unintelligent genius?
There were some who wondered.
In her singing she seemed to understand, to love, to pity, to enthrone.
In her life she often seemed not to understand, not to love, not to
pity, not to place high.
She sang of Venice, and those who cannot even think of the city in the
sea without a flutter of the heart, a feeling not far from soft pain in
its tenderness and gratitude, listened to the magic bells at sunset, and
glided in the fairy barques across the liquid plains of gold. She
spoke of Venice, and they heard only the famished voice of the mosquito
uttering its midnight grace before meat.
Which was the real Venice?
Which was the real woman?
CHAPTER V
ON the following day, which was warm and damp; Lady Holme drove to Bond
Street, bought two new hats, had her hand read by a palmist who called
himself “Cupido,” looked in at a ladies’ club and then went to Mrs.
Wolfstein, with whom she was engaged to lunch. She did not wish to lunch
with her. She disliked Mrs. Wolfstein as she disliked most women, but
she had not been able to get out of it. Mrs. Wolfstein had overheard
her saying to Lady Cardington that she had nothing particular to do till
four that day, and had immediately “pinned her.” Besides disliking
Mrs. Wolfstein, Lady Holme was a little afraid of her. Like many clever
Jewesses, Mrs. Wolfstein was a ruthless conversationalist, and enjoyed
showing off at the expense of others, even when they were her guests.
She had sometimes made Lady Holme feel stupid, even feel as if a good
talker might occasionally gain, and keep, an advantage over a lovely
woman who did not talk so well. The sensation passed, but the fact that
it had ever been did not draw Lady Holme any closer to the woman with
the “pawnbroking expression” in her eyes.
Mrs. Wolfstein was not in the most exclusive set in London, but she was
in the smart set, which is no longer exclusive although it sometimes
hopes it is. She knew the racing people, nearly all the most fashionable
Jews, and those very numerous English patricians who like to go where
money is. She also knew the whole of Upper Bohemia, and was a _persona
gratissima_ in that happy land of talent and jealousy. She entertained
a great deal, generally at modish restaurants. Many French and Germans
were to be met with at her parties; and it was impossible to be with
either them or her for many minutes without hearing the most hearty and
whole-souled abuse of English aspirations, art, letters and cooking.
The respectability, the pictures, the books and the boiled cabbage of
Britain all came impartially under the lash.
Mrs. Wolfstein’s origin was obscure. That she was a Jewess was known to
everybody, but few could say with certainty whether she was a German,
a Spanish, a Polish or an Eastern Jewess. She had much of the covert
coarseness and open impudence of a Levantine, and occasionally said
things which made people wonder whether, before she became Amalia
Wolfstein, she had not perhaps been--well really--something very strange
somewhere a long way off.
Her husband was shocking to look at: small, mean, bald, Semitic and
nervous, with large ears which curved outwards from his head like
leaves, and cheeks blue from much shaving. He was said to hide behind
his anxious manner an acuteness that was diabolic, and to have earned
his ill-health by sly dissipations for which he had paid enormous
sums. There were two Wolfstein children, a boy and a girl of eleven and
twelve; small, swarthy, frog-like, self-possessed. They already spoke
three languages, and their protruding eyes looked almost diseased with
intelligence.
The Wolfstein house, which was in Curzon Street, was not pretty,
Apparently neither Mrs. Wolfstein nor her husband, who was a financier
and company promoter on a very large scale, had good taste in furniture
and decoration. The mansion was spacious but dingy. There was a great
deal of chocolate and fiery yellow paint. There were many stuffy brown
carpets, and tables which were unnecessarily solid. In the hall were
pillars which looked as if they were made of brawn, and arches
with lozenges of azure paint in which golden stars appeared rather
meretriciously. A plaster statue of Hebe, with crinkly hair and staring
eyeballs, stood in a corner without improving matters. That part of the
staircase which was not concealed by the brown carpet was dirty white.
An immense oil painting of a heap of dead pheasants, rabbits and wild
duck, lying beside a gun and a pair of leather gaiters, immediately
faced the hall door, which was opened by two enormous men with yellow
complexions and dissipated eyes. Mrs. Wolfstein was at home, and one
of the enormous men lethargically showed Lady Holme upstairs into a
drawing-room which suggested a Gordon Hotel. She waited for about five
minutes on a brown and yellow sofa near a table on which lay some books
and several paper-knives, and then Mrs. Wolfstein appeared. She was
dressed very smartly in blue and red, and looked either Oriental or
Portuguese, as she came in. Lady Holme was not quite certain which.
“Dear person!” she said, taking Lady Holme’s hands in hers, which were
covered with unusually large rings. “Now, I’ve got a confession to make.
What a delicious hat!”
Lady Holme felt certain the confession was of something unpleasant,
but she only said, in the rather languid manner she generally affected
towards women:
“Well? My ear is at the grating.”
“My lunch is at the Carlton.”
Lady Holme was pleased. At the Carlton one can always look about.
“And--it’s a woman’s lunch.”
Lady Holme’s countenance fell quite frankly.
“I knew you’d be horrified. You think us such bores, and so we are. But
I couldn’t resist being malicious to win such a triumph. You at a hen
lunch! It’ll be the talk of London. Can you forgive me?”
“Of course.”
“And can you stand it?”
Lady Holme looked definitely dubious.
“I’ll tell you who’ll be there--Lady Cardington, Lady Manby, Mrs.
Trent--do you know her? Spanish looking, and’s divorced two husbands,
and’s called the scarlet woman because she always dresses in red--Sally
Perceval, Miss Burns and Pimpernel Schley.”
“Pimpernel Schley! Who is she?”
“The American actress who plays all the improper modern parts. Directly
a piece is produced in Paris that we run over to see--you know the sort!
the Grand Duke and foreign Royalty species--she has it adapted for her.
Of course it’s Bowdlerised as to words, but she manages to get back all
that’s been taken out in her acting. Young America’s crazy about her.
She’s going to play over here.”
“Oh!”
Lady Holme’s voice was not encouraging, but Mrs. Wolfstein was not
sensitive. She chattered gaily all the way to the Haymarket. When they
came into the Palm Court they found Lady Cardington already there,
seated tragically in an armchair, and looking like a weary empress.
The band was playing on the balcony just outside the glass wall which
divides the great dining-room from the court, and several people were
dotted about waiting for friends, or simply killing time by indulging
curiosity. Among them was a large, broad-shouldered young man, with
a round face, contemptuous blue eyes and a mouth with chubby, pouting
lips. He was well dressed, but there was a touch of horseyness in the
cut of his trousers, the arrangement of his tie. He sat close to the
band, tipping his green chair backwards and smoking a cigarette.
As Mrs. Wolfstein and Lady Holme went up to greet Lady Cardington, Sally
Perceval and Mrs. Trent came in together, followed almost immediately by
Lady Manby.
Sally Perceval was a very pretty young married woman, who spent most
of her time racing, gambling and going to house parties. She looked
excessively fragile and consumptive, but had lived hard and never had
a day’s illness in her life. She was accomplished, not at all
intellectual, clever at games, a fine horsewoman and an excellent
swimmer. She had been all over the world with her husband, who was very
handsome and almost idiotic, and who could not have told you what
the Taj was, whether Thebes was in Egypt or India, or what was the
difference, if any, between the Golden Gate and the Golden Horn.
Mrs. Trent was large, sultry, well-informed and supercilious; had the
lustrous eyes of a Spaniard, and spoke in a warm contralto voice. Her
figure was magnificent, and she prided herself on having a masculine
intellect. Her enemies said that she had a more than masculine temper.
Lady Manby had been presented by Providence with a face like a teapot,
her nose being the spout and her cheeks the bulging sides. She saw
everything in caricature. If war were spoken of, her imagination
immediately conjured up visions of unwashed majors conspicuously absurd
in toeless boots, of fat colonels forced to make merry on dead rats,
of field-marshals surprised by the enemy in their nightshirts, and of
common soldiers driven to repair their own clothes and preposterously
at work on women’s tasks. She adored the clergy for their pious humours,
the bench for its delicious attempts at dignity, the bar for its
grotesque travesties of passionate conviction--lies with their wigs
on--the world political for its intrigues dressed up in patriotism.
A Lord Chancellor in full state seemed to her the most delightfully
ridiculous phenomenon in a delightfully ridiculous universe. And she had
once been obliged to make a convulsive exit from an English cathedral,
in which one hundred colonial bishops were singing a solemn hymn,
entirely devastated by the laughter waked in her by this most sacred
spectacle.
Miss Burns, who hurried in breathlessly ten minutes late, was very thin,
badly dressed and insignificant-looking, wore her hair short, and could
not see you if you were more than four feet away from her. She had been
on various lonely and distant travelling excursions, about which she had
written books, had consorted merrily with naked savages, sat in the oily
huts of Esquimaux, and penetrated into the interior of China dressed as
a man. Her lack of affectation hit you in the face on a first meeting,
and her sincerity was perpetually embroiling her with the persistent
liars who, massed together, formed what is called decent society.
“I know I’m late,” she said, pushing her round black hat askew on her
shaggy little head. “I know I’ve kept you all waiting. Pardon!”
“Indeed you haven’t,” replied Mrs. Wolfstein. “Pimpernel Schley isn’t
here yet. She lives in the hotel, so of course she’ll turn up last.”
Mrs. Trent put one hand on her hip and stared insolently at the various
groups of people in the court, Lady Cardington sighed, and Lady Holme
assumed a vacant look, which suited her mental attitude at the moment.
She generally began to feel rather vacant if she were long alone with
women.
Another ten minutes passed.
“I’m famishing,” said Sally Perceval. “I’ve been at the Bath Club
diving, and I do so want my grub. Let’s skip in.”
“It really is too bad--oh, here she comes!” said Mrs. Wolfstein.
Many heads in the Palm Court were turned towards the stairs, down which
a demure figure was walking with extreme slowness. The big young man
with the round face got up from his chair and looked greedy, and
the waiters standing by the desk just inside the door glanced round,
whispered, and smiled quickly before gliding off to their different
little tables.
Pimpernel Schley was alone, but she moved as if she were leading a quiet
procession of vestal virgins. She was dressed in white, with a black
velvet band round her tiny waist and a large black hat. Her shining,
straw-coloured hair was fluffed out with a sort of ostentatious
innocence on either side of a broad parting, and she kept her round chin
tucked well in as she made what was certainly an effective entrance. Her
arms hung down at her sides, and in one hand she carried a black fan.
She wore no gloves, and many diamond rings glittered on her small
fingers, the rosy nails of which were trimmed into points. As she drew
near to Mrs. Wolfstein’s party she walked slower and slower, as if she
felt that she was arriving at a destination much too soon.
Lady Holme watched her as she approached, examined her with that
piercing scrutiny in which the soul of one woman is thrust out, like a
spear, towards the soul of another. She noticed at once that Miss Schley
resembled her, had something of her charm of fairness. It was a fainter,
more virginal charm than hers. The colouring of hair and eyes was
lighter. The complexion was a more dead, less warm, white. But there was
certainly a resemblance. Miss Schley was almost exactly her height, too,
and--
Lady Holme glanced swiftly round the Palm Court. Of all the women
gathered there Pimpernel Schley and herself were nearest akin in
appearance.
As she recognised this fact Lady Holme felt hostile to Miss Schley.
Not until the latter was almost touching her hostess did she lift her
eyes from the ground. Then she stood still, looked up calmly, and said,
in a drawling and infantine voice:
“I had to see my trunks unpacked, but I was bound to be on time. I
wouldn’t have come down to-day for any soul in the world but you. I
would not.”
It was a pretty speaking voice, clear and youthful, with a choir-boyish
sound in it, and remarkably free from nasal twang, but it was not a
lady’s voice. It sounded like the frontispiece of a summer number become
articulate.
Mrs. Wolfstein began to introduce Miss Schley to her guests, none of
whom, it seemed, knew her. She bowed to each of them, still with the
vestal virgin air, and said, “Glad to know you!” to each in turn without
looking at anyone. Then Mrs. Wolfstein led the way into the restaurant.
Everyone looked at the party of women as they came in and ranged
themselves round a table in the middle of the big room. Lady Cardington
sat on one side of Mrs. Wolfstein and Lady Holme on the other, between
her and Mrs. Trent. Miss Schley was exactly opposite. She kept her eyes
eternally cast down like a nun at Benediction. All the quite young men
who could see her were looking at her with keen interest, and two
or three of them--probably up from Sandhurst--had already assumed
expressions calculated to alarm modesty. Others looked mournfully
fatuous, as if suddenly a prey to lasting and romantic grief. The older
men were more impartial in their observation of Mrs. Wolfstein’s guests.
And all the women, without exception, fixed their eyes upon Lady Holme’s
hat.
Lady Cardington, who seemed oppressed by grief, said to Mrs. Wolfstein:
“Did you see that article in the _Daily Mail_ this morning?”
“Which one?”
“On the suggestion to found a school in which the only thing to be
taught would be happiness.”
“Who’s going to be the teacher?”
“Some man. I forget the name.”
“A man!” said Mrs. Trent, in a slow, veiled contralto voice. “Why, men
are always furious if they think we have any pleasure which they can’t
deprive us of at a minute’s notice. A man is the last two-legged thing
to be a happiness teacher.”
“Whom would you have then?” said Lady Cardington.
“Nobody, or a child.”
“Of which sex?” said Mrs. Wolfstein.
“The sex of a child,” replied Mrs. Trent.
Mrs. Wolfstein laughed rather loudly.
“I think children are the most greedy, unsatisfied individuals in--” she
began.
“I was not alluding to Curzon Street children,” observed Mrs. Trent,
interrupting. “When I speak in general terms of anything I always except
London.”
“Why?” said Sally Perceval.
“Because it’s no more natural, no more central, no more in line with the
truth of things than you are, Sally.”
“But, my dear, you surely aren’t a belated follower of Tolstoi!” cried
Mrs. Wolfstein. “You don’t want us all to live like day labourers.”
“I don’t want anybody to do anything, but if happiness is to be taught
it must not be by a man or by a Londoner.”
“I had no idea you had been caught by the cult of simplicity,” said Mrs.
Wolfstein. “But you are so clever. You reveal your dislikes but conceal
your preferences. Most women think that if they only conceal their
dislikes they are quite perfectly subtle.”
