by E. F. Benson
May Trentham had undeniably been guilty of this error. From that first night, when she had brought her young men to the opera, she had thought that Mrs. Wardour was not sufficiently alive to her value, and as Mrs. Wardour did not appear to be learning any better, she had certainly permitted herself to indulge in little rudenesses, little patronizations, little contempts, which Mrs. Wardour did not appear to notice. Certainly she made no direct allusion to them, and her rather meaningless countenance showed no sign of having perceived them....
This afternoon she was occupied with her secretary in making out a list of a favoured few, not more than eighty all told, who were to be bidden to an entertainment at which the Russian ballet was to figure. She ran her short, blunt forefinger down the alphabetical pages of her “visiting-list,” and dictated names to the gaunt Miss Winterton, who took them down in an angry scribble of shorthand. The last few’ pages were approaching.
“Then there’s Mrs. Trentham,” she said to Silvia. “I think we’ll leave out Mrs. Trentham.”
Silvia put in a mild plea.
“She rather enjoys things, mother,” she said.
There was a pause, in which Mrs. Wardour slowly and deliberately recalled certain moments which nobody would have thought she had noticed.
“Well, she isn’t, going to enjoy my things,” she said.
They were seated in Mrs. Wardour’s private sitting-room in the great house in Piccadilly. It was hung with French brocade; an immense Aubusson carpet covered the floor, and a Reisener table and bureau, with half a dozen very splendid chairs, echoed the same epoch. Mrs. Wardour had found this a little too stiff for domestic ease, and a decidedly more homely note was struck by a few wicker chairs, upholstered in cretonne, and a tea-table of the same imperishable material, with flaps which let down on hinges and formed convenient shelves for cakes and teacups. On the top of the bureau was a large photograph of the late Mr. Wardour in watch-chain and broadcloth. There were but a few more names, and Mrs. Wardour closed the book.
“Then you’ll send invitations to the names I’ve given you, Miss Winterton,” she said, “on R.S.V.P. cards. There’s no one else you’d like to ask, Silvia?”
Silvia knew quite well what she was intending to say, and wondered why she hesitated.
“Will you ask Mr. Peter Mainwaring?” she said.
“Mr. Mainwaring? I don’t seem to recollect—”
“Darling, of course you can’t recollect every-! body,” said the girl; “but I should like him to be asked.”
“Certainly then. What’s his initials and address?”
Silvia supplied this information, and Miss Winterton gathered up her papers and left them. She had the air of some dethroned queen, for whom disastrous circumstances had made it necessary to perform menial offices. Mrs. Wardour breathed a sigh of obvious relief when she had gone.
“She terrifies me, Silvia,” she said, when the door had closed. “She and that new butler. To think that one of them is called Summerton and the other Winterton. Well, I’m sure!”
Silvia blew out a little bubble of laughter.
“Stand up to them, dear,” she said.
“Yes, it’s all very well to talk; but how am I to stand up to them when my knees tremble? I wouldn’t have it known, but that’s the fact. Well, we are going to have a grand party next week.”
Mrs. Wardour relaxed herself in the wicker chair. “It’s been a job and a half,” she said, “and I wish your father was alive to see what a good job and a half I’ve made of it. He always had a hankering for high life himself, but he was too busy to catch hold of it. ‘When I give the word, Lucy,’ he’s often said to me, ‘we’ll start in and show them all how to do it.’ Often he’s said that to me. And I always had a taste for it, too; and sure enough it came natural to me from the first. We’re pretty well sitting down and knowing everybody now.”
Hard work it certainly had been; for the last two months Mrs. Wardour had worked as hard at securing the goal she had so steadfastly set before her as her husband had ever done in providing the paraphernalia for the enterprise; but now she might fairly claim that she was beginning to sit and know everybody. She had brought to her task an unremitting industry, and — when the tide was once flowing in her favour, so that it was possible to consider not so much whom she would ask but whom she would leave out — a steely ruthlessness. That ruthlessness, indeed, had been a weapon throughout the campaign; if a desirable guest was unable to come on Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday, Mrs. Wardour had adamantinely proceeded with Thursday, Friday, and Saturday; she had even taken her place at the telephone and demanded in her flat, firm voice that her quarry should consult his engagement-book and let her know which was the first disengaged night. Ruthless, also, she had now become, as in the case of Mrs. Trentham, when the question was one of exclusion, and the party for the Russian ballet had been selected on the sternest principles. Thinking over that now, her mind reverted to Silvia’s final invitation.
“And who is your Mr. Mainwaring?” she asked.
Silvia again had to stifle some embarrassment that, since it did not exist on the surface at all, must have had some more secret origin.
“Oh, I’ve met him a score of times,” she said. “He’s one of the people who is always there. He sat between us once at the opera, I think I remember. One evening when Lord Poole made love to you, dear. But, somehow, he’s never been to your house yet.”
