“Oh! Mr. Minho—how perfectly lovely! I’ve wanted to know you ever since my cradle.”
Fleur heard the novelist say quietly:
“I could wish it had been longer;” and passed on in doubt to greet Nesta Gorse and Sibley Swan, who came in, as if they lived together, quarrelling over L.S.D., Nesta upholding him because of his ‘panache’, Sibley maintaining that wit had died with the Restoration; this fellow was alive!
Michael followed with the Upshires and Aubrey Greene, whom he had encountered in the hall. The party was complete.
Fleur loved perfection, and that evening was something of a nightmare. Was it a success? Minho was so clearly the least brilliant person there; even Alison talked better. And yet he had such a fine skull. She did hope he would not go away early. Some one would be almost sure to say ‘Dug up!’ or ‘Thick and bald!’ before the door closed behind him. He was pathetically agreeable, as if trying to be liked, or, at least, not despised too much. And there must, of course, be more in him than met the sense of hearing. After the crab souffle he did seem to be talking to Alison, and all about youth. Fleur listened with one ear.
“Youth feels… main stream of life… not giving it what it wants. Past and future getting haloes… Quite! Contemporary life no earthly just now… No… Only comfort for us—we’ll be antiquated, some day, like Congreve, Sterne, Defoe… have our chance again… WHY? What IS driving them out of the main current? Oh! Probably surfeit… newspapers… photographs. Don’t see life itself, only reports… reproductions of it; all seems shoddy, lurid, commercial… Youth says ‘Away with it, let’s have the past or the future!’”
He took some salted almonds, and Fleur saw his eyes stray to the upper part of Amabel Nazing. Down there the conversation was like Association football—no one kept the ball for more than one kick. It shot from head to head. And after every set of passes some one would reach out and take a cigarette, and blow a blue cloud across the unclothed refectory table. Fleur enjoyed the glow of her Spanish room—its tiled floor, richly coloured fruits in porcelain, its tooled leather, copper articles, and Soames’ Goya above a Moorish divan. She headed the ball promptly when it came her way, but initiated nothing. Her gift was to be aware of everything at once. “Mrs. Michael Mont presented” the brilliant irrelevancies of Linda Frewe, the pricks and stimulations of Nesta Gorse, the moonlit sliding innuendoes of Aubrey Greene, the upturning strokes of Sibley Swan, Amabel Nazing’s little cool American audacities, Charles Upshire’s curious bits of lore, Walter Nazing’s subversive contradictions, the critical intricacies of Pauline Upshire; Michael’s happy-go-lucky slings and arrows, even Alison’s knowledgeable quickness, and Gurdon Minho’s silences—she presented them all, showed them off, keeping her eyes and ears on the ball of talk lest it should touch earth and rest. Brilliant evening; but—a success?
On the jade green settee, when the last of them had gone and Michael was seeing Alison home, she thought of Minho’s ‘Youth—not getting what it wants.’ No! Things didn’t fit. “They don’t fit, do they, Ting!” But Ting-a-ling was tired, only the tip of one ear quivered. Fleur leaned back and sighed. Ting-a-ling uncurled himself, and putting his forepaws on her thigh, looked up in her face. “Look at me,” he seemed to say, “I’m all right. I get what I want, and I want what I get. At present I want to go to bed.”
“But I don’t,” said Fleur, without moving.
“Just take me up!” said Ting-a-ling.
“Well,” said Fleur, “I suppose—It’s a nice person, but not the right person, Ting.”
Ting-a-ling settled himself on her bare arms.
“It’s all right,” he seemed to say. “There’s a great deal too much sentiment and all that, out of China. Come on!”
Chapter V.
