Читать книгу Lady Lilith - Stephen McKenna - Страница 6

"What private man in England is worse off than the constitutional monarch? … I don't believe he may even eat or drink what he likes best: a taste for tripe and onions on his part would provoke a remonstrance from the Privy Council."

Bernard Shaw: "An Unsocial Socialist."

The partnership in Pump Court lasted for more than four years. After nicely judging the minimum of work which would carry him through his bar examinations, Jack surprised his friends by closing the former life of indolence with a snap. When assizes were on, he made an undiscriminating round of the North Eastern circuit, conducting a dock defence as though it were a state trial; in London he attended suburban county courts with as much zeal as if he had been sent special. During the Long Vacation he remained at the end of a wire; the Bar Point-to-Point was sacrificed without a murmur, and invitations during his working day seldom penetrated farther than the telephone in his clerk's room.

Once a year, indeed, he consented to meet his friends at dinner with Loring, but they were contracting new ties and professing enthusiasms which he did not share. Framlingham and Knightrider had been drilled into the professional rigidity and limited outlook of junior subalterns in crack regiments: Oakleigh was a politician, Pentyre a man of leisure; Summertown had abandoned diplomacy for the army—the life of a public danger for that of a private nuisance, as Valentine Arden, the novelist, complained in a moment of exasperation. Deganway, on the same authority, rested in the Foreign Office by day and spent tireless nights adding to the number of those who addressed him by his Christian name. O'Rane and Mayhew were abroad.

Had he ever felt the inclination, Jack professed to be without the time or energy to take part in a social life of dinners and dances. Exchanging one pose for another, he had ceased to be the arbiter of "good form," as that is understood at Eton and New College, and was aping the manners of an older generation; the new aloofness, like the old, dispensed him from doing anything that he did not like and gratified his faint but ineradicable sense of superiority. At night he now chose the society of his own profession at the County Club and steeped himself in forensic retorts discourteous and the aroma of judicial wit; by day he chopped leading cases at luncheon in Hall and smoked one cigarette in the Gardens, striding up and down with his chin deep on his white slips and his hands locked beneath the tails of his coat. He was too busy for week-end parties, too old to take his sister to dances.

"It doesn't do to be seen lunching at your club too much," he explained to Eric, when at the end of four years he had decided that the inconvenience of moving was less than that of continuing to live in the Temple. "People think you've no work. Trouble is, I'm getting no exercise. I think I shall have to move away so that I can get a walk in the morning."

Eric received the news with little surprise and hardly more regret. Jack was in chambers before he himself got up in the morning and in bed before the London News began to print off. The dissolution would only cost them an occasional half-hour's talk in the early evening and a rare Sunday walk when Jack was not staying at Red Roofs.

"Nineteen nine, nineteen five," Eric calculated. "We're twenty-six and we've had four years here. By the way, are you dining with Jim to-night? Give him my love and say I wish I could come too. It's no good, if I have to run away after the fish. I remember your father telling me that journalism was a dog's life. He never spoke a truer word."

"But you've done extraordinarily well," Jack insisted, rousing reluctantly from the contemplation of his own career. "What are you? Dramatic critic and assistant literary editor? And you're making a dam' sight more than I am. I've decided to give up this twopenny ha'penny criminal work. Otherwise I shall get left in a rut."

Eric was thinking less of his routine work than of four dog's-eared plays which he had sent the round of the London managers; a critic was ever one who could not create.

"The right people have died at the right time," he explained. "It's not quite what I hoped, though."

Jack knocked out his pipe and left Eric to finish his early dinner by himself. It was the anniversary of their last Phoenix Club gathering at Oxford; and for the last four years a dozen or more of them had contrived to meet at the end of every June. So far, O'Rane's pessimistic forecast had halted short of fulfilment; none was dead, none was bankrupt, though Draycott was living at Boulogne with a warrant in readiness for him, if he ever returned to England. Sinclair was married, but the others had not yet found time for triumph or disaster. If Eric enjoyed a good salary and a responsible position, they had been bought with hard work, unsleeping contrivance and two severe illnesses; the instant spectacular effect of Lord Byron's descent upon London remained a day dream.

"You'll be able to find some one to take on my room, won't you?" asked Jack, with fleeting compunction, as he reappeared from his bedroom in shirt and trousers.

"I shan't try," answered Eric. "My books are overflowing into every room. … And I loathe strangers as much as you do."

