Читать книгу The Three Lovers - Frank Swinnerton - Страница 12

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The party swayed and engulfed Patricia. She was among all the others, and talking or listening, extraordinarily delighted with all this sound and colour. To her, whose first party of the kind it was, such a brimming claim to the senses had no shortcomings. It was all new and glorious and intoxicating. She felt herself a queen. Wherever she looked she found the strong colour and sensation for which she had pined. It was the first party, and a landmark. Compared with her days and the unattractive dinginess of her own rooms, Monty's home was all that was rich and desirable. At two-and-twenty, when one is starving for colour, a glut of it is like a feast. She was so happy, like a child at its first theatre, that she sat there spell-bound. It could not have occurred to her to think these people sophisticated; they were all so kind, she thought to herself, so kind and generous and interesting. Her heart went out to them all. It was as though she cast her own warm affectionateness upon the party. Her radiance increased with each instant. The corners of her mouth went up; her sweet, child-like laugh melted into the general laughter. All this light and colour and sound was superb. It was vivacity and richness, music and poetry, an unequalled stimulant to gaiety and the senses. It was life as she had dreamt of it. There was a spice of daring in such contact with the unknown and the exciting, and daring was her ideal. It was lovely.... She was in a beautiful dream of delight.

Even Patricia at last began to look, beaming in her happiness, from one face to the other. They were all faces that interested her. They all had a cast—not of dignity or wisdom, but of something which she thought of as enlightenment. There was a quality about them to which she was unaccustomed, and she exalted it. She was prepared to find all knowledge and emotion in the faces, and she found it. The tones of the voices charmed her; the little jokes which she did not understand, and the fragments of criticism which belonged to another world of interests and consciousness, were all a part of the magic and delight of the evening. She set herself to look round the studio, sitting close to Amy Roberts, as a child might have done, while Amy, to whom all this sort of thing was becoming almost as commonplace as she pretended to Patricia that it already was, preserved an air of most distinguished semi-boredom. Amy, herself an artist, told her the names of those present, and sometimes, if she knew it, something about the people. Patricia from time to time glanced aside at Amy's fair bobbed hair and her white face and light lashes and eyebrows and dissatisfied mouth; and thought how nice Amy was, and how clever, and how she wished Amy had a sense of humour of the same kind as her own.

"That's Rhoda Flower—that dark girl. She's a dress-designer. Not much good, as you can see from her dress. And those two over on the right, who're so fond of each other and think each other perfect...."

"I know. They're engaged," guessed Patricia, laughing.

"More than that. They're married. And happy. The only married people I know who are happy. And how it is that Olivia has brought herself to leave the babies this evening I can't understand. They must have got a nurse. So I suppose Peter's been making some money, for a change. Olivia and Peter Stephens, they are. They've been married three years, and they've got two babies. They're still devoted to each other."

"Odd!" joked Patricia, with archly raised brows. She had no notion of the truth of her comment in the present company, or of the underlying cynicism which an unfriendly hearer might read into it. Amy looked side-ways at her friend. She was puzzled, as the sophisticated always are puzzled by a remark made with nonsensical humour and without consciousness of its implications.

"It is," she agreed drily. "Then there's somebody who isn't devoted to her husband—Blanche Tallentyre. And with good reason. That white woman with the salmon lips."

"Is she unhappy?" Patricia's face clouded. She imagined a tragedy, and she still passionately desired happy endings to all stories. She scanned Mrs. Tallentyre's face, and saw the hard lines at the lips, and the thin cheeks, and how tight her skin was across the cheek bones; and her heart felt soft towards one to whom love had been cruel. Now that she knew this of Blanche Tallentyre she could notice the hunger in Blanche's face, and the thinness of her bare arms, and the cup at the base of her throat. She could imagine sleepless, tearless sorrow. So there was one at least here who, in spite of all the thrill of it, was unhappy.

"Not too unhappy," said Amy. "Hush. I'll tell you later. Not now."

They paused, Patricia looking childishly wise in an effort to disguise her faint distaste for this hint at an only dimly-realised form of ugliness; and both stared valiantly round at the others, so mysterious to Patricia, and so fascinating in their mysteriousness.

"Jack Penton's here," proceeded Amy. "Somewhere. Of course, not when he's.... Oh, there you are, Jack. You know Patricia, don't you? Who's that man at the back? Behind Charlotte Hastings. That quiet man." Patricia looked quickly at Jack Penton, whom she had met before. He was a dark, clean-shaven, commonplace-looking young man with a rasping voice; but he was a good dancer, and she thought him, if not clever, at least intelligent and worthy of some other girl's love. There was cameraderie, but no love, in Amy's manner to the boy; and something very similar, upon the surface, in his manner to Amy; but to Patricia it was agreeable to see their faces near together. But then Patricia was a sentimentalist, and saw and imagined all sorts of things that never existed.

Jack wrinkled his brow in the effort to recall a name half-forgotten.

"Er—I think his name's Rayne, or Mayne," he huskily reported. "That's it: Edgar Mayne. He's something in the city. Rather an old bird, don't you think? He's a friend of Monty's. Somebody told me he was clever, but you never know with that sort of chap."

"He looks very nice," whispered Patricia. "But rather stern. I don't think he likes this kind of thing. He looks disapproving. Oh, I wish he liked it."

Again came that incredulous stare from Amy which convicted Patricia of a naïveté. Patricia stiffened a little, and became more guarded. Some vanity in her cried out against criticism. It was the one thing she could not bear.

"Just there, on the right, is Felix Brow," proceeded Amy.

"Not ..." Patricia began in amazement.

Suddenly, as they sat thus absorbed, there came an interruption.

"Can't I help?" breathed an eager voice. "I can tell you all sorts of things you don't know—about everybody. Who they married, and why they separated, and who they're living with. I'm really an expert guide."

They all looked up, and saw Harry Greenlees, whose face was so lowered to Patricia's that it was almost level with her own. It was so close, too, that she could see the warm colour under his skin, and the crisp hairs of his moustache, and the curl of his lips as they parted in a smile of entreaty. Seen near at hand, Harry's face had all the additional attractiveness which health gives to good featured. His vigour was manifest. There was a pleading in his eyes that was almost irresistible. It was the pleading of an ideally masterful lover who would not understand a refusal and so would not accept it. Patricia looked, and held back her own head until the curve of her cheek was lengthened and made even more beautiful than before. She was smiling, and when she smiled one beheld such a picture of happiness that one became quite naturally intrigued and marvelling. To Harry the picture was an intoxication.

"You may tell me everything," said Patricia, with assurance equal to his own. "But first of all tell me who you are."

He took a seat upon the floor by her side, clasping his knees, and fixing his attention upon the two plump little hands which were clasped in Patricia's lap.

"I am the most marvellous and unfortunate of men," he said. "Unfortunate, at least, until this very minute. My name is Harry Greenlees...."