by E. F. Benson
Mrs. Murchison did not know, but she was very happy to do so. Also the informality was charming. But her happiness had a momentary eclipse. She knew that a man was introduced to a woman, and not the other way about, but might not some other rule hold when the case was between a plain miss and the brother of a Marquis? English precedence seemed to her a fearful and wonderful thing. But Kit relieved her of her difficulty.
“And Miss Murchison, Toby,” she said. “Charmed to have seen you again. Till 8.30 tomorrow;” and she smiled and retreated with Ted.
Blushing honours were raining thick on the enchanted lady. “One thing leads to another,” she said to herself, and here was the brother of Lord Conybeare endorsing the happy meeting of this afternoon.
Then aloud:
“Very pleased to make your acquaintance,” she said, for the phrase was ineradicable. She had searched in vain for a cisatlantic equivalent, but could not get hold of one. Like the snake in spring, she had cast off the slough of many of her transatlanticisms, but “very pleased” was deeply engrained, and appeared involuntarily and inevitably.
But Toby’s inflammable eye had caught the filia pulchrior.
“My sister-in-law tells me you are dining with her tomorrow,” he said genially. “That is delightful.”
He paused a moment, and racked his brain for another suitable remark; but, finding none, he turned abruptly to Miss Murchison.
“May I have the pleasure?” he asked. “We shall just have time for a turn before this is over.”
“Of course you may, Lord Evelyn,” said her mother precipitately.
Miss Murchison paused for a moment without replying, and Toby, though naturally modest, told himself that her mother’s ready acceptance for her justified the pause.
“Delighted,” she said.
Toby might be described as a good, useful dancer, but no more. People who persist in describing one thing in terms suitable to another speak of the poetry and the melody of motion, and the dancing Toby had no more poetry or melody in his motion than a motor car or a street piano. The tide of couples, as inexplicable in its ebb and flow as deep sea-currents, had gone down again, and they had a fairly free floor. But before they had made the circuit of the room twice Kit and Lord Comber reappeared, and Kit heaved a thankful sister-in-law’s sigh.
“Toby is dancing with the Murchison girl,” she said; “and she hardly ever dances. Now—”
And they glided off on to the floor.
“A design of yours?” asked Ted.
“Yes, all my own. Ego fecit, as Mrs. Murchison says. She has millions. If Jack were dead and I was a man, I should try to marry her myself. Simply millions, Ted. Don’t you wish you had?”
“Certainly; but I am very content dancing with you. I prefer it.”
“That is silly,” said Kit. “No sane man really prefers dancing with—with anyone, to having millions.”
“Why try the cynical rôle? Do you really believe that, Kit?”
“Yes, and I hate compliments. Compliments should always be insincere, and I’m sure you mean what you say. If they are sincere they are unnecessary. Oh, it’s stopping. What a bore! Six bars more. Quicker—quicker!”
The coda gathered up the dreamy threads of the valse into a vivid ever-quickening pattern of sound, and came to an end with a great blare. The industrious and heated Toby wiped his forehead.
“That was delicious,” he said. “Won’t you have an ice or something, Miss Murchison? I say, it is sw—stewing hot, isn’t it?”
Lily took his arm.
“Yes, do give me an ice,” she said. “Who is that dancing with Lady Conybeare?”
Toby looked round.
“I don’t see them,” he said. “But I expect it’s Ted Comber. Kit usually dances with him. They are supposed to be the best dancers in London. Oh yes, I see them. It is Comber.”
“Do you know him?”
“Yes, in the sort of way one knows fifty thousand people. We always say ‘Hulloa’ to each other, and then we’ve finished, don’t you know.”
“You don’t like him, apparently.”
“I particularly dislike him,” said Toby, in a voice that was cheerful and had the real ring of sincerity.
“Why?”
“Don’t know. He doesn’t do any of the things he ought. He doesn’t shoot, or ride, or play games. He stays at country houses, you see, and sits with the women in the drawing-room, or walks with them, and bicycles with them in the afternoon. Not my sort.”
Lily glanced at his ugly, pleasant face.