Like Jack, he had soon found that it was impossible to play on equal terms with men who did not pretend to work for a living; and Eric's rare excursions from the Temple led him only to the supper-table of the Thespian Club and occasional luncheons in Chelsea. In the days of his apprenticeship to the London News, he had won the friendship of Martin Shelley by attending first nights when, as happened three times out of five, the dramatic critic was indisposed. For ultimate reward he succeeded to a coveted position; in payment by instalments he received a careless regard and full-blooded advice on drama and life. When Shelley's ill-used brain and nerves had been flogged to activity and not yet drowned, he would talk of theatrical art as a master. "Don't forget what I'm telling you, Lane," he would say through a cloud of smoke and whiskey fumes. "I've taught you what construction is—and dialogue—and technique—and characterization. You could write a successful play to-morrow, but you must wait until you've filled a sketch-book or two. You don't know live men and women yet; you're too much the maiden of bashful fifteen. The public isn't ready for naturalism; so, if you want to kill theatricality—which is what I've tried to do all my life—you must do it with a play that's overwhelming. I could teach you a hell of a lot, if I had time. … When I'm gone, fire in your application for my berth so that no one else gets in before you and yet leave just enough margin to keep the old man from thinking you pushed me under the wheels. Not that I'd blame you, we've all got to make our way. But the old man finds me rather an asset. My poor wife runs teetotal salons in Chelsea on the strength of my name. I'll take you to one. You'll fill a sketch-book with society smatterers alone."

Eric went from courtesy and stayed from compassion. Mrs. Shelley, the faded, pretty daughter of a Cambridge tutor who had left her a few hundreds a year, threw herself tacitly on his mercy, as though he had come to blackmail her with sordid tales of her husband's degradation. They had no children; and she had set herself to make a life of her own. So long as she could fill her house with the North Street school of poets, the Fitzroy Square impressionists—and all who came humbly to her for a chance of meeting them—she shut her eyes to her husband's excesses and infidelities. He was required to act as decoy for new literary and artistic lions, to appear at one party out of five freshly shaved and decently habited, to lend her a hand when she could climb no longer unaided and to accept a rare invitation in return to lunch with Lady Poynter or the Duchess of Ross, when "the society smatterers" wanted him to write up a charity matinée or the amateur performance of a Restoration comedy.

Before and after her husband's unheroic death under a newspaper van, Mrs. Shelley was Eric's single link with the world outside Fleet Street and the Thespian Club. Jack's white waist-coat and button-hole were occasionally a galling remainder of his own bondage.

"God! this is a life!" he broke out, as he looked at the clock and brought his dinner to an untimely end. "I never dine anywhere; I don't speak to a woman from one year's end to another——"

"Nor do I. It only encourages them," Jack returned, as he filled his case with cigarettes and gave a final polish to his hat.

"It would bring a little colour into one's life," said Eric, looking with disfavour at the grimly celibate sitting-room.

"Some people don't know when they're well off. I can't dance and I've nothing to say to the modern girl. Why they won't take 'no' for an answer I can never make out. I suppose you like women, Eric. Every time you go to a theatre, you come back raving about somebody's dress or pearls or eyes—honestly, you do! It's like a fashion article. I'm beyond all that. I don't mind 'em when they're as old as Lady Knightrider; they've ceased to be exacting then, and you can count on them to see that you're comfortable and that you have plenty of bath-salts. But the vulgar little atrocities of nineteen! I'm not ragging; if you compare a girl like my sister Agnes, who's twenty-two, with the hoydens who think they constitute London Society! Brains of spidgers and manners of factory hands! In my day. … However, they're all pure young girlhood to you. The Lord preserve you in your innocence and keep you from marrying one of them! I must fly!"

He ran down the stairs and hailed a taxi at the top of Middle Temple Lane. Since the downfall of Draycott, the Phoenix Club dinners had lost their old strict form and were no longer confined to members of the club. As Jack entered the hall, Valentine Arden, a satirical consumptive, was divesting himself of a violet-lined cloak, smoothing his long straight hair back from his forehead, patting the tie that wound twice round his collar and adjusting the straps of his trousers under his insteps. There were other friends of a younger generation whom Loring had acquired in his easy-going progress, but the older members were meagrely represented.

The first arrivals were already in the library, exchanging fragmentary news of the absentees, when their host appeared with a preoccupied frown and a jejune apology for his lateness.

"Where's Pentyre?" he asked, as he looked round the room. "Here, my friend, you'll get yourself into hot water, if you give any more parties like your last one."

"What's the row?" asked Pentyre in surprise.

"Well, I won't mention names," Loring answered, "but one of your guests has come to grief as the result of your last little gathering at Croxton. I don't say that it's your fault," he added, "except that you ought to exercise more general control in your own house. There was a certain amount of gambling, wasn't there? Some fairly big sums of money changed hands? One man lost who couldn't afford to lose, I believe. It may have been absence of mind or it may have been the only way out of the difficulty, but the man in question signed his father's name on a cheque instead of his own. The son is now on his way to one of those 'thoughtful islands where warrants never come.' D'you mean this is all news to you?"