“Subtle people are delicious,” said Lady Manby, putting her mouth on
one side. “They remind me of a kleptomaniac I once knew who had a little
pocket closed by a flap let into the front of her gown. When she dined
out she filled it with scraps. Once she dined with us and I saw her,
when she thought no one was watching, peppering her pocket with cayenne,
and looking so delightfully sly and thieving. Subtle people are always
peppering their little pockets and thinking nobody sees them.”
“And lots of people don’t,” said Mrs. Wolfstein.
“The vices are divinely comic,” continued Lady Manby, looking every
moment more like a teapot. “I think it’s such a mercy. Fancy what a lot
of fun we should lose if there were no drunkards, for instance!”
Lady Cardington looked shocked.
“The virtues are often more comic than the vices,” said Mrs. Trent,
with calm authority. “Dramatists know that. Think of the dozens of good
farces whose foundation is supreme respectability in contact with the
wicked world.”
“I didn’t know anyone called respectability a virtue,” cried Sally
Perceval.
“Oh, all the English do in their hearts,” said Mrs. Wolfstein.
“Pimpernel, are you Yankees as bad?”
Miss Schley was eating _sole a la Colbert_ with her eyes on her plate.
She ate very slowly and took tiny morsels. Now she looked up.
“We’re pretty respectable over in America, I suppose,” she drawled. “Why
not? What harm does it do anyway?”
“Well, it limits the inventive faculties for one thing. If one is
strictly respectable life is plain sailing.”
“Oh, life is never that,” said Mrs. Trent, “for women.”
Lady Cardington seemed touched by this remark.
“Never, never,” she said in her curious voice--a voice in which tears
seemed for ever to be lingering. “We women are always near the rocks.”
“Or on them,” said Mrs. Trent, thinking doubtless of the two husbands
she had divorced.
“I like a good shipwreck,” exclaimed Miss Burns in a loud tenor voice.
“I was in two before I was thirty, one off Hayti and one off Java, and
I enjoyed them both thoroughly. They wake folks up and make them show
their mettle.”
“It’s always dangerous to speak figuratively if she’s anywhere about,”
murmured Mrs. Wolfstein to Lady Holme. “She’ll talk about lowering boats
and life-preservers now till the end of lunch.”
Lady Holme started. She had not been listening to the conversation but
had been looking at Miss Schley. She had noticed instantly the effect
created in the room by the actress’s presence in it. The magic of a
name flits, like a migratory bird, across the Atlantic. Numbers of the
youthful loungers of London had been waiting impatiently during the last
weeks for the arrival of this pale and demure star. Now that she
had come their interest in her was keen. Her peculiar reputation for
ingeniously tricking Mrs. Bowdler, secretary to Mrs. Grundy, rendered
her very piquant, and this piquancy was increased by her ostentatiously
vestal appearance.
Lady Holme was sometimes clairvoyante. At this moment every nerve in her
body seemed telling her that the silent girl, who sat there nibbling her
lunch composedly, was going to be the rage in London. It did not matter
at all whether she had talent or not. Lady Holme saw that directly,
as she glanced from one little table to another at the observant,
whispering men.
She felt angry with Miss Schley for resembling her in colouring, for
resembling her in another respect--capacity for remaining calmly silent
in the midst of fashionable chatterboxes.
“Will she?” she said to Mrs. Wolfstein.
“Yes. If she’d never been shipwrecked she’d have been almost
entertaining, but--there’s Sir Donald Ulford trying to attract your
attention.”
“Where?”
She looked and saw Sir Donald sitting opposite to the large young man
with the contemptuous blue eyes and the chubby mouth. They both seemed
very bored. Sir Donald bowed.
“Who is that with him?” asked Lady Holme.
“I don’t know,” said Mrs. Wolfstein. “He looks like a Cupid who’s been
through Sandow’s school. He oughtn’t to wear anything but wings.”
“It’s Sir Donald’s son, Leo,” said Lady Cardington.
Pimpernel Schley lifted her eyes for an instant from her plate, glanced
at Leo Ulford, and cast them down again.
“Leo Ulford’s a blackguard,” observed Mrs. Trent. “And when a fair man’s
a blackguard he’s much more dangerous than a dark man.”
All the women stared at Leo Ulford with a certain eagerness.
“He’s good-looking,” said Sally Perceval. “But I always distrust
cherubic people. They’re bound to do you if they get the chance. Isn’t
he married?”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Trent. “He married a deaf heiress.”
“Intelligent of him!” remarked Mrs. Wolfstein. “I always wish I’d
married a blind millionaire instead of Henry. Being a Jew, Henry sees
not only all there is to see, but all there isn’t. Sir Donald and his
Cupid son don’t seem to have much to say to one another.”
“Oh, don’t you know that family affection’s the dumbest thing on earth?”
said Mrs. Trent.
“Too deep for speech,” said Lady Manby. “I love to see fathers and sons
together, the fathers trying to look younger than they are and the sons
older. It’s the most comic relationship, and breeds shyness as the West
African climate breeds fever.”
“I know the whole of the West African coast by heart,” declared Miss
Burns, wagging her head, and moving her brown hands nervously among her
knives and forks. “And I never caught anything there.”
“Not even a husband,” murmured Mrs. Wolfstein to Lady Manby.
“In fact, I never felt better in my life than I did at Old Calabar,”
continued Miss Burns. “But there my mind was occupied. I was studying
the habits of alligators.”
“They’re very bad, aren’t they?” asked Lady Manby, in a tone of earnest
inquiry.
“I prefer to study the habits of men,” said Sally Perceval, who was
always surrounded by a troup of young racing men and athletes, who
admired her swimming feats.
“Men are very disappointing, I think,” observed Mrs. Trent. “They are
like a lot of beads all threaded on one string.”
“And what’s the string?” asked Sally Perceval.
“Vanity. Men are far vainer than we are. Their indifference to the
little arts we practise shows it. A woman whose head is bald covers it
with a wig. Without a wig she would feel that she was an outcast totally
powerless to attract. But a bald-headed man has no idea of diffidence.
He does not bother about a wig because he expects to be adored without
one.”
“And the worst of it is that he is adored,” said Mrs. Wolfstein. “Look
at my passion for Henry.”
They began to talk about their husbands. Lady Holme did not join in. She
and Pimpernel Schley were very silent members of the party. Even Miss
Burns, who was--so she said--a spinster by conviction not by
necessity, plunged into the husband question, and gave some very daring
illustrations of the marriage customs of certain heathen tribes.
Pimpernel Schley hardly spoke at all. When someone, turning to her,
asked her what she thought about the subject under discussion, she
lifted her pale eyes and said, with the choir-boy drawl:
“I’ve got no husband and never had one, so I guess I’m no kind of a
judge.”
“I guess she’s a judge of other women’s husbands, though,” said Mrs.
Wolfstein to Lady Cardington. “That child is going to devastate London.”
Now and then Lady Holme glanced towards Sir Donald and his son. They
seemed as untalkative as she was. Sir Donald kept on looking towards
Mrs. Wolfstein’s table. So did Leo. But whereas Leo Ulford’s eyes were
fixed on Pimpernel Schley, Sir Donald’s met the eyes of Lady Holme. She
felt annoyed; not because Sir Donald was looking at her, but because his
son was not.
How these women talked about their husbands! Lady Cardington, who was
a widow, spoke of husbands as if they were a race which was gradually
dying out. She thought the modern woman was beginning to get a little
tired of the institution of matrimony, and to care much less for men
than was formerly the case. Being contradicted by Mrs. Trent, she gave
her reasons for this belief. One was that whereas American matinee girls
used to go mad over the “leading men” of the stage they now went mad
over the leading women. She also instanced the many beautiful London
women, universally admired, who were over thirty and still remained
spinsters. Mrs. Trent declared that they were abnormal, and that, till
the end of time, women would always wish to be wives. Mrs. Wolfstein
agreed with her on various grounds. One was that it was the instinct
of woman to buy and to rule, and that if she were rich she could
now acquire a husband as, in former days, people acquired slaves--by
purchase. This remark led to the old question of American heiresses and
the English nobility, and to a prolonged discussion as to whether or not
most women ruled their husbands.
Women nearly always argue from personal experience, and consequently
Lady Cardington--whose husband had treated her badly--differed on this
point from Mrs. Wolfstein, who always did precisely what she pleased,
regardless of Mr. Wolfstein’s wishes. Mrs. Trent affirmed that for her
part she thought women should treat their husbands as they treated their
servants, and dismiss them if they didn’t behave themselves, without
giving them a character. She had done so twice, and would do it a
third time if the occasion arose. Sally Perceval attacked her for this,
pleading slangily that men would be men, and that their failings
ought to be winked at; and Miss Burns, as usual, brought the marital
proceedings of African savages upon the carpet. Lady Manby turned the
whole thing into a joke by a farcical description of the Private Enquiry
proceedings of a jealous woman of her acquaintance, who had donned a
canary-coloured wig as a disguise, and dogged her husband’s footsteps
in the streets of London, only to find that he went out at odd times to
visit a grandmother from whom he had expectations, and who happened to
live in St. John’s Wood.
The foreign waiters, who moved round the table handing the dishes,
occasionally exchanged furtive glances which seemed indicative of
suppressed amusement, and the men who were lunching near, many of whom
were now smoking cigarettes, became more and more intent upon Mrs.
Wolfstein and her guests. As they were getting up to go into the Palm
Court for coffee and liqueurs, Lady Cardington again referred to the
article on the proposed school for happiness, which had apparently made
a deep impression upon her.
“I wonder if happiness can be taught,” she said. “If it can--”
“It can’t,” said Mrs. Trent, with more than her usual sledge-hammer
bluntness. “We aren’t meant to be happy here.”
“Who doesn’t mean us to be happy?” asked poor Lady Cardington in a
deplorable voice.
“First--our husbands.”
“It’s cowardly not to be happy,” cried Miss Burns, pushing her hat over
her left eye as a tribute to the close of lunch. “In a savage state
you’ll always find--”
The remainder of her remark was lost in the _frou-frou_ of skirts as the
eight women began slowly to thread their way between the tables to the
door.
Lady Holme found herself immediately behind Miss Schley, who moved with
impressive deliberation and the extreme composure of a well-brought-up
child thoroughly accustomed to being shown off to visitors. Her
straw-coloured hair was done low in the nape of her snowy neck, and,
as she took her little steps, her white skirt trailed over the carpet
behind her with a sort of virginal slyness. As she passed Leo Ulford it
brushed gently against him, and he drummed the large fingers of his left
hand with sudden violence on the tablecloth, at the same time pursing
his chubby lips and then opening his mouth as if he were going to say
something.
Sir Donald rose and bowed. Mrs. Wolfstein murmured a word to him in
passing, and they had not been sipping their coffee for more than two or
three minutes before he joined them with his son.
Sir Donald came up at once to Lady Holme.
“May I present my son to you, Lady Holme?” he said.
“Certainly.”
“Leo, I wish to introduce you to Lady Holme.”
Leo Ulford bowed rather ungracefully. Standing up he looked more than
ever like a huge boy, and he had much of the expression that is often
characteristic of huge boys--an expression in which impudence seems to
float forward from a background of surliness.
Lady Holme said nothing. Leo Ulford sat down beside her in an armchair.
“Better weather,” he remarked.
Then he called a waiter, and said to him, in a hectoring voice:
“Bring me a Kummel and make haste about it.”
He lit a cigarette that was almost as big as a cigar, and turned again
to Lady Holme.
“I’ve been in the Sahara gazelle shooting,” he continued.
He spoke in a rather thick, lumbering voice and very loud, probably
because he was married to a deaf woman.
“Just come back,” he added.
“Oh!” said Lady Holme.
She was sitting perfectly upright on her chair, and noticed that her
companion’s eyes travelled calmly and critically over her figure with
an unveiled deliberation that was exceptionally brazen even in a modern
London man. Lady Holme did not mind it. Indeed, she rather liked it. She
knew at once, by that look, the type of man with whom she had to deal.
In Leo Ulford there was something of Lord Holme, as in Pimpernel Schley
there was perhaps a touch of herself. Having finished his stare, Leo
Ulford continued:
“Jolly out there. No rot. Do as you like and no one to bother you.
Gazelle are awfully shy beasts though.”
“They must have suited you,” said Lady Holme, very gravely.
“Why?” he asked, taking the glass of Kummel which the waiter had brought
and setting it down on a table by him.
“Aren’t you a shy--er--beast?”
He stared at her calmly for a moment, and then said:
“I say, you’re too sharp, Lady Holme.”
He turned his head towards Pimpernel Schley, who was sitting a little
way off with her soft, white chin tucked well in, looking steadily down
into a cup half full of Turkish coffee and speaking to nobody.
“Who’s that girl?” he asked.
“That’s Miss Pimpernel Schley. A pretty name, isn’t it?”
“Is it? An American of course.”
“Of course.”
“What cheek they have? What’s she do?”
“I believe she acts in--well, a certain sort of plays.”
A slow smile overspread Leo Ulford’s face and made him look more like a
huge boy than ever.
“What certain sort?” he asked. “The sort I’d like?”
“Very probably. But I know nothing of your tastes.”
She did--everything almost. There are a good many Leo Ulfords lounging
about London.
“I like anything that’s a bit lively, with no puritanic humbug about
it.”
“Well, you surely can’t suppose that there can be any puritanic humbug
about Miss Schley or anything she has to do with!”
He glanced again at Pimpernel Schley and then at Lady Holme. The smile
on his face became a grin. Then his huge shoulders began to shake
gently.
“I do love talking to women,” he said, on the tide of a prolonged
chuckle. “When they aren’t deaf.”
Lady Holme still remained perfectly grave.
“Do you? Why?” she inquired.
“Can’t you guess why?”
“Our charity to our sister women?”
She was smiling now.
“You teach me such a lot,” he said.
He drank his Kummel.
“I always learn something when I talk to a woman. I’ve learnt something
from you.”
Lady Holme did not ask him what it was. She saw that he was now more
intent on her than he had been on Miss Schley, and she got up to go,
feeling more cheerful than she had since she left the _atelier_ of
“Cupido.”
“Don’t go.”
“I must.”
“Already! May I come and call?”
“Your father knows my address.”
“Oh, I say--but--”
“You’re not going already!” cried Mrs. Wolfstein, who was having a
second glass of Benedictine and beginning to talk rather outrageously
and with a more than usually pronounced foreign accent.
“I must, really.”
“I’m afraid my son has bored you,” murmured Sir Donald, in his worn-out
voice.
“No, I like him,” she replied, loud enough for Leo to hear.
