, or again the Foolish woman, pride not thyself on a ring.’Mrs Henedge lived in a small house with killing stairs just off Chesham Place.
‘If I were to die here,’ she had often said, ‘they would never be able to twist the coffin outside my door; they would have to cremate me in my room.’ For such a cottage, the sitting-rooms, nevertheless, were astonishingly large. The drawing-room, for instance, was a complete surprise, notwithstanding its dimensions being ocularly curtailed by a somewhat trying brocade of drooping lilac orchids on a yellow ground.
But to-day, to make as much space as possible to receive her guests, all the household heirlooms – a faded photograph of the Pope, a bust of poor dear Leslie, some most Asiatic cushions, and a quantity of whimsies, had been carried away to the top of the house. Never before had she seen the room so bare, or so austere.
As her maid exclaimed: ‘It was like a church.’ If an entire Ode of Sappho’s had been discovered instead of a single line she could have done no more.
In the centre of the room, a number of fragile gilt chairs had been waiting patiently all day to be placed, heedless, happily, of the lamentations of Thérèse, who, while rolling her eyes, kept exclaiming: ‘Such wild herds of chairs; such herds of wild chairs!’
In her arrangements Mrs Henedge had disobeyed the Professor in everything.
Professor Inglepin had looked in during the week to ask that severity might be the key. ‘No flowers,’ he had begged, ‘or, at most, placed beside the fragment (which I shall bring), a handful, perhaps, of—’
‘Of course,’ Mrs Henedge had replied, ‘you can rely upon me.’ And now the air was laden with the odour of white and dark mauve stocks.
A buffet, too, had arisen altar-like in her own particular sanctum, an apology to those whom she was unable to dine; nor, for intriguing curiosities, had she scoured a pagan cookery-book in vain …
Glancing over the dinner list whilst she dressed, it seemed to her that the names of her guests, in neat rotation, resembled the cast of a play. ‘A comedy, with possible dynamics!’ she murmured as she went downstairs.
With a tiara well over her nose, and dressed in oyster satin and pearls, she wished that Sappho could have seen her then … On entering the drawing-room she found her beautiful Mrs Shamefoot as well as her radiant Lady Castleyard (pronounced Castleyud), had already arrived, and were entertaining lazily her Monsignor Parr.
‘Cima’s Madonnas are dull, dull, dull,’ Mrs Shamefoot was saying, looking over the Monsignor’s shoulder at her own reflection in the glass.
Mrs Shamefoot, widely known as ‘Birdie’, and labelled as politics, almost compels a tear. Overshadowed by a clever husband, and by an exceedingly brilliant mother-in-law, all that was expected of her was to hold long branches of mimosa and eucalyptus leaves as though in a dream at meetings, and to be picturesque, and restful and mute. As might have been foreseen, she had developed into one of those decorative, self-entranced persons so valued by hostesses at dinner as an ideal full stop. Sufficiently self-centred, she could be relied upon to break up a line, or to divide, with grace, any awkward divergencies of thought. Her momentary caprice was to erect with Lady Castleyard, to whom she was devoted, a window in some cathedral to their memory, that should be a miracle of violet glass, after a design of Lanzini Niccolo.
It was therefore only natural that Lady Castleyard (whose hobby was watching sunlight through stained glass) should take the liveliest interest in the scheme – and through the mediation of Mrs Henedge was hoping to kindle a window somewhere very soon.
A pretty woman, with magnificently bold shoulders, and a tiny head, she was, as a rule, quite fearlessly made up. It was courageous of her, her hostess thought, to flaunt such carnationed cheeks. Only in Reynolds or in a Romney did one expect to see such a dab.
‘Tell me! Tell me!’ she exclaimed airily, taking hold of Mrs Henedge. ‘I feel I must hear the line before everyone else.’
Mrs Henedge, who did not know it, pressed to her lips her fan.
‘Patience!’ she murmured, with her subtlest smile.
Monsignor Parr gazed at her with heavy opaque eyes.
Something between a butterfly and a misanthrope, he was temperamental, when not otherwise … employed.
‘I must confess,’ he observed, ‘that Sappho’s love affairs fail to stir me.’