Pentyre tugged at his moustache and shook his head in wide-eyed wonder. The only sign of discord that he could remember had occurred between his mother and Loring's own cousin, Barbara Neave. On the first night she had stayed up after Lady Pentyre had shepherded the women of the party to bed. In the morning there had been a gentle reprimand, but Lady Barbara ignored it and persisted in staying up as long as any one would stay up with her. She or one of the men—Pentyre could not remember—had started poker, which they played until two or three o'clock in the morning.

"I've never heard a word of it," he said. Less than a year had passed since he succeeded to his father's title and the ownership of Croxton Hall. The social life of the county had been brightened; but there had been one or two regrettable mishaps, and Loring always seemed to hear of them. "How did you get hold of the story?" he asked with a touch of bluster.

"From the man's father in the first place; then from my cousin Barbara. We're supposed to be responsible for her, and I tackled her about it. She won nearly five hundred pounds from this wretched boy. Of course, I made her disgorge it; but the fellow may be ruined for life. I told her so pretty plainly, and she seemed to take it as an enormous compliment."

"Who was the man?" asked Pentyre.

"Well, it wasn't your fat friend Webster, and it wasn't John Gaymer; they played poker before they could walk. I think you can guess now. Really, Pentyre, if you admit people of that kind to your house. … That girl will be the death of my poor mother. Thank goodness, Crawleigh's on his way home! D'you know, in the four years we've been nominally in charge of her we've been asked to have her removed from three different schools? Once it was for holding a table-turning séance in her bedroom after lights-out, and twice simply because they didn't know what to do with her. She's a holy terror. But I've got rid of her now, so let's have some dinner and forget all about her."

The three-hour discussion, which had been brought to an end by the dressing-gong, was only the latest of a long succession of family councils; but hitherto Lady Barbara had split the court of enquiry into factions and escaped between the feet of the disputants. On this, as on earlier occasions, she had won over her two aunts, but Loring proved himself to be of sterner stuff. "It's no use her saying that it's just as if she hadn't a father and mother of her own! She has—and they'll discover it to their cost," he said. "The immediate point is that, if Barbara stays in this house, I go out of it. She's not in the least sorry. You think she's crying, but she isn't. I've seen her do that a dozen times when she wants to get round the servants. It's time some one else had a turn of her. If you believe in her repentance, Aunt Kathleen, you're welcome to her." While he dressed for dinner, the girl's clothes were packed and disposed in Lady Knightrider's car. She herself came to his door with a woebegone face, begging him to forgive her, for life with Lady Knightrider involved discipline, religious exercises and banishment for most of the year to Scotland or Monmouthshire. He refused and felt so small-minded at using his authority against a child that it was a relief to vent his ill-humour on a man.

"This is all very well," said Pentyre stolidly, as they sat down to dinner, "but I refuse to be bully-ragged because you can't keep your own cousin in order."

"I can't make out how you can be seen in the same street as Webster and Gaymer," answered Loring. "To me they're everything that's wrong in the life of the present day. Webster, Pennington, Lady Maitland, Erckmann——"

"You're so infernally narrow-minded."

"If it's narrow-minded to dislike a noisy little clique of rich cads who try to dominate society by being one degree more outrageous than anybody else."

A murmur of dissent made itself heard; but Loring warmed to his work, and the party divided into two camps and joined battle over the bodies of their friends. It was a stimulating encounter and afforded unrestricted opportunity for personal attack. For several years there had been raging a secret warfare which Valentine Arden compared with a tournament in a dark room between blindfolded combatants who did not know why they were fighting. On the one side was a group of influential and highly respected families led by the Lorings, the Knightriders and the Pebbleridges, on the other the cosmopolitans. They were an ill-defined host without leader or tenets. In every other capital of the world they had found their place as a wealthy and cultured class, excluded from the houses of the historic aristocracy but forming an artistic aristocracy of their own. In Paris, Vienna and New York Sir Adolf Erckmann was a social power; he would not, indeed, be found with the Princesse de Brise or Mrs. Irwin T. Churton, but he was known and reverenced in a world of music and pictures which did not know Mrs. Irwin T. Churton or the Princesse de Brise by name.

