by E. F. Benson
Robin listened, and as he listened, stiffened slightly.
“Oh, yes,” he said, with so icy a politeness that his mother instantly guessed to whom he was speaking. “Yes, I’m afraid that she’s particularly engaged just now.”
Lady Grote got up.
“Hold on a minute, Robin,” she said. “I want to say one word to Mr. Kuhlmann.”
Robin very rudely made what is called “a face” at his mother, and replaced the receiver with so great a peremptoriness that he chipped a piece of enamel off it.
“Darling, you’ve got no manners,” she said.
“I know. Badly brought up. But, then, you see I’ve got you for the present. And then it’s the turn of the undertaker. But I wish you would come on the river instead.”
“But, darling, Mr. Pantitzi with — with his plumes and his coffin. Don’t insist.”
“Will you come if I insist?” asked the boy.
“I suppose so. What a bully you are! No one else in the wide world treats me like that. Go away, while I finish dressing and explaining to Mr. Pantitzi. We won’t take anyone else, shall we?”
“Not even Mr. Kuhlmann,” said Robin confidently.
Some twenty more guests came down from London that morning in time for lunch, to spend the afternoon, dine and scurry back to town again by train or motor that evening, since the sleeping accommodation of the house was already taxed to its limit. Mrs. Pounce, very nearly covered with pearls, glided about from group to group as they sat in the loggia, or beneath the big awning that covered in one end of the terrace, as if moving on castors, and steadily and relentlessly worked her way into introduction to and conversation with anyone whom she did not know who was worth knowing. There was an excursion in the steam launch five miles up the river to where another hostess was keeping open Sunday, and a party of her guests came down the river to have tea at Grote. Some played lawn tennis, and since the man who had just won the open championship at Wimbledon was among the Sunday arrivals, there was a sort of queue of incompetent but eager ladies to be his partner, and the poor young man, who would far more contentedly have sat in the shade, and flirted desperately with each of his partners for the period of a set, was obliged to play for some four hours on end.
Others were taken to a golf links some twenty miles distant and indulged in mixed foursomes, and the more sedentary, having exhausted the current scandalous topics, made up bridge-tables in the loggia. A troop of servants hovered about all afternoon with trays of cigarettes and iced drinks in long glasses, to give support and stimulant to the hours that intervened between lunch and tea, between tea and dinner.
A fever of mere living, a determination to make the most out of the present moment, whether bridge or scandal or games were the tincture in which the present moment was administered, pervaded the huge, extravagant restaurant, in which were collected the prettiest women and the most notable men who at the moment were the cream on that great saturated tipsy-cake called “the great world,” as opposed to the world generally.
From all nations, peoples and languages were they gathered together; France, Germany and Russia all sent representatives to this court of Mayfair, which was as exclusive in one sense as it was democratic in another. For into other courts any successful grocer and his wife can penetrate and make their obeisance, provided they have wealth, benevolence and respectability to be their sponsors, but mere benevolence and respectability were as powerless as unweaned babes to secure an entry on to Lady Grote’s lawn. So, too, was mere birth; the door was shut courteously but perfectly firmly in the face of anyone whose sole claim to coming in was something to do with William the Conqueror or Plantagenets generally; Lady Grote, in fact, was very exclusive in her hospitalities towards her own class, which, as a rule, consider it to be its right not so much to be excluded but to exclude.
On the other hand, as opposed to the usual procedure of less notable courts, the complete absence of anything approaching respectability was by no means a bar to entrance, though dullness, just ordinary, uncriminal, respectable dullness, quite unaccustomed in other places to be turned away, was here ejected with remarkable swiftness. But wealth, given that it was of Pounce-like proportions, here as elsewhere could show a ticket of admittance, even when totally unaccompanied by benevolence and respectability, for wealth in sufficient quantities had, in Lady Grote’s mind, a certain distinction: it implied power....
