by E. F. Benson
She held up her skirt with one hand, and gave him the other.
“We must be off, my Antony,” she said.
They got into the cab; a somewhat jaded-looking horse was lashed into a slow and mournful trot, and they rattled away down the hard, dry road.
A queue of carriages was already waiting to disembark its cargoes when they drew near the house, and leaning furtively and feverishly from the window, Mrs. Ames saw a Hamlet or two and some Titanias swiftly and shyly cross the pavement between two rows of the astonished proletariat. Beside her in the cab her husband grunted and fidgeted; she guessed that to him this entrance was of the nature of bathing on a cold day; however invigorating might be the subsequent swim, the plunge was chilly. But she little knew the true cause of his embarrassment and apprehension; had his military career ever entailed (which it had not) the facing of fire, it was probable, though his courage was of no conspicuous a kind, that he would have met the guns with greater blitheness than he awaited the moment that now inevitably faced him. Then came their turn; there was a pause, and then their carriage door was flung open, and they descended from the innocent vehicle that to him was as portentous as a tumbril. In a moment Cleopatra would meet Cleopatra, and he could form no idea how either Cleopatra would take it. The Cleopatra-hostess, as he knew, was going to wear sandals also; snakes were to writhe up her long white arms. . . .
Mrs. Ames adjusted the pear-shaped pearl on her forehead.
“I think if we say half-past one it will be late enough, Lyndhurst,” she said. “If we are not ready he can wait.”
It seemed to Lyndhurst that half-past one would probably be quite late enough.
The assemblage of guests took place in the drawing-room which opened into the garden; a waiter from the “Crown” inn, with a chin beard and dressed in a sort of white surplice and carrying a lantern in his hand, who might with equal reasonableness be supposed to be the Man in the Moon out of the Midsummer Night’s Dream, or a grave-digger out of Hamlet, said “Character names, please, ma’am,” and preceded them to the door of this chamber. He bawled out “Cleopatra and Mark Antony.”
Another Cleopatra, a “different conception of this part,” as the Kent Chronicle said in its next issue, a Cleopatra dim and white and willowy, advanced to them. She looked vexed, but as she ran her eyes up and down Mrs. Ames’ figure, like a practised pianist playing a chromatic scale, her vexation seemed completely to clear.
“Dear Cousin Amy,” she said, “how perfectly lovely! I never saw — Wilfred, make your bow to Cleopatra. And Antony! Oh, Major Ames!”
Again she made the chromatic scale, starting at the top, so to speak (his face), with a long note, and dwelling there again when she returned to it.
Other arrivals followed, and this particular Antony and Cleopatra mingled with such guests as were already assembled. The greater part had gathered, and Mrs. Ames’ habitual manner and bearing suited excellently with her regal role. The Turner family, at any rate, who were standing a little apart from the others, not being quite completely “in” Riseborough society, and, feeling rather hot and feverish in the thick brocaded stuffs suitable to Falstaff, Mistress Page and King Theseus, felt neither more nor less uncomfortable when she made a few complimentary remarks to them than they did when, with her fat prayer-book in her hand, she spoke to them after church on Sunday. Elsewhere young Morton, with a white face and a red nose, was the traditional Apothecary, and Mrs. Taverner was so copiously apparalled as Queen Catherine that she was looking forward very much indeed to the moment when the procession should go forth into the greater coolness of the night air. Then a stentorian announcement from the waiter at the Crown made every one turn again to the door.
“Antony and Cleopatra ten years later,” he shouted.
There was a slight pause. Then entered Mr. and Mrs. Altham with high-held hands clasped at fingertips. They both stepped rather high, she holding her skirt away from her feet, and both pointing their toes as if performing a pavanne. This entry had been much rehearsed, and it was arresting to the point of producing a sort of stupefaction.
Mrs. Evans ran her eye up and down the pair, and was apparently satisfied.
“Dear Mrs. Altham,” she said, “how perfectly lovely! And Mr. Altham. But ten years later! You must not ask us to believe that.”
She turned to her husband and spoke quickly, with a look on her face less amiable than she usually wore in public.
“Wilfred,” she said, “tell the band to begin the opening march at once for the procession, in case there are any more—”
But he interrupted —
“Here’s another, Millie,” he said cheerfully. “Yes, we’d better begin.”
His speech was drowned by the voice of the brazen-lunged waiter.
