B007TB5SP0 EBOK

by Firbank, Ronald

  ‘But surely the Thames—’

  ‘Bless you, no!’

  ‘And you saw nothing of the Bishop?’

  ‘His pinched white face frightened me. It gave me such a turn …

  ‘Weep, willow, weep,

  Willow, willow, weep,

  For the cross that’s mine is difficult to bear.’

  Miss Compostella interposed.

  ‘You needn’t pack up everything,’ she remarked.

  ‘It’s my impatience! I could sing when I think we’re returning home to-morrow. If it’s only to escape the housekeeper here. For we had quite a quarrel just now … “Where’s your wedding ring?” she says. “I never wear it,” I replied. “It makes one’s hand look so bourgeoise … And don’t you go flinging your nasty aspersions over me,” I said, “for I won’t have it.” ’

  ‘Quite right.’

  ‘My word. I was very carefully brought up. My mother was most tyrannical, especially with us girls. Why, I wasn’t even allowed to read The Vicar of Wakefield until after I was married … Not that I didn’t belong to a Rabelais-lovers-Society by the time I was twelve.’

  ‘What, in Stratford?’ Miss Compostella wondered, taking up with lassitude the manuscript of a play left with her by Mrs Shamefoot (before the accident), in the expectation of obtaining an interest at the Palace by overwhelming Miss Hospice by an eternal and delicate debt of thanks.

  It was a Tristram and Isolde.

  ‘Brangane and Isolde,’ she read, ‘Deck chairs. Isolde making lace. Soft music.’

  BR. But what makes you think he’s so fond of you, my dear?

  IS. He presses my hand so beautifully.

  BR. You know he does that to everybody.

  IS. O – h?

  BR. Take my advice. I should never marry him.

  IS. Really? Why not?

  BR. He would leave you.

  IS. Nonsense!

  BR. He has ears like wings …

  IS. Is that all?

  ‘Not such a bad beginning,’ Miss Compostella commented. ‘But why must Isolde be so impatient to confide to the waves her age? “I’m exactly nine-and-twenty.” I cannot see that helps. And why, oh, why,’ she murmured, rising to her feet, ‘when Tristram inquires for her, should Brangane lose her head so, and say: “She’s out, she’s not at home, she isn’t there.” Were she to reply quite calmly, almost like a butler: “The family’s away”, or, “I expect them home in about a fortnight”, it should be amply sufficient.’

  A lazy ripple of strings surprised her.

  ‘What is that—?’

  ‘I don’t know, miss, I’m sure. It sounds like Pippa Passes.’

  ‘Well, go and see.’

  ‘It brings back to me the reading Mrs Steeple gave at the Caxton Hall when I, Miss Falconhall, and her fiancé received Press tickets … Coming away, foolish fellow, he slipped on a piece of cabbage-stalk and snapped his coledge bone.’

  ‘Can you make out who is serenading us?’

  ‘It’s the Honourable Mrs Shamefoot,’ Sumph informed. Pacing beneath a magnificence of autumnal trees, Mrs Shamefoot was strolling slowly up and down with a guitar.

  ‘She’s been on stilts all day,’ Sumph said.

  Miss Compostella coiled an arm across her head.

  ‘Give me a phenacetin powder,’ she exclaimed, ‘at once. For what with the crash the Cathedral made in falling, and your silly jabber, and her guitar … !’

  XVIII

  Monday.

  Day Dawn.

  The little turquoise flower you admired, my beloved, on Wednesday, is known as Fragment of Happiness. You will find it again in some of Dürer’s drawings. Oh, George … On my desk there is an orange-tree. How it makes me yearn, dear, for the South! I count my oranges. Eight poor, pale, crabbed oranges. Like slum cripples. I think of Seville now. Yes. To-morrow. Absolutely. But, dearest, downstairs, Rosalba Roggers sometimes sallies up. She saw us together last time and begged so to be told who my wonderful big child was with the tragic face. Five o’clock, dear. And don’t be late as you usually are. M.

  P.S. – I will carry some of your troubles, if you will send them to me with your thoughts.

  P.P.S. – You say I blush! When, I wonder, shall I learn to have a mask of my own?’

  ‘Minx!’ Mrs Calvally exclaimed. ‘The snake …’

  She seemed stupefied, stunned.