In England there were no such recognizable lines of demarcation. Erckmann was received by the Duchess of Ross, because she wanted him to subsidise a French theatre for London and hoped that he might be induced to take Herrig on a long lease; he was blackballed for the County Club, because the committee disliked his race, his accent, his friends and his too frequent appearance in the Divorce Court. With one foot in a Promised Land, from which the society of Paris, Vienna and New York had excluded him, Sir Adolf lifted the second; it was at this point that the battle was joined, and both sides fought blindly. The cosmopolitans were not always fortunate in their manners or their allies; and to Loring their very toleration meant the invasion of society by "a noisy clique of rich cads." Their antagonists were no less unfortunate in a few of their prejudices; and the cosmopolitans claimed with some reason to be fighting against a Philistine oligarchy. As there was not even a common ground of dispute, the warfare degenerated into indecisive skirmishes, and the discussion of it into embittered personalities.

"They're a bit hairy about the heel," said Summertown, "but they are alive, and some of their shows are great fun. Val can bear me out."

Arden assumed non-moral detachment and explained that the novelist, like the sanitary inspector, entered all houses with professional impartiality.

"They've no sense of responsibility and not much feeling for decency. I don't want to make too much of this business," said Loring, as acrimony slipped out of control and threatened the peace of the dinner. "But I was thoroughly stirred up over that wretched boy and I felt it was time to make a stand."

"What are you going to do?" demanded Pentyre.

"Well, I've been knocking about in London for half a dozen years, watching these gentry, and I can see that we're not assimilating them. The egregious Pennington, that young swine Webster——"

"Both of whom I've met in this house," interposed Pentyre.

"I know. One gets roped in. Some one dragged me along to their parties, so I had to invite them back. But I don't go any more. The danger now is that they'll assimilate us. I went through my mother's book a short time ago and put a mark against certain names; and in future those people will not be invited or admitted to the house. No doubt they'll get on very happily without me, but so much mud is thrown at us in the ordinary way of business that I can't afford to put up gratuitous targets for the amusement of the gutter-press. Honestly, Pentyre, you'd feel rather small, if the Sunday Budget or Morton's Weekly came out with a 'Society Gambling Scandal.' Wouldn't you?"

Pentyre adroitly evaded the question and continued his own bombardment.

"Is your cousin's name in the condemned list?" he asked.

"It will be, if I have any trouble from her again. What I can't get people to see is that we're hanging on by our eyelids to such position as we've got. A hundred years ago we were a class apart and above criticism; nobody thought the worse of us, if we appeared at the theatre with a notorious cocotte or drank ourselves gently under the table. Our present accursed democracy was unborn. But, when once that came into existence, we could only keep ourselves from proscription by saying very loudly that we were still a class apart and were setting a standard. Democracy's too lazy and snob-ridden to be very exacting, but it's had its eye on us. George and his friends are conspiring to hamstring the poor, decent House of Lords; and, if they succeed, the rot won't stop there. I find life very pleasant, and it isn't worth a tremendous upheaval simply for the amusement of behaving like a Bank Holiday crowd. … Let's go and smoke in the library."

Under the tranquilling influence of tobacco, Loring recovered his good-humour and the controversy flickered to extinction. There was a short attempt to revive and explore the scandal of Croxton Hall, but Pentyre was secretly frightened by the possibility of seeing his name in the papers; and he knew from long experience that there was no surer way of achieving notoriety than that of telling anything in confidence to those of his friends whose social importance was measured by their range and freshness of gossip.

"You're too provoking!" Deganway protested shrilly, pinning him in an embrasure and flapping irritably with his eye-glass. "You know it's not fair to tell a story without giving all the names."

"I didn't tell the story," Pentyre pointed out.

"But I've asked Jim, and he won't say. Val! Do make him tell! He's being so tiresome."

Arden shrugged his shoulders and, with the outward frozen detachment which had become second nature to him, retired to a table by himself where he called for China tea and produced a pack of patience cards. There were other means of investigating the poker episode, and he had decided that it was more than time for the social satirist to make Barbara Neave's acquaintance. For the merits of the controversy he cared nothing, but his sense of humour was maliciously stirred in contemplation of a self-consciously decorous clan stung into undignified curvettings by a gadfly girl of sixteen. Though he ostentatiously refused to be drawn into partisanship, the stiff blamelessness of the interlocked Catholic families occasionally oppressed him; and the material outcome of Loring's tirade was to stimulate his desire to explore the domestic dissension at first hand.

"One feels that Lady Barbara would repay study," he observed to Jack, as they left the house together. "She is a new element in our worn-out social system."

"You must study her for me," answered Jack. "I agree with every word Jim said. I'm too busy to go out much, but some of the people I meet. … My father says that twenty years ago they wouldn't have been tolerated. But since the South African diamond boom and all the new money. … Of course, the girl just wants slapping."