Sir Donald did not look particularly gratified at this praise of his
achievement. Lady Holme took an airy leave of everybody. When she came
to Pimpernel Schley she said:
“I wish you a great success, Miss Schley.”
“Many thanks,” drawled the vestal virgin, who was still looking into her
coffee cup.
“I must come to your first night. Have you ever acted in London?”
“Never.”
“You won’t be nervous?”
“Nervous! Don’t know the word.”
She bent to sip her coffee.
When Lady Holme reached the door of the Carlton, and was just entering
one of the revolving cells to gain the pavement, she heard Lady
Cardington’s low voice behind her.
“Let me drive you home, dear.”
At the moment she felt inclined to be alone. She had even just refused
Sir Donald’s earnest request to accompany her to her carriage. Had any
other woman made her this offer she would certainly have refused it. But
few people refused any request of Lady Cardington’s. Lady Holme, like
the rest of the world, felt the powerful influence that lay in her
gentleness as a nerve lies in a body. And then had she not wept when
Lady Holme sang a tender song to her? In a moment they were driving up
the Haymarket together in Lady Cardington’s barouche.
The weather had grown brighter. Wavering gleams of light broke through
the clouds and lay across the city, giving a peculiarly unctuous look to
the slimy streets, in which there were a good many pedestrians more
or less splashed with mud. There was a certain hopefulness in the
atmosphere, and yet a pathos such as there always is in Spring, when it
walks through London ways, bearing itself half nervously, like a country
cousin.
“I don’t like this time of year,” said Lady Cardington.
She was leaning back and glancing anxiously about her.
“But why not?” asked Lady Holme. “What’s the matter with it?”
“Youth.”
“But surely--”
“The year’s too young. And at my age one feels very often as if the
advantage of youth were an unfair advantage.”
“Dare I ask--?”
She checked herself, looking at her companion’s snow-white hair, which
was arranged in such a way that it looked immensely thick under the big
black hat she wore--a hat half grandmotherly and half coquettish, that
certainly suited her to perfection.
“Spring--” she was beginning rather quickly; but Lady Cardington
interrupted her.
“Fifty-eight,” she said.
She laughed anxiously and looked at Lady Holme.
“Didn’t you think I was older?”
“I don’t know that I ever thought about it,” replied Lady Holme, with
the rather careless frankness she often used towards women.
“Of course not. Why should you, or anyone? When a woman’s once
over fifty it really doesn’t matter much whether she’s fifty-one or
seventy-one. Does it?”
Lady Holme thought for a moment. Then she said:
“I really don’t know. You see, I’m not a man.”
Lady Cardington’s forehead puckered and her mouth drooped piteously.
“A woman’s real life is very short,” she said. “But her desire for real
life can last very long--her silly, useless desire.”
“But if her looks remain?”
“They don’t.”
“You think it is a question of looks?”
“Do you think it is?” asked Lady Cardington. “But how can you know
anything about it, at your age, and with your appearance?”
“I suppose we all have our different opinions as to what men are and
what men want,” Lady Holme said, more thoughtfully than usual.
“Men! Men!” Lady Cardington exclaimed, with a touch of irritation
unusual in her. “Why should we women do, and be, everything for men?”
“I don’t know, but we do and we are. There are some men, though, who
think it isn’t a question of looks, or think they think so.”
“Who?” said Lady Cardington, quickly.
“Oh, there are some,” answered Lady Holme, evasively, “who believe in
mental charm more than in physical charm, or say they do. And mental
charm doesn’t age so obviously as physical--as the body does, I suppose.
Perhaps we ought to pin our faith to it. What do you think of Miss
Schley?”
Lady Cardington glanced at her with a kind of depressed curiosity.
“She pins her faith to the other thing,” she said.
“Yes.”
“She’s pretty. Do you know she reminds me faintly of you.”
Lady Holme felt acute irritation at this remark, but she only said:
“Does she?”
“Something in her colouring. I’m sure she’s a man’s woman, but I can’t
say I found her interesting.”
“Men’s women seldom are interesting to us. They don’t care to be,” said
Lady Holme.
Suddenly she thought that possibly between Pimpernel Schley and herself
there were resemblances unconnected with colouring.
“I suppose not. But still--ah, here’s Cadogan Square!”
She kissed Lady Holme lightly on the cheek.
“Fifty-eight!” Lady Holme said to herself as she went into the house.
“Just think of being fifty-eight if one has been a man’s woman! Perhaps
it’s better after all to be an everybody’s woman. Well, but how’s it
done?”
She looked quite puzzled as she came into the drawing-room, where Robin
Pierce had been waiting impatiently for twenty minutes.
“Robin,” she said seriously, “I’m very unhappy.”
“Not so unhappy as I have been for the last half hour,” he said, taking
her hand and holding it. “What is it?”
“I’m dreadfully afraid I’m a man’s woman. Do you think I am?”
He could not help smiling as he looked into her solemn eyes.
“I do indeed. Why should you be upset about it?”
“I don’t know. Lady Cardington’s been saying things--and I met a rather
abominable little person at lunch, a little person like a baby that’s
been about a great deal in a former state, and altogether--Let’s have
tea.”
“By all means.”
“And now soothe me, Robin. I’m dreadfully strung up. Soothe me. Tell
me, I’m an everybody’s woman and that I shall never be _de trop_ in the
world--not even when I’m fifty-eight.”
CHAPTER VI
THE success of Pimpernel Schley in London was great and immediate, and
preceded her appearance upon the stage. To some people, who thought they
knew their London, it was inexplicable. Miss Schley was pretty and knew
how to dress. These facts, though of course denied by some, as all facts
in London are, were undeniable. But Miss Schley had nothing to say. She
was not a brilliant talker, as so many of her countrywomen are. She
was not vivacious in manner, except on rare occasions. She was not
interested in all the questions of the day. She was not--a great many
things. But she was one thing.
She was exquisitely sly.
Her slyness was definite and pervasive. In her it took the place of wit.
It took the place of culture. It even took the place of vivacity. It was
a sort of maid-of-all-work in her personality and never seemed to tire.
The odd thing was that it did not seem to tire others. They found it
permanently piquant. Men said of Miss Schley, “She’s a devilish clever
little thing. She don’t say much, but she’s up to every move on the
board.” Women were impressed by her. There was something in her supreme
and snowy composure that suggested inflexible will. Nothing ever put her
out or made her look as if she were in a false position.
London was captivated by the abnormal combination of snow and slyness
which she presented to it, and began at once to make much of her.
At one time the English were supposed to be cold; and rather gloried in
the supposition. But recently a change has taken place in the national
character--at any rate as exhibited in London. Rigidity has gone out
of fashion. It is condemned as insular, and unless you are cosmopolitan
nowadays you are nothing, or worse than nothing. The smart Englishwoman
is beginning to be almost as restless as a Neapolitan. She is in
a continual flutter of movement, as if her body were threaded with
trembling wires. She uses a great deal of gesture. She is noisy about
nothing. She is vivacious at all costs, and would rather suggest
hysteria than British phlegm.
Miss Schley’s calm was therefore in no danger of being drowned in any
pervasive calm about her. On the contrary, it stood out. It became
very individual. Her composed speechlessness in the midst of uneasy
chatter--the Englishwoman is seldom really self-possessed--carried with
it a certain dignity which took the place of breeding. She was always
at her ease, and to be always at your ease makes a deep impression upon
London, which is full of self-consciousness.
She began to be the fashion at once. A great lady, who had a passion for
supplying smart men with what they wanted, saw that they were going to
want Miss Schley and promptly took her up. Other women followed suit.
Miss Schley had a double triumph. She was run after by women as well
as by men. She got her little foot in everywhere, and in no time. Her
personal character was not notoriously bad. The slyness had taken care
of that. But even if it had been, if only the papers had not been too
busy in the matter, she might have had success. Some people do whose
names have figured upon the evening bills exposed at the street corners.
Hers had not and was not likely to. It was her art to look deliberately
pure and good, and to suggest, in a way almost indefinable and very
perpetual, that she could be anything and everything, and perhaps
had been, under the perfumed shadow of the rose. The fact that the
suggestion seemed to be conveyed with intention was the thing that took
corrupt old London’s fancy and made Miss Schley a pet.
Her name of Pimpernel was not against her.
Men liked it for its innocence, and laughed as they mentioned it in the
clubs, as who should say:
“We know the sort of Pimpernel we mean.”
Miss Schley’s social success brought her into Lady Holme’s set, and
people noticed, what Lady Holme had been the first to notice, the faint
likeness between them. Lady Holme was not exquisitely sly. Her voice was
not like a choir-boy’s; her manner was not like the manner of an image;
her eyes were not for ever cast down. Even her characteristic silence
was far less perpetual than the equally characteristic silence of Miss
Schley. But men said they were the same colour. What men said women
began to think, and it was not an assertion wholly without foundation.
At a little distance there was an odd resemblance in the one white face
and fair hair to the other. Miss Schley’s way of moving, too, had a sort
of reference to Lady Holme’s individual walk. There were several things
characteristic of Lady Holme which Miss Schley seemed to reproduce, as
it were, with a sly exaggeration. Her hair was similar, but paler, her
whiteness more dead, her silence more perpetual, her composure more
enigmatically serene, her gait slower, with diminished steps.
It was all a little like an imitation, with just a touch of caricature
added.
One or two friends remarked upon it to Lady Holme, who heard them very
airily.
“Are we alike?” she said. “I daresay, but you mustn’t expect me to see
it. One never knows the sort of impression one produces on the world.
I think Miss Schley a very attractive little creature, and as to her
social gifts, I bow to them.”
“But she has none,” cried Mrs. Wolfstein, who was one of those who had
drawn Lady Holme’s attention to the likeness.
“How can you say so? Everyone is at her feet.”
“Her feet, perhaps. They are lovely. But she has no gifts. That’s why
she gets on. Gifted people are a drug in the market. London’s sick of
them. They worry. Pimpernel’s found that out and gone in for the savage
state. I mean mentally of course.”
“Her mind dwells in a wigwam,” said Lady Manby. “And wears glass beads
and little bits of coloured cloth.”
“But her acting?” asked Lady Holme, with careless indifference.
“Oh, that’s improper but not brilliant,” said Mrs. Wolfstein. “The
American critics says it’s beneath contempt.”
“But not beneath popularity, I suppose?” said Lady Holme.
“No, she’s enormously popular. Newspaper notices don’t matter to
Pimpernel. Are you going to ask her to your house? You might. She’s
longing to come. Everybody else has, and she knew you first.”
Lady Holme began to realise why she could never like Mrs. Wolfstein. The
latter would try to manage other people’s affairs.
“I had no idea she would care about it,” she answered, rather coldly.
“My dear--an American! And your house! You’re absurdly modest. She’s
simply pining to come. May I tell her to?”
“I should prefer to invite her myself,” said Lady Holme, with a distinct
touch of hauteur which made Mrs. Wolfstein smile maliciously.
When Lady Holme was alone she realised that she had, half unconsciously,
meant that Miss Schley should find that there was at any rate one house
in London whose door did not at once fly open to welcome her demure
presence. But now? She certainly did not intend to be a marked exception
to a rule that was apparently very general. If people were going to talk
about her exclusion of Miss Schley, she would certainly not exclude
her. She asked herself why she wished to, and said to herself that Miss
Schley’s slyness bored her. But she knew that the real reason of the
secret hostility she felt towards the American was the fact of their
resemblance to each other. Until Miss Schley appeared in London
she--Viola Holme--had been original both in her beauty and in her manner
of presenting it to the world. Miss Schley was turning her into a type.
It was too bad. Any woman would have disliked it.
She wondered whether Miss Schley recognised the likeness. But of course
people had spoken to her about it. Mrs. Wolfstein was her bosom friend.
The Jewess had met her first at Carlsbad and, with that terrible social
flair which often dwells in Israel, had at once realised her fitness for
a London success and resolved to “get her over.” Women of the Wolfstein
species are seldom jealously timorous of the triumphs of other women.
A certain coarse cleverness, a certain ingrained assurance and
unconquerable self-confidence keeps them hardy. And they generally have
a noble reliance on the power of the tongue. Being incapable of any
fear of Miss Schley, Mrs. Wolfstein, ever on the look-out for means of
improving her already satisfactory position in the London world, saw
one in the vestal virgin and resolved to launch her in England. She was
delighted with the result. Miss Schley had already added several very
desirable people to the Wolfstein visiting-list. In return “Henry” had
“put her on to” one or two very good things in the City. Everything
would be most satisfactory if only Lady Holme were not tiresome about
the Cadogan Square door.
“She hates you, Pimpernel,” said Mrs. Wolfstein to her friend.
“Why?” drawled Miss Schley.
“You know why perfectly well. You reproduce her looks. I’m perfectly
certain she’s dreading your first night. She’s afraid people will begin
to think that extraordinary colourless charm she and you possess stagey.
Besides, you have certain mannerisms--you don’t imitate her, Pimpernel?”
The pawnbroking expression was remarkably apparent for a moment in Mrs.
Wolfstein’s eyes.
“I haven’t started to yet.”
“Yet?”
“Well, if she don’t ask me to number thirty-eight--‘tis thirty-eight?”
“Forty-two.”
“Forty-two Cadogan Square, I might be tempted. I came out as a mimic,
you know, at Corsher and Byall’s in Philadelphia.”
Miss Schley gazed reflectively upon the brown carpet of Mrs. Wolfstein’s
boudoir.
“Folks said I wasn’t bad,” she added meditatively.
“I think I ought to warn Viola,” said Mrs. Wolfstein.
She was peculiarly intimate with people of distinction when they weren’t
there. Miss Schley looked as if she had not heard. She often did when
anything of importance to her was said. It was important to her to be
admitted to Lady Holme’s house. Everybody went there. It was one of the
very smartest houses in London, and since everybody knew that she had
been introduced to Lady Holme, since half the world was comparing their
faces and would soon begin to compare their mannerisms--well, it
would be better that she should not be forced into any revival of her
Philadelphia talents.
Mrs. Wolfstein did not warn Lady Holme. She was far too fond of being
amused to do anything so short-sighted. Indeed, from that moment she was
inclined to conspire to keep the Cadogan Square door shut against her
friend. She did not go so far as that; for she had a firm faith in
Pimpernel’s cuteness and was aware that she would be found out. But she
remained passive and kept her eyes wide open.
