Читать книгу The Way of These Women - E. Phillips Oppenheim - Страница 5

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‘I call this a most interesting situation,’ Lucille remarked, making a little poke with her parasol at an intrusive bee. ‘Our one dramatist of the younger school who can lay claim to any measure of inspiration—forgive me, Jermyn, but I love to quote the Daily Mail—is studying in these romantic surroundings the woman who is the chief interpreter of his genius. How do you like that, all of you? If you would eat bread-and-butter a little less vigorously, my dear Jermyn, and keep your eyes fixed upon Miss Cluley, you might help the illusion.’

‘Much too hungry,’ Jermyn replied, lifting up a silver cover and helping himself to a scone. ‘I had scarcely any lunch. They would put me in first wicket down.’

‘Make any?’ Lord Lakenham inquired.

‘Forty-two,’ Jermyn answered, holding out his cup for more tea. ‘Rather a sound innings, too. Mary, if you don’t eat another scone, our single wicket cricket match to-morrow is off.’

Mary helped herself without hesitation.

‘I wonder if you can bowl googlies?’ she asked. ‘A girl at school can.’

‘My dear child,’ Jermyn assured her impressively, ‘I can bowl anything. There are times after the ball has left my hands when a very demon seems to possess it. I can make it swerve in the air like an American baseball pitcher, or do a double break all round the bat.’

‘Don’t believe a word of it,’ Mary declared, derisively. ‘I don’t believe there is such a thing as a double break.’

‘Pity they never tried you for the county,’ Lord Lakenham remarked. ‘I never remember seeing you bowl an over in a match in my life.’

Jermyn sighed gently as he stirred his tea.

‘There is so much jealousy in county cricket,’ he explained. ‘If you are played for your batting, you are expected to bat and to make runs. To bowl as well is not good form.’

‘Ever been put on?’ Lakenham persisted.

‘Never,’ Jermyn confessed. ‘That, however, is entirely due to my modesty. I have never mentioned my peculiar acquirements. Wait until you see me bowl, Mary, at the nets to-morrow! Lucille, Miss Cluley will have a little more tea.’

‘Miss Cluley is finding you all much too frivolous,’ Lucille pronounced. ‘She sides with me, I am sure. Jermyn ought to be lying on the grass, studying every trick of your features, every change of your expression, oughtn’t he, Miss Cluley? This is his great opportunity.’

‘I am not sure,’ Sybil replied, ‘that a tea-party is calculated to call up any emotions worth studying.’

‘My dear,’ Lucille declared, ‘a tea-party is sometimes an epitome of all the passions. I have known tragedies lived and acted during the progress of this apparently harmless meal. I have seen women share a plate of muffins who I knew were thirsting for one another’s blood. In Hungary I remember two deputies who were the two most polite men I ever met, who went out and fought a most savage duel ten minutes after taking chocolate and sweetmeats with me. There is no telling what feelings may be concealed beneath the lightest and idlest of chatter. Don’t you agree with me, Miss Cluley?’

Sybil looked up and met Lucille’s gaze, half lazy, half insolent. Quick of comprehension, she was suddenly conscious of an enemy. Her heart sank, but she answered coolly enough.

‘Repression is rather the fashion nowadays, isn’t it? It makes acting very difficult. After all, you know, a little noise does help.’

‘I am afraid you won’t get much out of Jermyn,’ Lucille said. ‘His methods are almost crawly, they are so quiet.’

‘Give me a good honest melodrama,’ Lakenham declared. ‘I like to see my hero and my villain on the stage and have them fight it out. Plenty of blood-letting, I say. It’s the old-fashioned method, but it’s the surest and the safest. Drury Lane for me all the time! Now, why are you looking at me so intently, Miss Cluley? Of course, you think I’m talking rubbish.’

Sybil withdrew her eyes with a little start.

‘As a matter of fact,’ she replied, ‘I think that I was agreeing with you. Craft goes a long way round, but it sometimes loses its way. Simple force speaks first and speaks, perhaps, more surely.’