Wealth, indeed, to-day was considerably represented, and notable blends from America, Germany and (originally) Palestine could, by forming a small Semitie syndicate, have bought up the rest of the crowd, had it been for sale. Not to mention Mrs. Pounce, Sir Isaae Levison was there, playing bridge for extremely small points and almost squealing with dismay when his partner, greatly daring, incurred penalties. Lady Gurtner was there, too; she had two valid claims for admittance, the first of which was the really colossal wealth of her husband, Sir Hermann Gurtner, a German Jew, like in appearance to a small London fog, all black and yellow; the second her own almost lascivious enjoyment of the circles into which she had so firmly and industriously climbed. Like all her sisterhood, she had a speciality to attract people to her house beyond mere food and magnificent tapestries, for with a good deal of acumen, on her entry into London life but a few years ago, she had foreseen a “boom” in poetry, and made her house an absolute Parnassus. There all the bards, French, English and German, congregated, and read aloud their latest productions. Nobody, or very few at the most, really cared about poetry, bad good, or indifferent, but in a certain prominent set in London it was the fashion to simulate a passion for verse, and on the “viewless wings of poesy,” with this set as pilots, she soared with prodigious rapidity. In bright blue stockings, assumed for the purpose of flight, she mounted into the blue, and now being able to pick and choose her friends, instead of having eagerly to welcome anybody who would come, she was beginning to throw both the poetical set and the poets overboard like ballast, for she found there were others whom poetry, especially the recitation of it after dinner, when they preferred poker, positively kept away.
She was a very good linguist, being German on her mother’s side, and having lived much as a girl in France, and before Sir Hermann married her had been a governess in a family, where, as is the custom with governesses, she did not come down to dinner. Now, by the revolution of the wheel of fate, she was able to ask her late employers to dinner, and send them in towards the tail of her more resplendent guests. She was a snob of purest ray serene, and dressed her tall and beautiful figure in the most amazing gowns.
Sir Hermann had lately built an enormous house in Curzon Street, and had furnished it with anything in the way of tapestry, lacquer, Louis XV., and old oak that was expensive enough. There was no taste of any sort exercised over his purchases; the only point was that they should be extremely costly, and in consequence the whole house resembled a museum. He spoke German with an English accent, French with a German accent and English with a Yiddish accent. But he spoke all three sparingly, for he had nothing much to say in any of them.
To-day Lady Gurtner had brought down a young Neapolitan poet on Lady Grote’s invitation, who recited some amorous outpourings of his own to an enraptured audience, who understood not a word he was saying, for he shouted and whispered and bellowed and hissed in the dialect of the Neapolitan Camorra, of which society he was a prominent and active member. But it was wildly exciting to see anybody get so excited, especially since it was a sort of Apollo who raved, and he was further notable for having killed his wife, whom he passionately adored, for the very best of motives. These stanzas were addressed to her, and when he came to the last line in which he told her that her last hour was come, he gave a wild scream (which so startled the tennis-champion that he served a double fault) and burst into a torrent of tears. This was immensely thrilling, and he was a great success until, on his being sufficiently comforted by Lady Gurtner and a friend or two of the poetical fanatics, whose hands he grasped so hard that they were covered wit
h bruises next day, he proceeded to console himself further by getting drunk, and was in consequence unable to appear at dinner. But he had done his “stunt,” he had contributed his quota of excitement, and it did not particularly matter what happened to him afterwards, for nobody really wanted to hear “Giustizia” again.
It was Lady Grote’s amiable custom to devote some portion of the hours to each of her guests after the morning, which she claimed as her own, and since she had not yet had a word with Mr. Boyton she took him for a short stroll in the woods above the river in the half hour before dinner. Sunset flamed between the powdered trunks of the beech-trees, but the river in the valley below, from which the light had been withdrawn, lay like a broad riband of pale green, reflecting the sky above the flaming west.
His admiration for her was perfectly sincere, his expression of it verged on the dithyrambic, because that was his habit of speech when he paid his florid tributes to the aristocracy, and because he also wished, if possible, to get an invitation for next Sunday, when, so he had ascertained, some very august people were expected.