Miss Schley was only going to act for a month in London. Her managers
had taken a theatre for her from the first of June till the first of
July. As she was to appear in a play she had already acted in all over
the States, and as her American company was coming over to support her,
she had nothing to do in the way of preparation. Having arrived early
in the year, she had nearly three months of idleness to enjoy. Her
conversation with Mrs. Wolfstein took place in the latter days of March.
And it was just at this period that Lady Holme began seriously to debate
whether she should, or should not, open her door to the American. She
knew Miss Schley was determined to come to her house. She knew her
house was one of those to which any woman setting out on the conquest of
London would wish to come. She did not want Miss Schley there, but she
resolved to invite her if peopled talked too much about her not being
invited. And she wished to be informed if they did. One day she spoke to
Robin Pierce about it. Lord Holme’s treatment of Carey had not yet been
applied to him. They met at a private view in Bond Street, given by a
painter who was adored by the smart world, and, as yet, totally unknown
in every other circle. The exhibition was of portraits of beautiful
women, and all the beautiful women and their admirers crowded the rooms.
Both Lady Holme and Miss Schley had been included among the sitters of
the painter, and--was it by chance or design?--their portraits hung side
by side upon the brown-paper-covered walls. Lady Holme was not aware of
this when she caught Robin’s eye through a crevice in the picture hats
and called him to her with a little nod.
“Is there tea?”
“Yes. In the last room.”
“Take me there. Oh, there’s Ashley Greaves. Avoid him, like a dear, till
I’ve looked at something.”
Ashley Greaves was the painter. There was nothing of the Bohemian about
him. He looked like a heavy cavalry officer as he stood in the centre of
the room talking to a small, sharp-featured old lady in a poke bonnet.
“He’s safe. Lady Blower’s got hold of him.”
“Poor wretch! She ought to have a keeper. Strong tea, Robin.”
They found a settee in a corner walled in by the backs of tea-drinking
beauties.
“I want to ask you something,” said Lady Holme, confidentially. “You go
about and hear what they’re saying.”
“And greater nonsense it seems each new season.”
“Nonsense keeps us alive.”
“Is it the oxygen self-administered by an almost moribund society?”
“It’s the perfume that prevents us from noticing the stuffiness of the
room. But, Robin, tell me--what is the nonsense of now?”
“Religious, political, theatrical, divorce court or what, Lady Holme?”
He looked at her with a touch of mischief in his dark face, which
told her, and was meant to tell her, that he was on the alert, and had
divined that she had a purpose in thus pleasantly taking possession of
him.
“Oh, the people--nonsense. You know perfectly what I mean.”
“Whom are they chattering about most at the moment? You’ll be
contemptuous if I tell you.”
“It’s a woman, then?”
“When isn’t it?”
“Do I know her?”
“Slightly.”
“Well?”
“Miss Schley.”
“Really?”
Lady Holme’s voice sounded perfectly indifferent and just faintly
surprised. There was no hint of irritation in it.
“And what are they saying about Miss Schley?” she added, sipping her tea
and glancing about the crowded room.
“Oh, many things, and among the many one that’s more untrue than all the
rest put together.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s too absurd. I don’t think I’ll tell you.”
“But why not? If it’s too absurd it’s sure to be amusing.”
“I don’t think so.”
His voice sounded almost angry.
“Tell me, Robin.”
He looked at her quickly with a warm light in his dark eyes.
“If you only knew how I--”
“Hush! Go on about Miss Schley.”
“They’re saying that she’s wonderfully like you, and that--have some
more tea?”
“That--?”
“That you hate it.”
Lady Holme smiled, as if she were very much entertained.
“But why should I hate it?”
“I don’t know. But women invent reasons for everything.”
“What have they invented for this?”
“Oh--well--that you like to--I can’t tell you it all, really. But in
substance it comes to this! They are saying, or implying--”
“Implication is the most subtle of the social arts.”
“It’s the meanest--implying that all that’s natural to you, that sets
you apart from others, is an assumption to make you stand out from the
rest of the crowd, and that you hate Miss Schley because she happens
to have assumed some of the same characteristics, and so makes you seem
less unique than you did before.”
Lady Holme said nothing for a moment. Then she remarked:
“I’m sure no woman said ‘less unique.’”
“Why not?”
“Now did anyone? Confess!”
“What d’you suppose they did say?”
“More commonplace.”
He could not help laughing.
“As if you were ever commonplace!” he exclaimed, rather relieved by her
manner.
“That’s not the question. But then Miss Schley’s said to be like me not
only in appearance but in other ways? Are we really so Siamese?”
“I can’t see the faintest beginning of a resemblance.”
“Ah, now you’re falling into exaggeration in the other direction.”
“Well, not in realities. Perhaps in one or two trifling mannerisms--I
believe she imitates you deliberately.”
“I think I must ask her to the house.”
“Why should you?”
“Well, perhaps you might tell me.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Aren’t people saying that the reason I don’t ask her is because I am
piqued at the supposed resemblance between us?”
“Oh, people will say anything. If we are to model our lives according to
their ridiculous ideas--”
“Well, but we do.”
“Unless we follow the dictates of our own natures, our own souls.”
He lowered his voice almost to a whisper.
“Be yourself, be the woman who sings, and no one--not even a fool--will
ever say again that you resemble a nonentity like Miss Schley. You
see--you see now that even socially it is a mistake not to be your
real self. You can be imitated by a cute little Yankee who has neither
imagination nor brains, only the sort of slyness that is born out of the
gutter.”
“My dear Robin, remember where we are. You--a diplomatist!”
She put her finger to her lips and got up.
“We must look at something or Ashley Greaves will be furious.”
They made their way into the galleries, which were almost impassable. In
the distance Lady Holme caught sight of Miss Schley with Mrs. Wolfstein.
They were surrounded by young men. She looked hard at the American’s
pale face, saying to herself, “Is that like me? Is that like me?” Her
conversation with Robin Pierce had made her feel excited. She had
not shown it. She had seemed, indeed, almost oddly indifferent. But
something combative was awake within her. She wondered whether the
American was consciously imitating her. What an impertinence! But Miss
Schley was impertinence personified. Her impertinence was her _raison
d’etre_. Without it she would almost cease to be. She would at any rate
be as nothing.
Followed by Robin, Lady Holme made her way slowly towards the Jewess and
the American.
They were now standing together before the pictures, and had been joined
by Ashley Greaves, who was beginning to look very warm and expressive,
despite his cavalry moustache. Their backs were towards the room, and
Lady Holme and Robin drew near to them without being perceived. Mrs.
Wolfstein had a loud voice and did not control it in a crowd. On the
contrary, she generally raised it, as if she wished to be heard by those
whom she was not addressing.
“Sargent invariably brings out the secret of his sitters,” she was
saying to Ashley Greaves as Lady Holme and Robin came near and stood
for an instant wedged in by people, unable to move forward or backward.
“You’ve brought out the similarities between Pimpernel and Lady Holme.
I never saw anything so clever. You show us not only what we all saw but
what we all passed over though it was there to see. There is an absurd
likeness, and you’ve blazoned it.”
Robin stole a glance at his companion. Ashley Greaves said, in a thin
voice that did not accord with his physique:
“My idea was to indicate the strong link there is between the English
woman and the American woman. If I may say so, these two portraits, as
it were, personify the two countries, and--er--and--er--”
His mind appeared to give way. He strove to continue, to say something
memorable, conscious of his conspicuous and central position. But his
intellect, possibly over-heated and suffering from lack of air, declined
to back him up, and left him murmuring rather hopelessly:
“The one nation--er--and the other--yes--the give and take--the give and
take. You see my meaning? Yes, yes.”
Miss Schley said nothing. She looked at Lady Holme’s portrait and
at hers with serenity, and seemed quite unconscious of the many eyes
fastened upon her.
“You feel the strong link, I hope, Pimpernel?” said Mrs. Wolfstein, with
her most violent foreign accent. “Hands across the Herring Pond!”
“Mr. Greaves has been too cute for words,” she replied. “I wish Lady
Holme could cast her eye on them.”
She looked up at nothing, with a sudden air of seeing something
interesting that was happening along way off.
“Philadelphia!” murmured Mrs. Wolfstein, with an undercurrent of
laughter.
It was very like Lady Holme’s look when she was singing. Robin Pierce
saw it and pressed his lips together. At this moment the crowd shifted
and left a gap through which Lady Holme immediately glided towards
Ashley Greaves. He saw her and came forward to meet her with eagerness,
holding out his hand, and smiling mechanically with even more than his
usual intention.
“What a success!” she said.
“If it is, your portrait makes it so.”
“And where is my portrait?”
Robin Pierce nipped in the bud a rather cynical smile. The painter wiped
his forehead with a white silk handkerchief.
“Can’t you guess? Look where the crowd is thickest.”
The people had again closed densely round the two pictures.
“You are an artist in more ways than one, I’m afraid,” said Lady Holme.
“Don’t turn my head more than the heat has.”
The searching expression, that indicated the strong desire to say
something memorable, once more contorted the painter’s face.
“He who would essay to fix beauty on canvas,” he began, in a rather
piercing voice, “should combine two gifts.”
He paused and lifted his upper lip two or three times, employing his
under-jaw as a lever.
“Yes?” said Lady Holme, encouragingly.
“The gift of the brush which perpetuates and the gift of--er--gift of
the--”
His intellect once more retreated from him into some distant place and
left him murmuring:
“Beauty demands all, beauty demands all. Yes, yes! Sacrifice! Sacrifice!
Isn’t it so?”
He tugged at his large moustache, with an abrupt assumption of the
cavalry officer’s manner, which he doubtless deemed to be in accordance
with his momentary muddle-headedness.
“And you give it what it wants most--the touch of the ideal. It blesses
you. Can we get through?”
She had glanced at Robin while she spoke the first words. Ashley
Greaves, with an expression of sudden relief, began very politely to
hustle the crowd, which yielded to his persuasive shoulders, and Lady
Holme found herself within looking distance of the two portraits, and
speaking distance of Mrs. Wolfstein and Miss Schley. She greeted them
with a nod that was more gay and friendly than her usual salutations to
women, which often lacked _bonhomie_. Mrs. Wolfstein’s too expressive
face lit up.
“The sensation is complete!” she exclaimed loudly.
“Hope you’re well,” murmured Miss Schley, letting her pale eyes rest on
Lady Holme for about a quarter of a second, and then becoming acutely
attentive to vacancy.
Lady Holme was now in front of the pictures. She looked at Miss Schley’s
portrait with apparent interest, while Mrs. Wolfstein looked at her with
an interest that was maliciously real.
“Well?” said Mrs. Wolfstein. “Well?”
“There’s an extraordinary resemblance!” said Lady Holme. “It’s
wonderfully like.”
“Even you see it! Ashley, you ought to be triumphant--”
“Wonderfully like--Miss Schley,” added Lady Holme, cutting gently
through Mrs. Wolfstein’s rather noisy outburst.
She turned to the American.
“I have been wondering whether you won’t come in one day and see my
little home. Everyone wants you, I know, but if you have a minute some
Wednesday--”
“I’ll be delighted.”
“Next Wednesday, then?”
“Thanks. Next Wednesday.”
“Cadogan Square--the red book will tell you. But I’ll send cards. I must
be running away now.”
When she had gone, followed by Robin, Mrs. Wolfstein said to Miss
Schley:
“She’s been conquered by fear of Philadelphia.”
“Wait till I give her Noo York,” returned the American, placidly.
It seemed that Lady Holme’s secret hostility to Miss Schley was returned
by the vestal virgin.
CHAPTER VII
LORD HOLME seldom went to parties and never to private views. He thought
such things “all damned rot.” Few functions connected with the
arts appealed to his frankly Philistine spirit, which rejoiced in
celebrations linked with the glories of the body; boxing and wrestling
matches, acrobatic performances, weight-lifting exhibitions, and so
forth. He regretted that bear-baiting and cock-fighting were no longer
legal in England, and had, on two occasions, travelled from London to
South America solely in order to witness prize fights.
As he so seldom put in an appearance at smart gatherings he had not
yet encountered Miss Schley, nor had he heard a whisper of her
much-talked-of resemblance to his wife. Her name was known to him as
that of a woman whom one or two of his “pals” began to call a “deuced
pretty girl” but his interest in her was not greatly awakened. The
number of deuced pretty girls that had been in his life, and in the
lives of his pals, was legion. They came and went like feathers dancing
on the wind. The mere report of them, therefore, casual and drifting,
could not excite his permanent attention, or fix their names and the
record of their charms in his somewhat treacherous memory. Lady Holme
had not once mentioned the American to him. She was a woman who knew how
to be silent, and sometimes she was silent by instinct without saying to
herself why.
Lord Holme never appeared on her Wednesdays; and, indeed, those days
were a rather uncertain factor among the London joys. If Lady Holme
was to be found in her house at all, she was usually to be found on
a Wednesday afternoon. She herself considered that she was at home on
Wednesdays, but this idea of hers was often a mere delusion, especially
when the season had fully set in. There were a thousand things to be
done. She frequently forgot what the day of the week was. Unluckily she
forgot it on the Wednesday succeeding her invitation to Miss Schley.
The American duly turned up in Cadogan Square and was informed that Lady
Holme was not to be seen. She left her card and drove away in her coupe
with a decidedly stony expression upon her white face.
That day it chanced that Lord Holme came in just before his wife
and carelessly glanced over the cards which had been left during the
afternoon. He was struck by the name of Pimpernel. It tickled his
fancy somehow. As he looked at it he grinned. He looked at it again
and vaguely recalled some shreds of the club gossip about Miss Schley’s
attractions. When Lady Holme walked quietly into her drawing-room two or
three minutes later he met her with Miss Schley’s card in his hand.
“What have you got there, Fritz?” she said.
He gave her the card.
“You never told me you’d run up against her,” he remarked.
Lady Holme looked at the card and then, quickly, at her husband.
“Why--do you know Miss Schley?” she asked.
“Not I.”
“Well then?”
“Fellows say she’s deuced takin’. That’s all. And she’s got a fetchin’
name--eh? Pimpernel.”
He repeated it twice and began to grin once more, and to bend and
straighten his legs in the way which sometimes irritated his wife. Lady
Holme was again looking at the card.
“Surely it isn’t Wednesday?” she said.
“Yes, it is. What did you think it was?”
“Tuesday--Monday--I don’t know.”
“Where’d you meet her?”
“Whom? Miss Schley? At the Carlton. A lunch of Amalia Wolfstein’s.”
“Is she pretty?”
“Yes.”
There was no hesitation before the reply.
“What colour?
