Читать книгу Twos and Threes - G. B. Stern - Страница 7

The first waltz stirs the air. The first skilful probing of the material with which she has to deal: cue given: “Don’t you find these affairs leave an empty feeling behind them?”... so be it, then; the Puritan maid—for ten minutes. And you, sir, what may be your demands? Can’t be bothered with depths, or all that bally rot? Come then, we will e’en butterfly together.... And the music strikes up for the next one-step; Papillon bows and departs, and—who will come in his stead? Walk up! walk up, gentlemen all! Here are a variety of goods in one parcel: the Artistic Understanding; the Tantalizing Sphinx; Up-to-date Woman of the World, with trick of shoe and eyelash and epigram—this for the youth who will not be thought young; quickly alternating to the Clear-eyed Delightful Child: her first dance, and it’s all such splendid fun! Almost can Thirty-nine, cynical, weary, and grizzled at the temples, be brought to say: “Little girl, you make the years fall from me....”

Peter wriggles happily. Who can denounce her conduct as unfair? Who, at a masquerade, music-led, rose-fragrant, expects to confront aught but fellow-masqueraders?... Here comes another—Aha! I recognize you, my friend; you are he who vibrates like a jelly in dancing, and—apprehensively she glances down at her gold shoes in danger from the kiss of Othello.

Take from Peter what you please, gentlemen all! not for your sakes, believe me that. For Peter’s sake; for the glorification of her talents, and for the fun of it, and because you may take from Peter what you please, so it be not Peter. And she is safe enough, dodging mischievously from one disguise to another, rather wishing—through all the breathless shift and stir and glimmer—to meet for once her equal in skill and tactics. But it will come with the twenty-third waltz of the evening, promised to Antlers-and-Hothouse-Grapes; she has staged her climax cunningly, to crown the end of masquerade.

Supper with Mark St. Quentin, who had two years previously sent her a dozen handkerchiefs, in lieu of the gory one, tenderly retained; thus making for the ministering angel a clear profit of seventeen handkerchiefs, reckoning Merle’s half-dozen. He has spent this evening in being to Peter the cement which knits loose bricks together; watching her hungrily when she slides away in the embrace of another; slipping into the gap when a partner chances to be late; taking the first dance and the last dance and the supper-dance, and any extras she cares to give, and all the numbers she wishes to cut. Quite pleasant, the consciousness of Mark St. Quentin to fill with his stolid and persistent personality the tiniest chink and crevice which the intoxicating hours might otherwise have left empty. Nor is it difficult to supply him with the goods he wants: a solicitous reference to the episode of the thumb, and Peter is established as fragrant sweet-natured woman, thank Heaven, still surviving in a century of Suffragettes and kleptomaniacs—“And druggists,” adds Mark St. Quentin; “Morphia, you know.”

After-supper hours, bringing with them the usual flushed dishevelment, actual and spiritual. Blooms beginning to droop in the heat; prevailing carelessness as to the hieroglyphics actually scrawled on the programme; bold voices, mingling with the bandsmen’s deeper notes, as they chorus to the popular encore, imperiously demanded. Lingerings on the stairs, and where softly-lit seclusion is provided for those who care to linger. Departure of the suave and elderly diplomats; Madame des Essarts must perforce wait, royalty unattended, till romping insatiable youth shall have drunk its fill. Her reflections on modern dancing, its antics and exaggerations, are such as to preclude description. She is pleased to note, however, that her granddaughter’s burnished dark head is still unruffled, her complexion unheated. “Elle est vraie des Essarts!”

Number twenty-one. Merle and Peter, skilfully guided where the throng is thickest, smile at one another in passing, eager, in the midst of enjoyment, for the mutual retrospection of the morrow. Comes the interval between twenty-two and twenty-three. Armand Drélincourt, for the third time in four hours, discourses with immense relish upon his fatal temperament. Peter listens attentively, but springs to her feet, interrupting the narrative at its most thrilling point, when the far-off tinkle of a bell reaches her ear: “Hadn’t we better go down?” Having settled on Logan Thane as a piratical playmate, she is frankly excited at the prospect of number twenty-three.