“I want to applaud you, my dear lady,” he said, “every moment of the exquisite day that I pass here. If I followed my inclination, my hands would be mere ribands of raw flesh before evening. Like some celestial and magical amalgam you weld into a complete whole the amazingly different units that come here to pay you homage. Why is it that no one else has the smallest idea of how to do it, or, to put it differently, how is it that you have so complete a recipe for making us all homogeneous?”
Lady Grote, for all her splendour, was the most modest of mankind, but she rather liked other people being immodest, so to speak, about her.
“Oh, Mr. Boyton,” she said, “do you think they are really enjoying themselves? If they are, it has nothing to do with me—”
He interrupted.
“Let us instantly find a horse-marine,” he said, “to whom to confide that astounding information. Where is a horse-marine; I insist on a horse-marine being produced without delay. You arc like that industrious conjurer whom I remember seeing in ancient clays at the Egyptian Hall, who kept with a touch of his cleft hand half a dozen plates and a washing basin all miraculously dancing together on a small table without pause or collision. You have the touch — nature is it, or art? I suspect the consummate art that counterfeits nature — the touch that makes the whole world grin. We, cross-grained people, are just a collection of smiles when we are here. And what a supreme collection! I, the commonest, of your specimens, cannot help swelling with scarcely decent exultation at the fact that for the moment I belong to it. Think of them! Lord Thorley moving about in worlds not realized. I always feel inclined to address him, ‘Come down, O maid, from yonder mountain height.’ There is something virginal about that beautiful, aloof mind.”
She laughed.
“I saw him revoke just now at bridge,” she said. “That was human of him.”
“No, I take it the other way round. He was soaring somewhere on eagle’s wings; his revoke was but a moulted feather, an eagle’s feather that fluttered down from the empyrean. But I insist on going on with the survey of your spinning plates. There is our dear Duchess, whom I take to be no other than an incarnation of La Grande Bretagne out on a bank holiday. There is Monsieur Pelleton, who no less surely stands for France, and there is Sir Hermann Gurtner, who, although he plays bridge by the Thames, is no less surely the spirit of the ‘Watch by the Rhine,’ for the moment, it is true, asleep. There is Mrs. Pounce, in whom we are right to behold the States of America united in one small and imperfectly constructed human frame, for the shortness of her legs is as remarkable as the length of her tongue. There is Geoffrey Bellingham, in whose eyes abide the visions of Velasquez, and in whose mouth a confused noise welters; there is Kuhlmann, in whose mouth Song itself makes its home, and in whose eyes, as far as I can judge, a wild eat. And each of these great personages requires, in the ordinary way, a whole stage to himself, with a mute and enthralled audience. But here they are merely harmonious and humble spectators, who but rise from their seats to applaud.”
Mr. Boyton outlined this brilliant little sketch in the manner of a lightning artist at a music-hall. It seemed dashed in with all the effervescent charm of an improvisation, but behind the improvisation, just as in the case of the music-hall artist, there had been much quiet study in the composition of its neat phrasing. But it came out fresh as the milky-green of the beech foliage above him.
“Ah, but you have left out Robin and Mrs. Lockwater,” said Lady Grote. “Do say something delicious about Robin.”
“Just now they appeared to be enacting the fable of Endymion and the Moon in reversed rôles,” said Mr. Boyton. “Robin as Endymion was attempting to wake up the Moon. The Moon appeared gratified but drowsy.”
“That will do; that is charming. Robin is the most awful flirt. He has always got a moon on hand, which changes with remarkable rapidity. But we must get back, I am afraid; it is nearly dinner-time. Don’t dress, Mr. Boyton, unless you feel inclined. There are lots of people going back to town after dinner who won’t.”
“I am not among them. I shall certainly dress to show that I am staying here. And you go to town to-morrow?”
“Yes, till Saturday, when some other people are kind enough to come down here.”
“How kind of them; how remarkably kind!” he said. “It is most self-sacrificing of them. I shall picture them this time next week, those unfortunate guests of yours, boring themselves down here, while I stew in town.”
There was more than a hint conveyed here, and with the utmost good nature she took it.