“I quite agree with you,” she said. “I hate men to sit on chairs and look beautiful. He was introduced to me just now, though I did not catch his name, and I felt he knew what my dress was made of, and how it was made, and what it cost.”
“Oh, he knows all that sort of thing,” said Toby. “You should hear him and Kit talking chiffon together. And you dislike that sort of inspection?”
“Intensely. But most women apparently don’t.”
“No: isn’t it funny! So many women don’t seem to know a man when they see him. Certainly Comber is very popular with them. But a man ought to be liked by men.”
Miss Murchison smiled. Toby had got two ices and was sitting opposite her, devouring his in large mouthfuls, as if it had been porridge. She had been brought up in the country and the open air, among horses and dogs, and other nice wholesome things, and this mode of life in London, as she saw it, under her mother’s marchings and manœuvres to storm the smart set, seemed to her at times to be little short of insane. If you were not putting on a dress, you were taking it off, and all this simply to sit on a chair in the Park, to say half a dozen words to half a dozen people, to lunch at one house, to dine at another, and dance at a third. All that was only incidental in life seemed to her to be turned into its business; everything was topsy-turvy. She understood well enough that if you lived in the midst of your best friends, it would be delightful to see them there three times a day, in these pretty well-dressed settings, but to go to a house simply in order to have been there was inexplicable. Mrs. Murchison had given a ball only a few weeks before at her house in Grosvenor Square, about which even after the lapse of days people had scarcely ceased talking. Royalty had been there, and Mrs. Murchison, in the true republican spirit, had entertained them royally. Her cotillion presents had been really marvellous; there had been so many flowers that it was scarcely possible to breathe, and so many people that it was quite impossible to dance. But as success to Mrs. Murchison’s and many other minds was measured by your crowd and your extravagance, she had been ecstatically satisfied, and had sent across to her husband several elegantly written accounts of the festivity clipped from society papers. The evening had been to her, as it were, a sort of signed certificate of her social standing. But to Lily the ball had been more nearly a nightmare than a certificate: neither she nor her mother knew by sight half the people who came, and certainly half the people who came did not know them by sight. The whole thing seemed to her vulgar, wickedly wasteful, and totally unenjoyable.
There are those, and her mother was one, who would cheerfully be asphyxiated in a sufficiently exalted crowd. To be found dead among a heap of Duchesses would be to her what to a soldier is death in the forefront of the battle. A mob of fashionable people had eaten and drunk at her expense, listened to her band and marvelled at her orchids. She had also to a high degree that excellent though slightly barbarous virtue which is called hospitality. She liked to feed people. But the human soul, as poets are unanimous in telling us, is ever aspiring upwards, and this point reached, Mrs. Murchison, as has been already stated, desired more. Her tastes became childlike again; she yearned for simple little dinners with the mystic few, those dinners which never even appeared in the papers, and were followed by no ball, perhaps not even by a “few people.” Cold roast beef or bits of common bacon on skewers are sometimes served in the middle of banquets. Mrs. Murchison longed for her bits of bacon in suitable company. It was very nice to h
ave the Prince asking after your dachshund’s cough, but she had got past that.
These things passed vaguely through Miss Murchison’s mind, as she and Toby ate their ices. He was like a whiff of fresh air, she thought, to one who had been breathing a close and vitiated atmosphere. He did not ask her where she had been last night, and where she had dined today, and who was in the Park in the morning. He seemed to be as little of the world which danced and capered in the next room, chattering volubly about itself, as she was herself. On that point she would like information.
“Do you like London?” she asked, at length, and then thought herself inane for saying that. It sounded like one of the banalités she found so desperately stupid.
But Toby understood. He had just finished his ice, and with his spoon he made a comprehensive circle in the air. “This sort of thing, do you mean?” he asked. “All these fine people?”
“Yes, just that. All these fine people.”
“It seems to me perfectly idiotic,” he replied.
“Then why do you come?”
“Why? Oh, because there are a lot of people I really do like—real friends of mine, you understand, whom I see in this way. And they come for the same reason, I suppose.”