He is not waiting near the door of the ballroom. Neither is he in the stream descending the stairs. Peter waits impatiently till he shall choose to end his flirtation behind some draped portière. Already the dancers are in full swing. Rose-Marie approaches: “Shall we go home now, Peter? Most people have left; it looks so bad to be among the last.” And behold St. Quentin standing faithful as the painted sentinel of Herculaneum: “May I have the pleasure, Miss Kyndersley?”

“I’m booked already,—where is Logan Thane?”

“But your partner seems to have deserted you. Silly fellow; he doesn’t know what he’s missing.”

Peter privately agrees. It takes still three minutes to convince her that Logan Thane has undoubtedly cut his dances and gone home early; and then she lets St. Quentin reap the reward of his tireless vigil: “I shall be leaving after this one, so we may as well finish it instead of the next.” She has flushed richly and her eyes are dark with annoyance. Childishly, she wants Logan Thane to have a sense of all that might have been his, had he not succumbed to weariness.

“Peter,” Rose-Marie’s voice, plaintive now; “the car has been waiting over an hour already, and mother said——”

“All right.” Peter disengages herself from the infatuated St. Quentin, murmurs her thanks to her hostess, looks around in vain for Merle, and suffers herself to be led by Rose-Marie to the cloak-room.

Downstairs, a few stray couples, clinging still to the fringes of pleasure, boston stormily to the strains of “Gipsy Love.” The massed flowers on the walls hang heavier and heavier yet. Madame has yawned twice, daintily, behind her Pompadour fan. As the last notes die away, Merle dashes for the doorway, dragging her partner in her wake.

“Peter!—she hasn’t gone yet, has she, grandmaman?” She succeeds in waylaying Peter, cloaked and reluctant, on her passage down the main staircase.

“You mustn’t go. I want you to dance the next with Stuart.” Merle’s tone conveys all she dares put into it of meaning and entreaty. Peter shakes her head, indicating Rose-Marie, inclined to be fractious.

“Leave her to me. Do go on, Peter.”

Peter wavers; the ballroom, after good-byes have been spoken and wraps adjusted, becomes doubly a place of enchantment, if only because etiquette debars from re-entering.

She looks at Stuart Heron.

And he, for his part, tries to trace the connection between a tall girl in a bronze evening-cloak, and a picture which has forced itself irrelevantly upon his mental vision: picture of a Cavalier emerging from some dark doorway; backward-floating plume, and mantle carelessly flung; swagger and smile expressive of all that lurked in his quest of love and hazard, and peradventure of hazardous love....

“Go on, Peter,” urges Merle. “You’ll like him.”

Peter hesitates no longer; tosses aside her cloak; and permits Stuart to escort her back to the regions of light whence she had thought to be self-banished. The band is crashing out in true Bacchanalian frenzy the last waltz of all, the waltz of their release. Twenty years before, and it would have been: “After the ball is over,” with its cloying suggestions of regret and sentiment; but modern youth requires something at once more abandoned and more discordant.

Stuart speaks: “She said I was going to like you.”

“And she said I was going to like you.”

Then in earnest duet: “How we’re bound to hate each other!”

He is a little above medium height; their eyes are almost on a level. He cannot rid himself of the impression that whatever he says now, is likely to matter later on. And the entire contents of his brain have wandered round the corner, and sitting there, mock his futility.

“No,” contradicting his own statement. “I don’t think we shall hate each other; at least, not more than is necessary to preserve mutual interest.” Why are they hurrying the time, those fool musicians? How long can one decently sit out with a girl, after the last candle is extinguished, and a lackey is holding her cloak in readiness? Seven minutes, perhaps? He will have to give her in that seven minutes lightning indications of all that is in him worth her knowing; whet her curiosity, and at the same time satisfy his own. The undertaking is a breathless one.

“Who are you?” Peter queries, having in vain tried to fit him with some attributes of Merle’s catalogue. “I can’t place you at all, and——”

“And what?” he leaps in, for she has paused, and there is no time to pause; two more couples have ceased to dance, and are busy encircling Madame des Essarts with an aura of thanksgiving and farewell. “And what?”

“And Merle introduced you as if you mattered.”

“Merle was quite right. I do matter.”

“Merle?”

“Why not? I’m a relic of her childhood.”

“It makes you sound like Stonehenge.”

“You strive rather after effect, don’t you?” He slings this at her, himself striving after effect.