‘Ah, for shame!’ Mrs Henedge scolded, turning from him to welcome an elaborate young man, who, in some bewildering way of his own, seemed to find charming the fashions of 1860.
‘Drecoll?’ she inquired.
‘Vienna,’ he nodded.
‘This is Mr Harvester,’ she said. She had nearly said ‘Poor Mr Harvester’, for she could not endure his wife.
Claud Harvester was usually considered charming. He had gone about here and there, tinting his personality after the fashion of a Venetian glass. Certainly he had wandered … He had been into Arcadia, even, a place where artificial temperaments so seldom get – their nearest approach being, perhaps, a matinée of a Winter’s Tale. Many, indeed, thought him interesting. He had groped so … In the end he began to suspect that what he had been seeking for all along was the theatre. He had discovered the truth in writing plays. In style – he was often called obscure, although, in reality, he was as charming as the top of an apple-tree above a wall. As a novelist he was almost successful. His books were watched for … but without impatience.
‘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.
As a rule nobody ever noticed her (in spite of a few eccentricities, such as dancing singly at parties, etc., sufficiently manifest, possibly, to have excited attention). She was waiting to be found. Some day, perhaps, a poet or a painter would come along, and lift her up, high up, into the sun like a beautiful figurine, and she would become the fashion for a while … set, the New Beauty.
‘These apparent icebergs,’ Mrs Henedge thought, as she touched Mira’s charming, and sensitive hand, ‘one knows what they are!’
‘My dear, what a radiant frock!’ Lady Georgia exclaimed, fingering it.
‘The cupids,’ Mira explained, holding out the stiff Italian stuff of ruby and blue, ‘are imitated from a church frieze.’
‘I have seldom seen anything so splendidly hard!’ Lady Castleyard admired: ‘You’re like an angel in a summer landscape, reposing by the side of a well!’ And sinking to a small semi-circular settee, she surveyed the room, a bored magnificence.
‘There’s no plot,’ Mrs Asp, who seemed utterly unable for continuity, was confiding to a charmed few, ‘no plot exactly. It’s about two women who live all alone.’
‘You mean that they live just by themselves?’
Mrs Thumbler was unable to imagine a novel without a plot, and two women who lived so quietly! … She was afraid that poor, dear Rose was becoming dull.
‘I wonder you don’t collaborate!’ she said.
‘Oh no … Unless I were in love with a man, and just as a pretext, I should never dream of collaborating with anybody.’
‘You would need a sort of male Beatrice, I suppose?’
‘How amusing it would be to collaborate with Mr Harvester,’ Mrs Steeple murmured, glancing towards Miss Compostella, who just then was looking completely flattered, as she closed her eyes, smiled, and lifted, slightly, a hand.
‘Certainly I adore his work,’ Mrs Asp admitted. ‘He pounces down on those mysterious half-things … and sometimes he fixes them!’
‘Do you know Mr Harvester?’ Mira asked.
‘Of course I know Mr Harvester … He scoured Cairo for me once years ago, to find me a lotus. Why?’
‘I should so much like to meet him.’
‘My dear, what an extraordinary caprice!’ Mrs Henedge exclaimed, disengaging herself to receive a dowager of probable consequence, who, in spite of a crucifix and some celestial lace, possessed a certain poetry of her own, as might, for instance, a faded bacchante. It needed scarcely any imagination at all to picture her issuing at night from her cave on Mount Parnassus to watch the stars, or, with greater convenience, perhaps, strutting like the most perfect peacock, before some country house, over the rose-pale gravel; as charming as the little stones in the foreground of the Parnassus of Mantegna.
Lady Listless, or Atossa, as her friends respectfully called her, had the look of a person who had discovered something she ought not to know. This was probably brought about by being aware of most people’s family feuds, or by putting merely two and two together. In the year her mistakes came to thousands, but she never seemed to mind.
‘I’ve just been dining with the Barrows,’ she said solemnly to Mrs Henedge, keeping her by the hand. ‘Poor little Mrs Barrow has heard the Raven … She came up hurriedly last night from the country and has taken refuge at the Ritz Hotel.’