“Oh!--not Albino.”
Lord Holme stared.
“What d’you mean by that, girlie?”
“That Miss Schley is remarkably fair--fairer than I am.”
“Is she as pretty as you?
“You can find out for yourself. I’m going to ask her to
something--presently.”
In the last word, in the pause that preceded it, there was the creeping
sound of the reluctance Lady Holme felt in allowing Miss Schley to draw
any closer to her life. Lord Holme did not notice it. He only said:
“Right you are. Pimpernel--I should like to have a squint at her.”
“Very well. You shall.”
“Pimpernel,” repeated Lord Holme, in a loud bass voice, as he lounged
out of the room, grinning. The name tickled his fancy immensely. That
was evident.
Lady Holme fully intended to ask Miss Schley to the “something” already
mentioned immediately. But somehow several days slipped by and it was
difficult to find an unoccupied hour. The Holme cards had, of course,
duly gone to the Carlton, but there the matter had ended, so far as Lady
Holme was concerned. Miss Schley, however, was not so heedless as the
woman she resembled. She began to return with some assiduity to the
practice of the talent of the old Philadelphia days. In those days she
used to do a “turn” in the course of which she imitated some of the
popular public favourites of the States, and for each of her imitations
she made up to resemble the person mimicked. She now concentrated
this talent upon Lady Holme, but naturally the methods she employed in
Society were far more subtle than those she had formerly used upon
the stage. They were scarcely less effective. She slightly changed her
fashion of doing her hair, puffing it out less at the sides, wearing
it a little higher at the back. The change accentuated her physical
resemblance to Lady Holme. She happened to get the name of the
dressmaker who made most of the latter’s gowns, and happened to give her
an order that was executed with remarkable rapidity. But all this was
only the foundation upon which she based, as it were, the structure of
her delicate revenge.
That consisted in a really admirable hint--it could not be called
more--of Lady Holme’s characteristic mannerisms.
Lady Holme was not an affected woman, but, like all women of the world
who are greatly admired and much talked about, she had certain little
ways of looking, moving, speaking, being quiet, certain little habits
of laughter, of gravity, that were her own property. Perhaps originally
natural to her, they had become slightly accentuated as time went on,
and many tongues and eyes admired them. That which had been unconscious
had become conscious. The faraway look came a little more abruptly, went
a little more reluctantly; than it had in the young girl’s days. The
wistful smile lingered more often on the lips of the twenties than on
the lips of the teens. Few noticed any change, perhaps, but there had
been a slight change, and it made things easier for Miss Schley.
Her eye was observant although it was generally cast down. Society began
to smile secretly at her talented exercises. Only a select few, like
Mrs. Wolfstein, knew exactly what she was doing and why she was doing
it, but the many were entertained, as children are, without analysing
the cause of their amusement.
Two people, however, were indignant--Robin Pierce and Rupert Carey.
Robin Pierce, who had an instinct that was almost feminine in its
subtlety, raged internally, and Rupert Carey, who, naturally acute, was
always specially shrewd when his heart was in the game, openly showed
his distaste for Miss Schley, and went about predicting her complete
failure to capture the London public as an actress.
“She’s done it as a woman,” someone replied to him.
“Not the public, only the smart fools,” returned Carey.
“The smart fools have more influence on the public every day.”
Carey only snorted. He was in one of his evil moods that afternoon. He
left the club in which the conversation had taken place, and, casting
about for something to do, some momentary solace for his irritation and
_ennui_, he bethought him of Sir Donald Ulford’s invitation and resolved
to make a call at the Albany. Sir Donald would be out, of course, but
anyhow he would chance it and shoot a card.
Sir Donald’s servant said he was in. Carey was glad. Here was an hour
filled up.
With his usual hasty, decisive step he followed the man through a dark
and Oriental-looking vestibule into a library, where Sir Donald was
sitting at a bureau of teakwood, slowly writing upon a large, oblong
sheet of foolscap with a very pointed pen.
He got up, looking rather startled, and held out his hand.
“I am glad to see you. I hoped you would come.”
“I’m disturbing a new poem,” said Carey.
Sir Donald’s faded face acknowledged it.
“Sorry. I’ll go.”
“No, no. I have infinite leisure, and I write now merely for myself. I
shall never publish anything more. The maunderings of the old are really
most thoroughly at home in the waste-paper basket. Do sit down.”
Carey threw himself into a deep chair and looked round. It was a room
of books and Oriental china. The floor was covered with an exquisite
Persian carpet, rich and delicate in colour, with one of those vague
and elaborate designs that stir the imagination as it is stirred by a
strange perfume in a dark bazaar where shrouded merchants sit.
“I light it with wax candles,” said Sir Donald, handing Carey a cigar.
“It’s a good room to think in, or to be sad in.”
He struck a match on his boot.
“You like to shut out London,” he continued.
“Yes. Yet I live in it.”
“And hate it. So do I. London’s like a black-browed brute that gets an
unholy influence over you. It would turn Mark Tapley into an Ibsen man.
Yet one can’t get away from it.”
“It holds interesting minds and interesting faces.”
“Didn’t Persia?”
“Lethargy dwells there and in all Eastern lands.”
“You have made up your mind to spend the rest of your days in the fog?”
“No. Indeed, only to-day I acquired a Campo Santo with cypress trees, in
which I intend to make a home for any dying romance that still lingers
within me.”
He spoke with a sort of wistful whimsicality. Carey stared hard at him.
“A Campo Santo’s a place for the dead.”
“Why not for the dying? Don’t they need holy ground as much?”
“And where’s this holy ground of yours?”
Sir Donald got up from his chair, went over to the bureau, opened a
drawer, and took out of it a large photograph rolled round a piece of
wood, which he handed to Carey, who swiftly spread it out on his knees.
“That is it.”
“I say, Sir Donald, d’you mind my asking for a whisky-and-soda?”
“I beg your pardon.”
He hastily touched a bell and ordered it. Meanwhile Carey examined the
photograph.
“What do you think of it?” Sir Donald asked.
“Well--Italy obviously.”
“Yes, and a conventional part of Italy.”
“Maggiore?”
“No, Como.”
“The playground of the honeymoon couple.”
“Not where my Campo Santo is. They go to Cadenabbia, Bellagio, Villa
D’Este sometimes.”
“I see the fascination. But it looks haunted. You’ve bought it?”
“Yes. The matter was arranged to-day.”
The photograph showed a large, long house, or rather two houses divided
by a piazza with slender columns. In the foreground was water. Through
the arches of the piazza water was also visible, a cascade falling in
the black cleft of a mountain gorge dark with the night of cypresses.
To the right of the house, rising from the lake, was a tall old wall
overgrown with masses of creeping plants and climbing roses. Over it
more cypresses looked, and at the base of it, near the house, were a
flight of worn steps disappearing into the lake, and an arched doorway
with an elaborately-wrought iron grille. Beneath the photograph was
written, “_Casa Felice_.”
“Casa Felice, h’m!” said Carey, with his eyes on the photograph.
“You think the name inappropriate?”
“Who knows? One can be wretched among sunbeams. One might be gay among
cypresses. And Casa Felice belongs to you?”
“From to-day.”
“Old--of course?”
“Yes. There is a romance connected with the house.”
“What is it?”
“Long ago two guilty lovers deserted their respective mates and the
brilliant world they had figured in, and fled there together.”
“And quarrelled and were generally wretched there for how many months?”
“For eight years.”
“The devil! Fidelity gone mad!”
“It is said that during those years the mistress never left the garden,
except to plunge into the lake on moonlight nights and swim through the
silver with her lover.”
Carey was silent. He did not take his eyes from the photograph,
which seemed to fascinate him. When the servant came in with the
whisky-and-soda he started.
“Not a place to be alone in,” he said.
He drank, and stared again at the photograph.
“There’s something about the place that holds one even in a photograph,”
he added.
“One can feel the strange intrigue that made the house a hermitage. It
has been a hermitage ever since.”
“Ah!”
“An old Italian lady, very rich, owned it, but never lived there. She
recently died, and her heir consented to sell it to me.”
“Well, I should like to see it in the flesh--or the bricks and mortar.
But it’s not a place to be alone in,” repeated Carey. “It wants a woman
if ever a house did.”
“What sort of woman?”
Sir Donald had sat down again on the chair opposite, and was looking
with his exhausted eyes through the smoke of the cigars at Carey.
“A fair woman, a woman with a white face, a slim woman with eyes that
are cords to draw men to her and bind them to her, and a voice that can
sing them into the islands of the sirens.”
“Are there such women in a world that has forgotten Ulysses?”
“Don’t you know it?”
He rolled the photograph round the piece of wood and laid it on a table.
“I can only think of one who at all answers to your description.”
“The one of whom I was thinking.”
“Lady Holme?”
“Of course.”
“Don’t you think she would be dreadfully bored in Casa Felice?”
“Horribly, horribly. Unless--”
“Unless?”
“Who knows what? But there’s very often an unless hanging about, like
a man at a street corner, that--” He broke off, then added abruptly,
“Invite me to Casa Felice some day.”
“I do.”
“When will you be going there?”
“As soon as the London season is over. Some time in August. Will you
come then?”
“The house is ready for you?”
“It will be. The necessary repairs will be begun now. I have bought it
furnished.”
“The lovers’ furniture?”
“Yes. I shall add a number of my own things, picked up on my
wanderings.”
“I’ll come in August if you’ll have me. But I’ll give you the season to
think whether you’ll have me or whether you won’t. I’m a horrible
bore in a house--the lazy man who does nothing and knows a lot. Casa
Felice--Casa Felice. You won’t alter the name?”
“Would you advise me to?”
“I don’t know. To keep it is to tempt the wrath of the gods, but I
should keep it.”
He poured out another whisky-and-soda and suddenly began to curse Miss
Schley.
Sir Donald had spoken to her after Mrs. Wolfstein’s lunch.
“She’s imitating Lady Holme,” said Carey.
“I cannot see the likeness,” Sir Donald said. “Miss Schley seems to me
uninteresting and common.”
“She is.”
“And Lady Holme’s personality is, on the contrary; interesting and
uncommon.”
“Of course. Pimpernel Schley would be an outrage in that Campo Santo of
yours. And yet there is a likeness, and she’s accentuating it every day
she lives.”
“Why?”
“Ask the women why they do the cursed things they do do.”
“You are a woman-hater?”
“Not I. Didn’t I say just now that Casa Felice wanted a woman? But the
devil generally dwells where the angel dwells--cloud and moon together.
Now you want to get on with that poem.”
Half London was smiling gently at the resemblance between Lady Holme
and Miss Schley before the former made up her mind to ask the latter
to “something.” And when, moved to action by certain evidences of the
Philadelphia talent which could not be misunderstood, she did make up
her mind, she resolved that the “something” should be very large and by
no means very intimate. Safety wanders in crowds.
She sent out cards for a reception, one of those affairs that begin
about eleven, are tremendous at half past, look thin at twelve, and have
faded away long before the clock strikes one.
Lord Holme hated them. On several occasions he had been known to throw
etiquette to the winds and not to turn up when his wife was giving them.
He always made what he considered to be a good excuse. Generally he had
“gone into the country to look at a horse.” As Lady Holme sent out her
cards, and saw her secretary writing the words, “Miss Pimpernel Schley,”
on an envelope which contained one, she asked herself whether her
husband would be likely to play her false this time.
“Shall you be here on the twelfth?” she asked him casually.
“Why? What’s up on the twelfth?”
“I’m going to have one of those things you hate--before the Arkell House
ball. I chose that night so that everyone should run away early! You
won’t be obliged to look at a horse in the country that particular day?”
She spoke laughingly, as if she wanted him to say no, but would not be
very angry if he didn’t. Lord Holme tugged his moustache and looked very
serious indeed.
“Another!” he ejaculated. “We’re always havin’ ‘em. Any music?”
“No, no, nothing. There are endless dinners that night, and Mrs.
Crutchby’s concert with Calve, and the ball. People will only run in and
say something silly and run out again.”
“Who’s comin’?”
“Everybody. All the tiresome dears that have had their cards left.”
Lord Holme stared at his varnished boots and looked rather like a
puzzled boy at a _viva voce_ examination.
“The worst of it is, I can’t be in the country lookin’ at a horse that
night,” he said with depression.
“Why not?”
She hastily added:
“But why should you? You ought to be here.”
“I’d rather be lookin’ at a horse. But I’m booked for the dinner to
Rowley at the Nation Club that night. I might say the speeches were too
long and I couldn’t get away. Eh?”
He looked at her for support.
“You really ought to be here, Fritz,” she answered.
It ended there. Lady Holme knew her husband pretty well. She fancied
that the speeches at the dinner given to Sir Jacob Rowley, ex-Governor
of some place she knew nothing about, would turn out to be very lengthy
indeed--speeches to keep a man far from his home till after midnight.
On the evening of the twelfth Lord Holme had not arrived when the first
of his wife’s guests came slowly up the stairs, and Lady Holme began
gently to make his excuses to all the tiresome dears who had had their
cards left at forty-two Cadogan Square. There were a great many
tiresome dears. The stream flowed steadily, and towards half-past eleven
resembled a flood-tide.
Lady Cardington, Lady Manby, Mr. Bry, Sally Perceval had one by one
appeared, and Robin Pierce’s dark head was visible mounting slowly amid
a throng of other heads of all shapes, sizes and tints.
Lady Holme was looking particularly well. She was dressed in black.
Of course black suits everybody. It suited her even better than most
people, and her gown was a triumph. She was going on to the Arkell House
ball, and wore the Holme diamonds, which were superb, and which she had
recently had reset. She was in perfect health, and felt unusually
young and unusually defiant. As she stood at the top of the staircase,
smiling, shaking hands with people, and watching Robin Pierce
coming slowly nearer, she wondered a little at certain secret
uneasinesses--they could scarcely be called tremors--which had recently
oppressed her. How absurd of her to have been troubled, even lightly,
by the impertinent proceedings of an American actress, a nobody from the
States, without position, without distinction, without even a husband.
How could it matter to her what such a little person--she always called
Pimpernel Schley a little person in her thoughts--did or did not do?
As Robin came towards her she almost--but not quite--wished that the
speeches at the dinner to Sir Jacob Rowley had not been so long as
they evidently had been, and that her husband were standing beside her,
looking enormous and enormously bored.
“What a crowd!”
“Yes. We can’t talk now. Are you going to Arkell House?”
Robin nodded.
“Take me in to supper there.”