  ‘I merely opened his paint-box,’ she began, stammering to herself.

  ‘Mamma! …’

  And, as if to demonstrate that domestic drama is not entirely tired of its rather limited tricks, her little son Raphael entered the room at that same minute and rushed right into her arms.

  He came …

  She stooped …

  ‘My dear!’

  And now she was calm again, complacent, with all her old tranquillity of gardens.

  ‘Oh, how ugly! …’

  ‘Where, my precious?’

  ‘And is it a present, too?’

  For the artist’s anniversary Miss Thumbler had despatched a door-knocker, wrought in bronze, that represented a woe-begone, wan Amour.

  ‘By all means,’ Mrs Calvally had said, ‘let us put it up. I will call a carpenter. And some of the mirrors, as well, need glueing …’

  And the gift decidedly had eclipsed her own humble offering of the Hundred Best Pictures, in photogravure, that did not appear to have aroused in him all the interest that they might.

  ‘Mrs Asp and Mrs Thumbler are in the drawing-room.’

  ‘Are they, my pet?’

  ‘And Mrs Asp is concealing such a lovely-looking thing. All wrapped up. It must be something for papa.’

  ‘Come along and let us see.’

  ‘Don’t sigh, mamma. It bores me to hear you sigh.’

  ‘I’m so sorry George isn’t in,’ Mrs Calvally said, as she lounged leisurely round the huge Ming screen that began her drawing-room. ‘But he went out, quite early, almost before it was light, to make a Canaletto of the space before White Hall.’

  ‘I believe he’s unusually busy … So I hear!’ Mrs Asp announced.

  ‘No. Not so very … He’s making Mrs Jeffreys at present in all her jewels; or, at any rate, more than he usually likes. And the old Duke of Spitalfields. And the cartoons of a country church …’

  Mrs Thumbler began to purr.

  ‘And he obliges Mira,’ she said, ‘nearly every day. And in such varieties of poses! Even as Absalom, swinging from a tree.’

  ‘I know. He raves about her. He told me he looked upon her almost as an inspiration,’ Mrs Calvally replied, confident that the ‘almost’ would be repeated to haunt Miss Thumbler for days.

  ‘All the same, quite between ourselves, I confess, I wish he didn’t. It’s making her so vain! Lately (I’m ashamed to tell you), she’s taken to wear a patch. A crescent-moon-shaped affair above the lip, that gives her such an o-ri-gi-nal expression. Really, sometimes in the street … Well, I won’t go out with her again. I let her take the dog.’

  Mrs Asp untied an ermine stole.

  ‘My dear,’ she exclaimed, ‘do be careful. When it comes to dragging a dumb animal about as a chaperon one gets generally misunderstood.’

  ‘But what am I to do! Mira’s so sensitive. I dare hardly say a word. Although those pen-and-ink embroideries Mr Calvally made for her, charming as they are, are only fit for the house.’

  ‘I wasn’t aware he had ever made her any,’ Mrs Calvally said. ‘I’m sure he never made pen-and ink embroideries for me!’

  ‘Occupation,’ Mrs Asp reflected airily, ‘is an admirable thing, especially for a man. It restricts restlessness as a rule.’

  ‘How you comfort me! He talks of a farm-house now near Rome.’

  Mrs Thumbler shuddered.

  ‘I should hate to keep an Italian cow,’ she said. ‘I should be afraid of it!’

  ‘But we should be Byzantine. Just peacocks, stags and sheep …’

  ‘The danger of Italy,’ Mrs Asp observed, ‘is, it tends t
o make one florid. One expands there so … Personally, I go all to poppy-seed directly. I cannot keep pace with my ideas. And then I fall ill, and have to have a nurse. Shall I ever forget the creature I had last year! My dear Mrs Calvally, she looked just about as stable as the young woman on the cover of a valse. Unfortunately, I was too exhausted to object. But I simply couldn’t endure her. She made me so uneasy. A habit of staring vaguely into space whenever she spoke to me would make me shiver; I began to believe she must be in a league with the doctor; that she was hiding something, keeping something back … At last, one day I collected all my strength together and sat up in my bed and pointed towards the door. After that, I took a nun, who was quite rapacious for martyrdom. But all that was ever allowed to her was, sometimes, to get cold feet.’

  ‘And what are you doing now?’

  Mrs Asp relaxed.