‘It’s hardly likely to follow her, I suppose?’ Mrs Henedge inquired anxiously.
‘I don’t know, I’m sure. The hotel, it appears, already is particularly full … The last time, you remember, they heard it croak, it was for old Sir Philidor.’ And, looking exceedingly stately, she trailed away to repeat to Mrs Shamefoot her news: ‘Violet has heard the Raven!’
‘To be painted once, and for all, by my husband, is much better than to be always getting photographed!’ Mrs Calvally was saying to a Goddess as the Professor came in.
‘I know,’ the Goddess answered; ‘some of his portraits are really très Velasquez, and they never remind you of Whistler.’
‘Oh, beware of Mr Calvally!’ murmured Mrs Asp, flitting past to seize a chair. ‘He made poor Lady Georgia into a greyhound, and turned old General Montgomery into a ram – he twisted the hair into horns.’
An unwarrantable rush for places, however, announced that the critical moment had come.
‘Well, darling,’ Mrs Thumbler, triumphant, explained to her daughter, excusing herself for a sharp little skirmish with Monsignor Parr, ‘I was scarcely going to have him on my knee!’ And with emotion she fluttered a somewhat frantic fan.
‘I think your young musician so handsome,’ Mrs Asp whispered to Mrs Henedge, giving a few deft touches to a bandeau and some audacious violet paste. ‘With a little trouble, really, he could look quite Greek.’
‘Is your serial in The Star, my dear Rose, ever to be discontinued?’ Mr Sophax, who stood close behind her, stooped to inquire.
‘Don’t question me,’ she replied, without turning round. ‘I make it a rule never to be interviewed at night.’
Next her, Lady Listless, perched uncomfortably on Claud Harvester’s New Poems, sat eyeing the Professor with her most complacent smile. She knew hardly anything of Sappho, except that her brother, she believed, had been a wine merchant – which, in those times, was probably even better than being a brewer.
‘But if they had meant to murder me,’ the camel lady was mysteriously murmuring to Monsignor Parr, ‘they would not have put chocolate in the luncheon-basket; my courage returned to me at that!’ when a marvellous hiss from Mrs Asp stimulated Miss Compostella to expand.
‘My dear, when an angel like Sabine Watson …’ she was heard to exclaim vaguely above everyone else.
Julia, just then, was in high feather. George Calvally had promised to design for her a beautiful poster, by the time that Eysoldt should arrive, with cypress trees and handfuls of stars …
But the Professor was becoming impatient.
It would be utterly disgusting, Mrs Henedge reflected, if he should get desperate and retire. It was like Julia to expatiate at such a time upon the heavenliness of Sabine Watson, who was only one, it seemed, of quite a troop of angels.
To conceal her misgivings she waved a sultry yellow fan. There was a forest painted upon it of Arden, in indigo, in violet, in sapphire, in turquoise, and in common blue. The fan, by Conder, was known perversely as The Pink Woods.
‘I’m not going to inflict upon you a speech,’ the Professor said, breaking in like a piccolo to Miss Compostella’s harp.
‘Hear, hear!’ Mr Sophax approved.
‘You have heard, of course, how, while surveying the ruins of Crocodileopolis Arsinoë, my donkey having—’
And then, after what may have become an anguishing obligato, the Professor declaimed impressively the imperishable line.
‘Oh, delicious!’ Lady Listless exclaimed, looking quite perplexed. ‘Very charming indeed!’
‘Will anyone tell me what it means,’ Mrs Thumbler queried, ‘in plain English! Unfortunately, my Greek—’
‘In plain English,’ the Professor said, with some reluctance, ‘it means: “Could not” (he wagged a finger) “Could not, for the fury of her feet!” ’
‘Do you mean she ran away?’
‘Apparently!’
‘O-h!’ Mrs Thumbler seemed inclined to faint.
The Professor riveted her with his curious nut-coloured eyes.
‘Could not …’ she murmured helplessly, as though clinging to an alpenstock, and not quite sure of her guide. Below her, so to speak, were the roof-tops, pots and pans: Chamonix twinkling in the snow.
‘But no doubt there is a sous-entendu?’ Monsignor Parr suspiciously inquired.
