“He’ll survive the disappointment,” said Sylvia lightly.
The Seraph shook his head. “May I have one later?” he asked. “You oughtn’t to cut Willoughby, he’s been looking forward to it.”
Sylvia was not accustomed or inclined to dictation from others.
“Have you asked him?” she said, uncertain whether to be amused or angry.
“It wasn’t necessary. Haven’t you felt his eyes on you while you were dancing? He thinks you’re the most wonderful girl in the world. There he’s right. He’ll treasure up every word you speak, every smile you give him; he’ll send himself to sleep picturing ways of saving your life at the cost of his own. And he’ll dream of you all night.”
The Seraph’s tranquil, unemotional voice had grown so earnest that Sylvia found herself growing serious in spite of herself.
“I wish you wouldn’t discuss me with boys like that,” she said, more to gain time than administer reproof.
“Should I have discussed you?” exclaimed the Seraph. “And would he have told me? Why can’t you, why can’t any girl understand the mind of a boy of fifteen? You’d make such men of them if you’d only take the trouble. Look at him now, he’s thinking out wonderful speeches to make to you.…”
“I hope not,” said Sylvia ruefully.
“He’ll forget them all when he meets you. I was fifteen once.”
“I wonder if you’ll ever be more.”
The Seraph made no answer.
“That wasn’t meant for a snub,” said Sylvia reassuringly.
“I know that.”
Sylvia looked at him curiously. “Is there anything you don’t know?” she asked as they descended the stairs to the ball-room.
“I don’t even know if you’re going to let me take you in to supper.”
“I’m glad there’s something.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“Do you want to?”
“You ought to know that without asking.”
“I’m afraid there’s a great deal about you I don’t know.”
Supper was ended and their table deserted before Sylvia put the question with which I had primed her that afternoon.
“Is there anything I don’t know? to use your own words,” said the Seraph evasively.
“That’s not an answer, to use yours.”
“It’s the only answer I can give,” he replied, with that curious expression in his dark eyes that did duty for a smile.
“Why won’t you tell me? I’m interested. It’s about myself, so I’ve a right to know.”
“But I can’t explain; I don’t know. It never happened before.”
“Never?”
The Seraph thought over his first meeting with her the previous day.
“Never with any one else,” he answered.
Sylvia shook her head in perplexity.
“I don’t understand,” she said. “Either it was just coincidence and you were talking without thinking, or else … I don’t know. It’s rather funny. D’you want to smoke? Let’s go out on to the terrace.”
“The detectives are there.”
“No, father said they weren’t to appear tonight.”
“They’re out there.”
“How d’you know?”
“I can hear them.”
Sylvia looked round at the closed plate-glass windows.
“You can’t,” she said incredulously.
“Will you bet? No, I don’t want to rob you. Shall I tell you something else? You opened a fresh bottle of scent tonight when you dressed for dinner. It’s Chaminade, the same kind that you were using before, but this is fresher. Had you noticed it?”
The Seraph was considerably less impressed by his powers than Sylvia appeared to be.
“Anything else?” she asked after a pause.
The Seraph wrinkled his brows in thought.
“Gladys Merivale was coughing last night,” he said. “Some one passed my door at two o’clock and went into her room. I don’t know who it was, but it wasn’t you. The coughing stopped for a time, but started again just before three. Then you passed by and went in.”
“How do you know?”
“I heard you.”
“You may have heard some one; you didn’t know it was me. I went once and mother went once. You couldn’t tell which was which.”
The Seraph lit a cigarette and walked with her to the door of the supper-room.
“Oh, it was your mother?” he said. “Then she went the first time.”
“But how do you know?” Sylvia repeated.
“I can’t explain, any more than about the car coming back this morning.”
Sylvia shook her head a little uneasily.
“You’re abnormal,” she pronounced.
“Because I…?”
“Go on.”
“Because I know a fraction more about you than other people?”
“Do you?”
“Only a fraction. It would take time to understand you.”
“How much? I hate to be thought a sphinx.”
“However little I wanted, we should be parted before I got it.”
“Why? How? How parted?”
The Seraph shrugged his shoulders.
“Don’t ask me to read the future,” he said with a sigh.
At the end of the ball I found the Roden boys congratulating themselves on the success of the evening. I added my quota of praise, and was pressed to state if I now felt equal to three successive nights at Commemoration.
“Which reminds me!” Robin exclaimed, flying off at his usual tangent. “Where’s Sylvia? Sylvia, my angel, what about Commem.?”
His sister looked tired but happy, and in some way excited.
“I’ll come if you want me,” she answered, putting her arm round Robin’s neck and kissing him good-night. “Yes, all right—I will. Oh, Mr. Rawnsley told me this morning that Mavis wouldn’t be able to come, so you must get another girl.”
Robin dropped his voice confidentially.
“See if you can persuade Cynthia to come. And we’re still a man short.”
Sylvia looked slowly round the room with thoughtful, unsmiling eyes—past Culling, past Gartside.…
“Will you come, Seraph?” she asked.
