‘In Tanagra …?’ he said, ‘there was a kitten sunning himself in the Museum beside a pile of broken earthenware – handles of amphorae, arms and legs of figurines, and an old man seated in the doorway mending a jar.’
‘How extraordinary!’ she marvelled, removing with extreme precaution an atom of cork that had fallen into her glass. ‘Really! Is that all?’
‘Really all,’ he murmured, looking with sudden interest at Miss Compostella, whose face, vis-à-vis, he thought, still bore traces of his comedy.
He could appreciate her subtle mask quite enormously just then: now that she recalled to him his play. How very delightful she was!
‘Surely,’ he reflected, ‘her hair must be wired.’
Probably, as his wife had hinted once, her secret lay simply in her untidiness. She made it a study. Disorder, with her, had become a fine art. A loose strand of hair … the helpless angle of a hat … And then to add emphasis, there were always quantities of tiny buttons in absurd places on her frocks that cried aloud, or screamed, or gently prayed, to be fastened, and which, somehow, gave her an air of irresponsibility, which, for simple folk, was possibly quite fascinating.
‘She’s such a messy woman,’ Cleopatra had said. ‘And, my dear … so unnatural! I wonder you write plays for her. If I were a man, I should want only …’
And she had named the Impossible.
‘I feel I want to go somewhere and be ugly quietly for a week,’ Miss Compostella was confiding to George Calvally, as she cut a little wild-duck with her luminous hands. ‘The effort of having to look more or less like one’s photographs is becoming such a strain.’
He sympathized with her. ‘But I suppose,’ he said, ‘you are terribly tied.’
‘Yes; but you know, I love it! Next month I’m hoping to get Eysoldt over to play with me in Maeterlinck … It isn’t settled, there’s some incertitude still, but it’s almost sure!’
‘Her Joyzelle!’ he began to rave.
‘And my Selysette!’ she reminded him.
‘Now that Maeterlinck is getting like Claud Harvester,’ the Professor, without tact, put in, ‘I don’t read him any more. But at all events,’ he added graciously, ‘I hope you’ll make a hit.’
‘A hit! Oh, I’ve never done anything so dreadful,’ she answered, turning her attention towards her hostess, who, beneath her well-tipped tiara, was comparing the prose of a professional saint to a blind alley.
‘But what does it matter,’ Lady Georgia inquired, leaning towards her, ‘if he has a charming style?’
In the vivacious discussion that ensued, Mrs Steeple, imprudently, perhaps, disclosed to Winsome Brookes her opinion of Miss Compostella.
‘Oh, Julia’s so stiff,’ she said, ‘she will hold herself, even in the most rousing plays, as though she were Agrippina with the ashes of Germanicus, and in depicting agony, she certainly relies too much upon the colour of her gown. Her Hamlet,’ and she began to laugh, ‘her Hamlet was irresistible!’
And Mrs Steeple laughed and laughed.
Her laughter, indeed, was so hilarious that Winsome became embarrassed.
‘Her H-H-Hamlet was irresistible!’ she repeated.
‘Do tell us what is amusing you?’ Miss Compostella inquired.
But Mrs Steeple appeared to be too convulsed.
‘What has Winsome been saying?’ her hostess wished to know.
In none of these disturbances did Mrs Shamefoot care to join. Mentally, perhaps, she was already three parts glass. So intense was her desire to set up a commemorative window to herself that, when it was erected, she believed she must leave behind in it, forever, a little ghost. And should this be so, then what joy to be pierced each morning with light; her body flooded through and through by the sun, or in the evening to glow with a harvest of dark colours, deepening into untold sadness with the night … What ecstasy! It was the Egyptian sighing for his Pyramid, of course.
As might be feared, she appeared this evening entirely self-entranced. Indeed, all that she vouchsafed to her neighbour, Mr Sophax, during dinner, was that the King had once been ‘perfect to her’ in Scotland, and that she was fond of Yeats.
‘If you cannot sleep,’ she said to him, ‘you’ve only to repeat to yourself Innesfree several times. You might be glad to remember …’
As Mrs Henedge had explained, it was only a fragile little dinner. She was obliged to return to the drawing-room again as soon as possible to receive her later guests. It occurred to her as she trailed away with the ladies that after the Professor’s Sapphic postscript they might, perhaps, arrange some music. It would bring the evening to a harmonious close.
