B007TB5SP0 EBOK (9 page)

‘Cleopatra,’ he said, ‘was so disappointed she couldn’t come.’

‘I thought I saw some straw—’

‘Miss Compostella,’ the servant tunefully announced.

‘Ah, Julia!’

A lady whose face looked worn and withered through love, wearing a black gauze gown, looped like a figure from the Primavera, made her way mistily into the room.

Nobody would have guessed Miss Compostella to be an actress; she was so private-looking … Excessively pale, without any regularity at all of feature, her face was animated chiefly by her long red lips; more startling even than those of Cecilia Zen Tron,
cette adorable Aspasie de la décadence Venetienne
. But somehow one felt that all Miss Compostella’s soul was in her nose. It was her one delicate feature: it aspired.

‘How was I?’ she murmured, when she had shaken hands. ‘
I was too nervous for words!
’

‘You were completely splendid.’

‘My dear, how beautifully you died!’

Miss Compostella was experimenting, just then, at her own theatre, with some tableaux inspired from Holbein’s
Dance of Death
.

‘Two persons only,’ she said, ‘were present at my matinée. Poor things! I asked them back to tea … One of them is coming here to-night.’

‘Really, who can it be!’

‘He plays the piano,’ she said. ‘Composes: and he has the most bewitching hair. His name is Winsome Brookes.’

Mrs Shamefoot tittered.

‘Oh, Winsome’s wonderful,’ Mrs Henedge exclaimed. ‘I enjoy his music so much. There’s an unrest in it all that I like. Sometimes he reaches to a pitch of life …’

‘His tired ecstasy,’ Claud Harvester conceded, ‘decidedly is disquieting.’

Miss Compostella looked at him. She admired terrifically his charming little leer; it was like a crack, she thought, across the face of an idol. Otherwise, she was afraid, his features were cut too clearly to make any very lasting appeal …

Nevertheless, for her general calm she could have wished that it had been next year.

Each day she felt their position was becoming more strained
and absurd. She had followed Claud Harvester closely in his work, until at length she stood beside him on a pinnacle at some distance from the ground. And there they were! And she was getting bored. It disgusted her, however, to be obliged to climb down, to have had her walk for nothing, as it were.

With a smile that might, perhaps, have been called pathetic, she turned towards her hostess, who, with a deeply religious eye upon Monsignor Parr, was defending her favourite Winsome Brookes from Mrs Shamefoot’s innuendoes.

‘But why, why,
why
,’ she inquired, ‘do you think him dreadful?’

‘Because I think he’s odious,’ she replied.

‘Children irritate you, dear, I know, but he will do great things yet!’

‘Can one ever say?’

‘The most unexpected thing in my life,’ Monsignor Parr broke in gently, ‘was when a certain cab-horse from Euston ran away!’

‘Thanks for your belief in us,’ Mrs Henedge exclaimed gratefully, rising to greet an indolent-looking woman who brought with her, somehow, into the room, the tranquillity of gardens.

Mrs Calvally, the wife of that perfect painter, was what her hostess called a complete woman. She was fair, with dark Tziganne eyes, which dilated, usually looked mildly amazed. Like some of Rubens’ women, you felt at once her affinity to pearls. Equanimity radiated from her leisurely person. She never became alarmed, as her friends well knew, even when her husband spoke of ‘going away’ and ‘leaving’ her to live alone in some small and exquisite capital.

She would just smile at him sensibly, pretending not to hear … Secretly, perhaps, his descriptions of places interested her. She would have missed hearing about the White Villa, with its cypress tree, between the Opera House and the Cathedral, and she let him talk about it like a child. She did not mind when the town chosen was Athens, which was near Malta, where she had a cousin, but she had a horror of Bucharest.

George Christian Calvally accompanied his wife, unhappy, perhaps, at playing, if even for only a few hours, an oboe to her
violin. His face was delicate and full of dreams. It was a perfect
grief face
.

‘My dear Mary,’ Mrs Henedge exclaimed affectionately, leading the sympathetic woman to the most sylvan seat she could find, a small settee, covered with a chintz all Eve’s apples, and a wonderful winding snake: ‘had you to be very strategic?’

‘Oh, not at all,’ Mrs Calvally replied; ‘but what do you think followed us into the house?’

Mrs Henedge looked alarmed.

‘Oh, nothing so dreadful … Only a butterfly!’

Mrs Shamefoot, who was listening, became positively ecstatic.