“Of course. Would you have me display at once all the domestic virtues?”

“You haven’t any,” tauntingly. “Not one. Other girls can cook nothing but an omelette. You, I’m sure, can cook nothing at all. It must be a proud boast. I hate talking while I dance, don’t you?”

In silence they finish the waltz. Then Stuart sweeps her through a pair of velvet hangings, down two rooms, and to a sofa at the far end of a third, before she is well aware of his intentions. She takes a sidelong survey of his outward marks: features that vie for room with his monocle and quickly-changing expression, giving an effect to his face of overcrowding; a mouth corner-tilted and impish, such as is sometimes perceived in a small street-arab, but mostly in a leprechaun, who can only be met hammering shoes on moor and crag by moonlight. She notes further that his jaw is lean, with the forward bent of a runner; and his head, which by dint of hard brushing and grooming gives at first an effect of conventional sleekness, is in reality a most rebellious and intricate affair, no hair growing in precisely the same direction as its fellow, but each insisting it will beat out like Bret Harte’s pioneer, “a way of his own, a way of his own!”

From the distant ballroom, snatches of “God save the King” drift and die and are re-born, with an effect of inexpressible melancholy. And, sighing, Stuart relinquishes desire to show the girl all his sides before dawn—philosophical, tender, childish, manly, sporting, whimsical, or political,—resigns himself to proving merely that he is original.

“You can never get away from your likeness to a Reynolds’ Angel,” à propos of nothing; “because there are five of them, so that if the expression should miss one, it will hit the next; I’m sorry for you, of course, but there is nothing to be done about it. Do you live anywhere? Forgive me for these astounding acrobatics, but I’m so afraid you will be fetched by your nurse Rose-Marie; I heard you remark she was growing fractious.”

“I live in Thatch Lane with an aunt. My mother is dead, and my father unmentionable, to save you from the agonies of a tactless question.”

... The bandsmen are dimly visible, packing away their mute instruments. A voice from the long-ago is calling faintly “Peter” ... hastily she covers the sound: “What are you? A stockbroker?”

“No,” he too has heard, and speaks rather breathlessly; “do I make love like a stockbroker?”

“You haven’t.”

“I have, in my own subtle fashion. But I can’t overleap the first stages in this Post-impressionist preliminary scamper of ours.”

... “Pet-er! Pe-ter!” clearer now—and nearer.

“A stockbroker has but seven stages of love-making, and by these shall ye know him,” laughs Peter.

“And I have a hundred and seven, and seven more after that, and by none of these shall ye know me.”

“Do you always talk about yourself?”

“No,” desperately; “I can talk about ever so many things: Cathedrals, and good form, and machinery, and how to make pins. Oh, and metaphysics. Particularly metaphysics. I took a double first at Oxford. I’ve no right to tell you, but I want you to know,” with the first touch of boyishness that has as yet escaped the hard polished surface of his manner.

... “I can’t think where she is,” Merle replies courteously, two rooms off.

... “Pee-ee-eee-ter!”

—“Confound it! How can I be eloquent with that phantom female forever squawking like the poor cat i’ the adage.”

Peter remarks, caring not a whit for Rose-Marie: “I’m sure that an adage is a medieval Scotch pantry, and that the cat was stealing the cream.”

“The ‘Cat and Adage’ wouldn’t be a bad public-house,” Stuart reflects; “in case I shouldeverwanttobuilda—damn!” in an outburst of frenzied and polysyllabic fury, as a little procession, consisting of Merle, Rose-Marie, the two brothers of Rose-Marie, and Mark St. Quentin, advance with triumphant shoutings towards the truants’ retreat.

His curses are overtopped by St. Quentin’s pæans of victory:

“I told you I’d seen them come this way. You’ve given us a rare hunt, Miss Kyndersley.” And the eldest and most pimply of the Lester twins shakes a playful finger:

“Bedtime, you know, Miss Peter. No good running away and hiding.”

“Good night,” Stuart turns abruptly away, not caring to form part of the returning procession across three rooms. Nor does he express any audible hopes of renewing an acquaintance so delightfully begun.

“Well?” Merle threw a world of mischievous expectancy into the interrogation, when Peter paid her promised visit at tea-time the following day.

