by John Buchan
It was a very young party which I found assembled in Mollie’s sitting-room, and a hasty glance convinced me that I would be sent in with Mrs. Lamington. Old Folliot was there, and presently he sidled up to me to tell me a new piece of gossip. Having been out all day in strong air I was ravenous, and impatient for the announcement of dinner.
“Now, who are we waiting for?” Tom Nantley fussed around. “Oh, Corrie, of course. Corrie is always late. Confound that girl, she has probably gone to sleep in her bath. Pam, you go and dig her out. . . . Hullo, here she comes at last!”
In her hunting-kit she had looked handsome in an outlandish way, but as she swept down — without any apology — on our hungry mob there was no question of her beauty. For one thing she walked superbly. Few women can walk, and the trouble about the new fashion in clothes is that it emphasizes ugly movement. She wore a gown of a shade of green which would have ruined most people’s looks, but she managed to carry it off, and something more. For a young girl she was far too heavily made up, but that, too, she forced one to accept. I suddenly had a new view of her, and realized that there was quality here, a masterfulness which might charm, an arrogance which perhaps was not blasé but virginal.
I realized, too, that I had seen her before. This was the girl whom Vernon and I had watched at my cousin’s dance in July. I wondered if he had understood this in their encounter at the tea-table.
I had barely recovered from this surprise, when I had another. Folliot’s hand was on my arm and he was purring in my ear:
“We talked once of Shelley Arabin, and I told you he left no children. My memory betrayed me, for that young lady is his daughter. She has the true Arabin eyes and all their unfathomable conceit. She is what in my day we would have called ‘shocking bad form.’ Rather common, I think.”
From which I knew that she must have dealt hardly with old Folliot.
At dinner I sat between Mollie and Mrs. Lamington, and since my hostess had the garrulous Cheviot on her right hand, I devoted myself to my other neighbour. That charming lady, who gives to political intrigue what time she can spare from horseflesh, had so much to tell me that I had no need to exert myself. She was eloquent on the immense importance of certain pending Imperial appointments, especially on the need of selecting men with the right kind of wives, the inference being that George Lamington’s obvious deficiencies might be atoned for by the merits of his lady. I must have assented to everything that she said, for she told Mollie afterwards that the war had improved me enormously and had broadened my mind. But as a matter of fact I was thinking of Miss Arabin.
She sat nearly opposite to me, and I could watch her without staring. Her manner seemed to alternate between an almost hoydenish vivacity and complete abstraction. At one moment she would have her young neighbours laughing and protesting volubly, and then she would be apparently deaf to what they said, so that they either talked across her or turned to their other partners. . . . In these latter moods her eyes seemed almost sightless, so wholly were they lacking in focus or expression. Sometimes they rested on the table flowers, sometimes on the wall before her, sometimes on Mrs. Lamington and myself — but they were always unseeing. Instead of their former sullenness, they seemed to have a brooding innocence. . . . I noticed, too, the quality of her voice when she spoke. It was singularly arresting — clear, high, and vital. She talked the usual staccato slang, but though she rarely finished a sentence grammatically, the cadence and intonation were always rounded off to a satisfying close. Only her laugh was ugly, as if it were a forced thing. Every other sound that came from her had a musical completeness.
She had the foreign trick of smoking before the close of dinner, and, as if to preserve her beautiful fingers from contamination, before lighting a cigarette she would draw on her right hand a silk glove of the same colour as her gown. The Nantley’s seemed to be accustomed to this habit, but it at last withdrew Mrs. Lamington from her Imperial propaganda.
“What an extraordinary young woman!” she whispered to me. “Who is she? Is she a little mad, or only foreign?”
I paraphrased old Folliot in my reply: “Pure English, but lives abroad.”