“May I? Thank you. I’m going with Rupert Carey.”
“Really!”
At this moment Lady Holme’s eyes and manner wandered. She had just
caught a glimpse of Mrs. Wolfstein, a mass of jewels, and of Pimpernel
Schley at the foot of the staircase, had just noticed that the latter
happened to be dressed in black.
“Bye-bye!” she added.
Robin Pierce walked on into the drawing-rooms looking rather
preoccupied.
Everybody came slowly up the stairs. It was impossible to do anything
else. But it seemed to Lady Holme that Miss Schley walked far more
slowly than the rest of the tiresome dears, with a deliberation that
had a touch of insolence in it. Her straw-coloured hair was done exactly
like Lady Holme’s, but she wore no diamonds in it. Indeed, she had on
no jewels. And this absence of jewels, and her black gown, made her skin
look almost startlingly white, if possible whiter than Lady Holme’s.
She smiled quietly as she mounted the stairs, as if she were wrapt in a
pleasant, innocent dream which no one knew anything about.
Amalia Wolfstein was certainly a splendid--a too splendid--foil to her.
The Jewess was dressed in the most vivid orange colour, and was very
much made up. Her large eyebrows were heavily darkened. Her lips were
scarlet. Her eyes, which moved incessantly, had a lustre which suggested
oil with a strong light shining on it. “Henry” followed in her wake,
looking intensely nervous, and unnaturally alive and observant, as if
he were searching in the crowd for a bit of gold that someone had
accidentally dropped. When anyone spoke to him he replied with extreme
vivacity but in the fewest possible words. He held his spare figure
slightly sideways as he walked, and his bald head glistened under the
electric lamps. Behind them, in the distance, was visible the yellow and
sunken face of Sir Donald Ulford.
When Miss Schley gained the top of the staircase Lady Holme saw that
their gowns were almost exactly alike. Hers was sewn with diamonds, but
otherwise there was scarcely any difference. And she suddenly felt as if
the difference made by the jewels was not altogether in her favour, as
if she were one of those women who look their best when they are not
wearing any ornaments. Possibly Mrs. Wolfstein made all jewellery seem
vulgar for the moment. She looked like an exceedingly smart jeweller’s
shop rather too brilliantly illuminated; “as if she were for sale,” as
an old and valued friend of hers aptly murmured into the ear of someone
who had known her ever since she began to give good dinners.
“Here we are! I’m chaperoning Pimpernel. But her mother arrives
to-morrow,” began Mrs. Wolfstein, with her strongest accent, while
Miss Schley put out a limp hand to meet Lady Holme’s and very slightly
accentuated her smile.
“Your mother? I shall be delighted to meet her. I hope you’ll bring her
one day,” said Lady Holme; thinking more emphatically than ever that for
a woman with a complexion as perfect as hers it was a mistake to wear
many jewels.
“I’ll be most pleased, but mother don’t go around much,” replied Miss
Schley.
“Does she know London?”
“She does not. She spends most of her time sitting around in Susanville,
but she’s bound to look after me in this great city.”
Mrs. Wolfstein was by this time in violent conversation with a pale
young man, who always looked as if he were on the point of fainting, but
who went literally everywhere. Miss Schley glanced up into Lady Holme’s
eyes.
“I hoped to make the acquaintance of Lord Holme to-night,” she murmured.
“Folks tell me he’s a most beautiful man. Isn’t he anywhere around?”
She looked away into vacancy, ardently. Lady Holme felt a slight
tingling sensation in her cool skin. For a moment it seemed to her as if
she watched herself in caricature, distorted perhaps by a mirror with a
slight flaw in it.
“My husband was obliged to dine out to-night; unfortunately. I hope
he’ll be here in a moment, but he may be kept, as there are to be some
dreadful speeches afterwards. I can’t think why elderly men always want
to get up and talk nonsense about the Royal family after a heavy dinner.
It’s so bad for the digestion and the--ah, Sir Donald! Sweet of you to
turn up. Your boy’s been so unkind. I asked him to call, or he asked to
call, and he’s never been near me.”
Miss Schley drifted away and was swallowed by the crowd. Sir Donald had
arrived at the top of the stairs.
“Leo’s been away in Scotland ever since he had the pleasure of meeting
you. He only came back to-night.”
“Then I’m not quite so hurt. He’s always running about, I suppose, to
kill things, like my husband.”
“He does manage a good deal in that way. If you are going to the Arkell
House ball you’ll meet him there. He and his wife are both--”
“How did do! Oh, Charley, I never expected to see you. I thought it
wasn’t the thing for the 2nd to turn up at little hay parties like this.
Kitty Barringlave is in the far room, dreadfully bored. Go and cheer her
up. Tell her what’ll win the Cup. She’s pale and peaky with ignorance
about Ascot this year. Both going to Arkell House, Sir Donald, did you
say? Bring your son to me, won’t you? But of course you’re a wise man
trotting off to bed.”
“No. The Duke is a very old friend of mine, and so--”
“Perfect. We’ll meet then. They say it’s really locomotor ataxia, poor
fellow I but--ah, there’s Fritz!”
Sir Donald looked at her with a sudden inquiring shrewdness, that lit up
his faded eyes and made them for a moment almost young. He had caught a
sound of vexation in her voice, which reminded him oddly of the sound
in her singing voice when Miss Filberte was making a fiasco of the
accompaniment. Lord Holme was visible and audible in the hall. His
immense form towered above his guests, and his tremendous bass voice
dominated the hum of conversation round him. Lady Holme could see from
where she stood that he was in a jovial and audacious mood. The dinner
to Sir Jacob Rowley had evidently been well cooked and gay. Fritz had
the satisfied and rather larky air of a man who has been having one good
time and intends to have another. She glanced into the drawing-rooms.
They were crammed. She saw in the distance Lady Cardington talking to
Sir Donald Ulford. Both of them looked rather pathetic. Mrs. Wolfstein
was not far off, standing in the midst of a group and holding forth with
almost passionate vivacity and self-possession. Her husband was gliding
sideways through the crowd with his peculiarly furtive and watchful air,
which always suggested the old nursery game, “Here I am on Tom Tiddler’s
ground, picking up gold and silver.” Lady Manby was laughing in a corner
with an archdeacon who looked like a guardsman got up in fancy dress.
Mr. Bry, his eyeglass fixed in his left eye, came towards the staircase,
moving delicately like Agag, and occasionally dropping a cold or
sarcastic word to an acquaintance. He reached Lady Holme when Lord Holme
was half-way up the stairs, and at once saw him.
“A giant refreshed with wine,” he observed, dropping his eyeglass.
It was such a perfect description of Lord Holme in his present condition
that two or three people who were standing with Lady Holme smiled,
looking down the staircase. Lady Holme did not smile. She continued
chattering, but her face wore a discontented expression. Mr. Bry noticed
it. There were very few things he did not notice, although he claimed to
be the most short-sighted man in London.
“Why is your husband so dutiful to-night?” he murmured to his hostess.
“I thought he always had to go into the country to look at a gee-gee on
these occasions.”
“He had to be in town for the dinner to Sir Jacob Rowley. I begged him
to come back in--How did do! How did do! Yes, very. Mr. Raleigh, do tell
the opera people not to put on Romeo too often this season. Of course
Melba’s splendid in it, and all that, but still--”
Mr. Bry fixed his eyeglass again, and began to smile gently like an
evil-minded baby. Lord Holme’s brown face was full in view, grinning.
His eyes were looking about with unusual vivacity.
“How early you are, Fritz! Good boy. I want you to look after--”
“I say, Vi, why didn’t you tell me?”
Mr. Bry, letting his eyeglass fall, looked abstracted and lent an
attentive ear. If he were not playing prompter to social comedies he
generally stood in the wings, watching and listening to them with a cold
amusement that was seldom devoid of a spice of venom.
“Tell you what, Fritz?”
“That Miss Schley was comin’ to-night. Everyone’s talking about her. I
sat next Laycock at dinner and he was ravin’. Told me she was to be here
and I didn’t know it. Rather ridiculous, you know. Where is she?”
“Somewhere in the rooms.”
“What’s she like?”
“Oh!--I don’t know. She’s in black. Go and look for her.”
Lord Holme strode on. As he passed Mr. Bry he said:
“I say, Bry, d’you know Miss Pimpernel Schley?”
“Naturally.”
“Come with me, there’s a good chap, and--what’s she like?”
As they went on into the drawing-rooms Mr. Bry dropped out:
“Some people say she’s like Lady Holme.”
“Like Vi! Is she? Laycock’s been simply ravin’--simply ravin’--and
Laycock’s not a feller to--where is she?
“We shall come to her. So there was no gee-gee to look at in the country
to-night?”
Lord Holme burst into a roar of laughter.
“There’s the vestal tending her lamp,” said Mr. Bry a moment later.
“The what up to what?”
“Miss Pimpernel Schley keeping the fire of adoration carefully alight.”
“Where?”
“There.”
“Oh, I see! Jove, what a skin, though! Eh! Isn’t it? She is deuced like
Vi at a distance. Vi looks up just like that when she’s singin’. Doesn’t
she, though? Eh?”
He went on towards her.
Mr. Bry followed him, murmuring.
“The giant refreshed with wine. No gee-gee to-night. No gee-gee.”
CHAPTER VIII
“THE brougham is at the door, my lady.”
“Tell his lordship.”
The butler went out, and Lady Holme’s maid put a long black cloak
carefully over her mistress’s shoulders. While she did this Lady Holme
stood quite still gazing into vacancy. They were in the now deserted
yellow drawing-room, which was still brilliantly lit, and full of the
already weary-looking flowers which had been arranged for the reception.
The last guest had gone and the carriage was waiting to take the Holmes
to Arkell House.
The maid did something to the diamonds in Lady Holme’s hair with deft
fingers, and the light touch seemed to wake Lady Holme from a reverie.
She went to a mirror and looked into it steadily. The maid stood behind.
After a moment Lady Holme lifted her hand suddenly to her head, as
if she were going to take off her tiara. The maid could not repress
a slight movement of startled astonishment. Lady Holme saw it in the
glass, dropped her hand, and said:
“C’est tout, Josephine. Vous pouvez vous en aller.”
“Merci, miladi.”
She went out quietly.
Two or three minutes passed. Then Lord Holme’s deep bass voice was
audible, humming vigorously:
“Ina, Ina, oh, you should have seen her!
Seen her with her eyes cast down.
She looked upon the floor,
And all the Johnnies swore
That Ina, Ina--oh, you should have seen her!--
That Ina was the _chic_-est girl in town.”
Lady Holme frowned.
“Fritz!” she called rather sharply.
Lord Holme appeared with a coat thrown over his arm and a hat in his
hand. His brown face was beaming with self-satisfaction.
“Well, old girl, ready? What’s up now?”
“I wish you wouldn’t sing those horrible music-hall songs. You know I
hate them.”
“Music-hall! I like that. Why, it’s the best thing in _The Chick from
the Army and Navy_ at the Blue Theatre.”
“It’s disgustingly vulgar.”
“What next? Why, I saw the Lord Chan--”
“I daresay you did. Vulgarity will appeal to the Saints of Heaven next
season if things go on as they’re going now. Come along.”
She went out of the room, walking more quickly than she usually walked,
and holding herself very upright. Lord Holme followed, forming the words
of his favourite song with his lips, and screwing up his eyes as if he
were looking at an improper peepshow. When they were in the electric
brougham, which spun along with scarcely any noise, he began:
“I say, Vi, how long’ve you known Miss Schley?”
“I don’t know. Some weeks.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I did. I said I had met her at Mrs. Wolfstein’s lunch.”
“No, but why didn’t you tell me how like you she was?”
There was complete silence in the brougham for a minute. Then Lady Holme
said:
“I had no idea she was like me.”
“Then you’re blind, old girl. She’s like you if you’d been a chorus-girl
and known a lot of things you don’t know.”
“Really. Perhaps she has been a chorus-girl.”
“I’ll bet she has, whether she says so or not.”
He gave a deep chuckle. Lady Holme’s gown rustled as she leaned back in
her corner.
“And she’s goin’ to Arkell House. Americans are the very devil for
gettin’ on. Laycock was tellin’ me to-night that--”
“I don’t wish to hear Mr. Laycock’s stories, Fritz. They don’t amuse
me.”
“Well, p’r’aps they’re hardly the thing for you, Vi. But they’re deuced
amusin’ for all that.”
He chuckled again. Lady Holme felt an intense desire to commit some
act of physical violence. She shut her eyes. In a minute she heard her
husband once more beginning to hum the refrain about Ina. How utterly
careless he was of her desires and requests. There was something animal
in his forgetfulness and indifference. She had loved the animal in him.
She did love it. Something deep down in her nature answered eagerly to
its call. But at moments she hated it almost with fury. She hated it now
and longed to use the whip, as the tamer in a menagerie uses it when one
of his beasts shows its teeth, or sulkily refuses to perform one of its
tricks.
Lord Holme went on calmly humming till the brougham stopped in the long
line of carriages that stretched away into the night from the great
portico of Arkell House.
People were already going in to supper when the Holmes arrived. The
Duke, upon whom a painful malady was beginning to creep, was bravely
welcoming his innumerable guests. He found it already impossible to go
unaided up and down stairs, and sat in a large armchair close to the
ball-room, with one of his pretty daughters near him, talking brightly,
and occasionally stealing wistful glances at the dancers, who were
visible through a high archway to his left. He was a thin, middle-aged
man, with a curious, transparent look in his face--something crystalline
that was nearly beautiful.
The Duchess was swarthy and masterful, very intelligent and _grande
dame_. Vivacity was easy to her. People said she had been a good hostess
in her cradle, and that she had presided over the ceremony of her own
baptism in a most autocratic and successful manner. It was quite likely.
After a word with the Duke, Lady Holme went slowly towards the ballroom
with her husband. She did not mean to dance, and began to refuse the
requests of would-be partners with charming protestations of fatigue.
Lord Holme was scanning the ballroom with his big brown eyes.
“Are you going to dance, Fritz?” asked Lady Holme, nodding to Robin
Pierce, whom she had just seen standing at a little distance with Rupert
Carey.
The latter had not seen her yet, but as Robin returned her nod he looked
hastily round.
“Yes, I promised Miss Schley to struggle through a waltz with her.
Wonder if she’s dancin’?”
Lady Holme bowed, a little ostentatiously, to Rupert Carey. Her husband
saw it and began at once to look pugilistic. He could not say anything,
for at this moment two or three men strolled up to speak to Lady Holme.