“That’s more than most can say,” remarked Mrs. Wardour, so nearly smacking her lips that an impartial umpire might have said that “it counted.” This set Silvia laughing.
“And what have I said now?” asked Mrs. Wardour.
It was not so much what her mother was saying as what she was being that so continually kept Silvia in a state of simmering hilarity. Contemplate it as she might, she had never been able to comprehend the impulse, or rather the steady, unwavering devotion, that had kept Mrs. Wardour at such high pressure all these weeks. She did not enjoy the process of these eternal entertainments: the gaiety of others did not make her gay; music made no appeal to her; she was long past the age of dancing (though so many of her contemporaries were not), and yet she would sit benignly content through the short hours of the summer night, with her great tiara on her head, and feeling the heat acutely, for the mere pleasure of being there. That she was there was now undeniable, and, happily, having got there, she suffered no disillusionment. The mere chasse, the acquisition, was certainly not the mainspring of her activities. She had engaged in the chasse not for the sake of getting but of having....
The second terror of her busy life entered.
“Miss Heaton wants to know if you are at home, miss?” said the formidable Summerton.
It was a relief to Silvia’s mother that she had not got to “stand up” to Summerton, and, indeed, there was no crisis at all, for close behind him was Nellie.
“My dear, I was so afraid you might say that you weren’t at home,” she said, “that I thought it only my duty to save you telling lies. Am I interrupting? How are you, Mrs. Wardour? Send me away if I am intruding, or say that you have just gone out if you don’t want me to stop, and I will promise to believe you.”
Silvia had risen with a flush of pleasure on her face at the entrance of her friend. From all the new acquaintances of London, Nellie had made a shining emergence; through all the mists and bewilderments of the new life she shone with a steady beam, like the luminous finger from a lighthouse, clear and steadfast above the complicated currents.
“But this is lovely,” said Silvia. “Sit down. Tea? Something? Anything?”
She stood looking at her with frank, surrendered gaze; a little dazzled, as she always was, with such easy unconscious splendour. She regarded Nellie, if she could have put her appreciation into words, as she might have regarded some golden casket, set with gems, which seemed to have been laid in her hands. She had, as yet, no idea what was inside it; she had not attempted to raise the lid. It was enough at present to be allowed to hold
it in shy, adoring fingers.
“No, nothing,” said Nellie; “not even to sit down. I came, in fact, to make you stand up.”
“I’m doing that,” said Silvia:
“That’s not enough.... My dear, what a delicious frock! But my horrible Philip has been obliged to go out of town, and I’m at a loose end till dinner, and thought it would be wonderfully pleasant to sit on the grass somewhere. Isn’t that original? At the moment when that rural idea occurred to me, I passed your gilded portals and thought it would be even more wonderful if you came and sat there too. I don’t mean ordinary, dirty grass, but clean grass. Richmond Park, or something. Top of a bus, of course. Old hats.”
There could have been no more attractive notion to Silvia. She felt that it was just that she had long been wanting,; namely, to be with Nellie on the grass in an old hat. She could still ecstatically be dazzled, could follow the beam of the lighthouse with steady rapture; but a fresh aspect of her, away from ballrooms and crowds, just that old-hat aspect, she felt at once to be what most she desired. She might, it is true, be just as dazzling thus, she might, indeed, be more dazzling when other lesser brightnesses were withdrawn from her vicinity; but however she turned out, she could not fail to show a new enchantment.
“Of course I’ll come,” she said. “Let me go and get an old hat. You don’t want me, mother, do you?”
“No, dear. But if you’ll ring the bell, I’ll order the car for you. Far more comfortable and far quicker than the top of a bus.”
Nellie had been taking in the appurtenances of this room, to which she had not previously penetrated, with those quick, bird-like glances which were away again, scarcely alighting, before you knew they had perched at all. Mrs. Wardour’s hospitable suggestion seemed to contrast with her own project in just the manner in which those creaking cretonne chairs contrasted with the brocade on the walls and the Aubusson on the floor.
“Ah, how kind,” she said; “but, dear Mrs. Wardour, the point of our expedition is not to be comfortable and quick, but uncomfortable and slow. I yearn for that, and for being rustic and common. Otherwise, I should ask you to lend me one of those glorious chairs and let me sit and look at Buckingham Palace.”
“Yes, you can see it out of the window,” said Mrs. Wardour. “But the top of a bus — let me see, Miss Heaton, isn’t it — is the top of a bus quite the thing for girls like Silvia and you?”
“But absolutely,” said Nellie. “It wouldn’t be a bit the thing to drive in your lovely Rolls-Royce. And we shall have tea somewhere quite unspeakable, with dirty napkins.”
Mrs. Wardour shook her head.
“Now a nice tea-basket and the car,” she insinuated. “Ready in ten minutes, I beg you, Miss Heaton.”
