Julia’s nose detected perfumes by four different dressmakers as she stood awaiting her turn at the long mirror. What acres of flowers, she reflected, must be bottled for every London season. Her mind wandered to the flower farms of Grasse, mountain paths at sunset heavy with the scent of lavender, then returned with a start as she swept her skirt out of range of a jewelled heel. The summer night was hot, the cloak-room of the Metz was crowded, each mirror echoed an absorbed face intent on the activities of lipstick or puff, feathers fluttered in the air, and jewelled fingers plucked at flowing lengths of skirt. Pink ladies, yellow ladies, green ladies, elbowed their way past Julia as at last she took her place before the glass, and if for a moment she looked at herself with satisfaction, who shall blame her? The sleek white satin of her Molyneux gown gave her the distinction of a lily in a bunch of over-dressed carnations, and stressed the slenderness of her figure; bright chestnut hair crowned her rather high white forehead; slanting brown eyes held a suggestion of humour even while they looked in the mirror; and three freckles which persisted on her nose gave a faint air of the schoolroom to Julia at twenty-three.
Really, she thought to herself as she turned from the mirror, really I do look awfully like the future Lady Charles Kulligrew. And remembering how she had kept Charles waiting, she dropped a shilling in the saucer, threw a glance of sympathy at the kneeling attendant who was sewing up a damaged flounce, and went out into the foyer.
Yet her confidence, even the confidence of wearing a perfect frock, began to slide away from her as she walked across to Charles Kulligrew, standing at the foot of the staircase. It is absurd, she told herself hurriedly for the hundredth time, to be engaged for three months to this charming, intelligent and distinguished creature, to be quite sure that I know him really well and adore him—when he isn’t there—and then, when I’m with him—She slipped her hand through his arm and started to talk, to conquer her growing shyness.
Lord Charles Kulligrew, who looked down at her, was chiefly remarkable at first glance for the attractive and penetrating eyes which unexpectedly humanized a face and figure suggestive of a nervous race-horse. Tall and dark, he walked with a limp, the result of a German shell splinter, and when he spoke his voice betrayed a slight but charming nervous hesitation. He was one of those people who seem unfairly endowed with a multitude of talents, any of which taken alone and fostered would have brought fame and fortune to an ordinary man. Oxford remembered him both for athletic prowess and a Prize Poem, while to the public he was famous for his book on his Aztec expedition. During the war he had served with great distinction in that most adventurous force, the Intelligence Service, but met with acute dismay any reference to his achievements in this as in any other walk of life. He had become engaged to Julia Dallas partly because he admired her beauty and her mind, partly because, knowing her from childhood, he had never found in her independence and high-handed gaiety the hero-worship and invitation which he saw in the eyes of other women. Now, to their mutual but unspoken dismay, the demands of a closer relationship seemed to have done nothing but obscure a light-hearted friendship—and, half unconsciously, they invariably tried to arrange some kind of a party when they were to meet.
“Sorry I’ve been such an age, Charles. Have you been amused? It’s the most exciting kind of evening, isn’t it? I’ve a feeling Martin Pitt’s play is going to be a success. Did you get him for dinner? You’ve not told me who’s coming.”
“The party’s to be small but distinguished,” he smiled at her. “Professor Edward Milk, Miss Agatha Milk, Benvenuto Brown—and ourselves. I tried to get Martin, but he’s dining early with Terence Rourke. We’ll probably see them inside if they haven’t gone back to the theatre already. Look—isn’t this the Professor and Agatha?”
Framed in big glass doors held apart by two commissionaires, against the background of Piccadilly lit by the evening sun, they could see a taxi-cab from which two people were alighting. The first, a very tall and bent old man, seemed confused between an attempt to help his sister down and to extract money from beneath the folds of his long caped coat in one and the same movement. The lady who stepped with determination on to the pavement conveyed somehow, in spite of the warmth of the evening, an impression of frost-bite surrounded by tulle scarves and jet. As thin as her brother, she seemed but half his height, and he bent down to listen to her as they entered the hotel, nervously fingering his white beard.
“Tuppence would have been quite sufficient,” she was saying. “I do wish you could remember, Edward, that ten per cent. is the correct reward for the lower classes.” She unwillingly gave him over to the custody of an attendant who led him to the cloak-room, following them with her eyes like an anxious hen. Julia clutched Kulligrew’s arm.
“Such a nerve-racking moment,” she whispered. “Last time I went to the theatre with the Professor, he took off his dinner-jacket with his overcoat in the front row of the stalls, and sat down blandly in his shirt-sleeves.” Her face crumpled with laughter, and they went forward to greet Agatha, whose thin lips softened into a smile as she saw them.