The green glove somehow recalled that April evening at Plakos. This outlandish creature was interesting, for God knew what strange things were in her upbringing and her ancestry. Folliot was an old fool; she might be odious, but she was assuredly not “common.” As it chanced the end of dinner found her in one of her fits of absent-mindedness, and she trailed out of the room with the other women like a sleep-walker. The two youngsters who had been her companions at table stared after her till the door closed.
Later in the drawing-room I returned to my first impression. The girl was detestable. I would have liked a sleepy evening of bridge, but the young harpy turned the sober halls of Wirlesdon into a cabaret. She behaved like a man-eating shark, and swept every male, except Tom Nantley, Folliot, and myself, into her retinue. They danced in the library, because of its polished empty floor, and when I looked in I saw that the kind of dances were not what I should have chosen for youth, and was glad that Pam and Dolly had been sent to bed. I heard a clear voice declaring that it was “devilish slow,” and I knew to whom the voice belonged. At the door I passed old Folliot on his way to his room, and he shook his head and murmured “Common.” This time I almost agreed with him.
In the drawing-room I found my hostess skimming the weekly press, and drew up a chair beside her. Mollie Nantley and I count cousinship, though the relation is slightly more remote, and she has long been my very good friend. She laid down her paper and prepared to talk.
“I was so glad to see Colonel Milburne again. He looks so well too. But, Ned dear, you ought to get him to go about more, for he’s really a little old-maidish. He was scared to death by Corrie Arabin.”
“Well, isn’t she rather — shall we say disconcerting? More by token, who is she?”
“Poor little Corrie! She’s the only child of a rather horrible man who died last year — Shelley Arabin. Did you never hear of him? He married a sort of cousin of mine and treated her shamefully. Corrie had the most miserable upbringing — somewhere in Greece, you know, and in Rome and Paris, and at the worst kind of girls’ school where they teach the children to be snobs and powder their noses and go to confession. The school wouldn’t have mattered, for the Arabins are Romans, and Corrie couldn’t be a snob if she tried, but her home life would have ruined St. Theresa. She was in London last summer with the Ertzbergers, and I was rather unhappy about her living among cosmopolitan Jew rastaquouères, so I am trying to do what I can for her this winter. Fortunately she has taken madly to hunting, and she goes most beautifully. She has never had a chance, poor child. You must be kind to her, Ned.”
I said that I was not in the habit of being brutal to young women, but that she was not likely to want my kindness. “She seems to be a success in her way. These boys follow her like sheep.”
“Oh, she has had one kind of success, but not the best kind. She casts an extraordinary spell over young men, and does not care a straw for one of them. I might be nervous about Hugo, but I’m not in the least, for she is utterly sexless — more like a wild boy. It is no good trying to improve her manners, for she is quite unconscious of them. I don’t think there is an atom of harm in her, and she has delightful things about her — she is charming to Pam and Dolly, and they adore her, and she is simply the most honest creature ever born. She must get it from her mother, for Shelley was an infamous liar.”
Mollie’s comely face, with her glorious golden-red hair slightly greying at the temples, had a look of compassionate motherliness. With all her vagueness, she is one of the shrewdest women of my acquaintance, and I have a deep respect for her judgment. If she let her adored Pam and Dolly make friends of Miss Arabin, Miss Arabin must be something more than the cabaret girl of my first impression.
“But I’m not happy about her,” Mollie went on. “I can’t see her future. She ought to marry, and the odds are terribly ag
ainst her marrying the right man. Boys flock after her, but the really nice men — like Colonel Milburne — fly from her like the plague. They don’t understand that her bad form is not our bad form, but simply foreignness. . . . And she’s so terribly strong-minded. I know that she hates everything connected with her early life, and yet she insists on going back to that Greek place. Her father left her quite well off, I believe — Tom says so, and he has looked into her affairs — and she ought to settle down here and acclimatize herself. All her superficial oddities would soon drop off, for she is so clever she could make herself whatever she wanted. It is what she wants, too, for she loves England and English ways. But there is a touch of ‘daftness’ about her, a kind of freakishness which I can never understand. I suppose it is the Arabin blood.”
