by E. F. Benson
“No; if his name had been Fat, I should have remembered it,” she said. “It wasn’t Mr. Fat, nor Lord Fat. He seemed to know everybody, too. He just sat there and knew everybody.”
From Peter’s other side, where Silvia sat, there came some little tremor of a laugh, hardly audible, and turning, he saw that her face dimpled with amusement. It was singularly sexless; the curve of her jaw, the lines of her mouth were more like a boy’s than a girl’s; boyish, too, was her sideways cross-legged attitude. If she was laughing at her mother’s remark, her amusement was clearly of the most genial kindliness.
Mrs. Wardour continued in a perfectly even voice that almost intoned the words, so void was it of inflection.
“It’s a pity your party has missed so much of the opera,” she said. “There’s been a lot of pretty music; some of it reminded me of being in church and hymns. It’ll seem quite strange going to a dance afterwards. A lot of knights singing hymns. Parsifal, you know. Some say it’s the best opera Wagner ever wrote.”
This time Silvia certainly laughed, and again her laugh had not the smallest hint of satirical enjoyment; she was just amused. Peter found himself, though he had scarcely yet glanced at her, somehow understanding her. He recognized in her amusement all that he himself failed to feel with regard to his father’s cartoons and his mother’s readings in Bradshaw. He knew intuitively that Silvia had got hold of the right way to regard absurdities; to see comedy without contempt. Whether she knew it or not (it was quite certain that she did not), she had given him a glimpse, a hint, an enlightenment, not only of what she was, but of what he was not. Looking at her now directly for the first time, his handsome face caught some reflection of her boyish brightness.
“And what do you think of Parsifal?” he asked.
She raised her eyebrows.
“How can I tell?” she asked. “I never saw an opera before.”
“I envy you,” said Peter.
“Why? For not having seen one, or because I am at last seeing one?” she asked.
Peter, as usual, found himself wanting to make a good impression. If he had been in a lift with a crossing-sweeper he would certainly have tried to make the crossing-sweeper like him, and have exerted his wits to hit upon something which the crossing-sweeper would think to be admirable, even though on arriving at the next floor he would never see him again. He quickly decided now that the girl would not admire mere drivel.... She happened to want to know what he envied her for.
“For both,” he said. “For getting a new impression. That includes both. You mustn’t have seen an opera before, and you must be seeing one now.”
She looked at him with perfectly unshadowed frankness.
“I believe you meant the first,” she said. “I believe when you said you envied me, that you meant I was lucky in not having spent a quantity of boring evenings.”
“In any case, I don’t mean that now,” said Peter.
“Ah, then you did. Why do you mean it no longer?”
Peter found himself criticizing her. A conversation between the acts of an opera was not meant to degenerate into a catechism. You talked in order to mask the ticking of the minutes. But as he was in for a catechism, it was better to be an agreeable candidate.
“Why?” he asked. “Because I expect that you never spend boring evenings. Probably you are not a person who is bored.”
Clearly, as he suspected, she was not going to commit herself to any statement without consideration, even when so violently trivial a subject was under discussion. Her eyebrows, much darker than the shade of her hair, like Nellie’s, pulled themselves a little downwards and inwards, so that they nearly met.
“Oh, I could easily be bored,” she said. “A lot of bored people would infect me and make me bored.” She leaned a little forward towards him, again with that boyish appeal.
“Please don’t be bored,” she said. “Be interested and amused. Make yourself into a sort of disinfectant to protect me.”
“Is there an epidemic?” he asked.
“Yes; the place is reeking with it. My mother, for instance, detests music. Isn’t it darling of her?”
“How very odd of her, then—” he began.