Merle was lying on the couch, her back supported by many cushions, a silken wrap thrown lightly over her feet. For Madame des Essarts cherished the notion that constitutions of delicate birth were necessarily also of delicate health, to attain which desirable consummation, she kept a venerable and witty doctor in daily attendance, and reduced Merle on the slightest provocation from the vertical to the horizontal.

Peter tossed down her hat, and sank into a curly-legged arm-chair.

“I wish this weren’t such an impossible room,” she grumbled; “what with gilt and tapestries and priceless china and painted ladies on the ceiling, I can hardly hear myself speak. It’s the sort of room you can’t take up and wrap round you. What we ought to do, Merle, is with the aid of a ladder, a big apron, and a bottle of gum, cover the walls ourselves in brown paper, like those brave bright Bohemian bachelor girls in books.”

“Well?” quoth Merle again, disregarding the Bohemian girls.

“And then the supreme insult of a central heating system, when every fibre of me yearns for firelight. How would it be to light a fire of sticks on the carpet? Would your grandmother mind?”

“Shouldn’t think so,” murmured Merle. “It’s only Aubusson, and she’s a reasonable woman, and you could always explain to her that you were being the Swiss Family Robinson.”

“Or Robinson Crusoe. Why, do you suppose, are shipwrecked islanders always called Robinson? Is it something wild and primitive that lies in the name?”

“You know,” Merle suggested gently, “it’s not necessary to be quite so garrulous, to convince me that you want to hear about Stuart Heron.”

Peter gave in: “Who is he?”

“A millionaire.”

“That’s a nuisance. Is he sensitive about it? No, he doesn’t give me the impression of being sensitive about anything. He’s hard and polished and invulnerable; Achilles without the heel.”

“Three months’ treatment, and you’ll be crying aloud that he’s all heel and no Achilles.”

Nicole entered with the tea equipage, containing much of chased silver; and conversation was for a moment suspended.

“Mademoiselle Peter should not have risen from bed to-day,” severely. “She must surely be fatigued after so late an evening.”

“I was one of those who left early,” Peter mendaciously assured the old woman, of whom she stood in distinct awe.

“Nicole, you’ve forgotten the cream, and Mdlle. Peter is here. You know her love of cream is only equalled by her hatred of cows.”

Nicole looked respectfully incredulous: “Surely not, Mademoiselle. But if it were not for the good kind cows, what would Mademoiselle put in her tea?”

“I don’t put cows in my tea,” Peter protested unhappily. And as Nicole, with many chucklings, withdrew, “Merle, why do you hold me up to scorn before your staff? And I want more about Stuart—Heron, did you say?”

“Awfully Heron. They all are. And quite indecently rich. He has a mother, and three uncles, and a married sister, and some cousins—pretty girls. Family existing for the worship of Stuart, sole son of the house of Heron. And all things bright and beautiful, all things great and small, all things wise and wonderful, the Herons have them all. I don’t know much more about them, except presents; they’re for ever giving each other presents; costly trifles, such as a villa on the Riviera, or a Rolls-Royce motor, or a new hothouse, or a sackful of pink diamonds. Whenever you go there, Mrs. Heron is sure to say: ‘Oh, let me show you the chocolate-coloured page-boy that Stuart gave me because he scored a goal at football’; or ‘do help me think of a present for my brother-in-law, it’s the anniversary of his wife’s death. Last time I gave him twenty-four pairs of silk pyjamas sewn with seed-pearls; do you suppose he would like the Only Orinoco Orchid? I hear you can get it for five hundred guineas.’”

“Don’t be ridiculous, and pass the cake,” laughed Peter. “Besides, all this doesn’t explain Stuart.”

“I don’t know much about Stuart; of course I was taken there as a child, but then——” Merle’s eyes grew large and wistful, “I wasn’t a child; I was a French doll, in beautiful, expensive clothes, and not allowed to romp with the other children. So I suppose Stuart despised me. In fact, he told me as much last night; that since we’ve been grown-up he has avoided me for fear I should break. He’s only three years down from Oxford.”

“So young? I took him for about thirty.”

“Twenty-five, I believe.”

“He mentioned Oxford—isn’t Nicole going to bring that cream?—but I doggedly refused to take notice. ’Varsity is the one subject I will not discuss with the initiated; I pronounce Magdalen as God meant it to be pronounced, mix up dons with proctors, and earn for myself undying contempt. So it’s better left alone.”