Mollie sighed.
“I try to be tolerant about youth,” she added, “but I sometimes long to box its ears. Besides, there is the difficulty about the others. I am quite sure of Corrie up to a point, but I can’t be responsible for the young men. George Cheviot shows every inclination to make a fool of himself about her, and what am I to say to his mother? Really, having Corrie in the house is like domesticating a destroying angel.”
“You’re the kindest of women,” I said, “but I think you’ve taken on a job too hard for you. You can’t mix oil and wine. You’ll never fit Miss Arabin into your world. She belongs to a different one.”
“I wonder what it is?”
“A few hours ago I should have said it was the world of cabarets and Riviera hotels and Ertzbergers. After what you have told me I’m not so sure. But anyhow it’s not our world.”
As I went to bed I heard the jigging of dance music from the library, and even in so large a house as Wirlesdon its echoes seemed to pursue me as I dropped into sleep. The result was that I had remarkable dreams, in which Miss Arabin, dressed in the spangles of a circus performer and riding a piebald horse, insisted on my piloting her with the Mivern, while the Master and Vernon looked on in stony disapproval.
The next morning was frosty and clear, and I came down to breakfast to find my hostess alone in the dining-room.
“Corrie behaved disgracefully last night,” I was informed. “She started some silly rag with George Cheviot, and made hay of Mr. Harcus’s bedroom. Tom had to get up and read the Riot Act in the small hours. I have been to her room and found her asleep, but as soon as she wakes I am going to talk to her very seriously. It is more than bad manners — it is an offence against hospitality.”
I went to church with Tom and his daughters, and when we returned we found Miss Arabin breakfasting before the hall fire on grapes and coffee, with the usual young men in attendance. If she had been given a lecture by her hostess, there was no sign of it in her face. She looked amazingly brilliant — all in brown, with a jumper of brown arabesque and long amber ear-rings. A russet silk glove clothed the hand in which she held her cigarette.
Vernon came over to luncheon and sat next to Mollie, while at the other end of the table I was placed between Miss Arabin and Lady Altrincham. The girl scarcely threw a word to me, being occupied in discussing, quite intelligently, with Hugo Brune the international position of Turkey. I could not avoid overhearing some of their talk, and I realized that when she chose she could behave like a civilized being. It might be that Mollie’s morning discourse had borne fruit. Her voice was delightful to listen to, with its full, clear tones and delicate modulations. And then, after her habit, her attention wandered, and Hugo’s platitudes fell on unheeding ears. She was staring at a picture of a Jacobean Nantley on the wall, and presently her eyes moved up the table and rested on Vernon.
She spoke to me at last.
“Who is the man next to Mollie — the man who came to tea last night? You know him, don’t you?”
I told her his name.
“A soldier?” she asked.
“Has been. Does nothing at present. He has a place in Westmorland.”
“You are friends?”
“The closest.” There was something about the girl’s brusqueness which made me want to answer in monosyllables. Then she suddenly took my breath away.
“He is unhappy,” she said. “He looks as if he had lost his way.”
She turned to Hugo and, with an urbanity which I had thought impossible, apologized for her inattention, and took up the conversation at the point at which she had dropped it.
Her words made me keep my eyes on Vernon. Unhappy! There was little sign of it in his lean smiling face, with the tanned cheeks and steady eyes. Mollie was clearly delighted with him; perhaps her maternal heart had marked him down for Dolly. Lost his way? On the contrary he seemed at complete ease with the world. Was this strange girl a sorceress to discover what was hidden deep in only two men’s minds? I had a sense that Vernon and Miss Arabin, with nothing on earth in common, had yet a certain affinity. Each had a strain of romance in them — romance and the unpredictable.