Less than a day and a half had passed since I had noticed her practice of avoiding Christian names. For some reason I had supposed nicknames to fall into the same category.
CHAPTER V
Commemoration
“Oxford … the seat of one of the most ancient and celebrated universities in Europe, is situated amid picturesque environs at the confluence of the Cherwell and the Thames.… Oxford is on the whole more attractive than Cambridge to the ordinary visitor.… The best time for a visit is the end of the Summer term.… This period of mingled work and play (the latter predominating) is named Commemoration.… It is almost needless to add that an introduction to a ‘Don’ will greatly add to the visitor’s pleasure and profit.”
—Karl Baedecker
Handbook for Travellers: Great Britain.
Of the weeks that passed between my return to London from Brandon Court and our departure from London to Oxford, I have only the most indistinct recollection. My engagement book earned many honourable scars before I carried it away into my present exile, but for May and the first half of June there appears a black, undecipherable smudge that my memory tells me should represent a long succession of late nights and crowded days. Individual items are blurred out of recognition; my general sense of the period is that I pretended to be preternaturally young, and was punished by being made to feel prematurely old.
It was the busiest part of the London season, and Gladys appeared to receive cards for an average of three balls a night on five nights of the week. I accompanied her everywhere,
growing gradually broken to the work and relieved of my more serious responsibilities by the fact that Philip Roden was too busy at the House to waste his nights in a ball-room. We seemed to move in the midst of a stage army, the same few hundred men, women, and dowagers reappearing in an endless march-past. With the advent of the big hotels, hospitality had changed in character since the days when I counted myself a Londoner: there was more of it and it was less hospitable. The rising generation, and more particularly the female portion of it, seemed to have taken matters into its own hands.
Regularly each morning, after a late breakfast, Gladys would set me to write a series of common-form letters: “Dear Mr. Blank,” I would say, “My niece and I shall be so pleased if you will dine with us here tonight at 8.30 and go on to Lady Anonym’s ball.” Then Gladys would bring unknowing guest and unknown hostess into communication. “Can I speak to Lady Anonym?” I would hear her call down the telephone. “Oh, good morning! I say, do you think you could possibly do with another man for your ball tonight? Honest? It is sweet of you. Oh, quite a nice thing—Mr. Incognito Blank, 101, Utopia Chambers, St. James. Thanks, most awfully. Oh no, not him, he’s the most awful stiff; this is a dear thing. Well, I would have, only he’s only just got back to England, he’s been shooting big game.…”
This was the retail method. In the case of intimate friends, Gladys would be encouraged to send in her own list of desirable invitees. Because I am old-fashioned and unacquainted with English ways, I trust I am not inaccessible to new ideas. I would carry the policy of promiscuity to its logical conclusion. An announcement in the Times with draft ménu, name of band and programme of music—even a placard outside Claridge’s—would save endless postage and stationery, and could not pack the ball-room tighter than on a dozen occasions I remember. Hostesses who believe that numbers are the soul of hospitality, could be certain beforehand of the success of their efforts; superior young men would continue to remark, “Society gettin’ very mixed, what?” exactly as they have done ever since I entered my first ball-room at the age of seventeen. Everybody, in short, would be pleased.
We saw a good deal of Sylvia during those weeks, as for reasons of her own she would frequently drop in at Pont Street and conduct her share of the arrangements over our telephone. Occasionally Gladys would be called in as an accomplice, I would hear “Mr. Aintree’s” name added to Lady Anonym’s list, and Gladys would remark with fine carelessness, “Oh, just send him the card, if you will; don’t bother to say who it comes from.” The Seraph may have suspected, but he never had documentary proof of the originating cause of some of his invitations.
In making our arrangements for Commemoration, I decided to take the greater part of my charges to Oxford by road. Robin, of course, was still in residence, and Philip promised to come down by the first possible train. Gladys, Sylvia, the Seraph, and a pis-aller of Robin’s named Cynthia Bargrave constituted my flock; we motored quietly down to Henley, where we lunched and chartered a houseboat for the Regatta, and arrived in Oxford with ample time for the three girls to have a comfortable rest before dinner. I made rather a point of this, as they were going to have three very tiring days and would naturally wish to look their best; moreover, I wanted to roam round the town with the Seraph.
Even Oxford, that I thought could never alter, had changed during my years of absence. The little, nameless back-street colleges I would gladly sacrifice to the Destroyer, for they serve no purpose beyond that of breeding proctors, and I know we counted it an indignity to be fined by the scion of a college we had to reach by cab. But the High should have been inviolate; there wanted no new colleges breaking through its immemorial sides.… Univ. men, standing at their lodge gate and looking northward, have told me the High already contains one college in excess.