“Ah, do come and bore yourself, too,” she said. “Come down on Sunday. I wish I could ask you to stay, but we are quite full.”
“My dear lady, it is too kind of you. I have warned you before that I am utterly incapable of refusing any invitation from you.”
“That is charming, then; I shall expect you. Look, we are going to have a little illumination to-night on the terrace. I think it will look rather pretty. Or will it be too like a railway station with green lights and red lights, and a large crowd having dinner in the refreshment-room, which is the loggia, and then rushing away in different directions? Basle railway station, you know, where everybody eats in a great hurry and then disperses to Germany and Switzerland and France. I rather adore railway stations; there is a sense of movement.”
“There is that very often on the Channel,” said he. “But your illuminations are charming. They altogether extinguish the rather sad light which comes at the beginning and end of every day.”
“I know. I dislike the twilight in the evening. It reminds one that there’s a day gone. It’s like the curtain coming down at the end of a play. But the morning twilight I love; that is the curtain going up on the first act. Something is going to happen, and you don’t know what. In the evening something has happened, and you do know what.”
“In this instance a perfectly charming day has happened,” said he.
“That is nice of you. But nothing quite comes up to what you expect of it. The evening is the sadder light.”
“I have heard — I do not know with what truth—” said he, “that there are people so fortunate as to experience very agreeable sensations after sunset.” This was thoroughly Boytonian, the sort of thing that made people laugh at their own thoughts. But on this occasion her own thoughts did not amuse her. They were too serious.
CHAPTER VI
LADY GURTNER felt on this July evening that she had “arrived,” and her face at the end of her table, flushed with triumph, was like the harvest moon over the fields where she had sowed and reaped. She had not precisely sowed in tears, nor had she watered her springing fields with them, for tears do not in the crop she was raising, produce any kind of result, but she had sowed early and late, with winter wheat and summer wheat, spring and autumn, in poetry gatherings, in dinners and concerts and operas and weekends, and to-night she felt definitely that her harvest was reaped
and her barns stacked with golden grain.
All her sowings had helped her, even the poetry-sowings which she had altogether abandoned when she perceived that poetry was considered a nuisance by all but a very small and rather weird and curious set of falsetto people, and to-night, poetry, as a climbing ladder, was represented only by an ancient light who looked rather the worse for wear and want of washing. She had even asked one or two people “to be kind to the poor Duchess,” for she was sure that Constance Hampshire was not accustomed to shine among so bright a galaxy of stars as those who to-night sat at the very much extended table in her new house in Curzon Street. So extended was it, and so bright were the hungry constellations on each side of it, quite dimming the lustre of the Queen Anne silver which she had lately been buying by the hundredweight to furnish her table, that both from actual distance and, figuratively, from the distance of social values, she could barely see her husband, that little London fog, who sat at the far end, and paid for everything, and perspired easily.
There were two great achievements which to Aline Gurtner’s mind marked off this particular party as being in a somewhat different class to all her previous gatherings, increasingly splendid though these had been. The first was that there was a real Royal princess present, no mere Transparency or Serenity or Liability, or any of those pinchbeck German imitations, but the thing itself, a woman who was a near relation of a real imperial house, and talked of her brothers and sisters in a perfectly natural manner by their Christian names. There she sat next the little London fog, big and handsome and jolly, eating with an immense hereditary appetite and laughing at Sir Hermann’s sparse conversation with such cheerful spontaneity that he began to think he was a very amusing fellow, which in reality he was not.
The other achievement was hardly less notable, for she had got Lady Grote also to dine with her, and in her growing knowledge of the rungs of the London ladder she had become aware that this was almost as brilliant a feat as securing a real princess. True, she had been down to one of Lady Grote’s Sunday menageries, where all the world went, but that was a totally different thing from getting Lady Grote here, even as it was a totally different thing to go to a Windsor garden party from entertaining the giver of that yourself. But Aline Gurtner had begun to know her London well enough to tell Lady Grote that Kuhlmann was among her guests, and to know Lady Grote well enough to place him next her.