“My dear children, this is a pleasure. I fear we are late, but Edward could not arrange to leave Oxford until this afternoon. He will be with us directly—he is removing his coat.”
“You’re so wise, Agatha, not to brave the cloak-room—there’s such a traffic block.”
“I washed myself before I left our hotel, my dear.” Agatha’s tone swept all the face-powder out of the universe. Then, suddenly softening, “I’m glad to see you are wearing white. Young girls should always wear white.”
“Doesn’t she look charming?” said Charles, and Julia went forward to greet Professor Milk, whose mild blue eyes looked at her affectionately.
“O matre pulchra filia pulchrior,” he said, and then, turning to Charles, “Most kind of you, my dear Charles, to ask us up to this little gathering. It is a rare treat for Agatha and myself.” He beamed vaguely round at the company. “I confess myself greatly stirred at the prospect of seeing Martin Pitt’s play. A most promising boy—most promising—”
Kulligrew nodded. “Pitt is a great man, Professor, and has never won the recognition he ought to have had. I hear the whole of London is turning out for him to-night. Now, shall we go in and have a cocktail? Benvenuto Brown is joining us, but he rang me up and said he might be a bit late—he’s painting a portrait—so we won’t wait for him.”
Julia took the Professor’s arm and led the way along the softly lighted corridor to where Mario stood welcoming his clients at the door of the restaurant. “Good evening, Miss Dallas—good evening, sir—the window table, isn’t it, Lord Charles? This way.” He spoke with the urbanity only born of many years’ association with the most expensive kinds of food, and led the party with slow dignity through the crowded tables, while waiters melted out of his path. He stopped at a round table by an open window which gave on to the Park, and as a final honour rearranged with his own hand one of the green orchids in the centre bowl. They sat down and Julia threw a grateful smile at Charles. He did everything so well—her favourite table—her favourite kind of flower. She looked round the crowded restaurant, whose decoration always pleased her with its slightly faded splendour, listened to the hum of conversation and the distant rumble of Piccadilly traffic, the one broken here and there by laughter and the other by the notes of motor-horns; let her eyes rest on glass and flowers and silver, bare arms loaded with jewels resting on the white cloths, bright dresses, and the rich reds and yellows of wine, and thought to herself there is really nothing so nice as London in the season. She turned to the Professor at her side.
“D’you remember bringing me here on my birthday, one summer holidays? We sat in the corner over there—and you told me who all the people were who came in. It was only when we came to Mr. Gladstone and the Queen of Sheba that I began to get a bit suspicious!”
“My dear, I remember you looked like a little princess, and that it was all very expensive.” He smiled at the recollection of the early days of his guardianship of Julia, and stretched out his hand absent-mindedly to the cocktail in front of him.
“Edward!” Agatha’s voice admonished him. “Your tablets.”
“Of course, of course—very remiss of me—unusual excitement—” He fumbled in his waistcoat pocket and was about to place a pill in his mouth when a hand descended on his shoulder.
“Still doping, Professor? Sorry I’m late, Charles—had a hell of a day. Agatha, how are you? Julia, you look like a snowflake—can I come and sit next to you? Whew!” Running a hand through his already unruly hair Benvenuto Brown dropped into a chair beside her, dipped his rather long nose towards his cocktail glass and drank the company’s health.
“Good man—I thought you’d forgotten us. How’s painting—and how’s crime?” said Kulligrew.
He looked round the table before answering, his good-humoured, lined face with its long upper lip creased into a smile. Somehow with his coming the party had become a party, and even Agatha, rather primly holding her glass, seemed to wear her scarves at a more jaunty angle.
“Deep depression in both,” he said. “Country’s too well fed and too well policed—no one buying pictures or committing crimes. Going to have a shot at murder myself in a day or two—I’m painting a woman who wants high lights on every pearl. What’s this play you’re taking me to see to-night? I don’t know Martin Pitt—seem to remember seeing a play by him at some Sunday Society show.”
Kulligrew nodded. “He’s a most brilliant man and has never been properly appreciated. He was up at Oxford with me, and I got to know him pretty well, though he was fresh from school and I was just demobilized. Most interesting mind. The Professor knows him too—he’ll be admittedly a great man one day; don’t you think so, sir?”
The Professor looked up vaguely from his caviare.
“Yes, yes, a prophet in his own country—the mind of the masses is slow—think of some of our Australian poets—” He sighed and returned to his food.