How nice it was to escape, if even for a second, from the tiresome political doings of which she was so tired. Not that she could always catch everything that was said, now that she wore her hair imitated from a statue of the fifth century …

But the inclusion to-night, however, of Winsome Brookes was something of a trial. Without any positive reason for disliking him, she found him, perhaps, too similar in temperament to herself to be altogether pleased.

He came into the room a few minutes later in his habitual dreamy way, as might one upon a beauty tour in Wales – a pleasant picture of health and … inexperience. From the over-elaboration of his dress he suggested sometimes, as he did to-night, a St Sebastian with too many arrows.

A gentle buzz of voices filled the room.

Mrs Henedge, admirable now, was orchestrating fearlessly her guests.

Mr Sophax, a critic, who had lately lost his wife and was looking suitably subdued, was complimenting, just sufficiently, a lady with sallow cheeks and an amorous weary eye. This was Mrs Steeple.

One burning afternoon in July, with the thermometer at 90, the ridiculous woman had played
Rosmersholm
in Camberwell. Nobody had seen her do it, but it was conceivable that she had been very fine.

‘Tell me,’ she said to Mr Sophax, ‘who is the Victorian man talking to that gorgeous thing – in the gold trailing skirts?’

‘You mean Claud Harvester. His play the other night was a disaster. Did you see it?’

‘It was delightfully slight, I thought.’

‘A disaster!’

‘Somehow, I like his work, it’s so lightly managed.’

‘Never mind, Mr Harvester,’ Lady Georgia was saying to him, ‘I’m sure your play was exquisite; or it would have had a longer run.’

He smiled:

‘How satirical you are!’

She was looking tired, and not a bit wonderful; it was one of her lesser nights.

‘I wish she would give her poor emeralds a rest,’ a lady like a very thin camel was observing to Monsignor Parr.

A flattering silence greeted the Professor.

‘I’m afraid you must feel exhausted from your field day at the British Museum,’ Mrs Henedge said to him half hysterically, as they went downstairs.

The success of the dinner-table, however, restored her nerve. To create a slight atmosphere she had made a circuit of the table earlier in the evening, scattering violets indiscriminately into the glasses and over the plates.

For a moment her guests forgot to chatter of themselves. They remembered Sappho.

The Lesbian wine (from Samos. Procured, perhaps, in Pall Mall), produced a hush.

Claud Harvester bethought him then that he had spent a Saturday-to-Monday once, in Mitylene, at ‘a funny little broken-down hotel upon the seashore’.

It had been in the spring, he said.

‘In the spring the violets in Athens are wonderful, are they not?’ Mrs Calvally inquired.

‘Indeed, yes.’

She spoke to him of Greece, but all he could remember of Corinth, for instance, was the many drowned lambs he had seen lying upon the beach.

‘
Ah! Don’t speak to me of Corinth!
’

‘What a pity – and in Tanagra, tell me, what did you see?’

‘In Tanagra …?’ he said, ‘there was a kitten sunning himself in the Museum beside a pile of broken earthenware – handles of amphorae, arms and legs of figurines, and an old man seated in the doorway mending a jar.’

‘How extraordinary!’ she marvelled, removing with extreme precaution an atom of cork that had fallen into her glass. ‘Really! Is that all?’

‘Really all,’ he murmured, looking with sudden interest at Miss Compostella, whose face,
vis-à-vis
, he thought, still bore traces of his comedy.

He could appreciate her subtle mask quite enormously just then: now that she recalled to him his play. How very delightful she was!

‘Surely,’ he reflected, ‘her hair must be wired.’

Probably, as his wife had hinted once, her secret lay simply in her untidiness. She made it a study. Disorder, with her, had become a fine art. A loose strand of hair … the helpless angle of a hat … And then to add emphasis, there were always quantities of tiny buttons in absurd places on her frocks that cried aloud, or screamed, or gently prayed, to be fastened, and which, somehow, gave her an air of irresponsibility, which, for simple folk, was possibly quite fascinating.

‘She’s such a messy woman,’ Cleopatra had said. ‘And, my dear … so unnatural! I wonder you write plays for her. If I were a man, I should want only …’

And she had named the Impossible.

‘I feel I want to go somewhere and be ugly quietly for a week,’ Miss Compostella was confiding to George Calvally, as she cut a little wild-duck with her luminous hands. ‘The effort of having to look more or less like one’s photographs is becoming such a strain.’

