But reflections were put to flight, as some of the angels, from the famous Madonna, and several of the Pekinese, came whirling into the room.
‘It ran away in Berkeley Square.’
‘She had been having ices.’
‘On her head were two very tall green feathers.’
‘The policeman went away with her parasol.’
‘She was on her way to see us.’
The children were very much excited. ‘Hush, darlings!’ Lady Georgia exclaimed. ‘And when you’re calmer, explain who it was that ran away from Berkeley Square.’
‘Grandmamma did!’
‘Who would have thought,’ said Fräulein, appearing, ‘that a one-horse cab could do so much mischief!’
They were returning from the large heart of Bloomsbury, where the children were frequently taken to learn deportment from the Tanagras in the British Museum. After posing meaningly as a Corinthian, or practising sinking upon a camp-stool like an Athenian, they came home, as a rule, rampageous.
‘This afternoon they are uncontrollable!’ Fräulein murmured, attempting to hurry them away. But Mrs Henedge, with an arm about a child, was beginning to expand.
‘Her complexion,’ she observed, ‘is as lovely as ever; but she begins to look older!’
As a foreigner, Fräulein could fully savour the remark. She had succeeded, only lately, to Mademoiselle Saligny, who had been dismissed for calling Marie Antoinette a doll. Unfortunately, as Lady Georgia had since discovered, her Teutonic scepticism varied scarcely at all, from the Almighty to a can of hot water; but this was more pardonable, she considered, than labelling Marie Antoinette a doll. Distinguished, or harmless doubts were these!
‘It’s really rather an escape!’ Lady Georgia murmured, as soon as they were gone; ‘my mother-in-law’s dictatorialness is becoming so impossible, and in this warm weather she’s sure to be out of sorts.’
She stretched out a hand listlessly, towards a red, colossal rose. So many talismans for happiness fettered her arms! She could hardly move but the jingling of some crystal ball, or the swaying of some malachite pig, reminded her of the fact that she was unhappy. ‘I can’t bear,’ she said, ‘James to arrange the flowers, he packs them down into the vases.’ She got up and loosened some. ‘And when Charles does them,’ she murmured, ‘they’re invariably swooning away! Come and see, though, all I’ve been doing; our lease, you know, doesn’t expire until two thousand and one. And so it’s quite worth while to make some little improvements!’
But Mrs Henedge seemed disinclined to stir. Seated upon a sofa entirely without springs, that had, most likely, once been Juliet’s bier, it appeared she had something to confide. Something was troubling her besides ‘the poor Guards, in all this sun!’
‘My dear Georgia,’ she said, ‘now that you’ve told me your news, I want to tell you of a most exquisite discovery.’
Lady Georgia opened wide-wide eyes. ‘Is it,’ she hazarded, ‘some new thing about Mrs Hanover?’
Mrs Henedge looked about her. ‘It’s rather a secret still,’ she continued, ‘and although, in many ways, I should have liked to have told Ada, she would probably immediately tell Robert, and he, in confidence, would, of course, tell Jack, and Jack would tell everybody, and so—’
‘Better say nothing to Ada!’
Mrs Henedge heaved a sigh.
‘Do you remember Professor Inglepin?’ she asked. ‘His mother was a Miss Chancellor … Fanny. Well, quite lately, whilst in Egypt, the Professor (he terrifies me! He’s so thin, he’s so fierce!) came upon an original fragment of Sappho. And I’m having a small party at my house, on Sunday, with his assistance, to make the line known.’
Lady Georgia became immediately animated. The Isabella d’Este in her awoke.
‘My dear, how heavenly!’ she exclaimed.
‘Exceptional people,’ Mrs Henedge hinted nervously, ‘are coming.’
‘Oh-h?’
‘Mrs Asp, Miss Compostella, the Calvallys!’
‘It will be delightful!’
‘Well, you won’t blame me, dear, will you, if you’re bored?’
Lady Georgia closed her eyes. ‘Sappho!’ she exclaimed. ‘I’m wondering what I shall wear. My instinct would dress me, I believe, in a crinoline, with a yellow cashmere shawl, and a tiny turquoise bonnet.’