There was Winsome, fortunately, to be relied upon, and Mrs Shamefoot, who sang the song of Thaïs to her mirror very beautifully, and later, she hoped, there would be Mrs Rienzi-Smith, who composed little things that were all nerves … and who, herself, was so very delightful …
In the drawing-room she was glad to find that wonderful woman, Mrs Asp, the authoress of The Home Life of Lucretia Borgia, refreshing herself with coffee and biscuits while talking servants to Mrs Thumbler, the wife of the architect, and the restorer of Ashringford Cathedral.
‘She was four years with Lady Appledore,’ Mrs Asp was telling her, taking a bite at her biscuit, ‘and two at the Italian Embassy, and, although one wouldn’t, perhaps, think it, I must say she was always scrupulously clean.’
‘My dear Rose,’ Mrs Henedge said, sailing up, ‘I do hope you haven’t been here long?’ She seemed concerned.
‘I-I-I, oh no!’ Mrs Asp purred in her comfortable voice, using those same inflexions which had startled, so shockingly, the Duchess of York when, by telephone, she had confessed: ‘Yes … I am Mrs Asp … We’re getting up a little bazaar and we expect you royalties to help!’
‘And there, I believe, is Mira?’ Mrs Henedge said, turning towards a young girl who, seated in a corner, seemed to be counting the veins in her arms.
‘I admired your valsing, the other night,’ she said to her, ‘at the Invergordons’: it’s so brave of you, I think, to like dancing best alone.’
Mira Thumbler was a mediaeval-looking little thing, with peculiar pale ways, like a creature escaped through the border of violets and wild strawberries of a tapestry panel.
As a rule nobody ever noticed her (in spite of a few eccentricities, such as dancing singly at parties, etc., sufficiently manifest, possibly, to have excited attention). She was waiting to be found. Some day, perhaps, a poet or a painter would come along, and lift her up, high up, into the sun like a beautiful figurine, and she would become the fashion for a while … set, the New Beauty.
‘These apparent icebergs,’ Mrs Henedge thought, as she touched Mira’s charming, and sensitive hand, ‘one knows what they are!’
‘My dear, what a radiant frock!’ Lady Georgia exclaimed, fingering it.
‘The cupids,’ Mira explained, holding out the stiff Italian stuff of ruby and blue, ‘are imitated from a church frieze.’
‘I have seldom seen anything so splendidly hard!’ Lady Castleyard admired: ‘You’re like an angel in a summer landscape, reposing by the side of a well!’ And sinking to a small semi-circular settee, she surveyed the room, a bored magnificence.
‘There’s no plot,’ Mrs Asp, who seemed utterly unable for continuity, was confiding to a charmed few, ‘no plot exactly. It’s about two women who live all alone.’
‘You mean that they live just by themselves?’
Mrs Thumbler was unable to imagine a novel without a plot, and two women who lived so quietly! … She was afraid that poor, dear Rose was becoming dull.
‘I wonder you don’t collaborate!’ she said.
‘Oh no … Unless I were in love with a man, and just as a pretext, I should never dream of collaborating with anybody.’
‘You would need a sort of male Beatrice, I suppose?’
‘How amusing it would be to collaborate with Mr Harvester,’ Mrs Steeple murmured, glancing towards Miss Compostella, who jus
t then was looking completely flattered, as she closed her eyes, smiled, and lifted, slightly, a hand.
‘Certainly I adore his work,’ Mrs Asp admitted. ‘He pounces down on those mysterious half-things … and sometimes he fixes them!’
‘Do you know Mr Harvester?’ Mira asked.
‘Of course I know Mr Harvester … He scoured Cairo for me once years ago, to find me a lotus. Why?’
‘I should so much like to meet him.’
‘My dear, what an extraordinary caprice!’ Mrs Henedge exclaimed, disengaging herself to receive a dowager of probable consequence, who, in spite of a crucifix and some celestial lace, possessed a certain poetry of her own, as might, for instance, a faded bacchante. It needed scarcely any imagination at all to picture her issuing at night from her cave on Mount Parnassus to watch the stars, or, with greater convenience, perhaps, strutting like the most perfect peacock, before some country house, over the rose-pale gravel; as charming as the little stones in the foreground of the Parnassus of Mantegna.