“Cleopatra!” he shouted.
Mrs. Brooks entered with all the rows of seed-pearls.
Riseborough, if the census papers were consulted, might perhaps not prove to have an abnormally large percentage of inhabitants who had reached middle-age, but certainly in the festivities of its upper circles, maturity held an overwhelming majority over youth. It was so to-night, and of the half-hundred folk who thus masqueraded, there were few who were not, numerically speaking, of thoroughly discreet years. The diffused knowledge of this undoubtedly gave confidence to their gaiety, for there was no unconscious standard of sterling youth by which their slightly mature exhilaration could be judged and found deficient in genuine and natural effervescence. Thus, despite the somewhat untoward conjunction of four matronly Cleopatras, a spirit of extraordinary gaiety soon possessed the entire party. Odious comparisons might conceivably spring up mushroom-like tomorrow, and (unmushroom-like) continue to wax and flourish through many days and dinners, but to-night so large an environment of elderly people gave to every one of those elderly people a pleasant sense of not suffering but rather shining in comparison with the others. Even the Cleopatras themselves were content; Mrs. Ames, for instance, saw how sensible it was that Mrs. Altham should announce herself as a Cleopatra of ten years later, while Mrs. Altham, observing Mrs. Ames, saw how supererogatory her titular modesty had been, and wondered that Mrs. Ames cared to show her feet like that, while Mrs. Brooks knew that everybody was mentally contrasting her queenliness of height with Mrs. Ames’ paucity of inches, and her abundance of beautiful hair with Mrs. Altham’s obvious wig. While, all the time, Mrs. Evans, whom the appearance of a fourth Cleopatra had considerably upset for the moment, felt that at this rate she could easily continue being Cleopatra for more years than “the ten after,” so properly assumed by Mrs. Altham. In the same way Major Ames, with his six feet of solid English bone and muscle, and his fifth decade of years still but half-consumed, felt that Mr. Altham had but provided a scale of comparison uncommonly flattering to himself. Simultaneously, Mr. Altham, with a laurel-wreath round his head, reflected how uncomfortable he would have felt if his laurel-wreath was anchored on no sounder a foundation than a wig, and wondered if gardening (on the principle that all flesh is grass) invariably resulted in so great a growth of tissue. But all these pleasant self-communings were, indeed, but a minor tributary to the real river of enjoyment that danced and chattered through the starlit hours of this July night. Somehow the whole assembly seemed to have shifted off themselves the natural and inevitable burden of their years; they danced and mildly flirted, they sat out in the dim shrubbery, and played on the sea-shore of life again, finding the sand-castles had become real once more. Mrs. Ames, for instance, had intended to dance nothing but the opening quadrille, but before the second dance, which was a waltz, had come to a close, she had accepted Mr. Altham’s offer, and was slowly capering round with him. A little care was necessary in order not to put too unjust a strain on the sandal straps, but she exercised this precaution, and was sorry, though hot, when the dance came to an end. Then Major Ames, who had been piloting Mrs. Altham, joined them at the moselle-cup table.
“‘Pon my word, Altham,” he said, “I don’t know what to say to
you. You’ve taken my Cleopatra, but then I’ve taken yours. Exchange no robbery, hey?”
His wife tapped him on the arm with her palmette fan.
“Lyndhurst, go along with you!” she said, employing an expression, the mental equivalent of which she did not know ever existed in her mind.
“I’ll go along,” he said. “But which is my Cleopatra?”
At the moment, Mrs. Evans approached.
“My two Cleopatras must excuse me,” said this amazing man. “I am engaged for this next dance to the Cleopatra of us all. Ha! Ha!”
He offered his arm to Mrs. Evans, and they went out of the cave of the mulberry-tree again.
The band had not yet struck up for the next dance, the majority of the guests were flocking under the mulberry-tree at the conclusion of the last, and for the moment they had the cool starlit dusk to themselves. And then, all at once, the Major’s sense of boisterous enjoyment deserted him; he felt embarrassed with a secret knowledge that he was expected to say something in tune with this privacy. How that expectation was conveyed he hardly knew; the slight pressure on his arm seemed to announce it unmistakably. It reminded him that he was a man, and yet with all that gaiety and gallantry that were so conspicuous a feature in his behaviour to women in public, he felt awkward and ill at ease. He embarked on a course of desperate and fulsome eulogy, longing in his private soul for the band to begin.