"You have met her? No? One hoped that you would have effected the introduction."

"I avoid the present-day girl like the plague," said Jack.

The following afternoon Arden called in South Street with a book which, he assured Lady Knightrider, he had promised to lend her. Lady Barbara was at Hurlingham with Webster; but, as she was expected back to tea, he planted himself immovably in a chair and awaited her return. When at last she came, he found her utterly unlike the rebellious school-girl of his imagination. A childhood spent in public had matured her beyond her years so that she had the looks of twenty-two and the self-possession of forty. Instead of studying her, he found himself being studied; slender and lithe as a boy, she was tall enough to look down on him. He found her haggard with restlessness and a life of nervous excitement; her tired eyes, ever changing in size and colour, brightened as she took in his affectations of dress and mannerisms of speech; he felt that she was harmonizing her pose with his and that her vitality and quickness had already given her an advantage.

"I've read all your books. Witty, but very artificial," she said, as they were introduced. "The French do that sort of thing more easily, but you've not read much French, have you? There are several things I want to discuss with you. A play I've written." She drew off her gloves jerkily, splitting the thumb of one. "Did you come to see me or Aunt Kathleen? And you know Jim, of course. I want your opinion of him."

"He knows me," Arden distinguished, as he watched her carelessly calculated movements. Within sixty seconds she had shewn herself full-face and in profile, with a hat and again with two tapering hands smoothing a mass of wayward hair. He had seen her wistful and tired, as she came into the room, and again alert and galvanised at finding him there. Yet she had certainly noticed his hat in the hall; probably she had read the name and thought out her attack as she came upstairs. He was charmed by her conscientious artifice.

"You talk just like Fatty Webster's imitations of you! That's so clever of you! But why do you do it? You've arrived. There's no need to be eccentric now. But perhaps you've grown into your own pose? In that case you're right to express yourself in your own medium. Life is simply self-expression, isn't it? The discovery of the Ego, the refinement of the Ego, the presentation of the Ego." She nodded quickly at a portrait of her father in Garter robes. "It would never do to be submerged by that kind of thing. I'm always so sorry for Royalty."

As he hesitated for an answer, she put her hands to her throat, unclasped her necklace and threw it out of the window. Arden sprang across the room and looked down into the street to make sure that he had seen aright. A District Messenger-boy approached, whistling; he explored the necklace with his foot and finally picked it up.

"My dear, what are you doing?" cried Lady Knightrider in amazement.

"I went flying to-day," Lady Barbara answered, as she poured herself out a cup of tea.

"Flying!"

"Yes, I didn't tell you beforehand, because I was afraid of a scene. Besides, I should have done it, whatever you said. Johnnie Gaymer promised to take me up. I haven't been near Hurlingham. Don't bother, Mr. Arden."

"But why——?" Valentine began, startled out of his invertebrate placidity by a sensationalist more original than himself.

"Because I wasn't killed. I love that necklace more than anything in the world. It was given me when I was recovering from typhoid and every one thought I must die. … The engine stopped in mid-air, and I made sure I was going to be killed. Johnnie thought so, too. I felt I owed something to Nemesis. … I've known you by sight all this season, Mr. Arden. You weren't at the Poynters last night, by any chance? I couldn't go, because I was in disgrace. And Lord Poynter sent his car this morning with a wreath of lilies, because he was afraid I must be dead."

The short, disjointed sentences, flung out rapidly as she helped herself to cake, demanded all Arden's attention and left her aunt far behind. Lady Knightrider hurried belatedly to the window and then stretched her hand to the bell. Lady Barbara took her arm soothingly and led her back to her chair.

"Your disgrace was our diversion," said Arden.

"Did Jim tell you about it," asked Lady Barbara. "How like him! I'm beginning to think he's naturally cruel. Or unnaturally. Conscious cruelty is what divides men from animals. … Aunt Kathleen, if you fuss, I shall scream; I've been badly frightened and I hated throwing it away. … I'd sooner die than hurt any one. … Have you ever flown? I've wanted to for years; I felt it would be a new sensation. Won't it be awful when we've done so much that there are no sensations left? Aunt Kathleen's quite irrepressible, isn't she?"

After an interval of indecision Lady Knightrider had hurried out of the room and downstairs. Arden looked at his watch and prepared to follow her.

"One always lies down before dinner," he explained.

"You're going—just when we've been left a moment together?" she asked with a smile that had less of amusement than of artistic sympathy. "That's a brilliant effect. Not one man in a million would have thought of it. We must meet again. Why did you come at all? What had you heard about me? I don't recommend Aunt Kathleen's cigarettes."

