Читать книгу The Counterplot - Hope Mirrlees - Страница 9

Table of Contents

It was past seven o’clock when Captain Roderick Dundas and Mr. David Munroe drove up side by side to Plasencia.

If they did not find much to say to each other, the fault was not Rory’s; for he was a friendly creature, ready, as he put it, “to babble to any one at his grandmother’s funeral.”

In appearance he was rather like Guy, only much taller. They had both inherited considerable prettiness from their respective mothers—“the beautiful Miss Brabazons,” whose beauty and high spirits had made a great stir at their début in the eighties.

As to David Munroe; he was a huge man of swarthy complexion, slow of speech and of movement, and with large, rather melancholy brown eyes.

“Hullo! We must be arriving. Isn’t it terrifying arriving at a new house? It’s like going to parties when one was a child—‘are you sure there’s a clean pocket handkerchief in your sporran, master Rory?’”

David, turning a puzzled, rather suspicious, look upon him, said slowly, “Are you Scotch?”

“Lord, yes! I never get my ‘wills and shalls’ right, and I talk about ‘table-maids’ and all sorts of things. Here we are.”

As they got into the hall, Guy and Arnold came out from the billiard-room.

“Hullo, Rory!” said Guy, “you can’t have a bath before dinner because I’m going to have one.”

“You’ll have to have it with Concha then, Guy,” said Arnold, “she’s there regularly from seven till eight. I wish to God this house had more bathrooms. Hullo! You’ve got a paper, Dundas—I want to see the latest news about the Strike.”

In the meanwhile, David Munroe stood in the background, looking embarrassed and rather sulky, and Rendall, the butler, who secretly deplored “Mr. Arnold’s” manners, said soothingly, “I’ll have your bag taken up to your room, sir.” Whereupon Arnold looked up from the paper, greeted him with sullen excuses, took him up to his room, and hurriedly left him.

Half an hour later David walked into the drawing-room, forlorn and shy, in full evening dress. All the party, except Rory, were already assembled, and he felt still more uncomfortable when in a flash he realised that the other men were in dinner-jackets and black ties.

“Ah! How are you, Munroe?” cried Dick heartily, “very pleased to see you. So sorry I wasn’t there when you arrived—didn’t hear the car. Let me introduce you to my wife.”

“How do you do, Mr. Munroe. How clever of you to be dressed in time!” said the Doña. There was always a note of irony in her voice, and it was confirmed by the myopic contraction of her eyes; so David imagined, quite erroneously, that she was “having a dig” at his tails and white waistcoat. Nor did Dick improve matters by saying, “I say, Munroe, you put us all to shame.”

Then Rory came in, so easily, chattering and laughing as if he had known them all his life—also in a dinner-jacket and a black tie; because, if poor David had only known, Arnold had told him it was “just a family party and he needn’t bother about tails.”

The moment Rory had entered the room, Teresa had felt a sudden little contraction of her throat, and had almost exclaimed aloud, “At last!”

In their childhood, she and Pepa had dreamed of, and craved for, a man doll, made of some supple material which would allow of its limbs being bent according to their will, its face modelled and painted with a realism unknown to the toy shops, a little fair moustache of real hair that could be twisted, and real clothes that, of course, came off and on: waistcoat, tie, collar, braces, and in a pocket a little gold watch.

Their longing for this object had, at one time, become an obsession, and had reached the point of their regarding living men entirely from the point of view of whether, shrunk to twelve inches high, they would make a good doll.

So Teresa, who had so often deplored the childishness of her friends and family, actually found herself gazing with gloating eyes at Rory Dundas—the perfect man doll, found at last.

Then they went into dinner. Guy took in Teresa; he was nervous, and more talkative than usual, and she was unusually distraite.

The room grew hot; every one seemed to be talking at once—screaming about the Fifth Form at St. Dominics, or Black Beauty, or both. It seemed that Arnold, when he was at Rugby, had exchanged one or both with Concha for a Shakespeare, illustrated by photographs of leading actors and actresses, and that he wanted them back.

“Ah! he is thinking of his own children. Does it mean ... can he be going to ...?” thought the Doña, delighted at the thought of the children, frightened at the thought of the wife.

“You must certainly give them back to Arnold, Concha; they’re his,” she said firmly.

“I like that! When he got such an extremely good bargain, too! He always did in his deals with me.”

“Anna has a Black Beauty, you might wangle it out of her by offering to teach her carpentry or something ... something she could get a new badge for in the Girl Guides.”

“But it’s my own copy that I want.”

And so on, what time Dick at the foot of the table shook like a jelly with delighted laughter.

Nothing makes parents—even detached ones like Dick—so happy as to see their grown-up offspring behaving like children.

“English hospitality is to make you at home—a pistol at your head; look at the poor Scot!” said Guy to Teresa.

She had been trying to hear what Rory was saying to Concha about the latest Revue, and, looking absently across at the silent, aloof David, said vaguely, “Oh, yes of course; he’s Scotch, isn’t he?”

“Inverness-shire, I should think. They’ve got a special accent there—not Scotch, but a sort of genteel English. It’s rather frightening, like suddenly coming upon a pure white tribe in the heart of Darkest Africa, it....”

Teresa heard no more, but yielded to the curious intoxication produced by half a glass of claret, the din of voices, and the hot and brightly lighted room.

By some mysterious anomaly, its action was definitely Apolline, as opposed to Dionysiac—suddenly lifting her from the Bacchic rout on the stage to the marble throne of spectator.

David Munroe, too, sitting silent by the Doña, happened to be feeling it also.

It seemed to him as if the oval mahogany table, on which the lights glinted and the glasses rattled, and all the people sitting round it, except himself, suddenly became an entity, which tore itself away from surrounding phenomena like the launching of a ship, perhaps....

And at that very moment, “the dark Miss Lane” was saying to herself, “It’s like the beginning of the Symposium, which seems at first clumsy and long-winded, but by which the real thing—the Feast—is shifted further and further, first to the near past, and then to years and years ago, when they were all children, in the days when Agathon was still in Athens and was making his sacrifice for his victory at the dramatic contest; pushing the rôle of eyewitness through a descending scale of remoteness—from Apollodorus to Phœnix, the son of Philip, from Phœnix to ‘one Aristodemus, a Cydathenæan,’ till finally It—the Feast, small, compact, and far-away—disentangles itself from Space and Time and floats off to the stars, like a fire-balloon, while Apollodorus and his friend, standing down there in the streets of Athens, stare up at it with dazzled eyes.”

“I say, Teresa, I was wondering ... I was thinking of writing an article on ‘the men of the nineties’—do you think I should be justified in calling Oscar Wilde ‘brilliant’?”

Teresa, still bemused, gazed at Guy with puzzled eyes. Why on earth was he looking so odd and self-conscious?

“Brilliant? Yes; I suppose so. Why?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I was just wondering....”

But the Doña was getting up, and the men were left to their port.