He stopped because, in some emphatic, intangible way, the girl retreated from the platform of intimacy on to which she had stepped. She moved her chair an inch or two away from him, hitching it back with her foot, but that was only a symbol of her change of attitude. What to Peter made the significance of that small steering was a certain quenching of light in her face, as if, over it, she had put up some mask of herself that might easily have been mistaken for her, if the beholder had not, for a glimpse or two, seen her unmasked. She shifted from the personal ground on which, for a minute, they had met, and became Miss Silvia Wardour, generalizing in small talk, in the usual imbecile and social manner. She also became much more feminine....
“I wonder how many people in the house, who have come to hear Wagner, really dislike it,” she said. “Probably we all of us like some species of noise, and dislike another species of noise. If you like the Beethoven noise, you probably dislike the Wagner noise. Only nobody will, say so. They come to look at each other.”
She had carried back the conversation on to the personal platform again, as if she was sorry to have slipped off it so suddenly. But she carried it on to another part of the platform. Quite clearly she did not intend to discuss her mother’s presence at the opera.
“Tell me,” she said. “What sort of noise do you really like? This or somebody else’s?”
Peter wondered for the moment whether she was to prove to be the earnest sort of girl, who, whatever you said, insisted on discussing your random statements, until you contradicted yourself (which usually happened quite soon), and then, vouchsafing a gleam of daylight, found an explanation for them in order that you might be encouraged to entangle yourself further. The earnest girl, the inquisitorial girl; he did not like that type.... They gave you pencils and pieces of paper after dinner and made you write acrostics; they took letters out of a box and gave you eight of them, from which you had to make a word; they divided the guests up into equal numbers, told them that this was “Clumps,” and that two people were going to leave the room and guess whatever had been thought of. These were their lighter, intellectual motions, and you feverishly played “Clumps” in order to avoid intolerable abstract discussions. Yet Silvia had not the sleuth-hound expression that usually accompanied these hunters after intellect.
“What a searching question,” he said. “But, really, I’m omnivorous about noises. I like the noise I’m listening to. I like it particularly.”
There was not in her face the smallest consciousness that he might conceivably be alluding to the fact that she was talking to him. She let her eyes sweep across the crowded theatre.
“That noise?” she asked. “All those people talking? I love it, too. Oh, wouldn’t it be interesting to be somebody else for a minute, and know what he meant, what he felt like when he said anything?”
Clearly she had used the masculine gender quite unconsciously. Peter’s answer, on (he other hand, was deliberate.
“Yes, I should love to know what she feels like, even over the most trivial speech,” he said.
Silvia dropped on to this with a precision that only showed how complete her own unconsciousness had been.
“She?” she asked.
“Certainly ‘she,’” he said. “I know well enough the kind of thing which men feel like.”
She leaned forward again.
“Oh, tell me about that,” she said.
Certainly they were together on the personal platform again. Peter was quite at home there; his passion for making a good impression on new acquaintances, his rather uncanny skill in extracting intimacy from them, gave him a confident gait on these boards. He felt that this queer, attractive girl did not in the least wish to be talked to in the ordinary, nonsensical manner. In the gabble of the ballroom, and in the more intimate duologue on the st
airs outside it, girls, the generality of them, liked to be told that men thought exclusively about them, and spent their waking and sleeping moments in the contemplation of their divinity and pricelessness. Nellie, of course, was an exception, for between them there certainly was some peculiar bond of understanding; but the majority of girls, so ran his indolent and incurious creed, just wanted to be told that they were too priceless for anything, and some wanted to be kissed. It was all nonsense; they knew that as well as he did; but such was the inherited instinct, or, if you wished to be precise, the inherited instinct acting on the new conditions. But he knew that Silvia was not like that; there was some eager, friendly quality about her. She was not quite the normal girl of the ballroom; nor again, was she the earnest girl, who wanted to explore your brains and prove that you hadn’t got any. She seemed merely interested in the topic, not because it would lead to a demonstration of her cleverness.
“Men?” he said. “What do men feel? They are as vain as peacocks, and they think entirely about themselves. They think of you as an inferior sex designed to amuse them.”
“Ah, the darlings!” said Silvia, quite unexpectedly.