‘Indeed, no!’ the Professor answered. ‘It is probable, indeed, that Sappho did not even mean to be caustic! Here is an adventurous line, separated (alas!) from its full context. Decorative, useless, as you will; a water-colour on silk!’
‘Just such a Sapphic piece,’ Mrs Asp observed, with authority, ‘just such a Sapphic piece as the And down I set the cushion, or the , or again the Foolish woman, pride not thyself on a ring.’
‘I don’t know why,’ Lady Georgia confessed, ‘it thrills me, but it does!’
‘Do you suppose she refers to—’
‘Nothing of the kind!’ the Professor interrupted. ‘As Mrs Asp explains, we have, at most, a broken piece, a rarity of phrase … as the poet’s With lofty poles, or With water dripped the napkin, or Scythian Wood … or the (I fear me, spurious), Carrying long rods, capped with the Pods of Poppies.’
‘And isn’t there just one little tiny wee word of hers which says: A tortoise-shell?’ Mrs Calvally murmured, fingering the huge winged pin in the back of her hair.
‘I should say that Sappho’s powers were decidedly in declension when she wrote the Professor’s “water-colour”,’ Mrs Steeple said disparagingly.
‘I’m sure I don’t see why!’
‘Do you remember the divine Ode to Aphrodite?’ she asked, and rapidly, occult, archaic, before anybody could stop her, she began to declaim:
‘Zeus-begotten, weaver of arts deceitful,
From thy throne of various hues behold me,
Queen immortal, spare me relentless anguish;
Spare, I beseech thee.
Hither haste, if ever of old my sighing
Moved thy soul, O Goddess, awhile to hear me,
From thy Father’s house to repair with golden
Chariot harnessed.
Lovely birds fleet winged from Olympus holy
Fluttering multitudinous o’er the darksome
Breast of Earth their heavenly mistress hastened
Through the mid ether;
Soon they brought the beautiful Aphrodite;
Softly beamed celestial eyes upon me;
And I heard her ask with a smile my trouble,
Wherefore I called her.
What of all things most may appease thy frenzy?
Whom (she said) would Sappho beguile to love her?
Whom by suasion bring to heart adoring?
Who hath aggrieved her?
Whoso flies thee, soon shall he turn to woo thee;
Who, receives no gifts, shall anon bestow them;
If he love not, soon shall he love, tho’ Sappho
Turneth against him!
Lady now, too, come to allay my torment;
All my soul desireth, I prithee grant me;
Be thyself my champion and my helper,
Lovely Dione!’
‘Exquisite, dear; thanks.’
‘Christianity, no doubt,’ the Professor observed, with some ferocity, to Monsignor Parr, ‘has invented many admirable things, but it has destroyed more than it has created!’ The old pagan in him was moved.
‘You have been stirring our antenatal memories, Mrs Steeple,’ Claud Harvester said.
‘Have I?’ she laughed.
‘Mr Brookes has promised to play to us,’ Mrs Henedge said hurriedly, with sufficient presence of mind.
‘Can he play Après Midi sous les Pins?’ the camel lady wondered.
‘Certainly,’ Winsome snapped, lifting from the piano a photograph of two terrified-looking little boys that somehow had been forgotten. ‘I can play anything when I have the music!’
‘Poor Mr Calvally … he looks always so atrociously sad!’ Lady Listless murmured, staring about her.
‘It’s unfortunate,’ Mrs Rienzi-Smith said to her, ‘that the Professor seems so displeased.’
‘Well, what more could he want? We were all on footstools before him.’
‘What am I to play to you?’ Winsome asked of Mrs Henedge. ‘A fanfare? A requiem?’
‘Oh, play us something of your own. Play your “Oakapple”, from The Suite in Green.’
But, ‘to break the ice’, as he put it, he preferred the exciting Capriccio Espagnol of Rimsky-Korsakoff to anything of his own.
‘But didn’t you hate waiting for Othello to press the pillow?’ Lady Castleyard was questioning Miss Compostella. ‘I should have got up and screamed, or rang the bell, I’m sure I should!’
‘Really? I think it’s almost the only moment in the play that gives an actress an opportunity to see where are her friends,’ Julia replied.