She offered him her case, and Arden lighted one.

"A poker party was mentioned at dinner last night," he told her. "One casually wondered who the man was."

"Claude Arkwright. Jim says I've got his soul on my conscience. Any more questions?"

Arden laughed and for a moment shed all his mannerisms.

"Yes. What's behind all this?" he asked.

"All this what? All this me? What I do?" Lady Barbara met him unreservedly on his own chosen ground of sincerity, and her voice and smile changed. "I'm behind it. Come, you're quite clever enough to understand. I want to enjoy life and know life and meet people and read books and do things. … I won't be treated like a minor Royalty. The world's full of Jim Lorings. Wherever I go, some one says 'Not there, not there, my child.' And then! Then I go quite mad! You'll like me, I think. Good-bye."

"Good-bye, Lady Lilith."

"Lilith? Who was she? Wasn't she Adam's first wife?"

"She existed before Man tasted of the tree of knowledge; before good and evil came into the world," said Arden impressively.

"I remember. I hope you won't become sententious. That went out with the last of the Wilde plays."

Lady Knightrider was standing in the hall, plump, white-haired and perplexed, peering through her lorgnettes into the street. The messenger-boy had disappeared, and the necklace with him.

"He will take it to Scotland Yard," predicted Arden reassuringly. "And then Lady Barbara will throw it away again for fear of cheating Nemesis. One despaired of meeting honest superstition in these degenerate latter days."

"I've never heard——," began Lady Knightrider. One crime jostled another and confused her mind. "Crawleigh will be furious if he finds out she's been flying."

Arden walked back to the Ritz, wondering whether the fuller study of Barbara Neave justified him in giving away points by betraying interest in her. His preliminary diagnosis discovered energy with no outlet, premature experience with unsated curiosity; public life held no mystery or attraction for the only daughter of a viceroy; unless Lord Crawleigh set himself to gain a dukedom, there were no social heights to scale; the family was too rich for her to be troubled about money; and so energy sought its outlet in making and receiving new sensations. This was well enough at sixteen or seventeen, but after another five years emotion-hunting … ? He was still undecided when he encountered her a week later at Covent Garden, sitting with Summertown and Webster on a sofa outside Lady Maitland's box and having her fortune told by Sonia Dainton. Her setting was of more interest than her occupation, for Summertown and Miss Dainton were leaders of the younger cavalry in the cosmopolitan army; they echoed the noise and reflected the insistent glare of Sir Adolf Erckmann without sharing his solid prestige as a critic and patron of art. Webster was a sodden, characterless youth, who bought his way into toleration which he mistook for popularity. Arden wondered what Loring would say if he found his cousin in such company.

"The discovery of the Ego?" he enquired.

"Hullo! We're having such fun!" said Lady Barbara. "Miss Dainton's wonderful! I've had two bad illnesses, and something is going to happen soon which will change the whole of my life. I'm going to have an enormous success of some kind. And then an enormous tragedy. I'm very artistic and full of intuition. I've got a strong will and a great influence over people. Go on, Sonia."

"The line of heart—give me your other hand a minute," said Sonia Dainton. "Yes, the line of heart hasn't begun yet. When it does!"

Lady Barbara withdrew her hand abruptly.

"I don't believe you know anything about it, Sonia. Are there any good palmists in London, Mr. Arden? I collect fortune-tellers. Let's go somewhere to-morrow. Father will be back in England next month, and then I shan't be able to do anything."

"You believe in all this?" Arden asked, remembering her action with the necklace and wondering how far she was trying to beat him at his own game of extravagant effects.

"Oh, implicitly. Don't you? And I do want to find out all about the future. Let's devote a week to it and try every one."

"I might spare you two days," he answered, as he passed on to his box.

At the end of the first Arden's curiosity was satisfied. Lady Barbara was a study in crude contrasts. While she pained her family by sceptical indifference to religion, there seemed nothing that she would not believe, provided only that it did not come to her from the lips of a priest. As they drove from one clairvoyant to another, she revealed a curious knowledge of necromancy; she had read every book that she could find on Satanism and the Black Mass and would talk of astrology and the significance of dreams with grave conviction. But the cult of the fortune-tellers was inspired primarily by a desire to discuss herself and to be discussed. A single morning exhausted the possibilities of amusement from such a source, and her companions were less diverting than herself; Sonia Dainton dropped out when she found herself accorded second place, Summertown played a thin stream of monotonous jocosity over the survivors, and Webster fell asleep with an air of duty well done when he had provided luncheon for every one, discovered a new clairvoyant and driven the party to her at breakneck speed in the latest of the racing cars whose purchase constituted the overt business of his life.