While she was talking to them, Pimpernel Schley came in sight waltzing
with Mr. Laycock, one of those abnormally thin, narrow-featured, smart
men, with bold, inexpressive ayes, in whom London abounds.
Lord Holme’s under-jaw resumed its natural position, and he walked away
and was lost in the crowd, following the two dancers.
“Take me in to supper, Robin. I’m tired.”
“This way. I thought you were never coming.”
“People stayed so late. I can’t think why. I’m sure it was dreadfully
dull and foolish. How odd Mr. Carey’s looking! When I bowed to him just
now he didn’t return it, but only stared at me as if I were a stranger.”
Robin Pierce made no rejoinder. They descended the great staircase and
went towards the picture-gallery.
“Find a corner where we can really talk.”
“Yes, yes.”
He spoke eagerly.
“Here--this is perfect.”
They sat down at a table for two that was placed in an angle of the
great room. Upon the walls above them looked down a Murillo and a
Velasquez. Lady Holme was under the Murillo, which represented three
Spanish street boys playing a game in the dust with pieces of money.
“A table for two,” said Robin Pierce. “I have always said that the
Duchess understands the art of entertaining better than anyone in
London, except you--when you choose.”
“To-night I really couldn’t choose. Later on, I’m going to give two or
three concerts. Is anything the matter with Mr. Carey?”
“Do you think so?”
“Well, I hope it isn’t true what people are saying.”
“What are they saying?”
“That’s he’s not very judicious in one way.”
A footman poured champagne into her glass. Robin Pierce touched the
glass.
“That way?”
“Yes. It would be too sad.”
“Let us hope it isn’t true, then.”
“You know him well. Is it true?”
“Would you care if it was?”
He looked at her earnestly.
“Yes. I like Mr. Carey.”
There was a rather unusual sound of sincerity in her voice.
“And what is it that you like in him?”
“Oh, I don’t know. He talks shocking nonsense, of course, and is down on
people and things. And he’s absurdly unsophisticated at moments, though
he knows the world so well. He’s not like you--not a diplomat. But I
believe if he had a chance he might do something great.”
Robin felt as if the hidden woman had suddenly begun to speak. Why did
she speak about Rupert Carey?
“Do you like a man to do something great?” he said.
“Oh, yes. All women do.”
“But I perpetually hear you laughing at the big people--the Premiers,
the Chancellors, the Archbishops, the Generals of the world.”
“Because I’ve always known them. And really they are so often quite
absurd and tiresome.”
“And--Rupert Carey?”
“Oh, he’s nothing at all, poor fellow! Still there’s something in his
face that makes me think he could do an extraordinary thing if he had
the chance. I saw it there to-night when he didn’t bow to me. There’s
Sir Donald’s son. And what a dreadful-looking woman just behind him.”
Leo Ulford was coming down the gallery with a gaunt, aristocratic,
harsh-featured girl. Behind him walked Mr. Bry, conducting a very young
old woman, immensely smart, immensely vivacious, and immensely pink, who
moved with an unnecessary alertness that was birdlike, and turned her
head about sharply on a long, thin neck decorated with a large diamond
dog-collar. Slung at her side there was a tiny jewelled tube.
“That’s Mrs. Leo.”
“She must be over sixty.”
“She is.”
The quartet sat down at the next table. Leo Ulford did not see Lady
Holme at once. When he caught sight of her, he got up, came to her,
stood over her and pressed her hand.
“Been away,” he explained. “Only back to-night.”
“I’ve been complaining to your father about you.”
A slow smile overspread his chubby face.
“May I see you again after supper?”
“If you can find me.”
“I can always manage to find what I want,” he returned, still smiling.
When he had gone back to his table Robin Pierce said:
“How insolent Englishmen are allowed to be in Society! It always strikes
me after I’ve been a long time abroad. Doesn’t anybody mind it?”
“Do you mean that you consider Mr. Ulford insolent?”
“In manner. Yes, I do.”
“Well, I think there’s something like Fritz about him.”
Robin Pierce could not tell from the way this was said what would be a
safe remark to make. He therefore changed the subject.
“Do you know what Sir Donald’s been doing?” he said.
“No. What?”
“Buying a Campo Santo.”
“A Campo Santo! Is he going to bury himself, then? What do you mean,
Robin?”
“He called it a Campo Santo to Carey. It’s really a wonderful house in
Italy, on Como. Casa Felice is the name of it. I know it well.”
“Casa Felice. How delicious! But is it the place for Sir Donald?”
“Why not?”
“For an old, tired man. Casa Felice. Won’t the name seem an irony to him
when he’s there?”
“You think an old man can’t be happy anywhere?”
“I can’t imagine being happy old.”
“Why not?”
“Oh!”--she lowered her voice--“if you want to know, look at Mrs.
Ulford.”
“Your husk theory again. A question of looks. But you will grow old
gracefully--some day in the far future.”
“I don’t think I shall grow old at all.”
“Then--?”
“I think I shall die before that comes--say at forty-five. I couldn’t
live with wrinkles all over my face. No, Robin, I couldn’t. And--look at
Mrs. Ulford!--perhaps an ear-trumpet set with opals.”
“What do the wrinkles matter? But some day you’ll find I’m right. You’ll
tell me so. You’ll acknowledge that your charm comes from within, and
has survived the mutilation of the husk.”
“Mutilation! What a hideous sound that word has. Why don’t all mutilated
people commit suicide at once? I should. Is Sir Donald going to live in
his happy house?”
“Naturally. He’ll be there this August. He’s invited Rupert Carey to
stay there with him.”
“And you?”
“Not yet.”
“I suppose he will. Everybody always asks you everywhere. Diplomacy is
so universally--”
She broke off. Far away, at the end of the gallery, she had caught sight
of Miss Schley coming in with her husband. They sat down at a table near
the door. Robin Pierce followed her eyes and understood her silence.
“Are you going on the first?” he asked.
“What to?”
“Miss Schley’s first night.”
“Is it on the first? I didn’t know. We can’t. We’re dining at Brayley
House that evening.”
“What a pity!” he said, with a light touch of half playful malice. “You
would have seen her as she really is--from all accounts.”
“And what is Miss Schley really?”
“The secret enemy of censors.”
“Oh!”
“You dislike her. Why?”
“I don’t dislike her at all.”
“Do you like her?”
“No. I like very few women. I don’t understand them.”
“At any rate you understand--say Miss Schley--better than a man would.”
“Oh--a man!”
“I believe all women think all men fools.”
Lady Holme laughed, not very gaily.
“Don’t they?” he insisted.
“In certain ways, in certain relations of life, I suppose most men
are--rather short-sighted.”
“Like Mr. Bry.”
“Mr. Bry is the least short-sighted man I know. That’s why he always
wears an eyeglass.”
“To create an illusion?”
“Who knows?”
She looked down the long room. Between the heads of innumerable men and
women she could see Miss Schley. Her husband was hidden. She would have
preferred to see him. Miss Schley’s head was by no means expressive of
the naked truth. It merely looked cool, self-possessed, and--so Lady
Holme said to herself--extremely American. What she meant by that she
could, perhaps, hardly have explained.
“Do you admire Miss Schley’s appearance?”
Robin Pierce spoke again with a touch of humorous malice. He knew Lady
Holme so well that he had no objection to seem wanting in tact to her
when he had a secret end to gain. She looked at him sharply; leaning
forward over the table and opening her eyes very wide.
“Why are you forgetting your manners to-night and bombarding me with
questions?”
“The usual reason--devouring curiosity.”
She hesitated, looking at him. Then suddenly her face changed.
Something, some imp of adorable frankness, peeped out of it at him, and
her whole body seemed confiding.
“Miss Schley is going about London imitating me. Now, isn’t that true?
Isn’t she?”
“I believe she is. Damned impertinence!”
He muttered the last words under his breath.
“How can I admire her?”
There was something in the way she said that which touched him. He
leaned forward to her.
“Why not punish her for it?”
“How?”
“Reveal what she can’t imitate.”
“What’s that?”
“All you hide and I divine.”
“Go on.”
“She mimics the husk. She couldn’t mimic the kernel.”
“Ice, my lady?”
Lady Holme started. Till the footman spoke she had not quite realised
how deeply interested she was in the conversation. She helped herself to
some ice.
“You can go on, Mr. Pierce,” she said when the man had gone.
“But you understand.”
She shook her head, smiling. Her body still looked soft and attractive,
and deliciously feminine.
“Miss Schley happens to have some vague resemblance to you in height and
colouring. She is a clever mimic. She used to be a professional mimic.”
“Really!”
“That was how she first became known.”
“In America?”
“Yes.”
“Why should she imitate me?”
“Have you been nice to her?”
“I don’t know. Yes. Nice enough.”
Robin shook his head.
“You think she dislikes me then?”
“Do women want definite reasons for half the things they do? Miss Schley
may not say to herself that she dislikes you, any more than you say to
yourself that you dislike her. Nevertheless--”
“We should never get on. No.”
“Consider yourselves enemies--for no reasons, or secret woman’s reasons.
It’s safer.”
Lady Holme looked down the gallery again. Miss Schley’s fair head was
bending forward to some invisible person.
“And the mimicry?” she asked, turning again to Robin.
“Can only be applied to mannerisms, to the ninety-ninth part, the
inconsiderable fraction of your charm. Miss Schley could never imitate
the hidden woman, the woman who sings, the woman who laughs at, denies
herself when she is not singing.”
“But no one cares for her--if she exists.”
There was a hint of secret bitterness in her voice when she said that.
“Give her a chance--and find out. But you know already that numbers do.”
He tried to look into her eyes, but she avoided his gaze and got up.
“Take me back to the ballroom.”
“You are going to dance?”
“I want to see who’s here.”
As they passed the next table Lady Holme nodded to Leo Ulford. He bowed
in return and indicated that he was following almost immediately. Mrs.
Ulford put down her ear-trumpet, turned her head sharply, and looked at
Lady Holme sideways, fluttering her pink eyelids.
“How exactly like a bird she is,” murmured Lady Holme.
“Exactly--moulting.”
Lady Holme meant as she walked down the gallery; to stop and speak a
few gay words to Miss Schley and her husband, but when she drew near to
their table Lord Holme was holding forth with such unusual volubility,
and Miss Schley was listening with such profound attention, that it did
not seem worth while, and she went quietly on, thinking they did not see
her. Lord Holme did not. But the American smiled faintly as Lady Holme
and Robin disappeared into the hall. Then she said, in reply to her
animated companion:
“I’m sure if I am like Lady Holme I ought to say _Te Deum_ and think
myself a lucky girl. I ought, indeed.”
Lady Holme had not been in the ballroom five minutes before Leo Ulford
came up smiling.
“Here I am,” he remarked, as if the statement were certain to give
universal satisfaction.
Robin looked black and moved a step closer to Lady Holme.
“Thank you, Mr. Pierce,” she said.
She took Leo Ulford’s arm, nodded to Robin, and walked away.
Robin stood looking after her. He started when he heard Carey’s voice
saying:
“Why d’you let her dance with that blackguard?”
“Hulloa, Carey?”
“Come to the supper-room. I want to have a yarn with you. And
all this”--he made a wavering, yet violent, gesture towards the
dancers--“might be a Holbein.”
“A dance of death? What nonsense you talk!”
“Come to the supper-room.”
Robin looked at his friend narrowly.
“You’re bored. Let’s go and take a stroll down Park Lane.”
“No. Well, then, if you won’t--”
“I’ll come.”
He put his arm through Carey’s, and they went out together.
Lady Holme was generally agreeable to men. She was particularly charming
to Leo Ulford that night. He was not an interesting man, but he seemed
to interest her very much. They sat out together for a long time in the
corner of a small drawing-room, far away from the music. She had said to
Robin Pierce that she thought there was something about Leo Ulford
that was like her husband, and when she talked to him she found the
resemblance even greater than she had supposed.
Lord Holme and Leo Ulford were of a similar type. Both were strong,
healthy, sensual, slangy, audacious in a dull kind of fashion--Lady
Holme did not call it dull--serenely and perpetually intent upon having
everything their own way in life. Both lived for the body and ignored
the soul, as they would have ignored a man with a fine brain, a
passionate heart, a narrow chest and undeveloped muscles. Such a man
they would have summed up as “a rotter.” If they ever thought of the
soul at all, it was probably under some such comprehensive name. Both
had the same simple and blatant aim in life, an aim which governed all
their actions and was the generator of most of their thoughts. This
aim, expressed in their own terse language, was “to do themselves
jolly well.” Both had, so far, succeeded in their ambition. Both were,
consequently, profoundly convinced of their own cleverness. Intellectual
conceit--the conceit of the brain--is as nothing to physical
conceit--the conceit of the body. Acute intelligence is always
capable of uneasiness, can always make room for a doubt. But the
self-satisfaction of the little-brained and big-muscled man who has
never had a rebuff or a day’s illness is cased in triple brass. Lady
Holme knew this self-satisfaction well. She had seen it staring out of
her husband’s big brown eyes. She saw it now in the boyish eyes of Leo
Ulford. She was at home with it and rather liked it. In truth, it had
at least one merit--from the woman’s point of view--it was decisively
masculine.
Whether Leo Ulford was, or was not, a blackguard; as Mrs. Trent had
declared, did not matter to her. Three-quarters of the men she knew were
blackguards according to the pinched ideas of Little Peddlington; and
Mrs. Trent might originally have issued from there.
She got on easily with Leo Ulford because she was experienced in the
treatment of his type. She knew exactly what to do with it; how to lead
it on, how to fend it off, how to throw cold water on its enterprise
without dashing it too greatly, how to banish any little, sulky
cloud that might appear on the brassy horizon without seeming to be
solicitous.
The type is amazingly familiar to the woman of the London world. She can
recognize it at a glance, and can send it in its armchair canter round
the circus with scarce a crack of the ring-mistress’s whip.
To-night Lady Holme enjoyed governing it more than usual, and for a
subtle reason.
In testing her power upon Leo Ulford she was secretly practising her
siren’s art, with a view that would have surprised and disgusted him,
still more amazed him, had he known it. She was firing at the dummy
in order that later she might make sure of hitting the living man. Leo
Ulford was the dummy. The living man would be Fritz.
Both dummy and living man were profoundly ignorant of her moving
principle. The one was radiant with self-satisfaction under her
fusillade. The other, ignorant of it so far, would have been furious in
the knowledge of it.
She knew-and laughed at the men.