“I owe a lot to Pitt,” went on Kulligrew thoughtfully. “I can never disassociate him in my mind from Blake, Shelley, Pope—even Aristophanes—I suppose I’d read them all before I met him, but he seemed to make them his own, light them up from the inside and give them to you all alive. The first time I met him he was striding up and down Port Meadow outside Oxford, in the rain, holding his hat over a volume of poetry which he was reading aloud to himself. An extraordinary-looking creature, very pale and lightly made, with limp yellow hair and curiously vivid dark eyes which used to blaze with excitement when he read aloud anything that particularly stirred him. I went up and spoke to him that day. I said, ‘I used to sit in a trench in the rain and try to think how that went on—I wish you’d read it to me.’ He gave me a quick look and started at the beginning—‘The daughters of the Seraphim led down their sunny flocks.’ Evidently he considered my remark a sensible one, or he’d have turned on his heel and left me—his manners are non-existent. After that I seem to remember talking with him and reading with him for about four years—he’s got a more intense appreciation of literature than anyone I’ve ever met.”
“What’s he like as a man?” asked Julia. “I’ve only met him once, and that was at a polite tea-party. He was introduced to me, but wouldn’t speak a word and left shortly after. I thought him beautiful to look at, like some kind of a faun—but I couldn’t make him out.”
Kulligrew laughed. “He’s very like a child in some ways. If you’d talked about something he considered a suitable subject of conversation for a woman, like onion soup or the best kind of shoe leather, he’d probably have responded and been perfectly charming—but he’s got the most Eastern ideas of women’s mentality, or professes to have. I think actually he’s extremely shy of women—and of men too for that matter—and hypersensitive as to his effect on other people, so that he invariably seeks out highly abstract or excessively concrete subjects of conversation in an attempt to avoid the personal. This, of course, unfits him both for tea-parties and for intimate friendships. He’s got a rooted objection to discussing for one moment anything which doesn’t appeal to him as interesting.”
“Bad trait for an author,” put in Benvenuto.
“I don’t know,” Kulligrew considered. “It gives him great singleness of purpose and forbids other people inflicting their moods on him. I admit”—he smiled reminiscently—“it is rather irritating at times when he entirely disregards what one has been saying, and then proceeds to open up a train of thought far more interesting than one’s own. I think he needs success to humanize him. He’d never admit it, but I believe that the fact that neither of his previous plays caused anything of a stir hit him pretty hard. I only hope to-night will be a success.”
“The town is alive with rumours about it,” said Benvenuto. “I suppose that’s due to our friend Rourke—who’s not only a man with extremely good judgment but one of these damned Irishmen who infect other people with their enthusiasms. You know Rourke, don’t you?”
Kulligrew’s expression was slightly troubled, and he looked round, almost uneasily, Julia thought, before he answered:
“Known him all my life; we went through the war together. He ought to be here somewhere—Pitt told me he was dining with him. Isn’t that their table at the other end of the room?”
Following the direction of his glance Julia saw the yellow head of Martin Pitt, bent in conversation with a lady, the back of whose low-cut pink frock was towards her. Facing the pink lady sat a man who towered head and shoulders above the other two, and even across the distance which separated them, he conveyed a vivid impression of force and vigour to Julia. A mass of iron-grey hair was swept back from a surprisingly young face, and for a moment, across the babble of talk, she thought she heard his laugh, deep and rich. So that was Terence Rourke, the man who, although unheard-of two years before, had created a reputation as London’s greatest play-producer. She looked at him with interest, but while she did so found time to wonder why Charles hadn’t mentioned who was dining with Rourke and Pitt that night; in reply to a question of Benvenuto’s he was explaining that the owner of the pink dress was Louise Lafontaine, Rourke’s leading lady, playing the name part in The Lily Flower.
“Charming creature,” said Benvenuto. “I saw her once. Specializes in vamp parts, doesn’t she?”
Kulligrew frowned. “She’s a woman who’s been damned by her own success. She’s created a reputation for undressing on the stage almost as great as Tallulah’s own, but actually she’s an extremely good actress, and Rourke has had the sense to realize it. You’ll see her in an entirely different kind of part to-night.”