‘Just as I’ve observed,’ Mira Thumbler murmured maliciously to Claud Harvester, ‘that a person who begins by playing the Prelude of Rachmaninoff seldom plays anything else—’
‘Oh, no,’ he said. ‘When Winsome plays like that, I want to live in a land where there’d be eternal summer.’
Mira looked amused.
‘All places, really,’ she said, ‘have glamour solely in essence, didn’t you know, like a drop of scent!’
She paused a moment to listen to her neighbour.
‘So appallingly badly kept,’ the Goddess was describing Valhalla. ‘In the throne-room, for instance, the candles leaning in all directions … and everything else the same!’
‘Tell me,’ Mira said, turning towards Claud Harvester abruptly, and speaking with sudden passion, ‘why are you so genial with everyone? Why? It’s such – a pity!’
‘Good heavens,’ he exclaimed, startled, ‘what is the matter?’
But she had moved away.
‘No, something of your own.’ Mrs Asp was begging Winsome rather imprudently.
‘I will play through the first act of my Justinian, if you think it wouldn’t be too long.’
‘A few of the leading themes, perhaps,’ Mrs Henedge suggested.
‘Very well, I will begin with the folk-song of the Paralytics.’
‘That will be delightful.’
‘You must imagine them,’ Winsome explained to Lady Listless, who was sitting next to the piano, ‘grouped invalidishly about the great doorway of San Sopphia. The libretto directions will say that there is a heavy violet moon, and that it is a warm June night.’
Whilst listening to music Lady Listless would allow her aspirations to pass unrestrainedly across her face. They passed now, like a flight of birds.
‘And here,’ Winsome murmured airily, without ceasing, and playing with delightful crispness of touch, ‘is the pas of the Barefooted Nuns.’
Lady Listless became rhapsodical. ‘It’s almost as delicious,’ she breathed, ‘as the Shuggar-Plum-Fairies Dance from Casse Noisette.’
Mrs Asp also nodded her approbation. ‘The finale was distinctly curious,’ she exclaimed, ‘just like the falling of a silver tray!’
‘And this,’ Winsome explained, folding his arms and drooping back shyly, ‘is the motive for Theodora.’
‘My dear young man,’ Lady Listless objected, ‘but I hear nothing … nothing at all.’
‘The orchestra ceases. There’s audible only the movement of her dress—’
And, suddenly irresponsible, he began to play ‘Summer Palace – Tea at Therapia’, which seemed to break away quite naturally into an exciting Czardas of Liszt.
‘But how amusing!’
Mrs Henedge, slightly anxious now, judged that the moment had come to ask Mrs Shamefoot to sing. Winsome was hardly serious. It was perhaps a pity, she reflected, though it couldn’t be helped, that her dear Mrs Shamefoot cared only for the extremely exalted music of the modern French school. Just then, a dose of Brahms, she felt, would have done them all more good, but doubtless Mrs Rienzi might be relied upon to bring the evening to a calmer close with some of her drowsy gipsy dances.
‘And when she died she left everything for the Capucin Fathers,’ Mrs Shamefoot was telling Monsignor Parr as Mrs Henedge approached.
‘Sing, dear …?’ she said.
‘Oh, I don’t really know if I can … The room is so hot. And there are so many roses! I don’t know which look the redder, ourselves or the roses. And I have been chatting all the evening. And my voice is just the least bit tired. But if you simply insist, and Dirce will play my accompaniment; and if—’
And ultimately, as was to be hoped, she rose and fluttered over the many prayer rugs to the piano.
Seldom, George Calvally thought, watching her, had he seen a more captivating creature.
‘Do you think her as graceful as she passes for?’ He could hear Winsome Brookes inquire.
‘Graceful? the camel lady answered. ‘No, really! She’s like a sack of coals.’
‘Ah! je suis fatiguée à mourir!’ Mrs Shamefoot sang. ‘Tous ces hommes ne sont qu’indifférence et brutalité. Les femmes sont méchantes et les heures pesantes! J’ai l’âme vide … Où trouver le repos? … Et comment fixer le bonheur! O mon miroir fidèle, rassure-moi; dis-moi que je suis toujours belle, que je serai belle éternellement; que rien ne flétrira les roses de mes lèvres, que rien ne ternira l’or pur de mes cheveux; dis-moi que je suis belle, et que je serai belle éternellement! éternellement!