Presently she turned the conversation, which was getting a little too
personal--on Leo Ulford’s side--to a subject very present in her mind
that night.
“Did you have a talk with Miss Schley the other day after I left?”
she asked. “I ran away on purpose to give you a chance. Wasn’t it
good-natured of me, when I was really longing to stay?”
Leo Ulford stretched out his long legs slowly, his type’s way of
purring.
“I’d rather have gone on yarning with you.”
“Then you did have a talk! She was at my house to-night, looking quite
delicious. You know she’s conquered London?”
“That sort’s up to every move on the board.”
“What do you mean? What board?”
She looked at him with innocent inquiry.
“I wish men didn’t know so much,” she added; with a sort of soft
vexation. “You have so many opportunities of acquiring knowledge and we
so few--if we respect the _convenances_.”
“Miss Schley wouldn’t respect ‘em.”
He chuckled, and again drew up and then stretched out his legs, slowly
and luxuriously.
“How can you know?”
“She’s not the sort that does. She’s the sort that’s always kicking over
the traces and keeping it dark. I know ‘em.”
“I think you’re rather unkind. Miss Schley’s mother arrives to-morrow.”
Leo Ulford put up his hands to his baby moustache and shook with
laughter.
“That’s the only thing she wanted to set her up in business,” he
ejaculated. “A marmar. I do love those Americans!”
“But you speak as if Mrs. Schley were a stage property!”
“I’ll bet she is. Wait till you see her. Why, it’s a regular profession
in the States, being a marmar. I tell you what--”
He leaned forward and fixed his blue eyes on Lady Holme, with an air of
profound acuteness.
“Are you going to see her?”
“Mrs. Schley? I daresay.”
“Well, you remember what I tell you. She’ll be as dry as a dog-biscuit,
wear a cap and spectacles with gold rims, and say nothing but ‘Oh,
my, yes indeed!’ to everything that’s said to her. Does she come from
Susanville?”
“How extraordinary! I believe she does.”
Leo Ulford’s laugh was triumphant and prolonged.
“That’s where they breed marmars!” he exclaimed, when he was able to
speak. “Women are stunning.”
“I’m afraid I don’t quite understand,” said Lady Holme, preserving a
quiet air of pupilage. “But perhaps it’s better I shouldn’t. Anyhow, I
am quite sure Miss Schley’s mother will be worthy of her daughter.”
“You may bet your bottom dollar on that. She’ll be what they call ‘a
sootable marmar.’ I must get my wife to shoot a card on her.”
“I hope you’ll introduce me to Mrs. Ulford. I should like to know her.”
“Yours isn’t the voice to talk down a trumpet,” said Leo Ulford, with a
sudden air of surliness.
“I should like to know her now I know you and your father.”
At the mention of his father Leo Ulford’s discontented expression
increased.
“My father’s a rotter,” he said. “Never cared for anything. No shot to
speak of. He can sit on a horse all right. Had to, in South America
and Morocco and all those places. But he never really cared about it,
I don’t believe. Why, he’d rather look at a picture than a thoroughbred
any day!”
At this moment Sir Donald wandered into the room, with his hands behind
his thin back, and his eyes searching the walls. The Duke possessed a
splendid collection of pictures.
“There he is!” said Leo, gruffly.
“He doesn’t see us. Go and tell him I’m here.”
“Why? he might go out again if we keep mum.”
“But I want to speak to him. Sir Donald! Sir Donald!”
Sir Donald turned round at the second summons and came towards them,
looking rather embarrassed.
“Hulloa, pater!” said Leo.
Sir Donald nodded to his son with a conscientious effort to seem
familiar and genial.
“Hulloa!” he rejoined in a hollow voice.
“Your boy has been instructing me in American mysteries,” said Lady
Holme. “Do take me to the ballroom, Sir Donald.”
Leo Ulford’s good humour returned as abruptly as it had departed.
Her glance at him, as she spoke, had seemed to hint at a secret
understanding between them in which no one--certainly not his
father--was included.
“Pater can tell you all about the pictures,” he said, with a comfortable
assurance, which he did not strive to disguise, that she would be
supremely bored.
He stared at her hard, gave a short laugh, and lounged away.
When he had gone, Sir Donald still seemed embarrassed. He looked at Lady
Holme apologetically, and in his faded eyes she saw an expression
that reminded her of Lady Cardington. It was surely old age asking
forgiveness for its existence.
She did not feel much pity for it, but with the woman of the world’s
natural instinct to smooth rough places--especially for a man--she began
to devote herself to cheering Sir Donald up, as they slowly made their
way through room after room towards the distant sound of the music.
“I hear you’ve been plunging!” she began gaily.
Sir Donald looked vague.
“I’m afraid I scarcely--”
“Forgive me. I catch slang from my husband. He’s ruining my English. I
mean that I hear you’ve been investing--shall I say your romance?--in
a wonderful place abroad, with a fascinating name. I hope you’ll get
enormous interest.”
A faint colour, it was like the ghost of a blush, rose in Sir Donald’s
withered cheeks.
“Ah, Mr. Carey--”
He checked himself abruptly, remembering whet he had heard from Robin
Pierce.
“No, Mr. Pierce was my informant. He knows your place and says it’s too
wonderful. I adore the name.”
“Casa Felice. You would not advise me to change it, then?”
“Change it! Why?”
“Well, I--one should not, perhaps, insist beforehand that one is going
to have happiness, which must always lie on the knees of the gods.”
“Oh, I believe in defiance.”
There was an audacious sound in her voice. Her long talk with Leo Ulford
had given her back her belief in herself, her confidence in her beauty,
her reliance on her youth.
“You have a right to believe in it. But Casa Felice is mine.”
“Even to buy it was a defiance--in a way.”
“Perhaps so. But then--”
“But then you have set out and you must not turn back, Sir Donald.
Baptise your wonderful house yourself by filling it with happiness.
Another gave it its name. Give it yourself the reason for the name.”
Happiness seemed to shine suddenly in the sound of her speaking voice,
as it shone in her singing voice when the theme of her song was joy. Sir
Donald’s manner lost its self-consciousness, its furtive diffidence.
“You--you come and give my house its real baptism,” he said, with a
flash of ardour that, issuing from him, was like fire bursting out of a
dreary marsh land. “Will you? This August?”
“But,” she hesitated. “Isn’t Mr. Carey coming?”
At this moment they came into a big drawing-room that immediately
preceded the ballroom, with which it communicated by an immense doorway
hung with curtains of white velvet. They could see in the distance the
dancers moving rather indifferently in a lancers. Lord Holme and Miss
Schley were dancing in the set nearest to the doorway, and on the side
that faced the drawing-room. Directly Lady Holme saw the ballroom she
saw them. A sudden sense of revolt, the defiance of joy carried on into
the defiance of anger, rose up in her.
“If Mr. Carey is coming I’ll come too, and baptise your house,” she
said.
Sir Donald looked surprised, but he answered, with a swiftness that did
not seem to belong to old age:
“That is a bargain, Lady Holme. I regard that as a bargain.”
“I’ll not go back on it.”
There was a hard sound in her voice.
They entered the ballroom just as the band played the closing bars
of the lancers, and the many sets began to break up and melt into a
formless crowd which dispersed in various directions. The largest
number of people moved towards the archway near which the Duke was still
sitting, bravely exerting himself to be cheerful. Lady Holme and Sir
Donald became involved in this section of the crowd, and naturally
followed in its direction. Lord Holme and Miss Schley were at a short
distance behind them, and Lady Holme was aware of this. The double
defiance was still alive in her, and was strengthened by a clear sound
which reached her ears for a moment, then was swallowed up by the hum of
conversation from many intervening voices--the sound of the American’s
drawling tones raised to say something she could not catch. As she
came out into the hall, close to the Duke’s chair, she saw Rupert Carey
trying to make his way into the ballroom against the stream of dancers.
His face was flushed. There were drops of perspiration on his forehead,
and the violent expression that was perpetually visible in his red-brown
eyes, lighting them up as with a flame, seemed partially obscured as if
by a haze. The violence of them was no longer vivid but glassy.
Lady Holme did not notice all this. The crowd was round her, and she was
secretly preoccupied. She merely saw that Rupert Carey was close to her,
and she knew who was following behind her. A strong impulse came upon
her and she yielded to it without hesitation. As she reached Rupert
Carey she stopped and held out her hand.
“Mr. Carey,” she said, “I’ve been wanting to speak to you all the
evening. Why didn’t you ask me to dance?”
She spoke very distinctly. Carey stood still and stared at her, and now
she noticed the flush on his face and the unnatural expression in his
eyes. She understood at once what was the matter and repented of her
action. But it was too late to draw back. Carey stared dully for an
instant, as if he scarcely knew who she was. Then, with a lurch, he came
closer to her, and, with a wavering movement, tried to find her hand,
which she had withdrawn.
“Where is it?” he muttered in a thick voice. “Where is it?”
He groped frantically.
“Sir Donald!” Lady Holme whispered sharply, while the people nearest to
them began to exchange glances of surprise or of amusement.
She pressed his arm and he tried to draw her on. But Carey was exactly
in front of her. It was impossible for her to escape. He found her hand
at last, took it limply in his, bent down and began to kiss it, mumbling
some loud but incoherent words.
The Duke, who from his chair, was a witness of the scene, tried to raise
himself up, and a vivid spot of scarlet burned in his almost transparent
cheeks. His daughter hastened forward to stop his effort. Lady Holme
dragged her hand away violently, and Carey suddenly burst into tears.
Sir Donald hurried Lady Holme on, and Carey tried to follow, but was
forcibly prevented by two men.
When at length Lady Holme found herself at the other end of the great
hall, she turned and saw her husband coming towards her with a look of
fury on his face.
“I wish to go home,” she said to him in a low voice.
She withdrew her hand from Sir Donald’s arm and quietly bade him
good-bye. Lord Holme did not say a word.
“Where is the Duchess?” Lady Holme added. “Ah, there she is!”
She saw the Duchess hurriedly going towards the place where the Duke was
sitting, intercepted her swiftly, and bade her good-night.
“Now, Fritz!” she said.
She was conscious that a number of people were watching her, and her
voice and manner were absolutely unembarrassed. A footman took the
number of her cloak from Lord Holme and fetched the cloak. A voice cried
in the distance, “Lord Holme’s carriage!” Another, and nearer voice,
echoed the call. She passed slowly between two lines of men over a broad
strip of carpet to the portico, and stepped into the brougham.
As it glided away into the night she heard her husband’s loud breathing.
He did not speak for two or three minutes, but breathed like a man who
had been running, and moved violently in the carriage as if to keep
still were intolerable to him. The window next to him was up. He let it
down. Then he turned right round to his wife, who was leaning back in
her corner wrapped up in her black cloak.
“With the Duke sittin’ there!” he said in a loud voice. “With the Duke
sittin’ there!”
There was a sound of outrage in the voice.
“Didn’t I kick that sweep out of the house?” he added. “Didn’t I?”
“I believe you asked Mr. Carey not to call anymore.”
Lady Holme’s voice had no excitement in it.
“Asked him! I--”
“Don’t make such a noise, Fritz. The men will hear you.”
“I told him if he ever came again I’d have him put out.”
“Well, he never has come again.”
“What d’you mean by speakin’ to him? What d’you mean by it?”
Lady Holme knew that her husband was a thoroughly conventional man, and,
like all conventional men, had a horror of a public scene in which any
woman belonging to him was mixed up. Such a scene alone was quite enough
to rouse his wrath. But there was in his present anger something deeper,
more brutal, than any rage caused by a breach of the conventions. His
jealousy was stirred.
“He didn’t speak to you. You spoke to him.”
Lady Holme did not deny it.
“I heard every word you said,” continued Lord Holme, beginning to
breathe hard again. “I--I--”
Lady Holme felt that he was longing to strike her, that if he had been
the same man, but a collier or a labourer, born in another class of
life, he would not have hesitated to beat her. The tradition in which he
had been brought up controlled him. But she knew that if he could have
beaten her he would have hated her less, that his sense of bitter wrong
would have at once diminished. In self-control it grew. The spark rose
to a flame.
“You’re a damned shameful woman!” he said.
The brougham drew up softly before their house. Lord Holme, who was
seated on the side next the house, got out first. He did not wait on the
pavement to assist his wife, but walked up the steps, opened the door,
and went into the hall. Lady Holme followed. She saw her husband, with
the light behind him, standing with his hand on the handle of the hall
door. For an instant she thought that he was going to shut her out. He
actually pushed the door till the light was almost hidden. Then he flung
it open with a bang, threw down his hat and strode upstairs.
If he had shut her out! She found herself wondering what would have
become of her, where she would have gone. She would have had to go to
the Coburg, or to Claridge’s, without a maid, without luggage. As she
slowly came upstairs she heard her husband go into the drawing-room. Was
he waiting for her there? or did he wish to avoid her? When she
reached the broad landing she hesitated. She was half inclined to go in
audaciously, to laugh in his face; turn his fury into ridicule, tell him
she was the sort of woman who is born to do as she likes, to live as she
chooses, to think of nothing but her own will, consult nothing but her
whims of the moment. But she went on and into her bedroom.
Josephine was there and began to take the diamonds out of her hair. Lady
Holme did not say a word. She was listening intently for the sound of
any movement below. She heard nothing. When she was undressed, and there
was nothing more for the maid to do, she began to feel uneasy, as if
she would rather not dismiss the girl. But it was very late. Josephine
strangled her yawns with difficulty. There was no excuse for keeping her
up any longer.
“You can go.”
The maid went out, leaving Lady Holme standing in the middle of the big
bedroom. Next to it on one side was Lord Holme’s dressing-room. On the
other side there was a door leading into Lady Holme’s boudoir. Almost
directly after Josephine had gone Lady Holme heard the outer door of
this room opened, and the heavy step of her husband. It moved about
the room, stopped, moved about again. What could he be doing? She stood
where she was, listening. Suddenly the door between the rooms was thrown
open and Lord Holme appeared.
“Where’s the red book?” he said.
“The red book!”
“Where is it? D’you hear?”
“What do you want it for?”
“That sweep’s address.”
“What are you going to do? Write to him?”
“Write to him!” said Lord Holme, with bitter contempt. “I’m goin’ to
thrash him. Where is it?”
“You are going now?”
“I’ve not come up to answer questions. I’ve come for the red book. Where
is it?”
“The little drawer at the top on the right hand of the writing-table.”
Lord Holme turned
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