Mrs Henedge became alarmed. ‘I hope we shall be all as Ingre as possible,’ she said, ‘since there’s not much time to be Greek. And now that I’ve told you, I must fly! No, darling, I can’t even stay to look at the improvements; since the house is yours for so long, I shall see them, perhaps, again. I’m going this evening with the Fitzlittles to the Russian dancers.’ And she added melodiously from the stairs: ‘I do so adore Nijinsky in Le Spectre de la Rose.’
II
Mrs Henedge lived in a small house with killing stairs just off Chesham Place.
‘If I were to die here,’ she had often said, ‘they would never be able to twist the coffin outside my door; they would have to cremate me in my room.’ For such a cottage, the sitting-rooms, nevertheless, were astonishingly large. The drawing-room, for instance, was a complete surprise, notwithstanding its dimensions being ocularly curtailed by a somewhat trying brocade of drooping lilac orchids on a yellow ground.
But to-day, to make as much space as possible to receive her guests, all the household heirlooms – a faded photograph of the Pope, a bust of poor dear Leslie, some most Asiatic cushions, and a quantity of whimsies, had been carried away to the top of the house. Never before had she seen the room so bare, or so austere.
As her maid exclaimed: ‘It was like a church.’ If an entire Ode of Sappho’s had been discovered instead of a single line she could have done no more.
In the centre of the room, a number of fragile gilt chairs had been waiting patiently all day to be placed, heedless, happily, of the lamentations of Thérèse, who, while rolling her eyes, kept exclaiming: ‘Such wild herds of chairs; such herds of wild chairs!’
In her arrangements Mrs Henedge had disobeyed the Professor in everything.
Professor Inglepin had looked in during the week to ask that severity might be the key. ‘No flowers,’ he had begged, ‘or, at most, placed beside the fragment (which I shall bring), a handful, perhaps, of—’
‘Of course,’ Mrs Henedge had replied, ‘you can rely upon me.’ And now the air was laden with the odour of white and dark mauve stocks.
A buffet, too, had arisen altar-like in her own particular sanctum, an apology to those whom she was unable to dine; nor, for intriguing curiosities, had she scoured a pagan cookery-book in vain …
Glancing over the dinner list whilst she dressed, it seemed to her that the names of her guests, in neat rotation, resembled the cast of a play. ‘A comedy, with possible dynamics!’ she murmured as she went downstairs.
With a tiara well over her nose, and dressed in oyster satin and pearls, she wished that Sappho could have seen her then … On entering the drawing-room she found her beautiful Mrs Shamefoot as well as her radiant Lady Castleyard (pronounced Castleyud), had already arrived, and were entertaining lazily her Monsignor Parr.
‘Cima’s Madonnas are dull, dull, dull,’ Mrs Shamefoot was saying, looking over the Monsignor’s shoulder at her own reflection in the glass.
Mrs Shamefoot, widely known as ‘Birdie’, and labelled as politics, almost compels a tear. Overshadowed by a clever husband, and by an exceedingly brilliant mother-in-law, all that was expected of her was to hold long branches of mimosa and eucalyptus leaves as though in a dream at meetings, and to be picturesque, and restful and mute. As might have been foreseen, she had developed into one of those decorative, self-entranced persons so valued by hostesses at dinner as an ideal full stop. Sufficiently self-centred, she could be relied upon to break up a line, or to divide, with grace, any awkward divergencies of thought. Her momentary caprice was to erect with Lady Castleyard, to whom she was devoted, a window in some cathedral to their memory, that should be a miracle of violet
glass, after a design of Lanzini Niccolo.
It was therefore only natural that Lady Castleyard (whose hobby was watching sunlight through stained glass) should take the liveliest interest in the scheme – and through the mediation of Mrs Henedge was hoping to kindle a window somewhere very soon.
A pretty woman, with magnificently bold shoulders, and a tiny head, she was, as a rule, quite fearlessly made up. It was courageous of her, her hostess thought, to flaunt such carnationed cheeks. Only in Reynolds or in a Romney did one expect to see such a dab.
‘Tell me! Tell me!’ she exclaimed airily, taking hold of Mrs Henedge. ‘I feel I must hear the line before everyone else.’
Mrs Henedge, who did not know it, pressed to her lips her fan.
‘Patience!’ she murmured, with her subtlest smile.