EVE
The Honourable Wilfrid Desert’s rooms were opposite a picture gallery off Cork Street. The only male member of the aristocracy writing verse that any one would print, he had chosen them for seclusion rather than for comfort. His ‘junk,’ however, was not devoid of the taste and luxury which overflows from the greater houses of England. Furniture from the Hampshire seat of the Cornish nobleman, Lord Mullyon, had oozed into two vans, when Wilfrid settled in. He was seldom to be found, however, in his nest, and was felt to be a rare bird, owing his rather unique position among the younger writers partly to his migratory reputation. He himself hardly, perhaps, knew where he spent his time, or did his work, having a sort of mental claustrophobia, a dread of being hemmed in by people. When the war broke out he had just left Eton; when the war was over he was twenty-three, as old a young man as ever turned a stave. His friendship with Michael, begun in hospital, had languished and renewed itself suddenly, when in 1920 Michael joined Danby and Winter, publishers, of Blake Street, Covent Garden. The scattery enthusiasm of the sucking publisher had been roused by Wilfrid’s verse. Hob-nobbing lunches over the poems of one in need of literary anchorage, had been capped by the firm’s surrender to Michael’s insistence. The mutual intoxication of the first book Wilfrid had written and the first book Michael had sponsored was crowned at Michael’s wedding. Best man! Since then, so far as Desert could be tied to anything, he had been tied to those two; nor, to do him justice, had he realised till a month ago that the attraction was not Michael, but Fleur. Desert never spoke of the war, it was not possible to learn from his own mouth an effect which he might have summed up thus: “I lived so long with horror and death; I saw men so in the raw; I put hope of anything out of my mind so utterly, that I can never more have the faintest respect for theories, promises, conventions, moralities, and principles. I have hated too much the men who wallowed in them while I was wallowing in mud and blood. Illusion is off. No religion and no philosophy will satisfy me—words, all words. I have still my senses—no thanks to them; am still capable—I find—of passion; can still grit my teeth and grin; have still some feeling of trench loyalty, but whether real or just a complex, I don’t yet know. I am dangerous, but not so dangerous as those who trade in words, principles, theories, and all manner of fanatical idiocy to be worked out in the blood and sweat of other men. The war’s done one thing for me—converted life to comedy. Laugh at it—there’s nothing else to do!”
Leaving the concert hall on the Friday night, he had walked straight home to his rooms. And lying down full length on a monk’s seat of the fifteenth century, restored with down cushions and silk of the twentieth, he crossed his hands behind his head and delivered himself to these thoughts: ‘I am not going on like this. She has bewitched me. It doesn’t mean anything to her. But it means hell to me. I’ll finish with it on Sunday—Persia’s a good place. Arabia’s a good place—plenty of blood and sand! She’s incapable of giving anything up. How has she hooked herself into me! By trick of eyes, and hair, by her walk, by the sound of her voice—by trick of warmth, scent, colour. Fling her cap over the windmill—not she! What then? Am I to hang about her Chinese fireside and her little Chinese dog; and have this ache and this fever because I can’t be kissing her? I’d rather be flying again in the middle of Boche whiz-bangs! Sunday! How women like to drag out agonies! It’ll be just this afternoon all over again. “How unkind of you to go, when your friendship is so precious to me! Stay, and be my tame cat, Wilfrid!” No, my dear, for once you’re up against it! And—so am I, by the Lord!…’
When in that gallery which extends asylum to British art, those two young people met so accidentally on Sunday morning in front of Eve smelling at the flowers of the Garden of Eden, there were present also six mechanics in various stages of decomposition, a custodian and a couple from the provinces, none of whom seemed capable of observing anything whatever. And, indeed, that meeting was inexpressive. Two young people, of the disillusioned class, exchanging condemnations of the past. Desert with his off-hand speech, his smile, his well-tailored informality, suggested no aching heart. Of the two Fleur was the paler and more interesting. Desert kept saying to himself: “No melodrama—that’s all it would be!” And Fleur was thinking:
‘If I can keep him ordinary like this, I shan’t lose him, because he’ll never go away without a proper outburst.’
It was not until they found themselves a second time before the Eve, that he said:
“I don’t know why you asked me to come, Fleur. It’s playing the goat for no earthly reason. I quite understand your feeling. I’m a bit of ‘Ming’ that you don’t want to lose. But it’s not good enough, my dear; and that’s all about it.”
“How horrible of you, Wilfrid!”
“Well! Here we part! Give us your flipper.”