There was a brief pause. Sybil’s words were spoken lightly enough, yet Jermyn turned round to glance at her. There was a strain of earnestness in the conversation which he did not quite appreciate.

‘In these days, unfortunately,’ Lucille said, ‘the subtler methods of requital are safer. To poison your dearest enemy might lead to most unpleasant reprisals, but you can at least tell everybody where she buys her hats, and the secret of her complexion.’

Jermyn shivered palpably.

‘You women are crueller by nature than we are,’ he declared. ‘A simple shot through the heart would satisfy us. Now,’ he added, rising to his feet, ‘I want to warn you all that I am going to be a monopolist. I am going to take Miss Cluley away by myself into the most secluded spot I can think of, and I shan’t even tell you where it is. The rest of you can do exactly as you like. Lakenham, you can flirt with Lucille—she is just from Paris and in splendid practice—or you can play games with Mary. Please!’

He held out his hands to Sybil. She sprang lightly to her feet. Her eyes thanked him.

‘Nice sort of host you are,’ Lakenham complained. ‘I’ve got to go to-morrow or the next day. When am I going to see anything of Miss Cluley?’

‘My dear fellow,’ Jermyn replied, ‘I simply do not care. In this matter you are a Philistine. You are outside the gates of the garden in which Miss Cluley and I are privileged to wander. We belong, you see, to the sacred coterie. We are artists, and the work of each one of us depends upon the other. I have an invincible claim to monopolize Miss Cluley altogether.’

‘Miserable selfishness!’ Lakenham grumbled. ‘You don’t suppose Miss Cluley wants to be talking shop all the time?’

‘A remark,’ Jermyn retorted, ‘which proves to me, my dear cousin, that you have never had the privilege of knowing intimately anyone who belongs to the Profession. It’s absolutely all-engrossing, isn’t it, Miss Cluley?’

‘Absolutely,’ she admitted.

‘That’s why you chucked novels and took to plays, I suppose?’ Lakenham asked.

‘It was perhaps a mistake,’ Jermyn acknowledged with a sigh. ‘Before, I was at least a man and a novelist. Now I have sold myself into slavery—I am a dramatist. Come along, Miss Cluley. Don’t mind him, really.’

Lakenham watched them cross the lawn and turn into one of the walks. His eyes never left the girl’s figure. Lucille also turned her head. She watched Sybil with the thoughtful yet grudging appraisement of a rival.

‘The girl has the trick of walking as though she trod on air,’ she remarked. ‘She is really amazingly graceful.’

Lakenham grunted. He was still looking at the entrance to the laurel walk down which the two figures had disappeared.

‘If only I could—remember!’ he exclaimed moodily.

Lucille looked at him with dawning curiosity.

‘Remember what?’

He turned around to be sure that Mary was out of hearing. She had taken some biscuits and was throwing them to the swans in the lake a little distance away.

‘Something about this girl. What does Jermyn have her down here for and take the trouble to provide a chaperon? What’s it mean, I wonder? Who is she?’

‘Who is she?’ Lucille repeated. ‘Now surely that is an unnecessary question. Everybody knows who Sybil Cluley is.’

‘Yes, yes!’ he agreed impatiently. ‘One gets tired of reading that she is the prettiest, and most charming, and sweetest, and most virtuous young actress on the stage. We know all about that. What I can’t get out of my head is that I knew something of her before all these wonderful things happened.’

His companion was looking at him steadfastly. Her fine eyes were fixed upon his face, her head was resting upon the slim fingers of her right hand.

‘How interesting!’ she murmured. ‘You are not going to tell me that she was one of that innumerable army of your victims?’

‘I tell you I can’t remember,’ he declared irritably. ‘A thing like that always bothers me.’

Lucille’s fingers trifled with her parasol. From underneath it, however, she was studying her companion’s discontented expression with real interest.