They were to have met again with Lady Knightrider at the end of the season; but, when Arden and Jack Waring entered the train for Raglan, Loring awaited them with a grave face and pointed to a column notice in his paper, headed "Serious Flying Accident."

"Thank Heaven, it happened when she was with her people and not with me," he began. "That's my silly little fool of a cousin again! She got that fellow Gaymer down to Crawleigh Abbey; and, when her parents' backs were turned, they went off for a jaunt to Salisbury Plain. The manœuvres were on, so they brightened them up by flying so low that the inspecting general bolted and the troops scattered in panic. There'll be the deuce to pay for that alone. Then, on the way back, they came down in the New Forest and got hung up on a tree. Gaymer's broken a collar-bone and two ribs; and Barbara's badly shaken and bruised. Here's an opportunity for your literary genius, Valentine; help me to draft a telegram of sympathy which will shew at the same time that I think she richly deserved all she got."

The accident was Lady Barbara's formal introduction to England. Throughout 1909 there was an official pretence that she was not yet out; she would still be no more than seventeen when her parents returned, and both Lady Loring and Lady Knightrider refused to present her before that. The baptism of blood in the New Forest made her name and face known to every reader of every illustrated paper. "The ideal début for her," exclaimed Loring in disgust. "I can see her spending the rest of her life trying to live up to it."

Four days later he came into Arden's room with a letter which he threw onto the bed with a grim smile.

"Dearest Jim,

"It was sweet of you to send me that wire. I've strained my back and covered myself with bruises, but it was worth it. Fear is a wonderful sensation; I believe it's the strongest of all the emotions. I certainly feel that I shall never again get that sublimated degree of fear. I got Death. (D'you spell Death with a capital D? I always do—from respect; Death will outlast God.) You heard I had concussion? I knew I was dying and that one step would carry me over the dividing-line. There was a black curtain, like a drop-scene; and I knew that, as soon as that lifted, I should be dead and on the other side. I said to myself I wouldn't die. When I came to, the doctor was frowning terribly, and I heard him mutter, 'Just about time, too, young lady.' I wonder whether you'd be sorry, if I died, Jim. When I had appendicitis at Simla, you couldn't get through the streets for the people who were waiting to hear how the operation had gone off. The wires were blocked for three days with enquiries.

"I'm to be allowed out at the end of the week and hope to be well enough to come to you at House of Steynes with father and mother.

Your loving Barbara."

Arden smiled as he handed back the letter.

"Characteristic," he commented.

"Oh, very! Not a word about Gaymer. Or the feelings of her parents. She's had two new sensations and she can't be sure whether she'd get as good a press for her death here as in India. Crawleigh will have his hands full. You've not met him? Well, it's one thing to govern India and another to keep a little devil like that in order."

A month later, still in the detached spirit of the social satirist, Arden allowed himself to be introduced to Lady Barbara's parents in Scotland. He was anxious to study her family setting, for Lord Crawleigh was already beginning to be regarded primarily as the father of his own daughter and only in afterthought as a distinguished public servant. Fifteen years earlier he had first shewn the administrative brilliance and incapacity to work with colleagues which impel a man to a viceroyalty or the leadership of a disgruntled party of one on the cross-benches. In Canada, in Ireland and in India he had been publicly admired and privately abhorred. Without the backing of long established authority, however, he was thrown on his own resources; and paper-work genius proved itself powerless without palpable force of character. Over-sensitive to his personal dignity, he treated his wife and children with the pomp and despotism of Government House; according to Loring's description, councils were convened to decide what train should bear them from London to Crawleigh Abbey; the cook's shortcomings were minuted to Lady Crawleigh for observations and appropriate action; the servants were pinned to the straight path of their duties by proclamation, and the household books were scrutinized with an exhaustive particularity not vouchsafed to the preparation of an Indian budget.

It was the self-protective assertion of a man sensitive to his physical inadequacy. Lord Crawleigh's domed head, ascetic face and rimless spectacles were impressively intellectual, but he degenerated as he went lower. The bottom half of his face was confused with a straggling blonde moustache intended for an operatic viking; his body was too short, his legs too long; and, when he became excited, his voice rose querulous and shrill. But the viceregal manner carried him far. Lord Neave and his two younger brothers had been taught obedience at Eton; Lady Crawleigh, as her passivity and plumpness hinted, suffered from a family streak of laziness, which she shared with Lady Loring and Lady Knightrider, and from twenty-five years' experience of her husband, which she could share with no one. It required Barbara's temperamental irreverence and gipsy craving for liberty to break down the imposing forms and spirit of her father's rule. The boys, who could be caned while she remained immune, sheltered themselves behind their younger sister; and, with a woman's genius for tactical alliances and strategical choice of ground, she explored and profited by the weak places in the enemy's system of defences. Her father's public position and private dignity were her strongest accessories. "She can always blackmail him by threatening a scandal," as Loring explained.