Monsignor Parr gazed at her with heavy opaque eyes.
Something between a butterfly and a misanthrope, he was temperamental, when not otherwise … employed.
‘I must confess,’ he observed, ‘that Sappho’s love affairs fail to stir me.’
‘Ah, for shame!’ Mrs Henedge scolded, turning from him to welcome an elaborate young man, who, in some bewildering way of his own, seemed to find charming the fashions of 1860.
‘Drecoll?’ she inquired.
‘Vienna,’ he nodded.
‘This is Mr Harvester,’ she said. She had nearly said ‘Poor Mr Harvester’, for she could not endure his wife.
Claud Harvester was usually considered charming. He had gone about here and there, tinting his personality after the fashion of a Venetian glass. Certainly he had wandered … He had been into Arcadia, even, a place where artificial temperaments so seldom get – their nearest approach being, perhaps, a matinée of a Winter’s Tale. Many, indeed, thought him interesting. He had groped so … In the end he began to suspect that what he had been seeking for all along was the theatre. He had discovered the truth in writing plays. In style – he was often called obscure, although, in reality, he was as charming as the top of an apple-tree above a wall. As a novelist he was almost successful. His books were watched for … but without impatience.
‘Cleopatra,’ he said, ‘was so disappointed she couldn’t come.’
‘I thought I saw some straw—’
‘Miss Compostella,’ the servant tunefully announced.
‘Ah, Julia!’
A lady whose face looked worn and withered through love, wearing a black gauze gown, looped like a figure from the Primavera, made her way mistily into the room.
Nobody would have guessed Miss Compostella to be an actress; she was so private-looking … Excessively pale, without any regularity at all of feature, her face was animated chiefly by her long red lips; more startling even than those of Cecilia Zen Tron, cette adorable Aspasie de la décadence Venetienne. But somehow one felt that all Miss Compostella’s soul was in her nose. It was her one delicate feature: it aspired.
‘How was I?’ she murmured, when she had shaken hands. ‘I was too nervous for words!’
‘You were completely splendid.’
‘My dear, how beautifully you died!’
Miss Compostella was experimenting, just then, at her own theatre, with some tableaux inspired from Holbein’s Dance of Death.
‘Two persons only,’ she said, ‘were present at my matinée. Poor things! I asked them back to tea … One of them is coming here to-night.’
‘Really, who can it be!’
‘He plays the piano,’ she said. ‘Composes: and he has the most bewitching hair. His name is Winsome Brookes.’
Mrs Shamefoot tittered.
‘Oh, Winsome’s wonderful,’ Mrs Henedge exclaimed. ‘I enjoy his music so much. There’s an unrest in it all that I like. Sometimes he reaches to a pitch of life …’
‘His tired ecstasy,’ Claud Harvester conceded, ‘decidedly is disquieting.’
Miss Compostella looked at him. She admired terrifically his charming little leer; it was like a crack, she thought, across the face of an idol. Otherwise, she was afraid, his features were cut too clearly to make any very lasting appeal …
Nevertheless, for her general calm she could have wished that it had been next year.
Each day she felt their position was becoming more strained and absurd. She had followed Claud Harvester closely in his work, until at length she stood beside him on a pinnacle at some distance from the ground. And there they were! And she was getting bored. It disgusted her, however, to be obliged to climb down, to have had her walk for nothing, as it were.
With a smile that might, perhaps, have been called pathetic, she turned towards her hostess, who, with a deeply religious eye upon Monsignor Parr, was defending her favourite Winsome Brookes from Mrs Shamefoot’s innuendoes.
‘But why, why, why,’ she inquired, ‘do you think him dreadful?’
‘Because I think he’s odious,’ she replied.
‘Children irritate you, dear, I know, but he will do great things yet!’
‘Can one ever say?’
‘The most unexpected thing in my life,’ Monsignor Parr broke in gently, ‘was when a certain cab-horse from Euston ran away!’
‘Thanks for your belief in us,’ Mrs Henedge exclaimed gratefully, rising to greet an indolent-looking woman who brought with her, somehow, into the room, the tranquillity of gardens.