While the Seraph sought out Robin’s rooms in Canterbury, I wandered through the college—guiltily, I admit—looking for traces of a popular outbreak that occurred when a ball took place at Blenheim and House men asked in vain for leave to attend it. In time I came to my own old rooms in Tom, and gazed rather in sorrow than anger at the strange new name painted over the door. Twice my fingers went to the handle, twice I told myself that “Mr. R.F. Davenant” had as much right to privacy as I should have claimed in his place.… I wandered out through Tom Gate, across St. Aldates, and down Brewer Street to those pleasant digs in Micklem Hall, where I once spent an all-too-short twelve months. Then I returned to college, crept furtively back to the old familiar door, knocked, listened, entered.…
“R.F. Davenant” was far more civil than I should have been at a like intrusion. He showed me round the rooms, offered me whisky and cigarettes, wanted to know when I had been up, whether I was going to the Gaudy.… We were friends in a minute. I liked his fair, neatly-parted hair and clean, fresh colouring; I liked his Meissonier artist proofs; I liked the way the left back leg of the sofa collapsed unless you underpinned it with a Liddle and Scott. Not a thing was changed but the photographs on the mantelpiece. I walked over and surveyed them critically. Then one of those things happened that convince me an idle Quixotic Providence is watching over my least movements: I was staring at the picture of a girl on horseback when he volunteered the information that it was his sister.
“Your married sister?” I suggested.
“Do you know her?”
He fed me on Common-room tea and quarter-pound wedges of walnut cake. Joyce was coming up for two of the three balls I was attending, coming unprovided with partners to chaperone some girl who had captured her brother’s wandering fancy. These elder sisters earn more crowns than they are ever accorded; it seemed that Joyce who trampled on the world would stretch herself out to be trampled on by her heedless only brother. I wonder wherein the secret lies.
“Come and dine,” suggested Dick Davenant.
I told him of my own party, and lost no time in working the Cumberland days with his father for all they were worth. What happened to the Seraph I never discovered. As I hurried back to the Randolph for dinner, Robin met me with an apology in advance for the dull evening before me.
“’Fraid you’ll have rather a rotten time,” he opined. “I wish you had let me find you some old snag or other.”
“I shall be all right, Robin,” I said.
“There’s sure to be bridge somewhere. Or look here, what about a roulette-board? Combine business with pleasure—what?”
“I shall be able to amuse myself,” I assured him.
Our dinner that night was one of the gayest meals I have eaten; we were all expectant, excited, above our usual form—with the single exception of Philip. If I were a woman, I suppose I should notice these things; as it was I put his silent preoccupation down to overwork. When he approached Robin with other-world gentleness and suggested a stroll up St. Giles after dinner “just to keep me company, old boy,” I ought to have suspected something; but it was not till the Seraph, smoking a lonely cigar, murmured something about “Consul videat ne respublica detrimentum capiat,” that I saw my authority over Gladys was being threatened.
The girls had been despatched for their last mysterious finishing touches, and we had the hall of the Randolph to ourselves.
“What the deuce ought I to do, Seraph?” I asked.
“What can you do?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why do anything?”
That is the question I always ask myself when I have no definite idea what is expected of me.
“I wish he’d had the consideration to wait till my brother came back,” I grumbled.
“These little emotional crises never do wait till we’re ready for them, do they?”
“From the fulness of the heart.…”
“Oh, pardon me, I was not speaking of myself.”
“I thought you were.”
The Seraph shook his head at me.
“No, you didn’t. You aren’t thinking of me, or Gladys, or Phili
p, or any one but your own self.”
I hypnotised a waiter into taking my order for Benedictine.
“No emotional crises have come my way,” I protested.
“Something very curious has happened to you since we parted this afternoon.”
I accounted for every moment of my time since our arrival in Oxford.
“Why didn’t you tell me that before?” he exclaimed when I mentioned my chance meeting with Dick Davenant. “Joyce coming up for the ball? Will you…? No! sorry.”
“Will I what?”
“It’s no business of mine.”
“Why d’you start talking about it, then? Will I what?”
The Seraph knocked the ash off his cigar, finished his coffee, and sat silent. I repeated my question.
“Well.…” he hesitated nervously. “Are you going to propose to her tonight?”
“Really, Seraph!”
“You’re going to—some time or other.…”
“Don’t talk nonsense!”
“…I was wondering if it would be tonight.”
I felt myself growing rather annoyed and uncomfortable.
“Not very good form to talk like this,” I said stiffly. “After all, she’s a friend of yours and mine. A joke’s all very well.…”
“But I’m quite serious!”
“My dear Seraph, d’you appreciate that I’ve met the girl once—a few weeks ago—and once only since she was a child of five?”
“Oh yes. And do you remember my telling you what was bringing you back to England? Do you remember the impression she made on you that night? If you’re going to marry her.…”
“Seraph, drop it!”
He withdrew into his shell, and we smoked without speaking until I began to be sorry for snubbing him.
“I didn’t mean to be rude,” I said apologetically. “But she’s a nice girl; I may see her tonight for all I know to the contrary, and this coupling of names.… You see my point?”
The Seraph suddenly developed a nervous, excited earnestness.
“Let me give you a word of advice. If you’re going to propose to her—oh, all right; if X. is going to propose to her, he’d better do it now—before the crash comes. There’s going to be a very big crash; she’s going down under it. If you—if X. proposed now, she might be got out of the way before it’s too late. You—X. won’t like to see the woman he’s going to marry.…”
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