So long as she had her own way, Arden discovered a rule of peace and mutual affection. Lady Barbara hated to be on bad terms with any one; and her parents were humanly, if reluctantly, proud of her. Throughout his visit to House of Steynes, she dominated the party by her vitality and versatile charm. Loring was in the early stages of devotion to Sonia Dainton and disappeared as long and often as possible to escape his mother and sister, who were trying to avert an engagement, and Lady Dainton, who was forcing it to a head; and in his absence Arden watched Lady Barbara posing herself in the middle of the stage, methodically sharing herself among the guests and holding her own with all. It was the fruit of early years, during which she had lived consistently in public, meeting men of every profession and country, listening, remembering, learning and giving her best in return. She shewed a nice appreciation of personality and varied her attitude with her audience. In talking to Arden himself she still gravely met pose with pose and extravagance with extravagance.

"D'you feel you know me adequately now?" she asked him on the last night. "Mr. Deganway told me you were going to write a book about me."

"And you replied, 'Only one?' It is unfortunate that Meredith has already taken 'The Egoist' as a title."

Lady Barbara turned slowly, as though he were a mirror, and gave him time to appreciate her slender height and lithe figure. One hand directed attention to her hair, as she brushed away a curl from her forehead; and she looked at him sideways with her fingers pressed against one cheek so that he should see the size and deep colour of her eyes.

"D'you think I'm unduly vain?" she asked.

"Genius demands vanity. But one comes back to the old question: what is behind it? One thinks of you in six years' time and asks oneself what will be left. You have been everywhere, Lady Lilith, and met every one whom the world considers worth meeting—they were not too numerous? No?—and you have read so much. … In six years' time you will be the best known woman in London, but there will be nothing left for you to do."

"There are always new experiences. When I had that accident in the New Forest, a man came from the other end of England, because he'd fallen in love with my photograph. He said he couldn't marry any one else after seeing me."

"It is surfeiting to be easily loved," Arden sighed. "One does not shoot sitting birds. Some day, perhaps, Lady Lilith will meet a man who goes to the other end of England to avoid her. That will be a new experience. She will follow him, of course. To find a heart will be the greatest experience of all. One will watch your career with interest."

"And describe it? Or are you afraid to risk my friendship?"

"The only book that could offend Lady Lilith is one in which she does not appear."

For the next six months Arden was compelled to study her through the press. Loring went abroad for the winter in his yacht, Lady Knightrider withdrew to Scotland, and Lord Crawleigh moved his seat of government from Berkeley Square to Hampshire. Despite the rival claims of a general election, however, she secured creditable space in the daily and weekly papers. A ball at Crawleigh Abbey was followed by an abortive rumour of her engagement to her cousin Lord John Carstairs. A prompt and unambiguous disclaimer was issued, but the findings of the commission, which Lord Crawleigh appointed under his own chairmanship to investigate his daughter's conduct, were such that he deemed it prudent to transfer his seat of government from Hampshire to Cap Martin. A series of photographs from the Riviera correspondent of the 'Catch' shewed her walking demurely with her father, playing tennis and participating less demurely in a battle of flowers and a fancy-dress carnival.

In the spring of 1910 public interest was deflected to another branch of the family, for Loring's engagement to Sonia Dainton was announced. But by that time, as Arden pointed out, a man had only himself to blame if he did not know all that was to be known of Lady Barbara Neave.

"How poor Jim must loathe all this self-advertising," said Jack Waring, when he met Arden at the County Club to discuss the engagement. "I've never even seen her, but I've had her and her hats and her clothes thrust under my eyes by these infernal papers till I'm sick of them. She's talented, she's charming. I know all the things she said to all the big pots in India. When she is twenty-one she comes in for all her godfather's money on condition that she marries a Catholic. … I suppose there must be a public for this kind of stuff, or the papers wouldn't print it; but she's on the level of a musical-comedy star. Arden, my lad, I'm an old man, but I swear people had a little more dignity and restraint in my young days. The one good thing about the court mourning is that she doesn't get so much opportunity for her antics."

"She'll emerge again, when it's over," Arden predicted. "Meanwhile, London is becoming very tiresome. Has life lost its savour? Are we growing old? One would give much for the tonic of a good scandal."

"There'll be no lack of that," Jack prophesied, "judging from the people I see in London nowadays."