‘It is curious that your memory should have served you such a trick,’ she remarked, after a moment’s pause. ‘I wonder whether it has occurred to you that Miss Cluley might be troubled in the same manner?’

Lakenham selected a cigar from his case and bit off the end savagely.

‘What do you mean?’

Lucille laughed softly.

‘My dear man,’ she went on, ‘couldn’t you see how she kept her back to you all the time, whenever she could? I am afraid that she must dislike you very much indeed. I am rather a keen observer of these little things, and I couldn’t help noticing that she never even glanced towards you if she could help it.’

‘Just the same in the motor,’ Lakenham admitted reluctantly. ‘Can’t think what she means by it. She’s the prettiest little thing I ever saw in my life, too,’ he added enthusiastically. ‘I’ve got past the impressionable age, you know, but that girl could make a fool of me whenever she chose.’

‘At present,’ Lucille continued smoothly, ‘she seems to have no inclination in that direction. I agree with you, of course, that she is very sweet and very beautiful, but all the same——’

‘What?’

Lucille smoothed her muslin gown over her knees.

‘I don’t want Jermyn to marry her,’ she said quietly.

‘Is he thinking of it?’

‘It is just the sort of idiotic thing,’ Lucille sighed, ‘that one might expect of him. The more I think of it, the more frightened I become. Jermyn lives all the time with his head in the clouds. He is straining always to find something better than the things which actually exist. He worships beauty and he wants to believe that everything which he sees is beautiful. It is a very dangerous state. He won’t condescend to look down and see the way ordinary human beings really live. If the girl has her wits about her I am afraid it’s all up with Jermyn, unless——’

‘Unless what?’

‘Unless you can remember!’

Lakenham grinned, amiably yet not pleasantly.

‘Devilish amusing this!’ he exclaimed. ‘We were talking of Drury Lane just now. Here we are, you and I, villain and adventuress in the latest melodrama. Can we pick a hole in the spotless heroine’s past?’

‘It is at any rate a melodrama of real life,’ Lucille declared. ‘You see, the whole affair is really most annoying for me. I have always intended to marry Jermyn myself.’

‘Quite a natural arrangement,’ Lakenham agreed, ‘if you really do intend to take up matrimony again. I am a much better match, you know.’

She looked at him with a faint smile. In her way she was more beautiful than Sybil, but she was certainly not the type which appealed to Lakenham.

‘I don’t think you’re quite my style, Aynesworth,’ she remarked. ‘You have lived too long and too rapidly. You should marry an ingénue—that will probably be your fate in a few year’s time. Why not make a Marchioness of your long-legged friend down by the pond? She’ll be as pretty as her sister, no doubt, when she grows up.’

‘Thank you,’ Lakenham grunted. ‘I’m not taking that sort into St. George’s, Hanover Square.’

‘You ought to be thankful to take anything you can get,’ Lucille said severely. ‘I don’t think any nice girl who knew what she was doing would look at you.’

‘If you slang me much longer,’ he grumbled. ‘I’ll leave off trying to remember.’

She smiled at him.

‘I am not afraid of that, Aynesworth. You know, you are rather a vain man and you are a little piqued. You are just in the frame of mind to be dogged. Besides, you admire Miss Cluley yourself. Every man does, of course. Nothing would please you more than to suddenly remember the sort of thing you would like to remember about her, and to take her into a quiet corner and remind her of it. She’d have to be nice to you then, wouldn’t she?’

‘I wouldn’t be your husband for anything!’ Lakenham declared. ‘You’re too clever to live with in comfort. Here’s the child coming back.’

Lucille rose to her feet.

‘I shall take her to see the peacocks,’ she decided. ‘She might be worth cultivating. You had better come too.’

Lakenham shook his head and threw himself into a comfortable chair.

‘Not I,’ he answered. ‘I believe her sister’s told her not to talk to me if she can help it. She avoids me all the time, and I’m sure I don’t want to play around with a long-legged brat. I am going to sit here—and stir up the ashes of my sinful past. Perhaps in that way I may remember!’