Lily looked at him a moment out of her big dark eyes, and then nodded gravely.
“Yes, that makes all the difference,” she said. “If you have a lot of friends here, there is a reason for coming. But—” and she stopped loyally.
Toby guessed what was on the end of her tongue, and with a certain instinct of delicacy changed the subject, or rather led it away from what he imagined was in her mind.
“I know what you mean,” he said, “and everyone finds it a bore at times. One goes to a party hoping to see a particular person, and the particular person is not there. Really, I often wish I was never in London at all. But, you see, I am private secretary to my cousin Pangbourne, and while they are in office and the House is sitting I have to be in town. What would happen to the British Constitution if I wasn’t, I don’t dare to think.”
Miss Murchison laughed.
“That must be interesting, though,” she said. “I should love to be in the middle of the wheels. I notice in England that a sudden hush always comes over a room whenever a politician enters. Somebody describes the English as a race of shopkeepers. It is a very bad definition; they are much more a race of politicians. The shopkeepers come from America.”
Toby shook his head.
“I wish I could notice a hush whenever I came into a room,” he said. “I should feel as if I was making a mark. But I don’t.”
“But it is interesting, is it not?” asked Miss Murchison—“being secretary to a Minister, I mean.”
Toby considered.
“Last week,” he said, “I looked over the bills for the flowers in Hyde Park. They were immense, so I hope you approve of the flowers. I also checked the food of the ducks in St. James’s Park, so I hope you do not think they are looking thin. Those ducks are the bane of my existence. Since then I have done nothing. My cousin comes into the secretaries’ room every morning to see that we are working. He invariably finds us playing cricket with the fire-shovel. I am usually in.”
“That also is interesting,” said Miss Murchison. “I love games. Oh, there’s my mother! I think she is looking for me.”
“But I may have this dance?” asked Toby.
“I am sure she would allow me,” said the girl; and as they both thought of her mother’s feverish acceptance for her of the last, their eyes met.
“Let us go,” said Toby gravely; and he gave her his arm back into the ballroom.
Miss Murchison, when she left half an hour later with her mother, was conscious of having enjoyed herself much more than she usually did at such parties. For the most part they seemed to her sad and strange forms of amusement. She danced with a certain number of young men, who admired her pearls or her profile. It is true that both were admirable, especially her profile. But to talk to them was like talking to order through a telephone; it seemed impossible to get beyond the banalités of the day. She was labelled, as she knew, as the heiress of the year; and it was as difficult to forget that as to forget that other people remembered it. No doubt when she got to know people more intimately it would be different; but these first weeks of débutancy could not, she thought, be considered amusing.
But Toby had been a most delightful change. Here was an ordinary human young man, who did not seem to be merely a weary automaton for going from one party to another. He was fairly stupid—an unutterable relief; for if there was one mode of conversation she detested, it was cheap epigram; and he was quite sensible and natural, a relief more unutterable.
Her mother drove home with her in a state of elation. The mystic innermost shrine was going to be unlocked at last.
“Lady Conybeare said that simply no one was coming tomorrow night,” she said. “We shall be six or eight only. Lord Comber, I think, is coming, and Lord Evelyn. It will be quite an arcanum. She said she would wear only a tea-gown—I should say a tea-gown only. So chic. We will have a little tea-gown party before the end of the season, dear. You and Lord Evelyn quite hobnailed together. Did you enjoy yourself, Lily?”
“Yes, very much.”
“So glad, darling. I saw no pearls so good as yours. Wear them tomorrow, dear. Lady Conybeare said she adored pearls. ‘Ah, Margerita!’” And Mrs. Murchison hummed a bar or two of Siebel’s song in a variety of keys. “And the evening after we go to see ‘Tristram and Isolde,’” she continued. “It is a gala night, and Jean de Risky plays Tristram. How lucky we were to get the box next the royal box! I hope it won’t be very hot, for I hear that everybody stops to the end in ‘Tristram.’ There is a Leitmotif—or is it Liebstod?—at the end, which is quite marvellous, I am told. However, we can go late. I hope it will be in Italian. Italian is the only language for singing. I remember when I was a girl I used to sing ‘La donna è nobile.’ I forget who wrote it; those Italian names are so alike. And what did you talk to Lord Evelyn about, dear? Was he amusing? We might ask him to our box on Thursday to see ‘Tristram.’”