He sympathized with her. ‘But I suppose,’ he said, ‘you are terribly tied.’

‘Yes; but you know, I love it! Next month I’m hoping to get Eysoldt over to play with me in Maeterlinck … It isn’t settled, there’s some incertitude still, but it’s almost sure!’

‘Her Joyzelle!’ he began to rave.

‘And my Selysette!’ she reminded him.

‘Now that Maeterlinck is getting like Claud Harvester,’ the Professor, without tact, put in, ‘I don’t read him any more. But at all events,’ he added graciously, ‘I hope you’ll make a hit.’

‘A hit! Oh, I’ve never done anything so dreadful,’ she answered, turning her attention towards her hostess, who, beneath her well-tipped tiara, was comparing the prose of a professional saint to a blind alley.

‘But what does it matter,’ Lady Georgia inquired, leaning towards her, ‘if he has a charming style?’

In the vivacious discussion that ensued, Mrs Steeple, imprudently, perhaps, disclosed to Winsome Brookes her opinion of Miss Compostella.

‘Oh, Julia’s so stiff,’ she said, ‘she will hold herself, even in the most rousing plays, as though she were Agrippina with the ashes of Germanicus, and in depicting agony, she certainly relies too much upon the colour of her gown. Her Hamlet,’ and she began to laugh, ‘her Hamlet was irresistible!’

And Mrs Steeple laughed and laughed.

Her laughter, indeed, was so hilarious that Winsome became embarrassed.

‘Her H-H-Hamlet was irresistible!’ she repeated.

‘Do tell us what is amusing you?’ Miss Compostella inquired.

But Mrs Steeple appeared to be too convulsed.

‘What has Winsome been saying?’ her hostess wished to know.

In none of these disturbances did Mrs Shamefoot care to join. Mentally, perhaps, she was already three parts glass. So intense was her desire to set up a commemorative window to herself that, when it was erected, she believed she must leave behind in it, forever, a little ghost. And should this be so, then what joy to be pierced each morning with light; her body flooded through and through by the sun, or in the evening to glow with a harvest of dark colours, deepening into untold sadness with the night … What ecstasy! It was the Egyptian sighing for his Pyramid, of course.

As might be feared, she appeared this evening entirely self-entranced. Indeed, all that she vouchsafed to her neighbour,
Mr Sophax, during dinner, was that the King had once been ‘perfect to her’ in Scotland, and that she was fond of Yeats.

‘If you cannot sleep,’ she said to him, ‘you’ve only to repeat to yourself
Innesfree
several times. You might be glad to remember …’

As Mrs Henedge had explained, it was only a fragile little dinner. She was obliged to return to the drawing-room again as soon as possible to receive her later guests. It occurred to her as she trailed away with the ladies that after the Professor’s Sapphic postscript they might, perhaps, arrange some music. It would bring the evening to a harmonious close.

There was Winsome, fortunately, to be relied upon, and Mrs Shamefoot, who sang the song of Thaïs to her mirror very beautifully, and later, she hoped, there would be Mrs Rienzi-Smith, who composed little things that were all nerves … and who, herself, was so very delightful …

In the drawing-room she was glad to find that wonderful woman, Mrs Asp, the authoress of
The Home Life of Lucretia Borgia
, refreshing herself with coffee and biscuits while talking
servants
to Mrs Thumbler, the wife of the architect, and the restorer of Ashringford Cathedral.

‘She was four years with Lady Appledore,’ Mrs Asp was telling her, taking a bite at her biscuit, ‘and
two
at the Italian Embassy, and, although one wouldn’t, perhaps, think it, I must say she was always scrupulously clean.’

‘My dear Rose,’ Mrs Henedge said, sailing up, ‘I do hope you haven’t been here long?’ She seemed concerned.

‘I-I-I, oh no!’ Mrs Asp purred in her comfortable voice, using those same inflexions which had startled, so shockingly, the Duchess of York when, by telephone, she had confessed: ‘Yes … I am Mrs Asp … We’re getting up a little bazaar and we expect you royalties to help!’

‘And there, I believe, is Mira?’ Mrs Henedge said, turning towards a young girl who, seated in a corner, seemed to be counting the veins in her arms.

‘I admired your valsing, the other night,’ she said to her, ‘at the Invergordons’: it’s so brave of you, I think, to like dancing best alone.’

Mira Thumbler was a mediaeval-looking little thing, with peculiar pale ways, like a creature escaped through the border of violets and wild strawberries of a tapestry panel.