Why the notion of Richmond Park and a bus and a tea-shop had blown in upon Nellie she had no clear idea; but as she and Silvia swayed and bounced westwards, it easily yielded an unconscious analysis. Her morning had been taken up with dress and trousseau for the imminent wedding, her mother had joined her at the dressmaker’s flushed with triumph over some grabbing business called settlements, and over the afternoon there had hung, rather sultrily, the prospect of long hours with Philip, who was coming to lunch. Her mother, as usual, had a bridge party of harpies, and no doubt she and Philip, just as she and Peter had done not many weeks ago, would sit in the window and pass for being absorbed in each other. It was owing, no doubt, to the hymeneal morning, and the prospect of a similar afternoon, that, on the outpouring through the telephone of Philip’s calm, but sincere, regrets that business claimed him in the country, reaction had opened its sluice-gates and overwhelmed her with the desire for hours physically and morally remote from rich fabrics and opulent comfort, and from the ambient atmosphere of things connected with just one theme. She was perfectly well satisfied with the general prospect, matrimonially considered; but she wanted just now, as celibacy was so soon to vanish, a foreground of it and simplicity and freedom to her picture. Originally, when the telephone had first told her of Philip’s defection, she had scarcely made the needful pause of ringing off before getting into communication with Peter to know whether he could slip the official collar for an afternoon. Certainly that was “ringing off” Philip with some completeness, and with whom better than with the other could she take a last excursion into the country that would so soon be severed from her by the sea, placid she hoped, of matrimony? But the official collar could not, so Peter’s very distinct voice told, be shifted. He, Peter’s voice, at any rate, said he was sorry; but he added no superlatives of regret, and before she had removed her ear she heard the click of the replaced instrument at the other end. He rang off, so it seemed to her, with a certain finality, not lingering to gossip. That had been rather characteristic of him lately; though she had constantly met him, he had always appeared in that light, impenetrable armour of his aloofness, never raising his visor, nor showing a joint in his harness where she could get at him. Ever since the interview on the window-seat six weeks ago he had been withdrawn like that.
Failing to get Peter, her next inclination had been to sip her celibacy alone, for though Peter, better than anybody, symbolized the things that were passing away (the wet woods and the roving and the independence), she would, in his absence, get nearest to them alone. So she had already started on her suburban pilgrimage, strolling down the glare and wilderness of Piccadilly to get on to a Richmond bus at the corner of Hyde Park, when, finding herself dazzled by the sun on the newly-gilded gates of Wardour House, the notion of Silvia’s companionship suggested itself, and she paused weighing its advantages. Silvia would certainly give her an eager, appreciative comradeship (so much was instantly clear), and on the heels of that a tangle of other interesting little curiosities, with tentacles protruding, plumped themselves into the same scale. She did not trouble to unravel them now; they would straighten themselves out as the afternoon went on.
Richmond Park proved very empty of loiterers; occasionally a motor-bicycle, with a wake of dust hanging in the air behind it, streaked down the yellow road; but, by the Pen Ponds, no more than the distant throb of such passenger was audible. Summer was in full leaf among the oaks and beeches, retaining still the varnished freshness of spring, and populous in the shade of the leafy trees were herds of fallow-deer, which lay sleepy and yet alert, with twitching ears and whisking tail against the incorrigible menace of flies, until an abatement of the heat restored appetite for the young tussocky grass. The hawthorn was nearly over; smouldering coronets of faded flame, or grey ash of dazzling blossom represented the glories of May; but round the ponds the humps of the rhododendron banks were still on fire.
Such talk as had flourished between the two girls had not yet penetrated beyond the barrier where triviality ceases, and past dances, with keen criticism on their merits, and dances to come, and the adequacy of various partners (among whom Peter’s name flitted by like blowing thistledown) had been flashed on and off the public plate. There had been a little longer exposure for the projected party at which the Russian ballet were to supply the entertainment, and Nellie had been informed, with horrified eagerness on the; part of Silvia, that, of course, she had been bidden: the invitation had only been inscribed that afternoon. Her acceptance of it was equally “of course,” and with the luck that attended friends, the date of it was a clear two days before her marriage. Trivial though it had all been, she felt that the Hamadryad (herself) had been doing spade-work in the shade. The ground was cleared and levelled; every topic that she might now wish to work up into a more elaborate tapestry had been put in on tentative threads, much as characters in a decently-written drama, flit, at any rate, across the stage in the first act. The two, delightfully grouped, hatless, and secure from interruption, had come to anchor in the circular shade of an old thorn-bush not far from the edge of reeds that fringed the pond. The red petals of the spent blossom dropped down from time to time; the hum and murmur of June woods was a carpet on which more intimate conversation could lightly spread itself.
Nellie drew up and clasped her knees.
“Fancy my impertinence in dragging you out to Richmond Park when I know that you had a hundred things that you wanted to do,” she said. “Tell me, what would you have done if I hadn’t appeared like some bird of prey and clawed you? Now don’t say that you would have had tea with your mother and gone for a drive in the Park. If you do, I simply shan’t believe you.”