Lady Listless, or Atossa, as her friends respectfully called her, had the look of a person who had discovered something she ought not to know. This was probably brought about by being aware of most people’s family feuds, or by putting merely two and two together. In the year her mistakes came to thousands, but she never seemed to mind.
‘I’ve just been dining with the Barrows,’ she said solemnly to Mrs Henedge, keeping her by the hand. ‘Poor little Mrs Barrow has heard the Raven … She came up hurriedly last night from the country and has taken refuge at the Ritz Hotel.’
‘It’s hardly likely to follow her, I suppose?’ Mrs Henedge inquired anxiously.
‘I don’t know, I’m sure. The hotel, it appears, already is particularly full … The last time, you remember, they heard it croak, it was for old Sir Philidor.’ And, looking exceedingly stately, she trailed away to repeat to Mrs Shamefoot her news: ‘Violet has heard the Raven!’
‘To be painted once, and for all, by my husband, is much better than to be always getting photographed!’ Mrs Calvally was saying to a Goddess as the Professor came in.
‘I know,’ the Goddess answered; ‘some of his portraits are really très Velasquez, and they never remind you of Whistler.’
‘Oh, beware of Mr Calvally!’ murmured Mrs Asp, flitting past to seize a chair. ‘He made poor Lady Georgia into a greyhound, and turned old General Montgomery into a ram – he twisted the hair into horns.’
An unwarrantable rush for places, however, announced that the critical moment had come.
‘Well, darling,’ Mrs Thumbler, triumphant, explained to her daughter, excusing herself for a sharp little skirmish with Monsignor Parr, ‘I was scarcely going to have him on my knee!’ And with emotion she fluttered a somewhat frantic fan.
‘I think your young musician so handsome,’ Mrs Asp whispered to Mrs Henedge, giving a few deft touches to a bandeau and some audacious violet paste. ‘With a little trouble, really, he could look quite Greek.’
‘Is your serial in The Star, my dear Rose, ever to be discontinued?’ Mr Sophax, who stood close behind her, stooped to inquire.
‘Don’t question me,’ she replied, without turning round. ‘I make it a rule never to be interviewed at night.’
Next her, Lady Listless, perched uncomfortably on Claud Harvester’s New Poems, sat eyeing the Professor with her most complacent smile. She knew hardly anything of Sappho, except that her brother, she believed, had been a wine merchant – which, in those times, was probably even better than being a brewer.
‘But if they had meant to murder me,’ the camel lady was mysteriously murmuring to Monsignor Parr, ‘they would not have put chocolate in the luncheon-basket; my courage returned to me at that!’ when a marvellous hiss from Mrs Asp stimulated Miss Compostella to expand.
‘My dear, when an angel like Sabine Watson …’ she was heard to exclaim vaguely above everyone else.
Julia, just then, was in high feather. George Calvally had promised to design for her a beautiful poster, by the time that Eysoldt should arrive, with cypress trees and handfuls of stars …
But the Professor was becoming impatient.
It would be utterly disgusting, Mrs Henedge reflected, if he should get desperate and retire. It was like Julia to expatiate at such a time upon the heavenliness of Sabine Watson, who was only one, it seemed, of quite a troop of angels.
To conceal her misgivings she waved a sultry yellow fan. There was a forest painted upon it of Arden, in indigo, in violet, in sapphire, in turquoise, and in common blue. The fan, by Conder, was known perversely as The Pink Woods.
‘I’m not going to inflict upon you a speech,’ the Professor said, breaking in like a piccolo to Miss Compostella’s harp.
‘Hear, hear!’ Mr Sophax approved.
‘You have heard, of course, how, while surveying the ruins of Crocodileopolis Arsinoë, my donkey having—’
And then, after what may have become an anguishing obligato, the Professor declaimed impressively the imperishable line.
‘Oh, delicious!’ Lady Listless exclaimed, looking quite perplexed. ‘Very charming indeed!’
‘Will anyone tell me what it means,’ Mrs Thumbler queried, ‘in plain English! Unfortunately, my Greek—’
‘In plain English,’ the Professor said, with some reluctance, ‘it means: “Could not” (he wagged a finger) “Could not, for the fury of her feet!” ’
‘Do you mean she ran away?’
‘Apparently!’
‘O-h!’ Mrs Thumbler seemed inclined to faint.
The Professor riveted her with his curious nut-coloured eyes.