The great pervading brilliance of the lights went out. A row of veiled illuminations only remained in front of the red confectionery of the curtain, against which the conductor’s head was silhouetted. Silvia, after her surprising exclamation, drew her chair more into the corner in order to enable Peter to pull his up to the front of the box.
“Klingsor’s Castle,” said Mrs. Wardour, with a final desperate glance at her programme. “Who is Klingsor, Silvia?”
Peter wondered whether he could whisper, “Who is Silvia?”; but decided against it.
“A magician, darling,” said Silvia, with the same underlying bubble of amusement.
CHAPTER IV
THERE was a mad brutality of discordant noise, and the risen curtain disclosed an astrologer. He roared and yelled, and soon a dishevelled female, in an advanced stage of corruption, shrieked back at him. Silvia found herself disliking the Wagner noise, and her attention came closer home; came, in fact, to the quarter-view of Peter’s face, as he sat low in his chair in order to give her a clear view of Klingsor. She was not sure that she liked Peter any better than the hurly-burly that was going on, and though she knew she had been liking him during the interval between the acts, she now seriously set herself to the task of disliking him, and the easiest method of achieving that result was to class him as just one of the crowd which had come that night to occupy, by request, her mother’s two boxes. She perfectly understood the situation: Lady Thirlmere, the woman with the pearls and the blue-black hair, had told a lot of her friends that they could go to see Parsifal for nothing, and reap a quantity of subsequent benefits at the price of knowing Mrs. Wardour, of frequenting her house, and of permitting her to eddy round in the general whirlpool. For some reason, inscrutable to Silvia, her mother wanted that; she and her mother, in fact, were like a pill, which Lady Thirlmere had guaranteed that the world should swallow. The pill was nobly gilded, and there was any amount of jam to assist the swallowing of it.
Without doubt Peter was one of the open mouths.
Klingsor and Kundry continued to rave at each other, and so far from listening, Silvia used that external noise to drive her own thought into seclusion; much as a dull sermon, a tedious lecture, makes for introspection in the audience. And hardly had she classed Peter among the open mouths than she wondered if she had been quite fair in doing so, for the talk they had had was not of the same timbre as the conventional quackings which for the last week had made her mother’s house like a farmyard, with her, like Mrs. Bond of the nursery rhyme, calling “Dilly, dilly... you shall be stuffed,” and stuffed they were. Silvia could no more enter with sympathy into her mother’s aims than she could enter with sympathy into stamp-collecting; but out of love for the stamp-collector — the dear, weary, steadfast stamp-collector — she was eager to feel the highest possible interest in the collection and collect for her with all her might. But she knew that she despised the spirit of the stamps, which, in return for food and drink and opera-boxes, were so willing to be collected. Next week there was to be a dance “for her,” in that immense mansion which had been re-christened Wardour House, and pages of the stamp-book would on that occasion be filled with adhesive specimens. “Everybody,” so she understood Ella Thirlmere to say, would come, and no doubt it would be tremendous fun....
There were certainly some stamps here now. Lord Charles was one, though why had he been willing to be collected? He sat with his head propped between two long hands, and a queer sort of nose, just protruding, indicated by its downward angle that he was profoundly meditating. Next him was her mother, whose pearls clinked rhythmically to her breathing, and nearest to herself she could see the half-averted profile of the young man whom she was encouraging herself to dislike. He appeared to be looking at the stage; certainly he was paying no attention to her, and she got back to what she actually thought of him, instead of forcing herself into a defensive attitude against him. Somehow they seemed (not that it mattered) to have been talking to each other from odd standpoints. When, ridiculously interested for the moment, she had asked him what men “felt,” he had not given a masculine answer. He had spoken to her as if he had been a girl; he had said that men were as vain as peacocks, and thought of women as an inferior sex, designed for their amusement. Very likely that was quite true; but now in this isolation of darkness and loud noises, which cut her off from him and everyone else in the box, it seemed to her to have required a woman to state that. That was a woman’s view of a man; a man, though he shared it, could scarcely have said it. Instead, he would have told her that women were the angelic sex, meant to be adored....