Mrs Calvally, the wife of that perfect painter, was what her hostess called a complete woman. She was fair, with dark Tziganne eyes, which dilated, usually looked mildly amazed. Like some of Rubens’ women, you felt at once her affinity to pearls. Equanimity radiated from her leisurely person. She never became alarmed, as her friends well knew, even when her husband spoke of ‘going away’ and ‘leaving’ her to live alone in some small and exquisite capital.
She would just smile at him sensibly, pretending not to hear … Secretly, perhaps, his descriptions of places interested her. She would have missed hearing about the White Villa, with its cypress tree, between the Opera House and the Cathedral, and she let him talk about it like a child. She did not mind when the town chosen was Athens, which was near Malta, where she had a cousin, but she had a horror of Bucharest.
George Christian Calvally accompanied his wife, unhappy, perhaps, at playing, if even for only a few hours, an oboe to her violin. His face was delicate and full of dreams. It was a perfect grief face.
‘My dear Mary,’ Mrs Henedge exclaimed affectionately, leading the sympathetic woman to the most sylvan seat she could find, a small settee, covered with a chintz all Eve’s apples, and a wonderful winding snake: ‘had you to be very strategic?’
‘Oh, not at all,’ Mrs Calvally replied; ‘but what do you think followed us into the house?’
Mrs Henedge looked alarmed.
‘Oh, nothing so dreadful … Only a butterfly!’
Mrs Shamefoot, who was listening, became positively ecstatic.
How nice it was to escape, if even for a second, from the tiresome political doings of which she was so tired. Not that she could always catch everything that was said, now that she wore her hair imitated from a statue of the fifth century …
But the inclusion to-night, however, of Winsome Brookes was something of a trial. Without any positive reason for disliking him, she found him, perhaps, too similar in temperament to herself to be altogether pleased.
He came into the room a few minutes later in his habitual dreamy way, as might one upon a beauty tour in Wales – a pleasant picture of health and … inexperience. From the over-elaboration of his dress he suggested sometimes, as he did to-night, a St Sebastian with too many arrows.
A gentle buzz of voices filled the room.
Mrs Henedge, admirable now, was orchestrating fearlessly her guests.
Mr Sophax, a critic, who had lately lost his wife and was looking suitably subdued, was complimenting, just sufficiently, a lady with sallow cheeks and an amorous weary eye. This was Mrs Steeple.
One burning afternoon in July, with the thermometer at 90, the ridiculous
woman had played Rosmersholm in Camberwell. Nobody had seen her do it, but it was conceivable that she had been very fine.
‘Tell me,’ she said to Mr Sophax, ‘who is the Victorian man talking to that gorgeous thing – in the gold trailing skirts?’
‘You mean Claud Harvester. His play the other night was a disaster. Did you see it?’
‘It was delightfully slight, I thought.’
‘A disaster!’
‘Somehow, I like his work, it’s so lightly managed.’
‘Never mind, Mr Harvester,’ Lady Georgia was saying to him, ‘I’m sure your play was exquisite; or it would have had a longer run.’
He smiled:
‘How satirical you are!’
She was looking tired, and not a bit wonderful; it was one of her lesser nights.
‘I wish she would give her poor emeralds a rest,’ a lady like a very thin camel was observing to Monsignor Parr.
A flattering silence greeted the Professor.
‘I’m afraid you must feel exhausted from your field day at the British Museum,’ Mrs Henedge said to him half hysterically, as they went downstairs.
The success of the dinner-table, however, restored her nerve. To create a slight atmosphere she had made a circuit of the table earlier in the evening, scattering violets indiscriminately into the glasses and over the plates.
For a moment her guests forgot to chatter of themselves. They remembered Sappho.
The Lesbian wine (from Samos. Procured, perhaps, in Pall Mall), produced a hush.
Claud Harvester bethought him then that he had spent a Saturday-to-Monday once, in Mitylene, at ‘a funny little broken-down hotel upon the seashore’.
It had been in the spring, he said.
‘In the spring the violets in Athens are wonderful, are they not?’ Mrs Calvally inquired.
‘Indeed, yes.’
She spoke to him of Greece, but all he could remember of Corinth, for instance, was the many drowned lambs he had seen lying upon the beach.
‘Ah! Don’t speak to me of Corinth!’
‘What a pity – and in Tanagra, tell me, what did you see?’
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