‘Could not …’ she murmured helplessly, as though clinging to an alpenstock, and not quite sure of her guide. Below her, so to speak, were the roof-tops, pots and pans: Chamonix twinkling in the snow.
‘But no doubt there is a sous-entendu?’ Monsignor Parr suspiciously inquired.
‘Indeed, no!’ the Professor answered. ‘It is probable, indeed, that Sappho did not even mean to be caustic! Here is an adventurous line, separated (alas!) from its full context. Decorative, useless, as you will; a water-colour on silk!’
‘Just such a Sapphic piece,’ Mrs Asp observed, with authority, ‘just such a Sapphic piece as the And down I set the cushion, or the , or again the Foolish woman, pride not thyself on a ring.’
‘I don’t know why,’ Lady Georgia confessed, ‘it thrills me, but it does!’
‘Do you suppose she refers to—’
‘Nothing of the kind!’ the Professor interrupted. ‘As Mrs Asp explains, we have, at most, a broken piece, a rarity of phrase … as the poet’s With lofty poles, or With water dripped the napkin, or Scythian Wood … or the (I fear me, spurious), Carrying long rods, capped with the Pods of Poppies.’
‘And isn’t there just one little tiny wee word of hers which says: A tortoise-shell?’ Mrs Calvally murmured, fingering the huge winged pin in the back of her hair.
‘I should say that Sappho’s powers were decidedly in declension when she wrote the Professor’s “water-colour”,’ Mrs Steeple said disparagingly.
‘I’m sure I don’t see why!’
‘Do you remember the divine Ode to Aphrodite?’ she asked, and rapidly, occult, archaic, before anybody could stop her, she began to declaim:
‘Zeus-begotten, weaver of arts deceitful,
From thy throne of various hues behold me,
Queen immortal, spare me relentless anguish;
Spare, I beseech thee.
Hither haste, if ever of old my sighing
Moved thy soul, O Goddess, awhile to hear me,
From thy Father’s house to repair with golden
Chariot harnessed.
Lovely birds fleet winged from Olympus holy
Fluttering multitudinous o’er the darksome
Breast of Earth their heavenly mistress hastened
Through the mid ether;
Soon they brought the beautiful Aphrodite;
Softly beame
d celestial eyes upon me;
And I heard her ask with a smile my trouble,
Wherefore I called her.
What of all things most may appease thy frenzy?
Whom (she said) would Sappho beguile to love her?
Whom by suasion bring to heart adoring?
Who hath aggrieved her?
Whoso flies thee, soon shall he turn to woo thee;
Who, receives no gifts, shall anon bestow them;
If he love not, soon shall he love, tho’ Sappho
Turneth against him!
Lady now, too, come to allay my torment;
All my soul desireth, I prithee grant me;
Be thyself my champion and my helper,
Lovely Dione!’
‘Exquisite, dear; thanks.’
‘Christianity, no doubt,’ the Professor observed, with some ferocity, to Monsignor Parr, ‘has invented many admirable things, but it has destroyed more than it has created!’ The old pagan in him was moved.
‘You have been stirring our antenatal memories, Mrs Steeple,’ Claud Harvester said.
‘Have I?’ she laughed.
‘Mr Brookes has promised to play to us,’ Mrs Henedge said hurriedly, with sufficient presence of mind.
‘Can he play Après Midi sous les Pins?’ the camel lady wondered.
‘Certainly,’ Winsome snapped, lifting from the piano a photograph of two terrified-looking little boys that somehow had been forgotten. ‘I can play anything when I have the music!’
‘Poor Mr Calvally … he looks always so atrociously sad!’ Lady Listless murmured, staring about her.
‘It’s unfortunate,’ Mrs Rienzi-Smith said to her, ‘that the Professor seems so displeased.’
‘Well, what more could he want? We were all on footstools before him.’
‘What am I to play to you?’ Winsome asked of Mrs Henedge. ‘A fanfare? A requiem?’
‘Oh, play us something of your own. Play your “Oakapple”, from The Suite in Green.’
But, ‘to break the ice’, as he put it, he preferred the exciting Capriccio Espagnol of Rimsky-Korsakoff to anything of his own.
‘But didn’t you hate waiting for Othello to press the pillow?’ Lady Castleyard was questioning Miss Compostella. ‘I should have got up and screamed, or rang the bell, I’m sure I should!’
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