‘Ah! tais-toi, voix impitoyable! voix qui me dis: “Thaïs ne serai plus Thaïs! … Non, je n’y puis croire; et s’il n’est point pour garder la beauté de secrets souverains, de pratiques magiques, toi, Vénus, réponds-moi de son éternité! Vénus, invisible et présente!” … Vénus, enchantement de l’ombre! réponds-moi! Dis-moi que je suis belle, et que je serai belle éternellement! Que rien ne flétrira les roses de mes lèvres, que rien ne ternira l’or pur de mes cheveux; dis-moi que je suis belle et que je serai belle éternellement! éternellement! éternellement!’
‘Exquisite, dear; thanks!’
‘Oh, she’s heavenly!’
‘Edwina never sang so!’
‘If she becomes invocatory again,’ Mrs Asp whispered, beating applause with a finger upon a fan, ‘I shall have my doze – like Brunnhilde.’
‘You would be most uncomf’y,’ Mr Sophax observed, ‘and then who would finish your serial for The Star … No one else could.’
It was too true … Nobody else could draw an unadulterated villain with the same nicety as Mrs Asp. How she would dab on her colours, and then, with what relish would she unmask her man; her high spirits during the process were remarked by all her friends.
But there was to be another song, it seemed, for with her back to the room and a glow of light flooding her perfectly whitened shoulders, it was unlikely that Lady Castleyard would yield immediately to Mrs Rienzi her chair. With her head slightly inclined, it was permitted to admire the enchanting fold of her neck and the luxuriant bundles of silvered hair wound loosely about her head, from whence there flew an aigrette like a puff of steam.
‘An aigrette,’ Mrs Asp calculated, ‘at least sixteen inches long!’ No; there would be at least two more songs, she felt sure.
‘They tell me,’ she said to Mr Sophax, shaking long tearful earrings at him, ‘that the concert at Jarlington House, the other night, was a complete success, and that Lady Castleyard played so well that someone in the audience climbed over a great many poor toes and tried to kiss her hands … Atossa says that he received quite a large cheque to do it!’
But a troublesome valse, that smouldered and smouldered, and flickered and smouldered, until it broke into a flame, before leaping into something else, and which was perhaps the French way of saying that ‘still waters run deep’, cast for an instant its spell, and when it was over, Mrs Henedge decided that she would ask Mira Thumbler to dance.
Not unlikely it would be giving an old maid her chance. Indeed, at seventeen, the wicked mite was far too retiring. Nobody ever noticed her. So many people had said so! And her poor mother with nothing but daughters; her only child a girl …
She found Mira lolling beneath a capacious lampshade looking inexpressibly bored. Her hostess gathered by her silhouette that the temptation to poke a finger through a Chinese vellum-screen, painted with water-lilies and fantastic swooping birds, was almost more than she could endure.
‘My dear, won’t you dance for us?’ she asked.
Mira looked up.
‘Oh, forgive me, please,’ she exclaimed, ‘but I should feel far too like … you know!’
She raised white, shielding arms.
‘The daughter of Herodias?’ Mrs Henedge said. ‘Nonsense! Don’t be shy.’
‘Anything you might ask for …’ George Calvally murmured kindly, who was standing near.
‘Do you mean that?’
‘Of course I mean it!’
She considered his offer:
‘Then,’ she said, ‘I’m going to sit to you for my portrait. Oh, it’s stupid and dull of me, I suppose, to have so few features – just a plain nose, two eyes and a mouth – still!’ She flung a hand up into the air to be admired. She smiled. She looked quite pretty.
‘I shall be immensely flattered,’ the painter said.
And so – after what seemed to be endless preliminaries – Mira danced.
On their way home he spoke of her lovely Byzantine feet.
Mrs Calvally yawned. ‘It’s extraordinary that a little skimped thing like Miss Thumbler should fascinate you!’ she said.