Some violent concussion had occurred on the stage; there was no longer a gloomy black man with a photographic lens, but some insane sort of flowerbed; and remembering, her programme, she recollected that this was the enchanted garden. The enchantment seemed to lie in a quantity of prodigious calico or cardboard flowers. Presently they burst. If they had not burst they must have burst, for mature females, singing loudly, were hatched out of the centre of each. The change had awakened Charlie, and he opened his mouth very wide.
“My dear, what unspeakable wenches!” he said loudly to Mrs. Trentham.
“Silvia, look at the flower-maidens,” said her mother. “They all came out of the flowers. Was not that wonderful? Look at the one from the blue convolvulus! Isn’t she sweet?”
Silvia choked a laugh with an audible effort, swallowing it whole.
“Yes, darling,” she said. “Aren’t they pretty?”
Peter turned to her quickly.
“Oh, that’s just how I talk to my father!” he said, and instantly looked back at the stage again.
She reconsidered her verdict of him as merely belonging to the open mouths which Lady Thirlmere showered on her mother. They, at any rate, did not behave in that unwarranted way. Her neighbour was ill-bred, odious, familiar, and having thrown an impertinence like that over his shoulder, he did not even wait for her rejoinder. What it would have been she did not quite know. But... was it impertinent of him after all? Was it, perhaps, rather a pleasant indication of intimacy? For intimacy, in the ordinary sense, there had not been time or opportunity; but had he, perhaps, just spoken quite naturally, assuming a corresponding naturalness on her part?
If so, she had failed him....
Silvia was annoyed with herself for such a suggestion. How could she have “failed” a young man whom she had seen for the first time half an hour ago, who was only one specimen out of that flock of rooks which had alighted there in this new field, where worms were to be had for the mere picking of them up....
There was a long interval at the end of this second act, and a reseating of the occupants of the two boxes.
Lord Poole, whom Mrs. Wardour’s godmother had chosen as a genial acquaintance, came in with his great towering frame and his immense red face and hi
s unlimited capacity for enjoying himself.
“Lucky dog, Parsifal,” he remarked to Silvia, “to have had all those girls to choose from. He should have taken the one that came out of that great white lily. My word, she did surprise me when she came out of that lily. I wish I knew where I could get some of those lilies. Hallo, Peter! Get out of that chair like a good boy, and let me sit between Miss Silvia and her mother. Haven’t had a word with either of them yet. Go and make love to my wife for ten minutes; you’ll find her next door, and come back and tell me how you’ve been getting on.”
When this great licensed victualler of London appeared on the scene and made some such suggestion, it was usual to go and do as he told you. But now Peter glanced at the girl as if to ask whether she wished him to make way or not. She gave him no sign, however, no hint that he was to stop where he was, and so the best thing, as his cool, quick brain told him, was to answer Lord Poole genially according to his folly.
“You condone it, then,” he said.
“Lord, yes, I condone anything,” he said. “We all condone everything nowadays. Saves a lot of trouble in the courts.”
The frankness of these odious sentiments made it quite impossible not to treat them as a farce. No one in his senses took Lord Poole seriously; he was so jolly and so preposterous, and so successfully sought safety in numbers. He instantly spread himself over Peter’s chair and firmly put one arm round Silvia’s waist and the other round her mother’s.
“Nice young fellow that,” he observed as Peter went out of the box. “What a pair he and Miss Silvia make, hey? He’s black and she’s fair, and he’s a clever fellow and won’t have a penny, and I wish I was his age. Do you know his father? He’s a rum ‘un.”
These remarkable statements were addressed in a loud, hoarse whisper to Mrs. Wardour, and were, of course, perfectly audible to Silvia. Then he turned to the girl.