Nicole entered with the cream, and the intimation that Monsieur Heron desired to speak with Mademoiselle des Essarts on the telephone.

“The game commences in earnest,” laughed Merle. “But I don’t want to get up. You answer it, Peter.”

Peter, nothing loath, ran downstairs to the boudoir, and replaced Madame des Essarts at the mouthpiece: “Hello!”

“Hello—look here,” came Stuart’s unmistakable tones from the other end; tones veiling with the typical Oxford accent a curious eagerness as of a dog forever worrying and shaking a bone. “Look here, how’s my mother?”

“I’m not good at arithmetic.”

“Your grandmother has asked me three times, and I feel I ought to have known. I said ‘quite well, thanks,’ but now I come to think of it, she isn’t. Would it be the right thing to ring off, and ring up again to contradict the statement.”

“It would be easier on the whole to cure your mother, and get it right that way.”

“I say, it isn’t Merle. It’s you.”

“Yes, it’s me. Merle’s lying down.”

A pause. Then a chuckle from the other end.

“I trust you have recovered from the fatigues of the dance, Peter. I recollect that you were among the last to go.”

She assured him politely that she was suffering from no ill-effects, and trusted he was the same. And she passed over the use of her Christian name.

“What are you talking about, you two girls? Irish-stew of the night before? Have I come in yet?”

“Perhaps you don’t come in.”

“I am coming in,” something very like a threat in the assurance. “I’m in already. Well in. Merle told me about the projected Triumvirate.”

Peter sped an indignant glance towards the absent Merle, for not informing her of this breach of faith; and a look of defiance at Stuart, who could not see it, for daring to laugh, which he wasn’t.

“I’m afraid I had a purpose in ’phoning,” he continued; “though it would be splendid to say I’d rung up for no reason whatever. Will you ask Merle if she’ll come with me to a dance at the Cecil, next Tuesday evening, and bring her little friend.”

Peter refused to rise to such a palpable throw. “Tickets?”

“I’ve got them. Four. Can you provide another male of some sort?”

“I’ll ask Merle. Good-bye.”

“Good-bye.”

She returned to find Merle being cherished by her grandmother, so that a careful version of the foregoing invitation needed to be given:

“Mr. Heron is making up a party, and hopes we will join him; and at the same time benefit a charity in which he is interested.”

Madame des Essarts gave the scheme her gracious acquiescence. “He doubtless wishes to revenge himself for last night,” she mused approvingly; “but it is a somewhat hurried courtesy.” For there existed nothing in which she was so punctilious as in these social accounts of give and take; accounts which Merle insisted were as carefully noted and balanced as any butcher’s or baker’s. So much debit, so much credit; a nice perception of how many teas given went to cancel one luncheon taken. So now:

“If you are to invite another gentleman, mon enfant, it must be Mr. St. Quentin; you remember he motored us to Ranelagh.” Madame touched Peter’s cheek lightly with her hand, besought her not to tire Merle or herself with too much conversation, and rustled away, leaving in her train a faint swish and perfume. Whereupon Peter re-edited truthfully the duologue.

—“Merle, why did you tell him about the trio, and—and all that rot?”

“Rot?”

“He thinks so. He probably thinks it—oh, girlish!”

“He’s going to count,” said Merle. “And ... Peter——”

“What?”

“Three is a funny shape,” the younger girl admitted slowly. “I think it might mean two and one. And I think, Peter, we shall have to settle, you and I, to be square with each other, in the triangle.”

“What a ghastly geometrical figure: If the square ABCD standing on the base of the triangle XYZ——”

But Merle was not laughing. “We must agree to talk things out, and always get them clear, even if it should mean disloyalty to Stuart. Because I believe he’s the strongest.”

Peter considered this a moment, while she emptied the cream-jug into her cup. “Yes,” she decided at length. “But we’ll tell him that you and I are going to keep the path unblocked between us. It will be fairer; and save him from blundering.”

“He won’t blunder,” Merle prophesied. “And I think, too, that he’s capable of calling a taxi.”

Peter laughed:

“I’d forgotten the taxis; of course, they were the original means of bringing him in. But I rather wonder what he hopes to find.”