“‘Pon my soul, you are an enchantress, Millie!” he said. “You come to our staid, respectable old Riseborough, and before you have been here six months you take us all into fairyland. Positively fairyland. And — and I’ve never seen you looking so lovely as to-night.”
“Let us stroll all round the garden,” she said. “I want you to see it all now it is lit up. And the shrubbery is pretty, too, with — with the filter of starlight coming through the trees. Do tell me truthfully, like a friend, is it going all right? Are they enjoying themselves?”
“Kicking up their heels like two-year-olds,” said Major Ames.
“How wicked of you to say that! But really I had one bad moment, when — when the last Cleopatra came in.”
She paused a moment. Then in her clear, silky voice —
“Dear old things!” she said.
Now Mrs. Evans was not in any way a clever woman, but had she had the brains and the wit of Cleopatra herself, she could not have spoken three more consummately chosen words. All the cool, instinctive confidence of a younger woman, and a pretty woman speaking of the more elderly and plain was there; there, too, was the deliberate challenge of the coquette. And Major Ames was quite helpless against the simplicity of such art. Mere manners, the ordinary code of politeness, demanded that he should agree with his hostess. Besides, though he was not in any way in love with her, he could not resist the assumption that her words implied, and, after all, she was a pretty woman, whom he had kissed, and he was alone in the star-hung dusk with her.
“Poor dear Amy!” he said.
Millie Evans gave a soft little sigh, as of a contented child. He had expressed with the most ruthless accuracy exactly what she wished him to feel. Then, in the manner of a woman whose nature is warped throughout by a slight but ingrained falsity, she spoke as if it was not she who had prompted the three words which she had almost made him say.
“She is enjoying herself so,” she said. “I have never seen Cousin Amy look so thoroughly pleased and contented. I thought she looked so charming, too, and what dear, plump little feet she has. But, my dear, it was rather a surprise when you and she were announced. It looked as if this poor Cleopatra was going to be Antony-less! Dear me, what a word.”
Here was a more direct appeal, and again Major Ames was powerless in her soft clutch. Hers was not exactly an iron hand in a velvet glove, but a hand made of fly-catching paper. She had taken her glove off now. And he was beginning to stick to her.
“Pshaw!” he said.
That, again, had a perfectly satisfactory sound to her ears. The very abruptness and bluffness of it pleased her more than any protestation could have done. He was so direct, so shy, so manly.
She laughed softly.
“Hush, you mustn’t say those things,” she said. “Ah, there is the band beginning, and it is our dance. But let us just walk through the shrubbery before we go back. The dusk and quiet are such a relief after the glare. Lyndhurst — ah, dear me. Cousin Lyndhurst I ought to say — you really must not go home till my little dance is quite finished. You make things go so well. Dear Wilfred is quite useless to me. Does he not look an old darling as Timon of Athens? A sort of mixture between George the Fourth in tights and a lion-tamer.”
Mrs. Evans was feeling more actively alive to-night than she had felt for years. Her tongue, which was generally a rather halting adjutant to her glances and little sinuous movements, was almost vivified to wit. Certainly her description of her husband had acuteness and a sense of the ludicrous to inspire it. Through the boughs of laburnums in the shrubbery they could see him now, escorting the tallest and oldest Cleopatra, who was Mrs. Brooks, to the end of the garden. Dimly, through the curtain of intervening gloom, they saw the populous wooden floor that had been laid down on the grass; Mrs. Ames — the dance was a polka — was frankly pirouetting in the arms of a redoubtable Falstaff. Mrs. Altham was wrestling with the Apothecary, and Elsie Evans, one of the few young people present, was vainly trying to galvanize General Fortescue, thinly disguised as Henry VII, into some semblance of activity.
Mrs. Evans gave another sigh, a sigh of curious calibre.
“It all seems so distant,” she said. “All the lights and dancing are less real than the shadows and the stillness.”
That was not quite extemporaneous; she had thought over something of the sort. It had the effect of making Major Ames feel suddenly hot with an anxious kind of heat. He was beginning to perceive the truth of that which he had foppishly imagined in his own self-communings, namely, that this “poor little lady” was very, very much attached to him. He had often dwelt on the thought before with odious self-centred satisfaction; now the thought was less satisfactory; it was disquieting and mildly alarming. Like the fly on the fly-paper, with one leg already englued, he put down a second to get leverage with which to free the first, and found that it was adhering also.