“I don’t think he cares about Wagner,” said Lily; “indeed, he told me so.”
“How very unfashionable! We all like Wagner now. Personally I think it is quite enchanting; but it always sends me fast asleep, though I enjoy it very much until. But there is a great sameness in the operas; they are like those novels I used to read by Mrs. Austen—‘Sense and Sensibleness,’ and all the rest of them about Bath and other watering-places. I thought them very tedious; but I was told one must read them. Or was it Sir George Eliot who wrote them? Dear me, how stupid of me! Sir George was there tonight, and I never once thought of telling him how much I enjoyed his charming novels!”
“George Eliot was a woman,” remarked Lily, leaning back in her corner, tremulous with heroically-repressed amusement.
“You may be right, dear; but it isn’t a common name for a woman. Of course, there’s George Sand. But if you are right, how lucky I did not speak about his novels to Sir George! He would not have liked being mistaken for someone else. Some of those literary men are so sensitive.”
“But, you see, he did not write any of those novels,” said Lily, with a sudden little spasm of laughter.
“No, dear, that is just what I was saying. How you catch one up! My dearest, I am so glad you enjoyed yourself this evening. Sometimes I have thought you looked a little bored and tired. Really, London is charming! So much jeu d’esprit about it, is there not? And tomorrow we dine at Lady Conybeare’s! How pleasant, and what a wonderful dress she had on this evening! She made me feel quite a dodo—I should say a dowdy.”
Lily broke into a sudden peal of laughter, and her mother beamed good-humouredly.
“Laughing again at your poor mother,” she said, patting her hand. “You are always laughing, Lily; you are a perfect fille de joie. Dear me! I’m always saying the wrong word. Here we are, darling. Get out very carefully, because
my dress is all over.”
Lily stepped out into a perfect mob of powdered footmen who lined the steps of the Murchison mansion. Mrs. Murchison, when she took her house, gave what she called bête noire to a celebrated firm of London decorators (meaning, it is to be supposed, carte blanche) to make it as elegant and refined as money could. The result was an impression of extraordinary opulence; and the eminent firm of decorators, wise in their generation, had pleased Mrs. Murchison very well. Not the smallest part of her gratification was the immense sum she had to pay them. Money meant almost nothing to her, but it meant a good deal to other people; and to be able to say truthfully that one ceiling had cost a couple of thousand pounds was a solid cause of self-congratulation. Indeed, the contemplation of the cheque she had drawn pleased her nearly as much as what the cheque had accomplished.
She paused a moment in the hall, while one footman took off her cloak and handed it to another, and looked contentedly round on the stamped leather and the old oak, the Louis XIV. chairs, the Nankin ware, and the Persian rugs; and her mind went back for a second to the days of pitch-pine and horsehair, and in her excellent heart there rose a sudden thrill of thankfulness. Lily was already on the stairs, and her mother’s eye followed her, and rested there so long that the third footman had closed the door, and stood to attention, waiting for her to move. And one hair of Lily’s head was dearer to her than all the old oak and the opulence and the powdered footmen. She gave a heavy sigh, all mother.
“Put the lights out, William,” she said, “or is it Thomas?”
MAMMON AND CO. (Part 2)
CHAPTER VII
THE SOLITARY FINANCIER
Mr. Alington had not been present at the ball at the Hungarian Embassy, although Kit had taken the trouble to get him an invitation. By the evening mail had come a long report from his Australian manager, and as the report required considerable digestion, he, as always, put business before pleasure, especially since he did not dance, and devoted the evening to digesting it. It was all a report should be, concise, clear, and full, and since he had hitherto known very little, technically speaking, about his new venture, it demanded long and solitary consideration. There was a very careful map sent with it, drawn to scale, with the reef where found marked in red, where conjectured in yellow.