  ‘At present,’ she said, ‘I’m preparing a Women Queens of England.’

  ‘Isn’t it idle – to insist?’

  ‘Not as euphony. The Queens of England, somehow, sound so bleak. And, really, rather a brigade … More like history!’

  At the portentous word Master Raphael rolled down upon the floor.

  Mrs Asp considered him. She was old-fashioned enough to believe it necessary for a young thing, when it gaped, to know exactly where to place its hand.

  ‘Does he take after his papa?’ she asked.

  ‘I hardly know. He loves to flick his tongue up and down the rough paint of a picture, and to cool his cheek along the shrubberies on my fans.’

  ‘He promises!’ Mrs Asp declared.

  ‘But so wicked. Yesterday Princess Schara came to show George a fan. You know her husband used to paint the most wonderful fans. Poor man, in the end he became so decorative that he died! His last fan – would you care to see it? – is such a muddle that very few people can discover what it means. And now Raphael has made it utterly impossible.’

  ‘Most modern fans are so ill and sickly,’ Mrs Thumbler observed, ‘I hope nothing will happen to your courageous little boy.’

  Mrs Calvally lit – one of those …

  It was a caprice of hers that could still charm, thrill and fascinate a wayward husband.

  He had studied her too, thus, at three different angles on a single canvas. More vagabond, possibly, than the Charles, or the Richelieu, or the Lady Alice Gordon of Reynolds, but, nevertheless, with not one whit less style.

  ‘How stately the studio is,’ Mrs Asp said, a little confused. ‘A perfect paradise!’

  ‘I regret I’ve nothing to show you much that’s new. You’ve seen his joy-child for the top of a fountain, I expect, before?’

  But Mrs Thumbler did not seem cast down.

  ‘I admire your plain black curtains,’ she said, ‘and, oh, where did you get these?’

  Continually, Mrs Calvally would design an eccentric frame for her husband’s pictures. It was a pathetic attempt, perhaps, on her side, to identify herself in his career.

  For, indeed, she was notoriously indifferent to art.

  She was one of those destined to get mixed over Monet and Manet all their life.

  The exhibition of some ‘lost’ masterpiece, in Bond Street, was what she most enjoyed, when, if not too crowded, she could recline upon a sofa and turn out the lining to her purse.

  ‘I’m such a wretched, wicked housekeeper,’ she would say. ‘And were it not for an occasional missing Gainsborough, George, I should never know what I had.’

  ‘Bristling with intellect,’ Mrs Asp announced, laying down the fan, ‘and I seem to catch a face in it, too. Little Mrs Steeple’s! …’

  ‘Oh, quite—’

  ‘Poor thing. She says Sir Samuel has become so vigorous lately. It nearly kills her every evening waiting for his slap.’

  ‘We were at Smith Square on Sunday,’ Mrs Calvally said, ‘and sitting at her feet found Julia’s new man – Charley Chalmers!’

  ‘And I suppose a god?’ Mrs Asp inquired.

  ‘Not at all. It’s a doll-like, childlike, Adam’y sort of face, and very healthy.’

  ‘Dear Julia, I’ve seen nothing of her since the Sappho supper-party Mrs Henedge gave in the spring.’

  ‘I hear she’s been safely landed now about a week.’

  ‘One can hardly credit it!’

  ‘She sent us a jar of Ashringford honey,’ Mrs Thumbler said, ‘recently. Perfectly packed, in half-a-field of hay.’

  ‘She takes a kind of passionate pleasure in her bees. And Mr Brookes helps her in them, muffled up in all the newest veils.’

  ‘He’s been away now so long. He might be almost learning to be a priest,’ Mrs Asp remarked, as Lady Listless came in.

  ‘I heard a thrush singing in the park,’ she said. ‘It was so attractive. I don’t know what came over me! Are my eyes wet still with tears? I held back one to bring your husband (I saw the many-happy-returns in The World), but I lost it. It rolled, unluckily, under the wheels of a miserable motor bus. But I managed to get another! So I carried myself as if I were Lily, Lady Ismore, and got nearly safe with it, when it fell down as the lift stopped.’

  ‘You should have warned the boy!’

  ‘I did …’

  ‘The incredible thrush!’ Mrs Asp exclaimed.