His eyes—rather beautiful—looked dark and tragic above the smile on his lips, and she said stammering:
“Wilfrid—I—I don’t know. I want time. I can’t bear you to be unhappy. Don’t go away! Perhaps I—I shall be unhappy, too; I—I don’t know.”
Through Desert passed the bitter thought: ‘She CAN’T let go—she doesn’t know how.’ But he said quite softly: “Cheer up, my child; you’ll be over all that in a fortnight. I’ll send you something to make up. Why shouldn’t I make it China—one place is as good as another? I’ll send you a bit of real ‘Ming,’ of a better period than this.”
Fleur said passionately:
“You’re insulting! Don’t!”
“I beg your pardon. I don’t want to leave you angry.”
“What is it you want of me?”
“Oh! no—come! This is going over it twice. Besides, since Friday I’ve been thinking. I want nothing, Fleur, except a blessing and your hand. Give it me! Come on!”
Fleur put her hand behind her back. It was too mortifying! He took her for a cold-blooded, collecting little cat—clutching and playing with mice that she didn’t want to eat!
“You think I’m made of ice,” she said, and her teeth caught her upper lip: “Well, I’m not!”
Desert looked at her; his eyes were very wretched. “I didn’t mean to play up your pride,” he said. “Let’s drop it, Fleur. It isn’t any good.”
Fleur turned and fixed her eyes on the Eve—rumbustious-looking female, care-free, avid, taking her fill of flower perfume! Why not be care-free, take anything that came along? Not so much love in the world that one could afford to pass, leaving it unsmelled, unplucked. Run away! Go to the East! Of course, she couldn’t do anything extravagant like that! But, perhaps—What did it matter? one man or another, when neither did you really love!
From under her drooped, white, dark-lashed eyelids she saw the expression on his face, and that he was standing stiller than the statues. And suddenly she said: “You will be a fool to go. Wait!” And without another word or look, she walked away, leaving Desert breathless before the avid Eve.
Chapter VI.
‘OLD FORSYTE’ AND ‘OLD MONT’
Moving away, in the confusion of her mood, Fleur almost trod on the toes of a too-familiar figure standing before an Alma Tadema with a sort of grey anxiety, as if lost in the mutability of market values.
“Father! YOU up in town? Come along to lunch, I have to get home quick.”
Hooking his arm and keeping between him and Eve, she guided him away, thinking: ‘Did he see us? Could he have seen us?’
“Have you got enough on?” muttered Soames.
“Heaps!”
“That’s what you women always say. East wind, and your neck like that! Well, I don’t know.”
“No, dear, but I do.”
The grey eyes appraised her from head to foot.
“What are you doing here?” he said. And Flour thought: ‘Thank God he didn’t see. He’d never have asked if he had.’ And she answered:
“I take an interest in art, darling, as well as you.”
“Well, I’m staying with your aunt in Green Street. This east wind has touched my liver. How’s your—how’s Michael?”
“Oh, he’s all right—a little cheap. We had a dinner last night.”
Anniversary! The realism of a Forsyte stirred in him, and he looked under her eyes. Thrusting his hand into his overcoat pocket, he said:
“I was bringing you this.”
Fleur saw a flat substance wrapped in pink tissue paper.
“Darling, what is it?”
Soames put it back into his pocket.
“We’ll see later. Anybody to lunch?”
“Only Bart.”
“Old Mont! Oh, Lord!”
“Don’t you like Bart, dear?”
“Like him? He and I have nothing in common.”
“I thought you fraternised rather over the state of things.”
“He’s a reactionary,” said Soames.
“And what are you, ducky?”
“I? What should I be?” With these words he affirmed that policy of non-commitment which, the older he grew, the more he perceived to be the only attitude for a sensible man.
“How is Mother?”
“Looks well. I see nothing of her—she’s got her own mother down—they go gadding about.”
He never alluded to Madame Lamotte as Fleur’s grandmother—the less his daughter had to do with her French side, the better.
“Oh!” said Fleur. “There’s Ting and a cat!” Ting-a-ling, out for a breath of air, and tethered by a lead in the hands of a maid, was snuffling horribly and trying to climb a railing whereon was perched a black cat, all hunch and eyes.
“Give him to me, Ellen. Come with Mother, darling!”