Mrs. Evans spoke again.
“I took such pleasure in all the preparations.” she said. “You were so much interested in it all. Tell me, Cousin Lyndhurst, that you are not disappointed.”
It was hardly possible for him to do less than what he did. What he did was little enough. He pressed the arm that lay in his rather close to his white toga, and an unwonted romanticism of speech rose to his lips.
“You have enchanted me,” he said. “Me, us, all of us.”
She gave a little laugh; in the dusk it sounded no louder than a breeze stirring.
“You needn’t have added that,” she said.
Where she stood a diaper of light and shadow played over her. A little spray of laburnum between her face and the lights on the lawn outside, swaying gently in a breeze that had gone astray in this calm night, cast wavering shadows over her. Now her arms shone white under freckles of shadow, now it was her face that was a moon to him. Or again, both would be in shade and a diamond star on her bright yellow hair concentrated all the light into itself. All the elusive mysterious charm of her womanhood was there, made more real by the fantastic setting. He was kindled to a greater warmth than he had yet known, but, all the time, some dreadful creature in his semi-puritanical semi-immoral brain, told him that this was all “devilish naughty.” He was as unused to such scruples as he was unused to such temptations, and in some curious fashion he felt as ashamed of the one as he felt afraid of the other. At length he summed up the whole of these despicable conclusions.
“Will you give me just one kiss, Millie!” he said; “just one cousin-kiss, before we go and dance?”
Such early worms next morning in Major Ames’ garden as had escaped the early bird, must
certainly have all been caught and laid out flat by the garden roller, so swift and incessant were its journeyings. For though the dawn had overspread the sky with the hueless tints of approaching day when Antony and Cleopatra were charioteered home again by a somnolent cabman; though Major Ames’ repose had been of the most fragmentary kind, and though breakfast, in anticipation of late hours, had been ordered the night before at an unusual half-past nine, he found his bed an intolerable abode by seven o’clock, and had hoped to expatriate somewhat disquieting thoughts from his mind by the application of his limbs to severe bodily exertion.
He and his wife had been the last guests to leave; indeed, after the others had gone they lingered a little, smoking a final cigarette. Even Mrs. Ames had been persuaded to light one, but a convulsive paroxysm of coughing, which made the pear-shaped pearl to quiver and shake like an aspen-leaf, led her to throw it away, saying she enjoyed it very much. He had danced with Mrs. Evans three or four times; three or four times they had sat in the cool darkness of the shrubbery, and he had said to her several things which at the moment it seemed imperative to say, but which he did not really mean. But as the evening went on he had meant them more; she had a helpless, childlike charm about her that began to stir his senses. And yet below that childlike confiding manner he was dimly aware that there was an eager woman’s soul that sought him. Her charm was a weapon; a very efficient will wielded it. All the same, he reflected as the honest dews of toil poured from his forehead this morning in the hot early sunlight, he had not said very much . . . he had said that Riseborough was a different place since she — or had he said “they”? had come there; that her eyes looked black in the starlight, that — honestly, he could not remember anything more intimate than this. But that which had made his bed intolerable was the sense that the situation had not terminated last night, that his boat, so to speak, had not been drawn up safely ashore, but was still in the midst of accelerating waters. And yet it was in his own power to draw the boat ashore at any moment; he had but to take a decisive stroke to land, to step out and beach it, to return — surely it was not difficult — to his normal thoughts and activities. For years his garden, his club, his domestic concerns, his daily paper, had provided him with a sufficiency of pursuits; he had but to step back into their safe if monotonous circle, and look upon these disturbances as episodic. But already he had ceased to think of Mrs. Evans as “dear little woman” or “poor little woman”; somehow it seemed as if she had got her finger — to use a prosaic metaphor — into his works. She was prodding about among the internal wheels and springs of his mechanism. Yet that was stating his case too strongly; it was that of contingency that he was afraid. But with the curious irresponsibility of a rather selfish and unimaginative man, the fact that he had allowed himself to prod about in her internal mechanism represented itself to him as an unimportant and negligible detail. It was only when she began prodding about in him, producing, as it were, extraordinary little whirrings and racings of wheels that had long gone slow and steady, that he began to think that anything significant was occurring. But, after all, there was nothing like a pull at the garden roller for giving a fellow an appetite for breakfast and for squashing worms and unprofitable reflections.