Читать книгу The Anxious Days - Philip Gibbs - Страница 18

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Commander Compton dined with the Lamberts one night. Mrs. Lambert was the lady he had met on Election night, when he was feeling as lonely as death, and she was the mother of Simon who was keen on Madge.

They had quite a dinner party at their house in Queen’s Gate, and Compton was pleased to sit again at a table at which he had been entertained fairly often in the old days before the War. He had often thought of it out in the Malay States as typical of English hospitality and good middle-class comfort. There was a nice mid-Victorian feeling about this dining-room with its mahogany furniture and water-colour paintings by Frederick Walker and Birket Foster.

Henry Lambert had always done himself rather well, having private means besides his salary as a Treasury official. He looked a bit older than when Compton had dined here last. His hair was thinning on top and had gone grey at the sides. The crows’ feet of time had dug a bit deeper round his eyes, although they still looked out on life with a shrewd humour which had given him a reputation for wit—a little caustic sometimes. He had been a great amateur actor in the old days before the world became wearied.

“Ageing a bit,” thought Compton. “But he’s five years older than I am. I’m young compared with Henry Lambert!”

He felt young to-night, sitting next to Helen. Helen was good enough to say he looked absurdly young. But he had had one or two reminders of age, slightly disconcerting.

It was when he entered the drawing-room, five minutes late because he had sneaked half an hour with Madge at her rooms in Chelsea. The other guests were there when he made his bow, and one of the ladies who held out her hand to him beamed effusively.

“My dear Stephen, how enchanting to see you again!”

He couldn’t remember her. She was a stout lady, very pleasant-looking, with grey hair. For the life of him he couldn’t put a name to some dim memory which lurked for him in her eyes until Helen Lambert put him wise, very tactfully.

“You remember Mrs. Tavistock, Stephen? You knew her as Kitty Crichton.”

Kitty Crichton! Good heavens, yes! He remembered her as a little sylph-like thing, as light as gossamer when he danced with her on the deck of a battleship. She was lost—she had disappeared—in this luxuriance of middle age.

“My dear Kitty!” exclaimed Commander Compton in his best naval manner. “How splendid to meet you after all this time! Five years at least——”

“Ten,” said Mrs. Tavistock; “and I don’t believe you knew me! Well, I don’t blame you. I’m not such a fairy as I used to be, although I hardly eat a lettuce leaf.”

This was the first shock, reminding him of time’s swift pace. The second came when a friendly hand grasped him by the arm and said, “Well, young fellow!”

It was Edmund Hall, whom he had known as a naval lieutenant on his first cruise to China, and afterwards at intervals as an instructor of naval gunnery. He was one of Compton’s contemporaries. They had had many a spree together in foreign ports. They had met last in the Victory March through London, after the War, when he was in full uniform and looked magnificent. Now something seemed to have taken the stuffing out of him, and he was gaunt and haggard-looking; an elderly Sir Galahad, though still as handsome as ever. He looked ten years older than his age, which was Compton’s age.

Compton must have betrayed his thought by the flick of an eyelid.

“Oh, you needn’t rub it in, my dear man,” his friend said cheerfully. “Quantum mutatus ab illo! Isn’t that what we used to say? I’m just staggering up from double pneumonia and the devil knows what. I’m not so good-looking as I used to be when you and I gave the girls a treat in the Mediterranean ports.”

“I didn’t have a look in, old boy,” said Compton. “You were the Don Juan of the British Navy. ‘Handsome Harry’ is what the snotties used to call you.”

Admiral Sir Edmund Hall looked pleased by this reminder of his gallant youth, but he raised his finger and uttered a warning.

“Hush! I’ve repented of my ill-spent youth. Don’t drag it up to shame these withered bones. Double pneumonia, my friend. Six months in a nursing home. Lord! Lord!”

Compton found other friends in the room. They were his old crowd mostly. There was Dick Charrington, now Lord Bramshaw and something rather important in the Colonial Office. Compton and Charrington had once shared rooms together in Jermyn Street as giddy bachelors. They had been brought up at Bow Street for disorderly behaviour—in the springtime of youth—just before the Boer War. They had come across each other again in South Africa in 1912. They had stopped, laughed, and invited each other to a drink in Singapore, three years ago. It was good to see him here, in Helen’s rooms, getting a bit portly—he had been plump even as a young fellow—but still good-looking and genial.

“Hullo, old bird!” he said heartily. “Back again to bricks and mortar?”

His wife was with him—Marjorie Tewson, as she had been when she was one of the Gibson Girls in “The Catch of the Season”, and the loveliest perhaps of that lovely line. She still looked beautiful, though with a hint of sadness in her eyes, as though something had hit her spirit. Something had hit her spirit. It was a tragedy when that brilliant boy of hers was killed a month before Armistice Day.

Compton held her hand for a moment and raised it to his lips.

“In remembrance of good days!” he said tenderly.

She let her hand linger with him.

“A long time ago now, Stephen! Will they ever come again, do you think?”

Then there was Arthur Hammerton, now a K.B.E. or something, and a director of the Bank of England, though it seemed impossible to associate him with such a post, remembering days when he wrote love-lyrics for musical comedies in his spare time as private secretary to a Secretary of State. His wife, Beryl, was with him, the daughter of a Liberal Prime Minister. Perhaps that was why Arthur was a director of the Bank of England. She had inherited wads of money from her noble and ineffective father.

“Dogge Steenie!” exclaimed Arthur Hammerton, who was a dapper little man with sandy hair and pince-nez. “By all the gods!”

He clasped Compton’s hand in both his own, and grinned at him through his pince-nez.

“How’s the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street?” asked Compton, smiling down at this little man who had once been known to his friends as “Mustard Seed”, because of the colour of his hair.

“Shabby genteel,” answered a director of the Bank of England. “In reduced circumstances, my dear friend. How’s rubber? No need to ask, alas! I have some rubber shares.”

There were a few other guests unknown to Compton. Two of them were pretty women in their thirties; and at dinner young Simon—Helen’s son—sat between them at the other end of the table, looking very bored for a time, until he seemed to find one of these ladies fairly intelligent, and condescended to talk to her a little.