“She doesn’t appear to have changed her habits,” remarked Agatha acidly, surveying the bare and unconscious back of Louise. Julia gave a small explosion of laughter that seemed in keeping with the freckles on her nose, and became quickly conscious that Charles was silent. She picked up her glass and drank her wine. She was being ridiculous; why, she was not even sure that Charles had ever known Louise well. In any case, Charles was thirty-eight—presumably she herself was not the only woman he had ever met. For a moment she tried to imagine Charles in Pitt’s place, his head bent towards the dark curls above the pink dress, and felt at once, painfully, that the intangible veil of half-shy, half-friendly diffidence that she knew so well would not hang between Charles and that pink dress. It was her own fault, she told herself fiercely—she would break through it. She raised her eyes to Charles, but he was talking to Benvenuto.
“The play is called The Lily Flower,” he was saying.
“‘Thou low-born Lily Flower?’” quoted Benvenuto.
“Exactly,” Kulligrew looked at him appreciatively. “It concerns a suburban family, and more especially the daughter Lily, one of those entrancingly lovely creatures that are the miracle of London’s suburbs. Have you ever stood outside a big store at about six in the evening and watched them emerge from their ribbon counters and their typewriters—a conquering army with slim bodies and faces like angels, going out to do battle for seats in a Putney bus or an Ealing train?”
“Indeed I have,” returned Benvenuto, his fork suspended in mid-air. “They’re the most dazzling beauties in the world; and apart from the few who break away and advertise a shampoo powder or get in the Follies, they’re entirely unhonoured and unsung. This sounds interesting—tell us more about it, if you can spare time from this engaging soufflé.”
“Have some more. Professor, your glass. I won’t tell you the plot, it will spoil the show, and it is in any case merely an excuse—an emotional explosive which alights in the midst of this commonplace family and illumines each member of it for your benefit. It is psychologically that the play is interesting—the various reactions of Lily and her family to this event. You might call it a Study of the Effect of Suburban Life on the Soul. But you’ll see for yourselves.” He smiled at them.
Benvenuto looked at Kulligrew thoughtfully. “I shan’t be happy till I’ve met Martin Pitt,” he said. “You’ve described a most contradictory—But look—look—our friends must be rehearsing.”
Round them people were standing up and gazing at Terence Rourke, who, looking magnificently like some cavalry leader at the head of a charge, a long incongruous sword in his hand, was making cuts and thrusts at a frightened waiter. Pitt and the leading lady hung desperately to his coat-tails, but, dragging them behind him, he advanced menacingly, his grey hair waving, the sword-blade glittering in the electric light. “A superb composition,” Benvenuto murmured to Julia. “That’s his famous sword-stick. I’d better calm him down or we’ll have the gendarmes in.” So saying, he left her, and walking swiftly across the restaurant put his hand on his friend’s arm.
Rourke’s fury seemed to leave him as quickly as it had begun, and after saying in a loud voice, “Napoleon brandy! Holy Powers!” he allowed himself to be led up to Julia and introduced, kissing her hand and apologizing in the grand manner for his behaviour.
“I hope you didn’t wound the waiter,” said Julia, rather at a loss as to how to treat this melodramatic giant. “You seemed careless of his feelings,” she added.
“Sure, I’d be wounded myself if you thought so,” he replied. “The fellow thought I wouldn’t know his damned poteen from Napoleon brandy.”
He appeared rather ashamed of himself, and slipping his sword into its stick and tossing back his mane of hair, he seemed to draw himself into the likeness of an ordinary diner, and bowed very formally and gallantly to Agatha as Benvenuto introduced him. She gave him a bird-like smile.
“I consider you were perfectly right, Mr. Rourke,” she assured him. “Far too many people nowadays allow inferior articles to be fobbed off on them.”
Kulligrew had turned to greet Rourke’s fellow-diners who were approaching, and the next moment Julia saw the owner of the pink dress smiling at him.
“Charles,” she said, and gave him a small and beautifully shaped hand.
“Won’t you all join us for a moment?” he asked. “I want you to meet my fiancée. Julia, this is Miss Lafontaine—Miss Dallas.”
Julia saw a smiling mouth and unsmiling dark eyes, heard a clear and very controlled voice say, “I congratulate you both,” and then, “I didn’t know you were going to be married, Charles,” as a smooth shoulder was turned towards her.
Julia talked to Pitt while Kulligrew introduced Louise Lafontaine to Agatha and the Professor, and while she contented herself with conventional remarks about the coming play, felt she would have liked to pat him soothingly on the shoulder. He was obviously nervous and gave her his attention with an effort, his curious and beautiful face very white, his eyes very dark under his yellow hair. She was glad when Rourke summoned them both away to the theatre. She liked Rourke, she decided, if like was a word one could apply to so spectacular a creature, and as she watched him say good-bye to the others, wondered why his manner to Kulligrew should be almost exaggeratedly frigid.