Ting-a-ling came, indeed, but only because he couldn’t go, bristling and snuffling and turning his head back.
“I like to see him natural,” said Fleur.
“Waste of money, a dog like that,” Soames commented. “You should have had a bull-dog and let him sleep in the hall. No end of burglaries. Your aunt had her knocker stolen.”
“I wouldn’t part with Ting for a hundred knockers.”
“One of these days you’ll be having HIM stolen—fashionable breed.”
Fleur opened her front door. “Oh!” she said, “Bart’s here, already!”
A shiny hat was reposing on a marble coffer, present from Soames, intended to hold coats and discourage moth. Placing his hat alongside the other, Soames looked at them. They were too similar for words, tall, high, shiny, and with the same name inside. He had resumed the ‘tall hat’ habit after the failure of the general and coal strikes in 1921, his instinct having told him that revolution would be at a discount for some considerable period.
“About this thing,” he said, taking out the pink parcel, “I don’t know what you’ll do with it, but here it is.”
It was a curiously carved and coloured bit of opal in a ring of tiny brilliants.
“Oh!” Fleur cried: “What a delicious thing!”
“Venus floating on the waves, or something,” murmured Soames. “Uncommon. You want a strong light on it.”
“But it’s lovely. I shall put it on at once.”
Venus! If Dad had known! She put her arms round his neck to disguise her sense of a propos. Soames received the rub of her cheek against his own well-shaved face with his usual stillness. Why demonstrate when they were both aware that his affection was double hers?
“Put it on then,” he said, “and let’s see.”
Fleur pinned it at her neck before an old lacquered mirror.
“It’s a jewel. Thank you, darling! Yes, your tie is straight. I like that white piping. You ought always to wear it with black. Now, come along!” And she drew him into her Chinese room. It was empty.
“Bart must be up with Michael, talking about his new book.”
“Writing at his age?” said Soames.
“Well, ducky, he’s a year younger than you.”
“I don’t write. Not such a fool. Got any more newfangled friends?”
“Just one—Gurdon Minho, the novelist.”
“Another of the new school?”
“Oh, no, dear! Surely you’ve heard of Gurdon Minho; he’s older than the hills.”
“They’re all alike to me,” muttered Soames. “Is he well thought of?”
�
�I should think his income is larger than yours. He’s almost a classic—only waiting to die.”
“I’ll get one of his books and read it. What name did you say?”
“Get ‘Big and Little Fishes,’ by Gurdon Minho. You can remember that, can’t you? Oh! here they are! Michael, look at what Father’s given me.”
Taking his hand, she put it up to the opal at her neck. ‘Let them both see,’ she thought, ‘what good terms we’re on.’ Though her father had not seen her with Wilfrid in the gallery, her conscience still said: “Strengthen your respectability, you don’t quite know how much support you’ll need for it in future.”
And out of the corner of her eye she watched those two. The meetings between ‘Old Mont’ and ‘Old Forsyte’—as she knew Bart called her father when speaking of him to Michael—always made her want to laugh, but she never quite knew why. Bart knew everything, but his knowledge was beautifully bound, strictly edited by a mind tethered to the ‘eighteenth century.’ Her father only knew what was of advantage to him, but the knowledge was unbound, and subject to no editorship. If he WAS late Victorian, he was not above profiting if necessary by even later periods. ‘Old Mont’ had faith in tradition; ‘Old Forsyte’ none. Fleur’s acuteness had long perceived a difference which favoured her father. Yet ‘Old Mont’s’ talk was so much more up-to-date, rapid, glancing, garrulous, redolent of precise information; and ‘Old Forsyte’s’ was constricted, matter-of-fact. Really impossible to tell which of the two was the better museum specimen; and both so well-preserved!
They did not precisely shake hands; but Soames mentioned the weather. And almost at once they all four sought that Sunday food which by a sustained effort of will Fleur had at last deprived of reference to the British character. They partook, in fact, of lobster cocktails, and a mere risotto of chickens’ livers, an omelette au rhum, and dessert trying to look as Spanish as it could.
“I’ve been in the Tate,” Fleur said; “I do think it’s touching.”
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