  ‘Very likely it wasn’t totally the thrush. I won’t be positive. It may have been merely the reaction after Mr Hurreycomer’s Private View. His Suzannah! … Have you seen it? … A young woman (my dear, his wife), splashing herself in some perfectly lilac water … And the Elders … Oh, they are all portraits …’

  ‘Tell me about the Elders,’ Mrs Calvally begged.

  ‘Your husband. Most prominent.’

  ‘But George isn’t forty!’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘It’s incredible, in any case, that an insignificant stupid thing like Carla could interest even Elders,’ Mrs Asp remarked, getting up. ‘Moreover,’ she continued, drawing on a glove, ‘she revels in making herself needlessly hideous; it appeals to her sense of truth. Added to which,’ she rambled on, ‘his candid studies of women are simply hateful …’

  ‘Brutal!’ Mrs Thumbler opined.

  ‘Has anybody seen my stole?’

  ‘And remember, Rose,’ Mrs Calvally said, returning it to her, ‘for Friday, it’s you who’ve got the tickets!’

  ‘I shan’t forget. But since it’s likely to be a debate, don’t expect to see me smart. I shall simply wear my old, soiled, peach-charmeuse …’

  ‘My dear, don’t bother to dress!’

  Mrs Asp hesitated.

  ‘I trust that nobody of yours,’ she said, ‘is ill or stricken, for there’s a strange old man seated on the stairs, with such a terrific bag of tools!’

  Mrs Calvally rippled.

  ‘I conclude it’s only the carpenter,’ she explained, ‘who has come to pass a screw through Miss Mira’s charming consumptive Amour!’

  XIX

  ‘Don’t the hills look soaked through and through with water?’

  ‘My dear, I don’t know!’

  ‘If you don’t object, I’ll go back, I think, to bed.’

  ‘What can you expect at the fall of the leaf?’

  ‘But except for the evergreens, all the leaves are down.’

  ‘Well, last winter, it rained so, and it rained so, that the drawing-room became a lake. All my beautiful blue silk chairs …: and a few gold fish I’m attached to were floated right out of their bowl, and swam upstairs into Thérèse’s room.’

  ‘Ashringford’s becoming dreadfully disagreeable.’

  ‘Patience. The sun will come up presently. Even now, it’s doing something behind the Cathedral. It usually takes its time to pick a path across St Dorothea.’

  Now that she had actually abandoned it, St Dorothy, for Mrs Henedge, had become St Dorothea.

  ‘Hannah was telling us the night it fell she noticed devils sort-of-hobble-stepping beneath the trees.’

  ‘My dear, she tells such lies. One never can believ
e her. Only the other day she broke the child’s halo off my plaster Anthony and then declared she didn’t.’

  ‘The most wonderful name in all the world for any child,’ Winsome said, ‘is Diana. Don’t you agree? Your gardener intended to call his daughter Winifred, but I was just in time!’

  ‘There now, there’s a pretty motive for a walk. Save Mrs Drax’s baby. It’s to be christened Sobriety, to-day, at half-past-two. Such a shame!’

  ‘But I should miss Goosey.’

  ‘Winsome, lately, has taken quite a fancy to Goosey, while risking their necks together upon the scaffolding of St John’s.’

  ‘You see so much of him. The Miss Chalfonts, in comparison, aren’t to be compared.’

  ‘Don’t ever speak of them!’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I’ve such a shock in store.’

  ‘Yes, what is it?’

  ‘The Miss Chalfonts have scratched.’

  ‘Scratched! …’

  ‘Their Guardi.’

  ‘What does it matter if they have. I’ve really no need for any more pictures. People seem to think that St John’s is going to be a Gallery, or something of the kind.’

  ‘And I’ve something else to tell you.’

  ‘Sit down and tell me here.’

  ‘While we were leaning from the campanile an idea occurred to me. Another opera.’

  ‘Bravo! You shall kiss my hand.’

  ‘I start fortissimo! The effect of the Overture will be the steam whistle that summons the factory hands. Such a hoot! …’

  ‘But you’ll finish what you’re doing?’

  Since his arrival in Ashringford he had been at work on a Gilles de Rais, an act of which already was complete. The sextet between Gilles and his youthful victims, bid fair, Mrs Henedge declared, to become the most moving thing in all opera. While the lofty theme for Anne de Bretagne, and the piteous Prière of the little Marcelle seemed destined, also, to be popular.