Vernon had motored over to Wirlesdon and proposed to walk back, so I accompanied him for part of the road. I was glad of a chance for a talk, for I was miserably conscious that we were slipping away from each other. I didn’t see how I could help it, for I was immersed in practical affairs, while he would persist in living for a dream. Before the war I had been half under the spell of that dream, but four years’ campaigning had given me a distaste for the fantastic and set my feet very solidly on the rock of facts. Our two circles of comprehension, which used to intersect, had now become self-contained.
I asked him what he was doing with himself, and he said hunting, and shooting, and dabbling in books. He was writing something — I think about primitive Greek religion, in consequence of some notions he had picked up during his service in the Ægean.
“Seriously, old fellow,” I said, “isn’t it time you settled down to business? You are twenty-five, you have first-class brains, and you are quite fit now. I can’t have you turning into a flâneur.”
“There is no fear of that,” he replied rather coldly. “I am eager for work, but I haven’t found it yet. My training isn’t finished. I must wait till after next April.”
“But what is going to happen after that?”
“I don’t know. I must see what happens then.”
“Vernon,” I cried, “we are old friends, and I am going to speak bluntly. You really must face up to facts. What is going to happen next April? What can happen? Put it at its highest. You may pass through some strange mental experience. I can’t conceive what it may be, but suppose the last door does open and you see something strange and beautiful or even terrible — I don’t know what. It will all happen inside your mind. It will round off the recurring experiences you have had from childhood, but it can’t do anything more.”
“It will do much more,” he said. “It will be the crisis of my life. . . . Why have you become so sceptical, Ned? You used to think as I do about it.”
“It will only be a crisis if you make it so, and it’s too risky. Supposing, on the other hand, that nothing happens. You will have keyed your whole being up to an expectation which fails. You will be derelict, cut clean from your moorings. It’s too risky, I tell you.”
He shook his head. “We have fallen out of understanding each other. Your second alternative is impossible. I know it in my bones. Something will happen — must happen — and then I shall know what I have to do with my life. It will be the pistol-shot for the start.”
“But, my dear old man, think of the hazard. You are staking everything on a wild chance. Heaven knows, I’m not unsympathetic. I believe in you — I believe in a way in the reality of the dream. But life is a prosaic thing, and if you are to have marvels in it you should take them in your stride. I want to see you with some sort of policy for the future, and letting the last stage of your dream drop in naturally into a strategic plan. You can’t, at twenty-six, sit waiting on a revelation. You must shape your own course, and take the revelation when it comes. If you don’t, you’ll find yourself derelict. Damn it, you�
��re far too good to be a waif.”
He smiled a little sadly. “We’re pretty far apart now, I’m afraid. Can’t you see that the thing is too big a part of me to be treated as a side-show? It’s what I’ve been sent into the world for. I’m waiting for my marching orders.”
“Then you’re waiting for a miracle,” I said testily.
“True. I am waiting for a miracle,” he replied. “We needn’t argue about it, Ned, for miracles are outside argument. In less than six months I will know. Till then I am content to live by faith.”
After leaving him, I walked back to the house in an uncomfortable frame of mind. I realized that the affection between us was as deep as ever, but I had a guilty sense of having left him in the lurch. He was alone now, whereas once I had been with him, and I hated to think of his loneliness.
As I crossed the bridge between the lakes I met Miss Arabin sauntering bareheaded in the autumn sunlight. I would have passed on, with a curt greeting, for I was in no mood to talk trivialities to a girl I disliked, but to my surprise she stopped and turned with me up the long grassy aisle which led to the gardens.
“I came out to meet you,” she said. “I want to talk to you.”
My response cannot have been encouraging, but she took no notice of that.
“You’re a lawyer, aren’t you?” she went on. “Mollie says you are very clever. You look clever.”
I daresay I grinned. I was being comprehensively patronized.
“Well, I want you to help me. I have some tiresome legal complications to disentangle, and my solicitor is a sheep. I mean to sack him.”